ABSTRACT
The modern version of the Garden of Eden is the enclosed shopping mall. Surrounded by a desert of parking lots, malls comprise gardens of shops covered by glass domes, accessed by spiral staircases and escalators reaching upward toward heaven. Today’s malls feature lifesized trees, trellises decorated with flowers, stone grottoes, birds, animals, and even indoor beaches that simulate nature as a cultivated, benign garden. The “river that went out of the Eden to water the garden” is reclaimed in meandering tree-lined streams and ponds filled
with bright orange goldfish. The commodified Eden is the Recovery Narrative’s epitome in the modern world.
