{"id":2668,"date":"2025-07-01T09:22:05","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T08:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/centre-for-book-cultures-and-publishing\/?p=2668"},"modified":"2025-07-01T09:22:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T08:22:05","slug":"constructing-eve-a-materials-investigation-of-the-iconic-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/centre-for-book-cultures-and-publishing\/constructing-eve-a-materials-investigation-of-the-iconic-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Constructing Eve: A Materials Investigation of the Iconic Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Jennifer Davis Taylor<\/a>, Short-Term Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2025), University of Reading<\/em><\/p>\n

How is femininity made\u2014not just socially, but textually, visually, ideologically?<\/p>\n

In 1697, Charles Perrault\u2014best known today for fairy tales such as Cinderella<\/em> and Little Red Riding Hood<\/em>\u2014offered a surprising answer. In Adam, ou la cr\u00e9ation de l\u2019homme<\/em>, a poetic retelling of Genesis, Perrault stages the creation of Eve as a moment of aesthetic collaboration, spiritual symbolism, and ideological tension. Little known and long overlooked, this extraordinary work lies at the centre of my postdoctoral project: Constructing Eve: A Materials Investigation of the Iconic Woman<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Supported by the University of Reading and drawing on its strengths in book and print history, this project brings together literary analysis, art history, gender studies, and material text methodologies. It asks how Eve\u2014a foundational figure in Western ideas of femininity and sin\u2014was constructed not only through words, but through design, print labour, and embodied imagination.<\/p>\n

This forgotten Eve matters. Perrault\u2019s tales such as Bluebeard<\/em> and Red Riding Hood<\/em> continue to shape global gender narratives. Scholars have long assumed that fairy-tale heroines reflect the biblical Eve. Maria Tatar, for instance, suggests a biblical archetype underlies Bluebeard<\/em>, though she was unaware that Perrault had explicitly retold the Genesis story. Re-examining Adam<\/em> provides a new lens through which to reassess the feminist metanarrative often applied to Perrault\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

What also sets Adam<\/em> apart is its form: a manuscript illustrated by court painter No\u00ebl Coypel, engraved by royal artisans, and published\u2014once\u2014by the printer assigned to the Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise. This rich material record raises important questions. Why was the poem, produced with such care, forgotten? And what can its design and production teach us about how femininity was imagined in seventeenth-century France?<\/p>\n

These questions led me to embodied methods. What began as literary analysis evolved into creative recovery work\u2014piecing together a forgotten collaboration that resists binaries of soul and flesh, author and artisan.<\/p>\n

What the Process Revealed<\/strong><\/p>\n