Plotted, Shot, and Painted Cultural Representations of Biblical Women
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JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT SUPPLEMENT SERIES 215 Editors David J.A. Clines Philip R. Davies Executive Editor John Jarick GENDER, CULTURE, THEORY 3 Editor J. Cheryl Exum Sheffield Academic Press This page intentionally left blank Plotted, Shot, and Painted Cultural Representations of Biblical Women J. Cheryl Exum Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 215 Gender, Culture, Theory 3 for my mother Rebecca Cockrell Exum and my other mothers Lucy Cockrell, in memoriam and Margaret L. Hines Copyright © 1996 Sheffield Academic Press Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Mansion House 19 Kingfield Road Sheffield SI 1 9AS England Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Bookcraft Ltd Midsomer Norton, Bath British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1-85075-592-2 ISBN 1 85075-778-X pbk CONTENTS Preface 7 List of Figures 17 Chapter 1 BATHSHEBA PLOTTED, SHOT, AND PAINTED 19 Chapter 2 MICHAL AT THE WINDOW, MlCHAL IN THE MOVIES 54 Chapter 3 THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE 80 Chapter 4 PROPHETIC PORNOGRAPHY 101 Chapter 5 is THIS NAOMI? 129 Chapter 6 WHY, WHY, WHY, DELILAH?+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 175 Bibliography 238 Index of References 253 Index of Authors 257 This page intentionally left blank PREFACE I had originally intended to call this book Still Amid the Alien Corn? In fact, it was previously announced by the publisher under that title, with Feminist and Cultural Studies in the Biblical Field as its subtitle. I liked having a question as a title, and I liked the cultural connections Still Amid the Alien Corn? established between the biblical book of Ruth, Keats's poem, Calderon's painting that appears on the cover, and the question my title implied; namely, whether or not, or to what extent, feminist criticism in the field of biblical studies is still, like Keats's Ruth amid the alien corn,1 considered marginal, an outsider taking up lodging within the discipline. I had planned to begin the book with a chapter, 'Still Standing amid the Alien Corn after All These Years?', in which I pursued this question by playing with the similarities and differences between the situation of feminist criticism in the field and Ruth's inclusion, and, indeed, place of honor in Israelite tradition as over against her coding as outsider, not simply 'Ruth' but 'Ruth the JVloabite'. In the course of writing the book, however, it became clear to me that I did not want to rehearse points about feminist criticism that have been raised so often already.2 I wanted instead to pursue new ways of conceptualizing the issues and to take the discussion in a rather different direction by extending the scope of my inquiry beyond feminist biblical criticism into the broader area of cultural criticism. The present title, Plotted, Shot, and Painted, foregrounds the broader cultural backdrop of my project. With its reference to the visual (shot by the camera and painted) as well as to the textual (the narrative plot), the book's title signals a shift in emphasis from the biblical text and its portrayals of women to portrayals of biblical women in popu- lar culture—in literature, art, music, and film. It is not simply a matter 1. But unlike Keats's Ruth not in tears at its situation. 2. See Alice Bach, 'Reading Allowed: Feminist Biblical Criticism Approaching the Millennium', Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 1 (1993), pp. 191-215. 8 Plotted, Shot, and Painted of the Bible influencing culture; the influence takes place in both directions. What many people know or think they know about the Bible often comes more from familiar representations of biblical texts and themes in the popular culture than from study of the ancient text itself. Where, I often ask my students, did they get the image of an Eve wandering around the garden in search of Adam in order to give him a bite of the forbidden fruit (which they usually visualize as an apple)? Not only will our knowledge of the biblical text influence the way we view, say, a painting of a biblical scene, our reading of the biblical text is also likely to be shaped by our recollection of that painting. Moreover, as I point out in Chapter 5, 'Is This Naomi?', when our conventional ways of viewing clash with our remembered versions of the biblical story, adjusting one to the other can prove hard to handle. Plotted, Shot, and Painted is concerned with what happens to biblical women in their various cultural afterlives. In examining the different versions of biblical women's stories, I do not privilege the biblical text or any particular version over others. What this means in practical terms is that I am not interested in arguing for some 'correct', 'original' version of events—the biblical version—and then looking at how later versions 'got it right' or 'got it wrong'. The questions that concern me are, rather, How are these women's 'stories' altered, expanded, or invented—and to what ends? How is the gender ideol- ogy of the biblical text both reinscribed in and challenged by its cul- tural appropriations? How does what we think we know about biblical women, our preconceptions and assumptions shaped by our encounters with their cultural personae, affect the way we read their stories? Are women today still being given the same encoded gender messages about sexual behavior, gender roles and expectations we find inscribed in the Bible? Can women ever win, either in the biblical text or in its literary, musical, or visual afterlives? If not, why not? If so, how? In one form or another, these questions run through all the chapters of this book. In asking questions of this kind, this study addresses all the issues with which the series, Gender, Culture, Theory, is concerned. Plotted, Shot, and Painted is about theory, more as applied than in the abstract; about culture, specifically cultural representations of biblical women; and first and foremost about gender, about social and cultural assump- tions that cluster around sexual difference—gender roles, expectations, Preface++++++++++++++++++++++++++-- biases, stereotypes, etc.—and their influence on both representation and interpretation. The twin focus on representation—the way women are portrayed in biblical narratives and both the social assump- tions and unconscious motivations that create such portrayals—and interpretation—the way we explain the meaning of these narratives in the light of our own attitudes and circumstances—is fundamental to this study. I am interested here, as I was in my earlier book, Fragmented Women, in representation, in the patriarchal ideology that motivates portrayals of women in the Bible, whether negative or positive. I assume, as I did in that study, that women in the biblical narrative are male constructs, and, as such, tell us more about the men who produced them than about actual -women. Thus in Chapter 3, 'The Hand that Rocks the Cradle', I ask the question I also asked of stories about biblical women in Fragmented Women: what patriarchal agenda does this portrayal serve? But that is only a preliminary question. The more interesting and important question as far as the present study is concerned is the question of gender bias in interpretation, a subject that received little attention in Fragmented Women. We can, to a certain extent at least, account for the gender bias in representation that privileges the male and the male point of view when telling stories about women (and in the many stories where women are absent): we can ascribe it to the culturally conditioned, or even unenlightened (if we prefer to be judgmental and anachronistic) world-view of ancient authors and editors. But what about gender bias in interpretation? How do assumptions about sex and sexual difference, ideas about gender roles, and contemporary gender expectations affect the way not only biblical commentators but, more important, readers in general respond to these ancient texts today? Can we avoid reinscribing their time- and culture-bound gender ideology? Should we bother to try? Do female and male readers read these texts differently? This last question has received little attention to date within the field of biblical studies, but it seems to me of critical importance. I raise it not in terms of what psychological or neurological factors might affect the way the sexes read but rather in terms of a practical question that can be addressed: what different claims do these texts make upon female and male readers? The question needs to be raised about visual images too, and Chapter 6, about Delilah, adds music to the cultural mix. The biblical text and its visual representations align readers with a male 10 Plotted, Shot, and Painted subject position. Obviously this means that female readers and specta- tors will have to perform a different set of mental operations than their male counterparts. As I seek to illustrate throughout this study, adopting a male subject position most often means that women are asked to identify against our own interests. This quandary for the female reader in particular is crystallized, and thus best exemplified, in texts and visual representations where sexuality is foregrounded. Thus I treat the different potential reactions of female and male readers or viewers most extensively in Chapter 1, 'Bathsheba Plotted, Shot, and Painted', where the female body is positioned as the object of the male, voyeuristic gaze, and in Chapter 4, 'Prophetic Pornography', where the female body is again the object of the look, this time a pornographic gaze, as well as the object of sexual abuse. Chapter 6, 'Why, Why, Why, Delilah?', which deals with the biblical character's development into one of culture's most notorious femmes fatales, also interrogates the gaze or look, with attention centered on the male reader or viewer, since the femme fatale is a male problem.