This study identifies and addresses representations of Eve and the Madonna exhibited at seven well-known London venues during the Victorian era (1838-1901). The subjects of Eve and the Madonna are here selected for detailed analysis from the broader context of Victorian religious subject pictures, a category of Victorian art that remains arguably under-researched. Nineteenth-century religious art was rooted in a Romantic sensibility and was invested with the purpose of providing a balm during a course, commercial industrial age, which, like the Enlightenment that preceded it, heralded the birth of modern life. Religious art of the nineteenth-century was promoted for consumption by the emerging middle class as a balm to the material age. However, the art that reflected this anti-modern, anti-capitalist impulse served, paradoxically, as both an antidote to and a participant in the materialist marketplace. During the mid-nineteenth century, a moralizing, instructional value was invested in art and religious subjects in general, which experienced a peak in exhibition c. 1850. By the 1860s, however, British art was characterized by a less narrative and didactic sensibility, reflected in Aestheticism, which was concerned with ‘a separation of art from the concerns of ‘real life,’ as well as the Venetian Renaissance. In the 188s, Symbolism emerged, characterized not by style, but a sensibility, which included preoccupation with emotions, dream states, mythologies and religion, innocence, sin, beauty, motherhood, sex, disease, death. Although they were traditional figures, the Madonna and Eve were each invested with, and emblematic of, some of these fin-de-siècle themes. The seven prominent Victorian London exhibition venues examined range from conservative promoters of academicism to sites that promoted the risk-takers of the nineteenth century, such as the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery. These were venues where national tastes were codified, national heroes were made and international artistic values were reexamined and reevaluated. This dissertation examines a nineteenth-century trajectory, from the early Victorian era through the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, identifying styles if art through which to biblical icons of feminine identity, Eve and the Madonna, were expressed, and examining the ideas invested in them, all within the context of the Victorian revival of interest in Renaissance art and the stylistic trends in nineteenth-century art making.

Thesis advisor: Caroline Bicks / In the last ten years, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues has morphed from a successful off-Broadway production into an activist movement that fosters fundraising productions of the play by community and campus groups in almost every country. In this thesis, I examine how the ‘body stories’ told by actual women made it to community stages all over the world through a series of translations: first, how Ensler poetically/theatrically interprets their stories; second, how the monologic form (and the current multiple-actor form) of the play affects the meaning of those stories; third, projecting how the audience reacts to those stories; and last, suggesting possibilities for broadening the audience’s experience into community discussion and social change. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English Honors Program. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: English.

In traditional Islam, Adam is the first human created. Eve, or Hawa, was created to be his mate and she was made from Adam’s uppermost left rib. There has been a move to argue that Eve and Adam were created simultaneously. I will argue that, because of the negative patriarchal and misogynistic imagery that has been attached to Islam, some feminist Muslim thinkers are attempting to move Islam into a realm where they believe is revolutionary enough to make a new statement in the modern world. These feminist Muslims are making strides to make the Qur'an the sole authority in Islam, while simultaneously dismissing all traditional accounts that have historically been used to assist in interpreting the Qur’an. Although their conclusions are interesting, their methods will be the focus of my thesis. What these feminists are attempting is a method of interpretation that has never been widely accepted in Islam.

Feminist scholars have long assumed that Tertullian, a second-century Church Father, was a misogynist. This assumption is based almost exclusively on the infamous “Devil’s gateway” passage in the opening chapter of De cultu feminarum. However, feminist scholars have read this passage in isolation without reference to its wider context in De cultu feminarum and without considering other passages from Tertullian’s treatises. Furthermore, they have failed to recognize the influence which ancient rhetoric had on Tertullian’s work. By reading the “Devil’s gateway” passage in a wider context, and by engaging in a detailed analysis of Tertullian’s use of rhetoric, it becomes evident that Tertullian’s comments in that passage are not based on misogynistic view of women. Rather, they serve a specific rhetorical purpose in one particular treatise. Furthermore, by looking beyond the “Devil’s gateway” passage to other passages in which Tertullian makes reference to women, it is clear that his comments in the “Devil’s gateway” passage are not representative of his view of women. An examination of themes such as Mary, the anthropology of woman and woman’s role in the social order reveals a more nuanced picture of Tertullian’s view of women, than the one offered by some feminist scholars. By bringing together two areas - Tertullian’s use of rhetoric and feminist critique of Tertullian and of the Fathers in general - I will challenge the assumption that Tertullian was a misogynist and show that in some areas Tertullian can make a positive contribution to the feminist question.

On reading the biblical version of the Creation and Fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis ii-iii) we find that the presentation lends itself to two possible interpretations: on the one hand, we may regard the narrative as being a mere history of two lives; or, what is more likely, we may see in the report an attempt to explain the present state of the World through an allegorical account of the entrance of evil into the mind of Man and so into the Macrocosm. [...]

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Religion, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2008 May 25

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2005. Graduate Programme in Musicology & Ethnomusicology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-84). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss &rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR11889

The Adam and Eve myth has long captured the attention of Christian and non-Christian minds alike. Tropes of paradise, serpents, fruit, and fallenness appear in works such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Emily Dickenson’s “Awake ye Muses Nine,” Walt Whitman’s “Great are the Myths” and Joyce Kilmer’s “The Snowman in the Yard.” Religious commentary on Adam and Eve is equally pervasive; most notably the theology of St. Augustine whose work may well be considered the most influential in Western Christianity. Even though a story as old as this one may not seem relevant in a first-world culture where newness is both expected and valued, the legacy of the Adam and Eve myth has not diminished. Linda Shearing writes, “Whether they realize it or not, Americans spend a great deal of time negotiating their world with Adam and Eve” (Schearing 3). To test Shearing’s assertion, this essay seeks to illuminate the ways in which Americans negotiate Adam, Eve, and Eden in political rhetoric and how assumptions of marriage, family, labor, sacrifice, fallenness, redemption and morality are used by political leaders as a persuasive appeal to encourage their audiences to join with them in recovering a state of purity and innocence.

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