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Abstract: This paper examines the reception of the Genesis creation narrative in Margaret Atwood's Madd Addam trilogy, situating it within a North American post-apocalyptic tradition of engagement with Genesis 1-3. I argue that the trilogy discloses the potential for a posthuman ontology that retells the foundation myth through a lens of partnership, challenging the gender and species hierarchies that pervade the myths reception. Echoing colonial efforts of cultivating a new Eden on Earth, its characters locate original sin in the genome, attempting to eradicate it in an effort to build a prelapsarian utopia. This transhumanist future, however, fails to materialise as expected, leading instead to an ambivalent ustopia (Atwoods term for a combined utopic and dystopic future) in which the Fall is repeated. In this strange world, the apocalypse reveals the potential for rethinking our origin story not by seeking to reverse the Fall, but by embracing the creaturely and the queer connections that a rereading of Genesis enables.
Introduction
In the penultimate chapter of Walter M. Miller Jr.s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), as the Abbot Zerchi lies dying in the wake of a nuclear attack, he observes the emergence of a new type of human: one of prelapsarian innocence. This unexpected embodiment of purity is found in the character of Mrs. Grales, or rather, Mrs. Graless nuclear-induced second head, Rachel. Mrs. Grales dies in the nuclear explosion, but Rachel, who had not previously shown signs of consciousness, comes to life. Looking upon her, Zerchi observes that she is a creature of primal innocence, given the preternatural gifts of Eden, which had been lost by man in the Fall (Miller 317). As humankind brings about its own destruction, Zerchi finds a glimmer of hope in innocence born from disaster-in original sin torn away through the violence of the apocalypse.
Miller's abbot is not alone in his dying hope: the emergence of a new, innocent generation born out of the ruins of civilization is a recurring motif in post-apocalyptic fiction. In the destruction of the earth, it seems, speculative fiction finds the potential for a rebirth in which humanity is unburdened from its inherited state of sin. An early American progenitor of this preoccupation, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The New Adam and Eve" (1843) depicts an...