Back to the Garden

Abstract

In seventeenth-century England, the biblical story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Adam and Eve was culturally prominent. While the medieval emphasis on Eden as the locus of original sin continued, this was overshadowed by a widespread fascination with the idea of returning to paradise. People attempted to recover the language of Adam or to recreate the spiritual or environmental conditions of paradise; the story of the Creation and the Fall preoccupied many writers, including John Milton. Pullman continues this imaginative engagement with the Genesis story by making Lyra the new Eve. As he does in other ways, Pullman takes up aspects of a familiar story—the story of the Fall, or Milton’s retelling of this story in Paradise Lost—in order to invert the terms. The biblical Eve succumbed to temptation, an act that became associated with misogynistic accounts of female sexuality. As the new Eve, Lyra’s sexuality is restorative, halting the devastating loss of Dust from the multiverse. Both Milton and Pullman emphasize that paradise is not to be found elsewhere, but is a goal that we must strive to achieve on earth. The counterpart to the story of the Garden of Eden is the destruction of the earth described in the biblical book of Revelation. Pullman engages with the specter of environmental catastrophe through the flooding depicted in The Subtle Knife and La Belle Sauvage.