IN AN ESSAY EXAMINING the relationship between the female author, reading and writing, French feminist Hélène Cixous interprets the Genesis narrative and Eve's transgression in terms of its providing a fundamental lesson for women about the politics of reading. For Cixous, the primal Edenic location provides the ‘[s]cene of the meal in which desire and prohibition coexist’. The ‘meal’ in question here, of course, is that of the ‘forbidden’ fruit, which provides and remains a primary symbol of humankind's problematic relationship with its own innate desires and its cultural systems of taboo. Faced with the primal prohibition of God's law and her own desire to move beyond its boundaries, Eve chooses to read the apple as symbol of satiation rather than one of transgression or disobedience. Although aware of the rhetoric of death as punishment for indulgence of desire (‘For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death’), within an economy where death does not yet exist, its meaning, paradoxically, is devoid of anything meaningful. In its non-existence, death fails to signify, whereas the apple – tactile, mysterious and inviting investigation of its luscious interior – is present in all its multiplicity of potential significations. The contest between law and desire, therefore, turns out to be no contest at all.