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Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself
An original reinterpretation of Eve and the Garden of Eden that offers women a new sense of feminine power and opportunity.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
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124 people want to read
About the author
Kim Chernin
44 books22 followersKim Chernin (born May 7, 1940, Bronx, New York) is an American fiction and nonfiction writer, feminist, poet, and memoirist. She has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 21, 2021
Cover for this book 10/10. Content for this book, not on par. I really was looking forward to some science and history about female Goddesses and what I got was essentially a memoir of one woman's journey to enlightenment. I skimmed the last 60 pages and when I say skim I do mean I read a few sentences and the last 3 pages.
June 8, 2010
I was torn about this book. On one hand, it was like reading this woman's self-indulgent (and kinda weird at times - writing in milk and blood) description of her search to find herself. On the other hand, there were some brilliantly insightful moments where I felt like she was on to something powerful. So, completely crazy or crazy brilliant...couldn't quite decide. If you can look past the crazy, this can be an interesting exploration of women and women's roles in our society.
April 22, 2023
Seeking as sin, or subversion? Precipitating the Fall, or propagating all of humanity? Turning away from the Goddess to the patriarchy of the father-world, or reunifying with the Goddess, the one, inevitable Creator? These are the questions Kim Chernin grapples with in her part-memoir, part-psychoanalytic, part-feminist theory book, 1987’s Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself. I didn’t realize until I read the foreword that Chernin’s book is actually the third in her trilogy on women and eating disorders, starting with Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, and The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity. Without having read those two prior books (and I normally wouldn’t read the third book in a series first!), it does seem fitting to conclude with the ultimate mythologized act of “feminine hunger” in Eve’s lurch for the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden in Christianity.
Chernin traces back this mythology to other mythological tales from the Far East to the Greeks, and how they had their own serpents, their own fruits, their own fruit trees, and their own Creators, but with varying symbolism, while also weaving in psychoanalysis, largely responding to and expanding upon Freud’s work with his Oedipus complex, or to put it in Chernin’s words, his penis theory, about children and why they subconsciously denounce their mothers. With the latter, Chernin proposes an alternative perspective she calls the breast-theory. She was grappling with why it is the “girl-child” would turn away from the Goddess (the mother) of the underworld (the subconscious), of warm, protective skin and food (through the breasts) to the father, to the patriarchy, and through her breast-theory, she argues that the girl-child sees the mother depleted by … herself — that is, the child — and paradoxically, in guilt, the child then reconstitutes the depleted Goddess as a vengeful, rivalrous monster, and turns to the distant, non-nurturing, non-breastfeeding father for protection.
Instead of a depleted Goddess, though, Chernin asks us to reimagine, “reinvent,” Eve to recapture the Goddess and the power of femininity — indeed, the power within all women. Rather than Eve being what causes the Fall, Chernin, who is leaning on the non-canon Gnostic Gospels (of which, she speculates were written by a woman), argues that an arrogant male God claimed all of creation as his, foregoing and forsaking his own mother, and so, when Eve seeks the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, her act of disobedience is in defiance to a wrongheaded God, but also, in accordance with the Goddess, as the Goddess is symbolized by the tree itself. God cast Eve and Adam out of Eden, out of paradise, but was it really a punishment when, ultimately, God still needed Eve to propagate the human species? In that recasting and retelling, Chernin sees Eve as a potent and necessary force, a source of feminine pride rather than cause for cowering over having done something supposedly sinful. Referring to the basic knowledge that birth is a female act, Chernin states, “They might curse it, pretend to despise it, make it seem the painful outcome of a sinful deed, but fundamentally they could not do without it.” So, God, if he was all-knowing, necessarily needed to make a disobedient woman in Eve, and as I said, even after her disobedience, we arrive back at the same point: woman as creator.
The throughline to Chernin’s other books in the trilogy about women and hunger, I’m surmising, is that far from it being a bad thing to seek food as a women, it was the right thing to do, and we should embrace the Goddess who fed us (the tree of knowledge, the symbol for her).
And it’s worth underscoring why Chernin talks about the Goddess being within the underworld, as it were. Other myths from the Pacific to the Greeks again to Hawaiian myth-making see the underworld as a place of renewal and rebirth, not banishment, not a “hell” in the Christian sense. In fact, Chernin argues that Shamans of the far north believed they could put on a “Hel-met,” go the underworld without dying, and come back transformed. That is what Chernin seeks to do, and when she comes back to the earth, she does so with “New Eve,” reborn through the non-canon Gnostic Gospels.
It is speculative, to be sure, but it is interesting to consider how Western culture, largely dominated by the Christian Creation myth, and specifically, the story of Eve as antagonist, would have been like had Western culture developed through a Creation myth where Eve is cast as a Goddess, as a creator, as someone rightly seeking knowledge, and what that would have meant for scores of women over the last 2,000 years. Alas.
Chernin’s book was a challenging (it gets a bit esoteric at times), but interesting re-imagining of Eve in a feminist and psychoanalytic (itself reimagined) context. I’m always drawn to the idea of someone being radical and disobedient, and if you believe in the Christian Creation myth, the first “someone” was Eve, for better, not worse.
Chernin traces back this mythology to other mythological tales from the Far East to the Greeks, and how they had their own serpents, their own fruits, their own fruit trees, and their own Creators, but with varying symbolism, while also weaving in psychoanalysis, largely responding to and expanding upon Freud’s work with his Oedipus complex, or to put it in Chernin’s words, his penis theory, about children and why they subconsciously denounce their mothers. With the latter, Chernin proposes an alternative perspective she calls the breast-theory. She was grappling with why it is the “girl-child” would turn away from the Goddess (the mother) of the underworld (the subconscious), of warm, protective skin and food (through the breasts) to the father, to the patriarchy, and through her breast-theory, she argues that the girl-child sees the mother depleted by … herself — that is, the child — and paradoxically, in guilt, the child then reconstitutes the depleted Goddess as a vengeful, rivalrous monster, and turns to the distant, non-nurturing, non-breastfeeding father for protection.
Instead of a depleted Goddess, though, Chernin asks us to reimagine, “reinvent,” Eve to recapture the Goddess and the power of femininity — indeed, the power within all women. Rather than Eve being what causes the Fall, Chernin, who is leaning on the non-canon Gnostic Gospels (of which, she speculates were written by a woman), argues that an arrogant male God claimed all of creation as his, foregoing and forsaking his own mother, and so, when Eve seeks the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, her act of disobedience is in defiance to a wrongheaded God, but also, in accordance with the Goddess, as the Goddess is symbolized by the tree itself. God cast Eve and Adam out of Eden, out of paradise, but was it really a punishment when, ultimately, God still needed Eve to propagate the human species? In that recasting and retelling, Chernin sees Eve as a potent and necessary force, a source of feminine pride rather than cause for cowering over having done something supposedly sinful. Referring to the basic knowledge that birth is a female act, Chernin states, “They might curse it, pretend to despise it, make it seem the painful outcome of a sinful deed, but fundamentally they could not do without it.” So, God, if he was all-knowing, necessarily needed to make a disobedient woman in Eve, and as I said, even after her disobedience, we arrive back at the same point: woman as creator.
The throughline to Chernin’s other books in the trilogy about women and hunger, I’m surmising, is that far from it being a bad thing to seek food as a women, it was the right thing to do, and we should embrace the Goddess who fed us (the tree of knowledge, the symbol for her).
And it’s worth underscoring why Chernin talks about the Goddess being within the underworld, as it were. Other myths from the Pacific to the Greeks again to Hawaiian myth-making see the underworld as a place of renewal and rebirth, not banishment, not a “hell” in the Christian sense. In fact, Chernin argues that Shamans of the far north believed they could put on a “Hel-met,” go the underworld without dying, and come back transformed. That is what Chernin seeks to do, and when she comes back to the earth, she does so with “New Eve,” reborn through the non-canon Gnostic Gospels.
It is speculative, to be sure, but it is interesting to consider how Western culture, largely dominated by the Christian Creation myth, and specifically, the story of Eve as antagonist, would have been like had Western culture developed through a Creation myth where Eve is cast as a Goddess, as a creator, as someone rightly seeking knowledge, and what that would have meant for scores of women over the last 2,000 years. Alas.
Chernin’s book was a challenging (it gets a bit esoteric at times), but interesting re-imagining of Eve in a feminist and psychoanalytic (itself reimagined) context. I’m always drawn to the idea of someone being radical and disobedient, and if you believe in the Christian Creation myth, the first “someone” was Eve, for better, not worse.
July 4, 2021
I would rate this one 3.5 stars if I could (can I?)
Respect to Kim Chernin for unfolding its content at the time she did. (And also, rest in peace - while reading I discovered that I had happened to unconsciously pick this text off my bookshelf three days following the author's death from covid-19 :( )
I deeply enjoyed Reinventing Eve's introductory chapters, certainly the concept, the melding of authentic personal experience alongside theoretic psychological analysis, its mysticism, subconscious pulls, relationship to mother nature and the necessary religious reframing. That said, I found it began to lose speed in the second half with some redundant psychological spinning which could have been easily countered on the spot, likely by Chernin herself just as well, should honouring divine masculine equally alongside divine feminine had at all been her aim. I see why it wasn't, but can't help but feel the narrative was too heavily led by a time period where Chernin was really coming to terms with her own lesbian orientations.
I enjoyed it in principle, it was an intelligent and yet sensorial read. Some of the phrasing and quoting definitely stuck with me, and I most certainly won't forget its ideas or uniqueness of essence, but do feel it could have made a stronger and more compelling case in the way of proving its point.
Respect to Kim Chernin for unfolding its content at the time she did. (And also, rest in peace - while reading I discovered that I had happened to unconsciously pick this text off my bookshelf three days following the author's death from covid-19 :( )
I deeply enjoyed Reinventing Eve's introductory chapters, certainly the concept, the melding of authentic personal experience alongside theoretic psychological analysis, its mysticism, subconscious pulls, relationship to mother nature and the necessary religious reframing. That said, I found it began to lose speed in the second half with some redundant psychological spinning which could have been easily countered on the spot, likely by Chernin herself just as well, should honouring divine masculine equally alongside divine feminine had at all been her aim. I see why it wasn't, but can't help but feel the narrative was too heavily led by a time period where Chernin was really coming to terms with her own lesbian orientations.
I enjoyed it in principle, it was an intelligent and yet sensorial read. Some of the phrasing and quoting definitely stuck with me, and I most certainly won't forget its ideas or uniqueness of essence, but do feel it could have made a stronger and more compelling case in the way of proving its point.
January 8, 2018
I liked this book . Chernin looks at the Eve story inside out, with large swaths of Freudian theory, with histories of matriarchal societies, and with the Gnostic stories about creation. One of her central ideas is that, like Eve, women today have been taught that they are less-than in a patriarchal society. We are told that eating from the tree of knowledge was sin. But her theory is that Eve had to eat the fruit, to break from patriarchal control, to connect with the goddess in her, to become the powerful woman she is. I am grossly understating this, but you get the idea perhaps.
This is a roundabout, odd book, rife with Freud (she upends the many penis theories of Freud and postulates a breast theory) Nevertheless, interesting and oddly heartening.
This is a roundabout, odd book, rife with Freud (she upends the many penis theories of Freud and postulates a breast theory) Nevertheless, interesting and oddly heartening.
September 13, 2021
Got weird in some places but the good parts were so good and useful that it was worth it.
January 28, 2014
Reinventing Eve is definitely a book that I was a bit uneasy to start reading, since it is kind out of my genre, but I loved it in the end. Her perspective on a Mother Goddess not being associated with the patriarchal world, a world of her own, was a very intriguing subject.
One of my favorite quotes from Reinventing Eve came from an account of Etty Hillesum when talking about God:
"When I pray I hold a silly, naive or deadly dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for convenience sake I call God... And that probably best expresses my feeling for life: I repose in myself. And that part of myself, that deepest and richest part in which I repose, is what I call "God." page 22.
This gives me shivers because I believe in that, too. There's no other way I could express that.
I'll definitely read this book again in the future.
One of my favorite quotes from Reinventing Eve came from an account of Etty Hillesum when talking about God:
"When I pray I hold a silly, naive or deadly dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for convenience sake I call God... And that probably best expresses my feeling for life: I repose in myself. And that part of myself, that deepest and richest part in which I repose, is what I call "God." page 22.
This gives me shivers because I believe in that, too. There's no other way I could express that.
I'll definitely read this book again in the future.
November 9, 2011
Amazing book! Chernin has deftly defeated Freud's notion of childhood development and re-interprets human growth according to the mother rather than the patriarchal father. I would highly recommend this book for any interested in feminism and psychology.
July 22, 2015
Loved this book.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews