ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by biblical story of the Fall and its impact and cultural significance. The myth of the Fall, and the subsequent loss of Eden, has such a tentacular reach and power to suggest that the anxieties to which it ministers are the most urgent and elementary of all. The anxiety of unhappiness is narrated as a myth which relieves the burden: a myth in which there is an othering of good and bad, Eden and Fall. Gerard Manley Hopkins calls it, and his sweetly poisonous poem, ‘Spring and Fall’ and in it he addresses a child who is weeping over leaves falling in Autumn. The myth of the Fall and the early church’s misogynistic reading of it is largely due to multiple instances of male envy – of women’s ultimate creativity in childbirth, of their certain knowledge of true parenthood and of the female orgasm and the clitoris itself.
