Eden is a fearless and wildly original debut, a powerhouse of a novel
that explodes on the first page and sustains a tightrope intensity until the
last. When fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield draws a naked woman on the pages
of Genesis in fire-engine-red lipstick during Sunday school, the rural black
community of Pyke County, Mississippi, is scandalized. Her mother, mortified by
the small-town gossip and determined to teach Maddy the perils of her youthful
intelligence, forces her from then on to spend weekends caring for her estranged
Aunt Pip, an outcast who lives on the wrong side of town and is dying of cancer.
The lessons Maddy learns are ones that could not be taught in any church.Shuttling between the home she shares with her parents—endlessly locked in a cycle of resentment, violence, and only sporadic tenderness—and the house of tough, strong-minded Aunt Pip out on Commitment Road, Maddy feels her eyes gradually opening to the complicated dynamics that inform her world. As the once self-possessed, fiery Pip wastes away in body and spirit, Maddy is forced to confront the brutal finality of death and to contend with the ghosts that hover over Pyke County—the violated body of Laurel Pillar, a young white girl raped in the field years before; Uncle Sugar, the black man said to have Laurel’s blood on his hands, in prison for life; Justice Bates, Sugar’s alleged accomplice, his broken body strung up and hanging from a tree; and the community of dead and dying women who have been ravaged by disease, in whom Maddy finds a terrible sort of comfort.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1) In Eden, Vernon introduces Maddy, a singularly inspired narrator who relates her whole universe with an earthy sensuality. Over the course of the novel, Maddy matures from a girl, unseeing and naive to the ways of the adult world, into a person with an understanding of good and evil, of womanhood and race, born through deep impressions of the adults she sees around her. These adults are people she has always known, but they take on new roles as life models. What about these people has changed them in Maddy's eyes, from shadowy adults to be respected and obeyed, into frail human beings? What are the signal events that forge her new consciousness?
2) Maddy learns particularly from the women around her, both seeing and foreseeing herself in Mama, Aunt Pip and Fat. How does each of these women contribute to Maddy's vision of how her life will be or how it should be?
3) Willie, retarded, orphaned, exploited, yet maintains a dignity and fortitude that impress Maddy. (One character who dares to be kind to Willie is Miss Birch, the school bus driver who sets an example of goodness in a bullying community.) Willie also plays a crucial role in the plot. What does he know and what happens to him as a result? Willie's grandfather offers an antithesis to the villainous Jesus. It is the grandfather who seems to forgive the violence to his grandson; it is he who anoints Mama with oil in church and who blesses Pip at her end. What does Maddy notice at that moment? What is it that both Willie and his grandfather represent that might offer paths out of the anger and frustration of both black and white people? Is it more than 'blessed are the meek?'
4) Aunt Pip's breast cancer and slow demise are central to the theme and structure of Eden. Maddy, Fat, her mother and even memory-driven Daddy come and go to Pip's house as she lies dying. Much of the action is internal, in memory as the lives of women are intertwined with each other and with the men around them. How does Vernon sustain the momentum of current and past events?
Time in the novel appears to be more cyclical than linear. Events and attitudes are destined to recur. Is Vernon, in her interplay of past and present, showing how inexorably we are linked to our histories? Magic realism, in art theory and literary tradition (Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison, for example) fuses the concrete and the fantastic. It is not so much that Vernon goes back and forth between worlds of the normal and the mythical, even nightmarish, but that she insistently blends opposites. The rational is counter-posed with the dreamlike, as in the paintings of Magritte. It is a technique peculiarly suited to the mind of a child in transition, one who clings to observed reality even as she is faced by incomprehensible violence and injustice.
5) Echoes from other black women authors appear in Eden. Consider the mad dog in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Toni Morrison's young protagonist The Bluest Eye. Ethel Waters, like burdened black women in this novel, consoled herself with the idea that God watches the least of us; she chose as her title His Eye Is On The Sparrow. Lorraine Hansberry in Raisin In The Sun has her Mama slapping her daughter and proclaiming, 'In my house there is still God!' What is the import of these analogies to EDEN? What are the ways in which Vernon links herself to other narratives from black women? Further, how can we link her to a larger feminist context?
6) Perhaps the strongest tradition that informs the novel is the Biblical. Both Old Testament (especially Deuteronomy) and New (Jesus--always) prevail in these black people's lives. They wear the Book thin reading it. They quote verses and sing hymns to sustain themselves. The character Jesus functions as an antichrist. How? And how does the church serve as a riveting setting for revealing character? Mama's? Daddy's? Others'?'Fat, widow of Justice Bates, is determined to chop down a fine old oak tree. Why? When Maddy offers to help, 'a faint smile came over Fat's face. 'You can't wash out a killing. . . . When you get grown, get saved 'Cause the end come quick. And it ain't a matter of time and clocks no more. You be dead' (p. 232).
What are the roles of religion in the novel? Is it folk remedy? Palliative? What seems to be Maddy's attitude? Olympia Vernon's as suggested in her characters?
7) It is the Koran that provides the epigraph for the novel. 'Do you think you shall enter the garden of bliss without such trials as those who have passed before you?' Does the quotation give a key to the lives of the characters, especially Maddy's? Is Vernon saying that the present must be forged in the past? If Islam means surrender to God, is Vernon also creating in her novel a new spirituality that embraces both Islam and Christianity, as well as a sense of the natural world?
8) What is the significance of the prevailing absorption with female anatomy? Are the stains and odors, on the surface repellant, also to be seen as brands of pride, endurance perhaps? Insistent links among all women? Perhaps like the blisters and bunions that testify to the hard labor Mama is proud of? As in Garcia-Marquez, the physicality of being human is unavoidably disgust with the body but also celebration.
9) One of the defining characteristics of all women, indeed all female animals, (including the dog in the woods in this book) is the breast. The breast is a force for nurturing and good, but it can also kill. Milk and breast cancer are consistently tied together.) But milk that sustains life can also sour and clot and, they believe, turn to corruption and mortal disease. How did you react as a reader to this central paradox?
10) Perhaps the most powerful development of disease as a symbol appears in the great scene of Revelation. Eden is the place where Pip wants to be taken when she dies. It is also to this center that Maddy is brought in an epiphany, a kind of Matisse dance with mothers and daughters and grandmothers stricken by breast cancer. How does the disease work as a symbol of not only destruction but also bonding?
11) A further part of the Revelation is Maddy's finding, in the center of the forest. An open grave hole into which she climbs as lightning crashes. She also crawls into an open casket and closes the lid. Thus Maddy enters into death as she earlier imagined or experienced her own birth in a whirlwind. Are these hallucinations? After the apocalyptic forest scene, Maddy emerges naked, and re-enters Pip's house. 'My heart had begun to pound as I felt the women going back into the sky where their bodies turned to stars' (p.239). The mysticism blends with the concrete. Do you find this surreal imagery an effective device, particularly at this moment of awakening for Maddy? Can we sustain our disbelief in order to enter into this world of spiritual intensity?
12) Much of Vernon's writing is charged with powerful, even bizarre imagery. Other times she writes with quiet sparseness. 'The air began to penetrate the room. You cannot imagine the silence. Not even a barking dog with rabies to pierce the clouds, no tractors or white men in the green field beside us, the propellers of a faraway plane in the sky. Nothing. Just the rotation of an antique fan sending its wind upon the covers' (p. 243) . What other scenes of understated power do you recall? Consider, for instance, Maddy's moment of truth as she learns that Landy has impediments in New Orleans, and he himself has drawn a line. 'He picked up the chainsaw again, turning in the direction of a grown pine tree. The earth was silent. The crickets were no longer chirping. And Fat had slammed the door of her house long ago. I was alone in the world' (p. 135)?
It is a moment that conjures memories for anyone who has ever loved, or almost loved, and lost.' I could never have him. He looked at me that way. I had some growing up to do, long after being a witness to a sickness and passing history' (p.162).
13) Two creatures appear throughout the book: the hog and the dog in the woods. How are these animals important to both theme and plot? What are Maddy's own reactions to each of them? The hog, doomed to its own death, is fed the remnant of Grandma's grisly deed. The hog is also 'conditioned to a sort of 'used to' type of living' (p. 10) like Negroes in Maddy's observing and reading, (the reading that constitutes her secret life that as a black child she dare not share.) Another analogy is that of the condemned boy in Ernest Gaines' Lesson Before Dying; he, too, is regarded as a hog by his white accusers until his humanity is redeemed. In this book, the hog, to Daddy, is the symbol of his mutilation, but to Maddy there is also love in its eyes. It is this same hog that exemplifies the bestiality of lynching in a memorable scene. The dog, also an object of Maddy's pity, (miraculously eluding slaughter in the road) crawls to the woods to give birth and later howls its own battle with rabies. These animals both recur throughout the book. How is Vernon linking the human and animal worlds? Is she successful?
14) Is there hope of reconciliation or even understanding between the black and white worlds in the book? What are the major points of conflict on the day-to-day level as well as more dramatic crises? Is there a sense that Maddy's world might be different? Is there an instance you can cite?
15) The opening image is a fire engine red naked lady drawn in lipstick on the opening page of Genesis. It is a challenge emblazoned by Maddy on the first page of her own story. It both brands her in the church and empowers her as her mother understands. (Is this defiant act why Maddy is sent to minister to Aunt Pip, the sinner sister Maddy's mother cannot forgive?) Mama shake Maddy but is proud of her at the same time. This is her child who may have a voice in ways that she herself could not. Is this idea built upon in the rest of the novel?
16) Do women and men view sex differently in Eden? For instance, it is Mama's duty, but the delight of Pip and Fat, laughing in their memories of wicked haydays in New Orleans, 'where they had both laughed with men who did not deserve them.' Sex is how Daddy tries to redeem his manhood, and it is sex run amuck that drives the rapes. There are early stirrings in Mandy's longings for Landy. How else does Vernon explore this topic?
17) A poor illiterate black man with bad gambling habits is what Daddy is. He was a man with 'the low self esteem of a man with no insurance. . . . a man who didn't own his own house.' But Maddy can see underlying causes for his catastrophes. 'A black man didn't have time to be gentle with his woman. He had enough stress already. Staying alive was stressful. Waking up with that black skin and that nappy black head that showed to the roots, those rough black hands that they couldn't do nothing about, was enough stress to break him, no matter how much man he thought he was.' To what degree do you think Daddy and perhaps Sugar are handed their cards, their fates determined?
18) In what ways are blacks and whites different in the novel? How do these differences affect Maddy's family? Her father who works for a white man who barely tolerates him? Her mother who cleans their houses? To Maddy, the whites are different. 'They stood like white men...All the white men in town knew one another.... I wished my daddy could just sit around in his pride, debt-free, and shoot the breeze about something so trivial as miles to the gallon. White men had it easy. They worked just enough to call themselves men and went home and laid across their flat ironed sheets with their long legs propped up on the bed rail, chatting and kissing the cleanliness from their white wives' (p. 87).
How else do the whites demonstrate their self-declared superiority? What are the consequences of white attitudes and actions? Give examples. Is there any ultimate justice brought to bear on whites in the novel?
19) What is the significance of the title? Eden is where Pip wants to be taken when she dies. Eden is also a place where Eve is born from a man into a life often determined by men. Could the title be largely ironic? Does Maddy carve out her own meaning for it? At Pip's death Maddy recognizes her own limits of comprehension. 'It was far beyond me. I was still green. Green like the land of Eden where the flesh was confused, where green was so beautiful that nobody noticed it...our lives were limited and unbalanced in human understanding. Not knowing that there was no understanding in human language. Only greenness and death' (p. 261).
Does Vernon turn traditional meanings of the place Eden on end as she opens up its connotations?
20) What do you think Maddy thinks about her destiny --is she resigned to it, or does she embrace it? Does her attitude change over the course of the novel? Apart from her reading, Maddy finds her meaning on a continuum with the women around her. 'How could I have counted every star in the sky that night, the unusually bright one, forming a circle between the others? Was it this way with women? One bright star upon another, each circulating in a pattern of dependence? The gathering of light, one holding the other, in an attitude of sickness, faithful to the earth around it...I was a child of opinion. Every thought created within me, from birth, was like this one bright star' (p. 140). Do you find other points in the novel when Maddy seems to have a strong sense of her own destiny?
21) At the heart of the novel is what the dead and dying have to teach us. Death, in yet another paradox, is both mourned and celebrated. 'You must hold the dead in their last days. Look into their eyes and listen to their voices...They live in the spirit. They can no longer speak your language. Your words mean nothing to their bones. It is their spirit that listens' (p. 261). A further paradox for Maddy who values literacy and language is that spiritual truth seems to transcend such man-made constructs. Has Vernon, a writer after all, had it both ways in the book? How do you react as a reader to these essential contradictions?
