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Chapter 3 - The Biblical Fall

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2019

David Troupes
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Summary

This chapter turns to the many poems in which Hughes plays with the characters of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, including an attempt to tease out Hughes’s sense of human moral accountability. We tour some of the most raucous of Hughes’s Edenic rewrites, including “Theology” and “A Horrible Religious Error,” demonstrating how Hughes continues to pursue an essentially religious agenda in the teeth of his gleeful anti-ecclesiasticism. The chapter turns then to morality, addressing a central paradox of Hughes’s work: he seems on the one hand to embrace Nietzsche’s anti-Christian moral nihilism, but on the other hand he argues passionately on behalf of our moral obligations toward nature. The problematic biblical term “dominion” is discussed. Many of the moral inconsistencies presented in this chapter are seen to smooth out in Hughes’s farming poems, in which Mosaic moral duty and ecological responsibility unite within a lapsarian view of human existence.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • The Biblical Fall
  • David Troupes, University of Sheffield
  • Book: Ted Hughes and Christianity
  • Online publication: 17 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108594363.003
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  • The Biblical Fall
  • David Troupes, University of Sheffield
  • Book: Ted Hughes and Christianity
  • Online publication: 17 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108594363.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Biblical Fall
  • David Troupes, University of Sheffield
  • Book: Ted Hughes and Christianity
  • Online publication: 17 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108594363.003
Available formats
×