Since the advent of ordered civilization, patriarchal rule has held dominion over the kingdoms of men. Women have had equally as many influential, inspirational and imperative tales to be told as men, however their voices have been marginalized, neglected, iniquitously subjugated, and bound by the ineffable chains of bondage for centuries. One need only possess a cursory knowledge of biblical history to recognize immediately the lowly status of women in the ancient Hebrew world. There is nary a better sourcebook of patriarchy and the proscriptive treatment of women in all of literature than that of the Old Testament. One cannot possibly, however, ignore the stories of Delilah, of Sarah, of Jezebel, and, perhaps most interestingly, of Dinah. Anita Diamant, a contemporary chronicler of Jewish lore and a seminal figure in modern-day historical fiction, expressed the woes and voicelessness experienced by the women of the Old Testament in her novelistic midrash entitled The Red Tent. Narrated from Dinah's perspective, Diamant's novel presents a feministic interpretation and retelling of the story of Dinah, her mothers, and her sisters. Dinah's life in the Book of Genesis is relegated to just a few ambiguous sentences, since she was a woman and the principle authors of the Bible were men with their own bigoted agendas. Had Dinah been given the opportunity to share her story, trials and tribulations, and actual experiences, her account would have doubtlessly been different from that which is commonly accepted. As evidenced by the stories of Dinah, Mary Magdalene, and any number of marginalized genders, religions, and ethnic groups, those who maintain power write history, eclipsing the perspectives of the powerless and the weak and crushi...
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...rejudice." Though ink is indelible and irreversible, it can be left to fade into obscurity by reexamining history from a number of diverse, contradistinctive perspectives. Re-evaluating history from alternative perspective is profoundly important, for to give the stricken, the marginalized, and the subjugated back their voices is to give them new life.
Works Cited
Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent. New York: Wyatt Book for St. Martin's, 1997. Print.
King James Bible. Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2010. Print.
Van Biema, David. "Mary Magdalene: Saint or Sinner?" Time Magazine. Time Magazine, 5 Aug. 2003. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. .
Levertov, Denise. "What Were They Like?" All Poetry. Poetry Foundation, 20 Aug. 1996. Web. 28 Sept. 2011. .
On December 10, 1950, in Stockholm, Sweden, one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, William Faulkner, presented his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. If one reads in between the lines of this acceptance speech, they can detect a certain message – more of a cry or plead – aimed directly to adolescent authors and writers, and that message is to be the voice of your own generation; write about things with true importance. This also means that authors should include heart, soul, spirit, and raw, truthful emotion into their writing. “Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” (Faulkner) should all be frequently embraced – it is the duty of authors to do so. If these young and adolescent authors ignore this message and duty, the already endangered state of literature will continue to diminish until its unfortunate extinction.
Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate is the story of an African boy, Kek, who loses his father and a brother and flees, leaving his mother to secure his safety. Kek, now in Minnesota, is faced with difficulties of adapting to a new life and of finding his lost mother. He believes that his mother still lives and would soon join him in the new found family. Kek is taken from the airport by a caregiver who takes him to live with his aunt. It is here that Kek meets all that amazed him compared to his home in Sudan, Africa. Home of the brave shows conflicts that Kek faces. He is caught between two worlds, Africa and America. He feels guilty leaving behind his people to live in a distant land especially his mother, who he left in the midst of an attack.
Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
Looking back through many historical time periods, people are able to observe the fact that women were generally discriminated against and oppressed in almost any society. However, these periods also came with women that defied the stereotype of their sex. They spoke out against this discrimination with a great amount of intelligence and strength with almost no fear of the harsh consequences that could be laid out by the men of their time. During the Medieval era, religion played a major role in the shaping of this pessimistic viewpoint about women. The common belief of the patriarchal-based society was that women were direct descendants of Eve from The Bible; therefore, they were responsible for the fall of mankind. All of Eve’s characteristics from the biblical story were believed to be the same traits of medieval women. Of course, this did not come without argument. Two medieval women worked to defy the female stereotype, the first being the fictional character called The Wife of Bath from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The second woman, named Margery Kempe, was a real human being with the first English autobiography written about her called The Book of Margery Kempe. In these two texts, The Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe choose to act uniquely compared to other Christians in the medieval time period because of the way religion is interpreted by them. As a result, the women view themselves as having power and qualities that normal women of their society did not.
Diamant may have been influenced by the recent resurgence of creating Midrashim, or stories that attempt to explain the Torah by examining its subtexts. Modern women have taken a keen interest in this practice, hoping to expand on the minute biblical mentions of women like Dinah.
Inside Toyland, written by Christine L. Williams, is a look into toy stores and the race, class, and gender issues. Williams worked about six weeks at two toy stores, Diamond Toys and Toy Warehouse, long enough to be able to detect patterns in store operations and the interactions between the workers and the costumers. She wanted to attempt to describe and analyze the rules that govern giant toy stores. Her main goal was to understand how shopping was socially organized and how it might be transformed to enhance the lives of workers. During the twentieth century, toy stores became bigger and helped suburbanization and deregulation. Specialty toy stores existed but sold mainly to adults, not to children. Men used to be the workers at toy stores until it changed and became feminized, racially mixed, part time, and temporary. As box stores came and conquered the land, toy stores started catering to children and offering larger selections at low prices. The box stores became powerful in the flip-flop of the power going from manufacturers to the retailers. Now, the retail giants determine what they will sell and at what price they will sell it.
In Diamant’s powerful novel The Red Tent the ever-silent Dinah from the 34th chapter of Gensis is finally given her own voice, and the story she tells is a much different one than expected. With the guiding hands of her four “mothers”, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah, all the wives of Jacob, we grow with Dinah from her childhood in Mesoptamia through puberty, where she is then entered into the “red tent”, and well off into her adulthood from Cannan to Egypt. Throughout her journey we learn how the red tent is constantly looked upon for encouragement, solace, and comfort. It is where women go once a month during menstration, where they have their babies, were they dwell in illness and most importantly, where they tell their stories, passing on wisdom and spinning collective memories. “Their stories were like the offerings of hope and strength poured out before the Queen of Heavens, only these gifts were not for any god or goddess—but for me” (3). It essentially becomes a symbol of womanly strength, love and learning and serves as the basis for relationships between mothers, sisters, and daughters.
From the beginning of time woman have faced the difficult task of discovering her position in a “man’s world”. From a historical viewpoint, we can trace woman’s struggle back to Eve — the women who ate the forbidden fruit and from those actions left mankind to pay a huge price — to also the expectations of women from the beginning of time to be only confined to the domestic lifestyle of obedience. Females have been shunned from seeking higher knowledge because knowledge, as deemed by the male ego, is only for the male neurological capacity. The Bluebeard tales give life to the theory that women’s desperation for knowledge will lead them down the path to their demise. In each Bluebeard tale for example, the three wives in Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber and the seven wives in
Aemilia Lanyer, in “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women” written in 1611, reinterpreted traditional biblical scriptures that held the idea that women were to blame for the loss of paradise and the overall decline of humanity, an idea that was very prevalent in 17th century England. Today, however, Lanyer’s evidence in favor of the equality of women is often times thought to be weak, and many go as far as to imply that Eve’s “defense of women” advocates more for women’s sub ordinance than of women’s equality. However, only by analyzing rhetorical appeals, rhetoric, and elements of form can one truly appreciate Lanyer’s radical ideas which paved the way for feminist advocates in later years.
In conclusion, most of the female character are often isolated, victimized and ultimately killed by the male characters. Furthermore, it is rather ironic how Mary Shelly, the daughter Mary Wollestonecraft who wrote the Vindication of the Right of Women chooses to portray women. In this novel, the female characters are the exact opposite of the male characters; they are passive, weak and extremely limited. Mary Shelly repeatedly shows women in a victimized position exhibiting to the audience how things should not be. In conclusion, Mary Shelly’s novel is a reflection of how women were treated in the 1800’s.
Foster in this chapter again coins a term that has religious connotation, but that is not strictly used that way. This use of biblical terms is itself a reminder of how much our world is influenced by old literature. Foster also used an interesting approach to answering readers questions by literally asking the questions in the text and responding to them. This made the text more approachable to me, because when I did have a question, it was usually answered in that format. I also appreciated that Foster used ‘he’ and ‘her’ interchangeable when referring to unspecific authors or characters; sometimes authors only use ‘he,’ and to me that sets a divide between what they think females and males can do.
Professor Naomi Hetherington is a faculty member of Lifelong Learning Institute. She has a bachelor degree in Theology and Religious Studies from Newnham College Cambridge. She got a master’s degree in Victorian Literature at Manchester and a Ph.D. from Southampton. She received a Birkbeck Distinguished Teaching and Scholarship Award for her contribution to literacy education. Hetherington’s research interests are 19th and nearly 20th centuries literature and culture, religion, gender, sexuality history of feminism, the popular Victorian fiction, and the literary new woman. Hetherington has written three books, that is, rethinking the history of feminism, religion and sexuality and Amy Levy: Critical Essay co-edited with Nadia Valman. All the three books are literature oriented which gives her an edge when it comes to critiquing any literature work.
Feminist proponent, Phyllis Trible, seeks to “rediscover all the information about women that still can be found in biblical writings … seeking to address layers of androcentric [interpretation]...”(West, 2013, pg. 1). She asserts that, “biblical texts themselves are not misogynist but have been patriarchalised by interpreters who have projected their androcentric cultural bias onto biblical texts” (West, 2013, pg. 1). From a Feminist perspective, the story of Tamar is not descriptive of an actual situation; it is a reflection on the type of treatment endured by Palestine women. The revisionist feminist approach states that, Tamar is given a voice of wisdom and rebels against this act of violation with courage. Nevertheless, “this remains a story of men set in the man’s world of power and politics” (Birch, 2013, pg. 1302). Accordingly, Tamar is not introduced in this story as an individual but as Absalom’s sister and Amnon’s object of desire. This emphasis in the Bible of man overriding woman supports the truth that women were ostracised and degraded because men deemed women inferior. According to The New Interpreter’s Bible commentary, the rape of Tamar is said to be “of interest as a personal tragedy for Tamar but as an offense to the family of Absalom…” (Birch, 2013, pg. 1303). In the words of Phyllis Trible,
In Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder teaches philosophy and it explains basic philosophical ideas better than any other reading book or textbook that I have ever read. The many philosophical lessons of the diversified thinkers of their own time were dexterously understood. The author has a wonderful knack for finding the heart of a concept and placing it on display. For example, he metamorphoses Democritus' atoms into Lego bricks and in a stroke makes the classical conception of the atom dexterously attainable. He relates all the abstract concepts about the world and what is real with straightforward everyday things that everyone can relate to which makes this whole philosophy course manageable. ''The best way of approaching philosophy is to ask a few philosophical questions: How was the world created? Is there any will or meaning behind what happens? Is there a life after death? How can we answer these questions? And most important, how ought we to live?'' (Gaarder, Jostein 15).
Rich demonstrates a protest against the dominating patriarchal system which excludes women from the book of myth. A history written for men by men, views woman’s accomplishments as far less important. As Rich struggles through the control of man, she combats the dismissal of women in history.