Constructing Eve—Rethinking Fairy Tale Heroines through the Printing Press

What if the fairy tale heroine wasn’t just born from imagination—but from the printing press?

In my new project, Constructing Eve, I return to a neglected 1697 poem by Charles Perrault—Adam ou la création de l’homme—to excavate how the figure of Eve was materially crafted at the intersection of theology, technology, and gendered design.

Preparatory drawing by N. Coypel for Charles Perrault. Adam ou la création de l'homme.

Though Perrault is best known as the father of the modern fairy tale, this text reveals another side: that of a collaborative designer working with painter, printer, and engraver to construct gendered knowledge through form as much as content.

My method combines archival study with experimental reconstruction. Using seventeenth-century presswork, I’ve recreated the textures and tensions of early modern print labour—pressing, engraving, setting type by hand. The process becomes a lens: how was Eve printed into being? What happens when we read the press as body—and the issue (the font, the impression, the bleed)—as bearers of ideological meaning?

Unknown miniaturist. Illustration for Charles Perrault's La barbe bleue. 1695.

This project reframes Perrault’s heroines—Bluebeard’s wife, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella—as Eve figures not simply of morality or archetype, but of design. It invites us to consider how the material tools of book-making—engraving plate, press, page layout—inscribed gendered power into cultural memory.

What if the printing press were a metaphor for Eve's curse?

What if the fairy tale heroine was born not from myth, but from mechanism?

Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing insights from the lab, from press to page: visual fragments, video essays, and reflections on how making can be thinking. This is practice-led research for a material age.

Stay tuned.