Eroticizing Eve: A Narrative Analysis of Eve Images in Fashion Magazine Advertising

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award Winner

In this paper, Colette engages in a feminist narratological analysis of the Genesis/Fall myth, as contemporary fashion magazine advertisements retell this story. At first glance, such advertisements might seem innocuous, even benign. Fashion magazines are hardly high literature, after all. Yet they are read by an exceptionally wide audience, and the images of Eve contained within them inform how we understand ourselves and our places in the world around us. The author explores how these advertising images have adapted the Genesis 3 story, and the ways in which omissions from the biblical text subtly shift the focus of the narrative from a genesis story to a character portrait of a hypersexualized Eve. Colette also examines the multiple roles of the reader in the construction of this eroticized Eve and the far-reaching cultural influences of such popular reconstructions.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.31.2.5

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