Critical Essay on "Apple sauce for Eve"
Claiming a link between women and children is as old as motherhood itself and usually entails the natural physical bond between mother and child, as well as centuries of social mores that have assigned child care to the female gender. Poems addressing the ties between women and children are also commonplace and often sentimental and tender, not contentious and controversial. Piercy’s “Apple sauce for Eve” is not a typical mother-and-child poem; there is not even a typical “mother” or typical “child” in it. Instead, the link here lies in the childlike innocence, curiosity, and determination that Piercy applies to Eve’s quest for knowledge. Eve is not only all women, but the mother of all women; ironically, her exuberance and resolve are that of a “difficult brat,” “kid / of the ego,” and bouncing baby all wrapped up into one.
The first line of the poem establishes the flippant attitude of the narrator with her reference to the biblical Jewish forefathers as “old daddies.” But “daddy” is also an endearing term, especially when used by a child to call her father. While the most likely intent of the word here is to mock the writers of the Old Testament who condemned Eve in the Garden of Eden tale, it also sets the tone for succeeding metaphors in the poem that use child imagery to praise Eve.
The allusion to nursery rhyme characters in the second stanza enhances the association between childlike enthusiasm and Eve’s excitement over learning new things. She is as persistent and naughty in her pursuit as mischievous little boys who shirk their duties in order to do whatever they want to do. Here, Eve wants to eat the apple. She wants to see what comes of it, what knowledge she will gain, what new truths will be revealed to her. In essence, she is one of the “difficult brats” who dares to buck the system. She is as defiant and determined as a child who screams to get her way until she gets it.
Eve’s attributes thus far may not seem like something to be proud of, much less praiseworthy, yet there is an air of jubilant vigor in her resolve to experiment, to “turn each thing . . . / round and round” until “white / fractures into colors,” until “the image breaks” and the “chips” fall where they may “into patterns.” She does not claim to know any answers, only that the ones she has been handed so far by Adam and by a God considered male in the annals of Jewish doctrine fall far short of what she believes may be out there. Like a rebellious kid who will not take “because I said so” for an answer or like an inquisitive scientist who is not satisfied with only one result, Eve forges ahead with her decision to try something new. If she ends up saying, “Whoops!” in the end, so be it.
Even the famed thinker René Descartes has nothing on Eve in her pursuit of knowledge. After all, the world’s first woman is not content to sit around and think about her existence; she needs to get up and “kick the tree” to see what falls from it. She does not stop at discovering why she lives; she wants to know why she is “going, going to die, die, die.” In the hard-hitting third stanza, in which the speaker levels blatant accusations against men and calls her God-given mate a “good dog,” the child imagery is still present. Whether it is Eve or Descartes who is the “first conceived kid / of the...
(This entire section contains 1451 words.)
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ego,” the allusion supports the notion that youth and innocence lay the groundwork for many relentless endeavors.
The reality of the question Why am I going to die because of my desire to become knowledgeable? is ominous at best. The fact that the question must be asked by Eve, or by the speaker in the poem, drives home her frustration in having simple human curiosity in a world that dictates curiosity is for men only. She possesses the same intellect, skills, inquisitiveness, and determination as any male counterpart and yet her gender requires a separate path. Eve may be “the first conceived kid” to recognize a desire for something more than life has allotted her, but she also is well aware that acting upon that desire may mean doom. But like a little girl who knows her daddy will punish her for eating the extra cookie, Eve takes a bite of the forbidden treat anyway, relishes its taste, and waits for the penalty to come.
The final stanza of “Apple sauce for Eve” is the most celebratory of the poem and the one in which the speaker plainly states, “We are all the children of your bright hunger.” Metaphorically, women are the “products of that first experiment,” and the retribution Eve suffers for her daring is worth it because it brings “freedom and the flowering of choice” to succeeding generations of females. In spite of the obvious odds against Eve’s success (odds meted out by the status quo) the initial and final tone of the poem is one of ovation and victory. The speaker is energetic and passionate in affirming Eve’s achievement: “You are indeed the mother of invention,” “Your name means / life,” “We are all the children,” “We are all products,” “the seeds were freedom.” It appears that the bitterness and sarcasm of the speaker’s earlier details are diminished in the sheer joy of celebration.
Not surprisingly, some readers of Piercy’s work are uncomfortable with both the subject matter and the poet’s seemingly irreverent handling of it. Is this not blasphemy? Can a Jewish poet ridicule Jewish teachings and still be a devout Jew? The opinion here is yes. The practice, or art, of midrash has been around for centuries. Its intent has always been to enhance standard, traditional writings, to fill in the blanks left open by official doctrine, and that is Piercy’s intent as well with “Apple sauce for Eve.” (The section of The Art of Blessing the Day that includes this poem is called “Toldot, Midrashism [Of History and Interpretation].”) If the poem seems crude and ribald, or just humorous, its tone is simply a reflection of the period in which it was written. Contemporary midrash takes on contemporary issues in a contemporary manner. In praising Eve and in allotting her a playful innocence and childlike determination to show her resolve, the speaker is not mean-spirited or hateful. She pokes fun at some of the fundamentals of religious teachings but she never steps over the line. In essence, Piercy does not defy God in this poem, only the men who interpret God’s word.
Perhaps the use of child imagery to portray both the naughty and the innocent nature of Eve serves to soften the blunt language that some readers find distasteful. Though she is described as a “lab partner” of Satan’s, she is also a curious kid filled with awe and excitement at all the possibilities the world holds. Though she takes a shot at the “old daddies” who condemned her, she also paves the way for centuries of women and men to come who, like her, would dare to question and experiment and discover rather than remain static and void of imagination. If Eve is not wholly innocent here, she is allowed just enough “sin” to prove her devotion to a cause she believes is just. She is strong-willed and steadfast but not blasphemous or profane.
Any reader still uncomfortable with Piercy’s poetic midrash on the story of Adam and Eve may want to read the entire collection in which this work appears before passing final judgment on it. There, one will find serious, somber poems on faith and Judaism; tender yet candid accounts of family and love and passion; and, wry, no-holds-barred examinations of Jewish tradition set against contemporary culture with a bit of humor thrown in to lighten the load. Perhaps after placing “Apple sauce for Eve” within the context of the complete volume, one may understand why Piercy’s biblical first woman could never be content with a simple, ordinary apple. She is bound to make sauce of it.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “Apple sauce for Eve,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Hunger for Knowledge
In her review of The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, Judy Clarence writes that in this collection, “in many ways [her] best yet,” Marge Piercy “brings together poems written to celebrate [her] Jewishness, reflecting and expressing the joy, pain, passion, and elegance of this rich culture.” Donna Seaman and Jack Helbig, in their review of the collection for Booklist, note that Piercy dedicated these works to the Grrrl movement, “a feisty form of feminist expression found in zines and music and on the Web—because Piercy had been Grrrl long before Grrrl got its name.”
One of the finest poems in this collection, “Apple sauce for Eve” reflects Piercy’s Jewish heritage as well as her dedication to feminist expression. The poem centers on the story of Eve eating the apple from the tree of knowledge and the consequences this action had on Jewish women. Yet, the statements the poem makes about oppression of women and the desire for freedom are universal. Felicia Mitchell, in her article on Piercy for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, insists that “Piercy’s liturgical poems follow the Jewish mystical tradition for some readers and appeal to others on a different level, [which] affirms her appeal to an audience as diverse as her poems.” “Apple sauce for Eve” becomes a call to all women to break the bonds of tradition and satisfy their hunger for knowledge.
Piercy’s voice becomes personal and universal in “Apple sauce for Eve” as she encourages women to recognize their ancestral link to Eve. She addresses, much like Langston Hughes does in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” an entire community, tracing its continuity over the centuries. While Hughes speaks of the black race’s strength and endurance, reaching back to the beginning of time, Piercy maps out Jewish women’s desire for knowledge, a need first expressed by Eve as she eats the forbidden apple. The struggle against the restraints of Jewish orthodoxy becomes a universal one for all women living under patriarchal systems who share the dream of self actualization and freedom. “Apple sauce for Eve” presents alternatives to oppressive traditions and celebrates communal solidarity and significant change.
Piercy announces this theme in the poem’s title, which, along with the title of the collection, becomes an ironic statement of Eve’s independence. Applesauce, made with honey and apples, is served on Jewish holy days to sweeten the year. The apple, however, was forbidden to Eve. God denied her knowledge much like Judaism denies women the highly esteemed position of scholar in its community. Jewish orthodoxy promotes scholarship as one of the highest callings, but this role is reserved for men, not women. Piercy celebrates Eve’s challenge of this doctrine by rewarding her with the celebratory applesauce. The collection’s title, The Art of Blessing the Day, which derives from the Jewish custom of reciting daily blessings, reinforces the praise for Eve’s courageous actions.
The poem chronicles and honors Eve’s challenge throughout its free-verse stanzas, an appropriate form for a poem that centers on individual and collective freedom. In the first, the speaker addresses the curse suffered by Eve and her descendents after she disobeyed God’s law by eating the apple, which granted her knowledge. Piercy insists that Eve was “damned for [her] curiosity.” She was punished not only for her disobedience but also for “wanting knowledge,” which the “old daddies,” God and the male rulers of the entrenched patriarchies that have ruled women for centuries, forbid her and all women—“the us” in Eve. This is the paradise that she and her descendents have been denied.
This stanza also begins to outline the innate desire for knowledge, which Piercy likens here to a crystal of many facets that fracture into fragments as each “factoid” is taken into the brain. The speaker notes Eve’s need “to try, to taste, / to take into the body” this life-sustaining knowledge. The result of this activity is also chronicled. Alliteration in these lines forecasts the harmonious relationship that will emerge during this process between self and world. As the mind engages in the act of understanding and interpreting, as it casts “the chips into patterns,” the white facets of each piece of information break into colors. Here Piercy suggests that one’s world will gain depth and color through the process of gaining knowledge.
The second stanza reinforces the lure of knowledge acquisition, recognizing the power of this process to blow “a horn in the ear / of belief.” Knowledge can challenge the personal, the “dead languages” of Jewish orthodoxy, as well as the universal, as it helps pose “real questions into the still air / of the desiccated parlor of stasis.” Tradition regards these questions as “nasty and difficult brats” challenging “what we all know to be true, constant.” Yet the speaker argues that consistencies are desiccated or frozen, “like frost landscapes on a window.” Each experiment, like Eve’s biting into the apple, that “dares existence” by posing real questions brings steam to melt the frost. Questions like those that examine instincts and behavioral patterns, the speaker suggests, can debunk old myths that impose conventional notions of a woman’s place or of her abilities. Consistency leads to death; the active mind’s persistent examination and interpretation of the world leads to life.
Piercy illuminates the dehumanizing consequences of stasis in her third stanza in which she juxtaposes Adam’s actions in Eden with those of Eve. Adam, initially the obedient servant to God’s decrees, wags his tail like a “good dog,” expecting praise and reward for shying away from the forbidden fruit while Eve and the serpent “shimmy up the tree,” ready to face the penalty of their rebelliousness. Piercy extends the metaphor of the experiment here, the questioning that must occur if understanding is to be gained, as Eve and the snake become “lab partners in a dance of will and hunger.” Eve questions God’s decree that the knowledge obtained by eating the apple should be denied her. Revealing the strength of the female spirit, she refuses to allow her will, in this case her hunger for knowledge, to be suppressed and so joins the snake in a quest for freedom.
The speaker notes that this act in itself involves a double challenge to tradition. Eve challenges God’s control over her as well as conventional notions of what women want. In a clever play on the symbolism of the serpent, the speaker scoffs at the established conviction that women are interested in the body, the phallic “snake,” and not the mind, “when it is the world she’s after.” Here, Piercy debunks the myth of Eve as temptress, insisting that her “thirst” is “not of the flesh but of the brain.”
Eve suffered the consequences of her challenge to authority when God banished her from paradise and decreed that she and her female descendents must endure the pain of childbirth. The speaker insists that this suffering would lead to an ultimate state of freedom. By eating the apple and facing the consequences of her actions, Eve experienced “the birth trauma for the first conceived kid / of the ego”—the brain engaged in the active pursuit of knowledge. Piercy insists that women cannot exist without this dynamic engagement with the world, without the constant “kick[ing] of the tree” of knowledge to make the apples fall to the ground, without the participation in the quest to discover “who am I.” She argues that women have the right to ask why the punishment for a woman’s pursuit of knowledge was a death decree for her and all of her descendents.
In the final stanza, Piercy elevates Eve to the highest position in Jewish orthodoxy and celebrates her ancestral link to all women as the “mother of invention, / the first scientist.” Eve becomes a “dynamic” symbol of life as a result of her experiment, “tasting, testing” experience. She ate the apple of knowledge, “like any other nutrient,” rebelling against God’s decree, which forced her to swim “against / the current of time.” The speaker notes that this desire for knowledge, this “bright hunger,” is shared by all women through their common ancestor.
Eve’s heroic rebelliousness has survived throughout generations of women, “products of that first experiment.” Piercy acknowledges that God punished Eve for eating the apple by banishing her from Eden and denying her and her descendents the gift of eternal life, which became “the worm in that apple.” Yet she champions Eve for her independent spirit, which provided women with a greater gift—“freedom and the flowering of choice.”
In “Apple sauce for Eve,” Piercy acknowledges the bleak decree Eve and her descendents have suffered under as a result of her eating the apple of knowledge. Yet, the poem becomes a celebration of this inherited rebellious spirit that has inspired women to throw off the bonds of oppression. Jean Rosenbaum writes in her essay on Piercy’s poetry in Modern Poetry Studies that “Piercy strikes out at the attitudes, institutions, and structures which impede natural growth and development and thus destroy wholeness.” Piercy infuses “Apple sauce for Eve” with a hopeful perspective, of the spiritual renewal gained through the life-sustaining pursuit of knowledge.
Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on “Apple sauce for Eve,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.