This Other Eden Themes

Paul Harding’s This Other Eden is full of unconventional families, and it raises the question of what exactly makes a group of people a family. Although the Honeys (who are all biologically related) all care for and protect each other, their family has a dark beginning: Esther only gave birth to Eha because her white father raped her. Esther considers drowning Eha to erase the memory of her father, but instead she keeps her newborn…

This Other Eden portrays the moment in history when eugenics—the pseudoscience of attempting to improve the genes of humanity by excluding “inferior” groups in favor of “superior” ones—started to come to prominence. By 1911, when the novel begins, racism, particularly against Black people, had a long history in the United States, but eugenics marked a new phase. Although slavery ended after the Civil War, with eugenics, racism increasingly became part of government policy again, with…

Much of This Other Eden was inspired by real-life photos that the residents of Malaga Island (the real-life analogue for the fictional Apple Island) left behind. Paintings and photographs preserve a moment in time, sometimes even revealing things that aren’t visible to the naked eye. Ethan, for example, doesn’t recognize how boyish he looks until he draws his first self-portrait. Similarly, Bridget doesn’t realize how thoughtful Ethan is until she sees a portrait that…