Eve vs. The New Eve

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 28 May 2014.

I want to keep talking about this idea of Steffi Humboldt.

The name Stephanie is a feminization of Stephen, which means "crowned one," literally "that which surrounds or encompasses"--that latter one being an even better meaning vis-à-vis our central motif. Humboldt sounds like "humbled," but actually means almost the opposite: "bold man." I don't want tightly symbolic names in this story, but I think this works on a number of levels.

Steffi could work as the Blessed Virgin Mary's primary foil in that she illustrates a distortion of the ideal. Mary is truly humble and, paradoxically, she is the crowned one; she also "surrounds and encompasses" in a much more definitive way. And she achieves this definitive transcendence without compromising or distorting her feminine genius (cf. St. John Paul the Great's Mulieris Dignatatem).

Steffi, as we've mentioned, takes the feminine sea deity/demon route to power. She overtakes, usurps, and cannibalizes (figuratively? literally?) Farthington. She emerges victorious over everyone: Will, Farthington, Arthur, and Joe Lazarus. She may have been the beast, or she could have been mauled/shot along with everyone else, usurping power later.

Or perhaps Will had the insight enough to recognize her true status. Maybe the moment just before or just after he shot her, like some kind of anagnorisis. Perhaps she is the one he went after and shot. Perhaps Will already knew her in some capacity. She could be the one who is now chapless, she could be the one in the costume. She could be the "top sail," meaning she is the one who captured all this wind/vanity and harnessed it to her own purposes. Although the name Humboldt suggests that she may have masculinized herself to achieve these ends, I don't think that's the main thing going on. Hers is a distorted/disordered femininity.

One problem that we have right now is that Farthington's "speeches" make reference to an apple orchard, which I think are fairly rare in Burma and Oxford.

"hers is the hand that holds the apple"

I'm wondering now if this memory could come from Steffi's childhood in Midwestern America! That might be a nice thing to pawn off as one of Farthington's discourses then have a moment when we see that hers is the hand that holds the apple. We could go even further at that point and say she viciously murdered her grandmother, stoning her to death with apples so to speak. Heck, we could throw Grandpa in for good measure. In that case, we may have a kind of "Eve vs. The New Eve" situation (cf. Adversus haereses).

The master stroke would be if we could arrange for Will to have some anagnorisis regarding Steffi. For some reason, I think it's some realization he has right before shooting her. Perhaps he sees some symbol or feature such that he realizes that she--not Farthington--is the one behind the curtain, that she is the one who has prevented him from keeping his promise.

Less sophisticated would be that he goes down into the tunnels and happens upon Steffi, maybe in some kind of half-beast form, feeding on an already-dead Farthington. She turns on Will and he merely shoots off her jaw in self defense.

Kind of cool, but not very Aristotelian.