Adam & Eve: The True Story
Sloan, John. “The Foray.” Adam & Eve The True Story series. The Masses (Vol 4., No. 5): 16. New York: The Masses Publishing Co., 1913.
Sloan, John. “Out After Hours” Adam & Eve – The True Story series. The Masses (Vol. 4, No. 6): 8. New York: The Masses Publishing Co., 1913.
Sloan, John. “She’s Got the Point.” The Masses (Vol. 5, No. 1): 9. New York: The Masses Publishing Co., 1913.
The “Adam & Eve” cartoon series present a re-imagining of one of western culture’s most enduring and formative stories: the Biblical tale of original sin and the Garden of Eden. As with other images in the series, the cartoon reflects an anxiety regarding gender politics and the inversion of power roles. As in the “Votes for Wimmin” cartoon, the wife in this series also possesses the power in the relationship. Eve is larger and, because of her grotesque size, able to control her weaker husband. The cartoon inverts the Biblical story as it has been recorded and passed down, in which Eve is the culprit of original sin, while Adam is a victimized bystander led astray by his unruly wife. While the reimagining re-frames the initial desire for the forbidden fruit from Eve to Adam—he is now the one reaching for the object—the text does maintain an important theme from the Biblical myth: that of the wife’s disruptive control. One theme of the original Biblical text, as it has often been discussed and analyzed, is the disproportionate amount of power a wife has over her husband. In Genesis, God punishes her for this power and withdraws it: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (NIV, Gen. 3:16b). The cartoon strip expresses the same dynamic of an authoritative wife and a weak husband. However, in this retelling, the powerful woman actually protects her husband from sin by withholding the apple. It is not Eve, a woman easily led astray because of the devil’s temptation and her husband’s failure to control his wife, who wants to eat the apple. Instead, it is Adam reaching for the forbidden fruit while a playful Eve keeps it out of arm’s reach and, by doing so, shields him. The cartoon then plays on anxieties regarding women’s power, but also suggests a hopeful thread of resolution in allowing women to have greater authority in marriage.
The cartoonist of the piece, John Sloan, claims a rather progressive track record. Biographically, he married an alcoholic woman—an experience that motivated him to feel empathy towards impoverished and downtrodden women. He often engaged with gender issues in his work through a somewhat feminist lens (Fitzgerald 128). Sloan’s history supports the possible women-positive reading. This hopeful analysis, however, is problematized by Eve’s grotesque physical presence. Richard Fitzgerald has suggested that “Sloan had a particular interest in large women” (143), and this cartoon is no exception. Eve’s large naked body becomes a spectacle of un-feminine horror, as her husband’s small physique signifies an un-masculine representation of castration fear. Rachel Schreiber has described how cartoons often reproduced the conventions they sought to undermine: “Cartoons begin with conventional representations then push at the boundaries of the familiar, often in order to comment on those very characterizations” (16), however such attempts by The Masses in particular often “rel[y] on the very representational conventions” that the magazine “seeks to critique” (Schreiber 16).
The humor in this series operates primarily through its images, rather than its captions. The caricatures of Adam and Eve work as examples of body humor; in a sense, it is a somewhat “lowbrow” form of comedy that invites its audience to laugh, primarily, at a fat and naked woman. But despite the lowbrow element in the work, the text none-the-less asserts a unique reading of the societal anxiety towards women in its comical declaration of itself as “Adam & Eve: the True Story” as it invites a reimagining of past and present gender roles.
Sources
Schreiber, Rachel. Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of The Masses. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Print.
Fitzgerald, Richard. Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973. Print.
New International Version. BibleGateway. Web.