Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve provides readers with an alternative take on the ancient story of Genesis, creating a narrative around the growing love of a young couple through the years of their life and rejecting the traditional, largely sexist tone of the biblical tale. Often, Eve is depicted as a temptress, receiving the majority of the blame for the fall of Eden, and as such, she is generally regarded as a corruptive influence and a bringer of destruction; traditional tellings of Genesis aim to warn of the supposed dangers of women, asserting that it was the choices of the first woman that led humans to be expelled from Eden forever. Conversely, Twain depicts Eve as a naive-but-joyful, free-spirited young woman, whose worldview is fundamentally different from that of her partner, Adam, and of their creator, yet is still not evil, nor intending any ill effects as a result of the actions that she takes. Twain flips the narrative on a traditional tale, creating an alternative perspective that is both easily relatable and largely positive in nature, welcoming his readers to reconsider their preconceptions about Christianity’s creation story and the motives of its “first woman.”
Twain places his story in a familiar-yet-distant setting, creating a sense of relatability that enables his readers to more easily draw similarities between the ancient tale and their own lives, here in modern America. For many in today’s secular world, the story of Genesis and tales about the Garden of Eden may seem like distant fairytales, and the antiquated, flawed insights into the deceptions of women that traditional tellings provide are not particularly applicable to the modern world in which we live. However, Twain confronts this problem through the usage of familiar locations, placing his Garden of Eden somewhere close to home. Adam remarks in the earliest portions of his “diary,” “Been examining the great waterfall. It is the finest thing on the estate, I think. The new creature calls it Niagara Falls—why, I am sure I do not know” (Twain 2). Niagara Falls is surely a location readily present in the minds of any American or Canadian reader, and commands a similar sense of respect and natural beauty to that of Eden, while simultaneously maintaining the familiarity necessary for the alternate, positive telling of the tale. Later, Adam again remarks, frustratedly, on the naming that Eve has done throughout their home: “She has littered the whole estate with execrable names and offensive signs: THIS WAY TO THE WHIRLPOOL. THIS WAY TO GOAT ISLAND. CAVE OF THE WINDS THIS WAY” (Twain 4-5). Each of these named locations exist also within the real-world Niagara Falls Park, solidifying once again the familiarity of the setting in the mind of even the most casual reader. Twain’s story is built around relatability - it creates an everyday couple, slowly falling in love within an ancient, distant version of our own natural landscape, allowing readers to understand the story of Adam and Eve in a way that would not otherwise be possible.
An important element of The Diaries of Adam and Eve is that the piece reads as a story of growing mutual love and understanding - of each other and the world - rather than that of temptation, destruction, and sin. Eve is often depicted in extremely sexist ways - she is a temptress, wishing to corrupt Adam and bring an end to the simple, innocent beauty of life in the Garden of Eden. Conversely, Twain’s Eve, though perhaps unfairly naive and impulsive at times, was not looking to tempt Adam into eating an apple in order to end something beautiful - rather, she was enjoying the simpler delights of life as she befriended and named the many animals in the garden, discovering the beauty of the landscape around her, and finding love in her world and her companions, both of the human and animal variety. Eve remarks, as she childishly considers the “loss” of the moon at the end of her first night, “I already begin to realize that the core and center of my nature is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful” (Twain 16). Twain’s Eve is innocent and pure; she loves the beauty in the world around her, and wishes to share that love with Adam, whom she finds the most interesting out of any creature in the garden. She is overjoyed when she is with him, and distraught when he, indifferent to her presence in the early portions of the story, pushes her away: “My first sorrow. Yesterday he avoided me and seemed to wish I would not talk to him. I could not believe it, and thought there was some mistake, for I loved to be with him, and loved to hear him talk, and so how could it be that he could feel unkind toward me when I had not done anything?” (Twain 20). She did not wish to destroy the life that she had with Adam in the garden, but rather she wished to live happily with him, and share with him the many countless wonders that she saw in their world.
Eve’s desire to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge is often described as a lust for the forbidden that is nothing short of evil and destructive. Twain rejects this notion, instead depicting her desire as a yearning for the excitement of discovery, a joy for the expansion of one’s understanding of the world and its properties, and the wide array of emotions that inform and influence the human experience. She wished to share her many discoveries and her excitement with Adam because she believed that life was best lived through joy, and joy was best experienced through sharing. Indeed, Twain continues with this positive narrative as he writes Eve to state that her greatest fear is the potential loss of the joy of discovery: “Such things make me sad; because by and by when I have found out everything there won't be any more excitements, and I do love excitements so!” (Twain 29). This thirst for knowledge is something that is essential to the human experience - it is the force that drives us to seek answers to our curious questions and to work to better understand our world - and in the context of this story, it again shows Eve not as an evil, deceitful woman in search of “forbidden” and “evil” knowledge, but rather a curious and joyful soul, seeking to discover as much as she can about the world in which she lives.
Ultimately, The Diaries of Adam and Eve provides an incredible alternate telling of the iconic Christian tale - one that paints Eve in a much more fair and understanding light and acknowledges that her actions were not made out of malice, but rather out of love and appreciation for the beauty of her world and for her sometimes boorish male companion. It is a story of love, rather than temptation, as Eve works at Adam in hopes of getting him to see the same joy and beauty that she does, so that they might share a happy life together - in the end, of course, succeeding, as Adam mournfully declares at her grave: “Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden” (Twain 32). Twain’s tale is relatable and understandable to a wide audience and reframes a classic story in a manner that is positive, rather than negative, sexist, and antiquated. Indeed, Twain’s characters force his readers to reject their preconceptions about the story of Genesis and instead consider the motives of Eve in a new and positive light.
Work Cited
Twain, Mark. The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Harper, 1906. Freeditorial, https://freeditorial.com/en/books/the-diaries-of-adam-and-eve/readonline.