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Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (review)

Carolyn Merchant’s Reinventing Eden begins in prehistory and ends in the present. It rejects the biblical notion of human dominion over nature. Instead, “we should think of ourselves as partners with the non-human world” (p. 6). Most of the book is devoted not to exploring that idea, however, but to “the fate of nature in western culture.” Only the last twenty-two pages discuss how Eden might be reinvented. Merchant focuses on narratives. Part 1 traces the transformation of the idea of Eden into the progressive “recovery narrative,” in which human beings will create a new, future garden. Merchant examines the Bible, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and many others, concluding with Locke and Smith. Part 2 is concerned with “New World Edens,” focusing primarily on the United States and drawing largely on the classic literature of American studies (Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and familiar landscape paintings), to show the emergence of the male settler as a new Adam, taking possession of an untouched virgin land and colonizing first the continent and then foreign lands, ending with the commodified Eden of the shopping mall and the manipulation of DNA. Part 3, “New Stories,” begins by arguing that environmental critiques, from Rachel Carson to Bill McKibben, remain within the tradition of the recovery narrative because they posit a rupture with an early era when people had a sustainable relationship with Nature. Such writers seek a return to Eden, rather than rethinking the story itself. Likewise, feminist and ecofeminist narratives, while praiseworthy for their attacks on “the mainstream Enlightenment Recovery Narrative” (p. 198), ultimately remain trapped in the “linear” Edenic story, whereas what is needed are “non-linear narratives within weblike human and human/ nature partnerships” (p. 199). Merchant recognizes that deconstruction challenges linear narrative, but rejects its more extreme claims, and concludes “that people can use sto-