Garden of Edenville, Michigan

Illustration from Paradise Lost by Gustave Dore

In the book of Genesis, God creates the first man and women and places them in a utopia called the Garden of Eden. This garden is perfect in every way; Adam, the first man, and Eve, the first women, live in want of nothing. They never age, they’ll never go hungry, they live in perfect bliss. God tells them that they could live forever in this utopia he has created for them under one condition, they do not eat the Forbidden Fruit. This is the test. Eventually Satan, the antagonist of the text, tempts Eve to into eating the Forbidden Fruit. Because of this transgression, Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden and away from God, mortal on Earth. Adam and Eve fail the test because Satan convinces them to give into temptation, and go against God. In Romanticism, we see many allusions to the Garden test. For example, in “Young Goodman Brown”, we see Goodman Brown come across a man with walking stick carved as a serpent, a clear allusion to Satan in the Garden. The man offers Brown the staff twice, a symbol of the devil tempting Brown as he did Eve, to which Brown firstly refuses, but eventually gives in, just as Eve does. Additionally, in Realism we see examples of the Garden Test, such as in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, specifically when we see Huck give into the temptation of hiding Jim in from the Bounty Hunters, a decision which, at the time, is considered a grave sin. Finally, we see Garden Test allusions in Modernism as well. For example, in “The Awakening”, we follow a man and a woman in love, struggling against temptation utopian island, a very clear allusion to the story of The Garden of Eden.

Source:  https://www.pinterest.com/pin/549157748282382157/