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Cobb 1 THE CONTEMPORARY INTERPELLATION OF WOMEN THROUGH POETRY AND THE HEBREW BIBLE and THE RIB BRIDGE: A POETRY COLLECTION ________________________________________________ A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College Ohio University ________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the Degree of Bachelors of Arts in English ________________________________________________ Olivia Cobb April 2018 Cobb 2 Table of Contents In The Beginning: A Critical Introduction… 3 Why Women … 4 Choosing the Words … 9 Gathering the Biblical Information … 12 Writing the Words … 20 Man and Woman, He Created Them … 28 Poems Becoming Woman … 29 Mothers … 42 Romance … 56 Violence … 71 Cobb 3 In the Beginning: A Critical Introduction The goal of this collection is to complicate the dialogues of womanhood. I chose to combine my poetic perspective of womanhood with that of biblical woman. Alice Ogden Bellis writes, “stories have been used against women, but stories can also provide tools to use in the struggle for wholeness and dignity” (3). Stories are capable of creating a new reality, a different perception. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, we are “impressionable and vulnerable […] in the face of a story” (Adichie). Framing narratives in the voice of the feminine demystifies the statue of female “other.” This collection creates the female voice as the “I” instead of the Other. I do this by reframing the stories of the Hebrew Bible through the eyes of the female characters. By initiating each major theme with a poem told from the voice of a woman from the origins of Christian womanhood, I lend legitimacy and belonging to the contemporary female voices that follow. This collection expands through poetry to unfold a series of complicated and unanswerable questions, all of them asking, what does it mean to be a woman? In my poems and related scholarship, I aim to answer Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s call to construct a narrative as an act of deconstruction. I aim to replace patriarchal narratives with a more complex story. Hélène Cixous writes that the “feminine practice of writing […] will always exceed the discourse governing the phallocentric system” (Easthope162). I want my work to include voices that do not always have the chance to speak and be heard, let alone speak and be respected. This collection—based on the work of scholars such as Carol Meyers, Alice Ogden Bellis, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Kate Millet, and Simone De Beauvoir—acts as a reconstruction of the stories we tell about the Hebrew Bible and the women in it. It takes a careful look at how we tell the story of womanhood, past and present. I chose to break up my body of work into four sections: Becoming Woman, Romance, Violence, and Mothers. These Cobb 4 sections represent four concepts that are regularly portrayed as characteristic of the cultural ideal feminine experience. If you call yourself a woman, chances are someone or something along the way has hailed you into one of these categories of essential womanhood, of mother, of lover of men, of victimhood. The poems are placed to both challenge and expose different expressions of violence, romance, essentialism, or motherhood as I have seen women experience and present it. Why Women? The inclusion of Biblical voices was a strategic one. In the words of feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “[s]o often we act out the present against the backdrop of the past,” (90). There is power in working with origins. Carol Meyers writes, “too often, emotional justification for the existence and continuation of present unacceptable gender roles or behaviors is embedded in religious tests that shape our collective psyche” (7). The U.S. roots itself in an understanding of ideals constructed from the Hebrew Bible. Major cultural decisions are made or broken by the narrative we, as a social group, have created from the Bible and its interpretations. To reframe the narrative of womanhood we must work with the same materials as the original story. The importance of biblical stories has a heavy effect on how we define womanhood, as stated by Meyers who writes, “as the first woman, Eve Symbolizes all women” (1). For this reason I chose my poem, “Eve on the Subject of Original Sin,” to open the collection. This piece uses a chatty voice to align the original Hebrew story, in which Adam and Eve are both present for the warning and temptation of the fruit, with the cultural retelling of Eve tempting an innocent Adam. Eve claims her story in my poem, telling the reader that she has always known that “we would have to keep going.” This opening declaration by Eve, the epitome of woman Cobb 5 leads into a poem titled “Things to Let Go of (A Midmorning Prayer)” (Meyers 1). This list poem records a series of anxiety-driven concerns of a female speaker unable to let go of her worries. She prays to the reader, asking to release “my fear of God, / the terror of being known, the terror of being unknown” alongside the boys she once loved. Eve is mad that we look at her as a temptress. The next speaker is mad that she looks at herself as a collection of faults. The juxtaposition encourages readers to examine the perceptions of female self and personhood. What does it mean to these speakers to live as women? The matching of biblical and contemporary pairs their similarities in theme—as well as their disparities in respect and legitimacy—to show that the shared themes and understandings must be acknowledged. Throughout my writing, biblical scholarship remains central to my construction of identity and voice. Beyond the bounds of Eve, Bathsheba, Dinah, etc., the biblical scholarship also allowed me to expand narratives of the modern voices I use through out my collection. Navigating through the plurality of perspective in biblical scholarship, captured by the declaration that there is “not […] a single feminist reading of a biblical woman’s story,” granted me room to practice interpreting from a variety of viewpoints (Bellis 210). This process of unfolding became a way for me to examine my own experiences of womanhood. Why not, I thought, combine the two? I put together poems written from the perspective of characters in the Hebrew Bible with confessional poetry so that readers could critically examine their religio- cultural conception of gender and their currently held beliefs side-by-side. My hope is that this work encourages people to inspect their own relationship with the divine and look at how that relationship contributes to the stories that create their identities. By reimagining women’s voices, bodies, authority, autonomy, and ideals, into the creation myths that act as the foundation of present day (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) society, we develop a more nuanced and equalitarian Cobb 6 expression of gendered politics. There is power in the materials we use to create our beginnings, and I want to look carefully at that power. Feminist scholarship, as I use it in this project, identifies the pervasive ideas of patriarchal culture on current social practice. This scholarship revolves largely around writers such as Mohanty, Meyers, Millet, and Cixous, who all examine the creation of gender and the reactions of society to the categories it overlays. It turns its eye to the construction of culture; it examines how gender creates itself and shapes the space around it. Largely, the scholarship I have used to through out this project examines the cultural realities surrounding De Beauvoir’s assertion that woman “is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her” (Easthope 52). I have found it most productive to examine the role of woman as the Other through the Hebrew Bible as it distances us from our daily existence through the practicality of time and space. I use this distance as a poetic tool. It allows me to closely examine how we socially format the questions we ask and answers we give with respect to the history of women and their role in the Hebrew Bible. In the poem “Bathsheba,” I attempt to first and foremost grant Bathsheba a voice. With the lines, “He saw me bathing on the roof / and he did not wait for me to finish / drying my skin,” the speaker redirects attention from King David’s perspective, in which he sees a beautiful woman and decides he must sleep with her, and instead shifts the line of sight to Bathsheba, who was in the middle of her bath (lines 3-5). The shift is distinct; the poem is about what Bathsheba knows, not David or the narrator. I highlight her perspective by reaching into emotional complexities: “I met him while I was still married / wet with desire he thought / but really damp from the bath / and muddy from being alone for so long” (lines 10-13). She examines David’s own perceptions and her reality challenges his. The moment becomes a conversation of perceptions instead of a direct narration. The expansion allows for a Cobb 7 plurality of voices that was not in the story before. The more voices in play, the more opportunities for everyone (including the feminine) to be heard. Biblical women have power, as if clear from Bellis’s careful examination of each individual woman of the Hebrew Bible in her book Helpmates, Harlots and Heroes, but because their power does not serve the values and goals of modernity we do not explore it. Meyers writes that because interpretations, or “persistent male bias,” in interpretation exist, feminist readings of biblical literature—whether historical-critical, culturally cued, postmodern, or what have you— are necessary to reflect the realities of gender capabilities.

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