The Verdict portrays Eve being found guilty for all time, particularly by Christian theologians with their doctrine of the Fall and the woman’s culpability in it. In her commentary on the painting, the artist notes that “In 418 A.D., a Church synod declared that death was not a necessity of nature, but rather a direct result of Eve’s disobedience.”3 Granirer’s Eve (and her Adam) are portrayed as marionettes, indicating that both are stock figures for humanity—“race unimportant, … sex unclear, easily manipulated.”4 In this retelling of the myth, there is no serpent; the primal woman is tested by Cannibal Birds. In west-coast Aboriginal mythology, the Cannibal Bird attempts to devour a young man in quest of his song, believed to express a person’s inner being. In the intense struggle to prevail, the initiate becomes a wild creature, and discovers his song when he returns to his people and regains his humanity.5 For Granirer, Eve’s eating of the fruit is “a deliberate and independent act, the first act of free will.”6 The artist found the Cannibal Bird symbolism especially suitable to express Eve’s inner process of seeking independence from the dictates of a God who “sets the trap for his own creation.”7 In The Verdict, Granirer explains, “the Cannibal Birds have become part of Eve’s life, haunting her from within and without. Symbols of the guilt placed on women, they have infiltrated her very soul.” 8 The accompanying poem expresses the verdict verbally: “We, of the Highest Court / of Men made in God’s image, / hereby decree / that Eve shall be / forever haunted by her sin. / This is our verdict: / she is guilty for eternity.”9
The next scene, The Sentence, is an unusual one to find in a series about Eve, especially by a Jewish artist. Granirer relates that on a visit to Strasbourg Cathedral in France, she was “shocked to see that the craftsman who had designed the window chose to portray Mary Magdalene [sic] lying flat on her belly at His feet. Unlike other representations of similar scenes showing Christ himself or His apostles washing feet … where they were shown kneeling in a dignified posture, here the woman was shown in a totally subservient position.”10 Christ in his role of the Second Adam looks benignly down on the eternally groveling penitent Eve: “In the stained glass window / enshrined in medieval forms / OFFICIAL POLICY: / woman, like a faithful dog / at her master’s feet, / is sentenced forever / to love and to obey.” Above the window, pencil drawings of women “playing the parts” of glamorous seductresses hover; however, the one at the far left shows the anguish and sorrow the rest are hiding. 11 In subsequent scenes, the “token woman of influence,” the Virgin Mary, “a goddess without power / a virgin / eternally pure” is shown sitting demurely on a little cloud, behind her glorious son, and the Virgin and the Whore are shown side by side in golden shrines topped by symbols of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Adam sits astride on top of the structure, savouring “the sweet taste of the apple” that is “only for him who writes the laws.”12
Granirer describes the year-long Trials of Eve project as a personal spiritual journey involving her recognition as a Jew that the jealous warrior God “Jehovah” had lost his appeal for her, her struggle with her own Cannibal Birds of fear and conscience, and her own quest for a vision of a humanity where the two halves of the puzzle, male and female, will interact as equal.13 In the questionnaire, she states that shortly after The Trials was published, she read and was excited by Elaine Pagels’s Adam, Eve and the Serpent, and that subsequently she has been an enthusiastic reader of feminist theology/thealogy, especially works by Jewish scholars. Her implicit Eve/Job typology is original, as is her reinterpretation of the “temptation” in terms of Kwakiutl mythology. Her identification of Eve with the stereotype of Mary Magdalene as the eternally grovelling penitent whore is also a piece of striking feminist theological interpretation.