Eve's legacy: revisions of the biblical creation myth in the poetry of Rose Auslander.

The figure of Eve is a powerful and evocative poetic image. In Rose Auslander's poetry, Eve sheds her traditional role as unwitting accomplice to the corruption of humanity and instead becomes a symbol of creation, creativity, and the power of the female poet. The poems emphasize Eve's active role in the Garden of Eden and constitute a playful revision of the Biblical creation myth. Auslander uses Eve to access the forbidden knowledge of opposites as a poetic source and reinterprets the role of sin as a driving force in the creative process. (KvH)

"We cannot understand the history of Eve without seeing her as a deposed Creator-Goddess, and indeed, in some sense as creation itself" writes John Phillips in Eve: The History of an Idea (3). Some of Rose Auslander's early poems, which remained unpublished during her lifetime, envision the figure of Eve along similar lines. In these poems, Auslander reinterprets the role of Eve in the creation process and ultimately arrives at a new definition of her own role as a female poet. Other writers before Auslander, particularly those influenced by the Enlightenment, have returned to Genesis and reread the transgression and fall as a positive transition from instinct to reason in human history, but they have ignored the role of Eve. Early twentieth-century interpreters of the creation story, driven by interest in myth, saw Eve as a representation of the Great Mother archetype. In this context, the transgression becomes the sexual reunion with the mother. Beyond that they ignored Eve and focused on Adam's conflict with the Father-God (Phillips 78-95). Other Auslander scholars have also not paid much attention to the Eve figure until recently. (1) In this article I want to offer new insights into Auslander's struggle with the creative process by looking at her later poems, where Eve has been mostly replaced by the apple, side by side with the earlier ones, where Eve takes center stage. Before moving on to a detailed discussion of several poems, I will briefly explore the question of why the poet turns to myth in the first place.

Auslander's first volume of poetry, Der Regenbogen (The Rainbow, 1939), contains mainly love poetry and was praised by her mentor at the time, Alfred Margul-Sperber, as a portrayal of the "eternal experience of women's fate" (Braun 72). His praise barely hides value judgments inherent in the stereotypical view of women's writing. Margul-Sperber, who helped put together this first poetry volume, comes from a world in which women's poetry is a category by itself and in which graduating from women's poetry to the realm of Poetry is a hard task for any female poet. He traces all of Auslander's poetry back to what he calls its erotic premises ("Voraussetzungen erotischer Art"), thus reducing it to love poetry, the subgenre to which female poets had most easy access. (2) Although Auslander's work does not stress concern with gender, a closer look at her appropriation of the Biblical creation myth shows a particular focus on the female figure and her participation in the creation process. (3)

According to the poet and critic Alicia Ostriker, myth has been a welcome vehicle for female poets, since it allows them to write about emotions and topics that might otherwise be taboo or difficult for women to articulate. Women's revision of myth, in Ostriker's view, is part of an attempt to redefine women's roles within a given cultural setting: "The poet simultaneously deconstructs a prior `myth' or `story' and constructs a new one which includes, instead of excluding, herself" (212). Such use of myth allows the female writer to enter an existing public discourse and to make use of the authority of the established culture that is imparted by the myth. Furthermore, myth often seeks to represent that which is more private and irrational or inexplicable. Thus it can help the female poet to come to terms with the question: why do I write? (4) In Auslander's case, this is further heightened since the myth she appropriates explores the very question of creation. (5)

Auslander returns to the origin myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which has often been used to legitimize a hierarchical relationship between the sexes. Besides functioning as the archetypal seductress, Eve symbolizes the marginalization of feminine powers as well as the domestication of women and their creativity. Thus, Auslander revisits Eve as the figure standing at the threshold between the Judeo-Christian tradition and older religious belief systems that revere the feminine as sacred. She does so most explicitly during her earlier years, at a time when she is still struggling to establish herself as a writer. Auslander's particular revision of this central myth of Western culture becomes a vehicle for the young poet to overcome the limitations of the traditional female role. Through the newly defined figure of Eve, Auslander leaves behind restrictions placed upon her as a female poet and claims a voice for herself. In this process, she also uses earlier revisions from another Jewish tradition.

Auslander's reinterpretation of the creation myth displays elements of the mysticism of the Kabbala, particularly ideas from the book Zohar. In the Zohar, Eve is literally absent, but we find the figure of the Shekhina, who embodies the feminine aspect of God. As the lowest of the ten divine emanations on the Zefirot tree, she is closest to the realm of human beings, (6) and, like the Jewish people, she endures separation from God through the condition of exile. The Shekhina was particularly powerful as that part of the divine that is closest to humans and expressed through human relationships. However, she is also an ambiguous feminine figure and a projection of male writers (Plaskow 139-40). In Auslander's poems, the Shekhina never appears directly, as she does in the poetry of Nelly Sachs (Beil 224-30), although frequent metaphors for the Shekhina, such as the moon, the apple, or the mother (7) appear in the poems to be discussed here. Auslander, whether consciously or unconsciously, thus seeks a link to Jewish tradition while at the same time changing and integrating it into a poetics of her own.

Among the early unpublished poems, "Eva" most closely follows the basic Biblical narrative of the second creation story in Genesis 2 and 3, but in Auslander's version Eve becomes the center of her story, while Adam and God play subordinate roles: