'Biting temptation': An examination of the Eden myth in the Southern fiction of William Faulkner, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison

This study argues that through their use of allusion, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison respond to interpretations of the Eden myth that were used to substantiate oppressive practices in Southern culture. Using Ziva-Ben Porat's definition of allusion, I contend that Faulkner, Walker, and Morrison reopen the myth for reexamination, and, in the case of Walker and Morrison, revise the myth. After delineating the historical uses of the myth to support race and gender hierarchies in Southern society, I discuss Faulkner's, Walker's, and Morrison's allusions to the Eden myth in their novels of Southern experience. Faulkner alludes to the creation and fall in his depiction of Thomas Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom!, whose actions bring Sutpen's Hundred to fruition and then to ruin. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner again alludes to the Eden myth, this time evoking Eve in his rendering of Caddy Compson. Unlike the sociopolitical interpretations of the myth, Faulkner's employment of the Eden myth underscores the injustice of race and gender oppressions. Alice Walker's allusions to the Eden myth in The Color Purple perform this service as well, but Walker more candidly indicts Southern religion for its complicity in domination. Walker in The Color Purple rejects an anthropomorphic god and presents an alternate African version of the Eden myth which likens the impulse to subjugate others to the serpent in the garden. Toni Morrison, too, alludes to Eden in ways that expose the oppressions inherent in Southern religious culture. Her use of allusion in Beloved condemns the Southern practice of slavery by ripping the facade from the plantation idyll, exposing the plantation as a perversely evil garden. Her novel Paradise further explores the idea of Edenic spaces spoiled by patriarchal religious values and racial exclusion. Finally, all three novelists challenge the authority of master-narratives like the Eden myth. By providing multiple versions of the events in their plots and by alluding to the Eden myth in texts that resist hierarchical readings of Genesis 1-3, they interrogate and discredit scriptural validation of white, male textual and social domination.