The Red Tent, Anita Diamant, 1997

 I read The Red Tent as a means to study the writing of female characters in novels. It’s a bit of cliche, but one nonetheless true, that many or most of the “great novels” of the canon are written by men and do not focus or execute well on the female characters of their stories, many of whom are limited to instrumental roles or are otherwise incidental to the plot. For example, there is the famous “Bechdel test” that assigns a simple True or False to a story depending on if in the plot there is at least one conversation between two women in which they do not discuss one of the men in the story. If the plot fails this test, it is seen as a non-feminist story with women as instruments or objects rather than genuine subjects. I am not sure if I was able to get past this in the story that I wrote this past summer, so I decided to study further in hopes of improving. 

I decided to start at the beginning, so to speak. The thinking of Joseph Campbell on the wisdom embedded in ancient myths has had a significant impact on how I analyze stories, and now more recently, how I write them. Campbell wrote of the “monomyth” in The Hero with a Thousand Faces which made two major claims: one, that all stories are more or less instances of the same unifying monomyths, featuring recurring archetypes of character and plot; and two, that these myths are a medium for passing crucial lessons in the guise of fiction in order to teach something that is somehow truer than true. Examples include the biblical tales, the Greek epics, etc. Unfortunately for my intention of studying women in these myths, most of the myths that we have in our culture are male-centric, dealing with archetypes of son and father, warrior and lover, and so on. I apparently could not easily access the female monomyth. 

This observation was not original to me - far from it. There is an emerging popular literary genre where authors are using these myths (particularly from the Greeks) as source material for retelling stories either with more details that satisfy contemporary tastes for novels, or for injecting contemporary lessons and beliefs. A subgenre here includes retellings with women characters as the central subjects rather than the objects. These are often written by women for women. While these do not truly represent ancient myths with the kind of wisdom therein, it seemed like a suitable substitute with additional value as part of this interesting cultural phenomenon and literary genre. 

The Red Tent was written in the 1990s as a retelling of the biblical story of Dinah. Her tale is short but vivid in the original telling - Dinah is the lone daughter of the patriarch Jacob, the lone sister to the progenitors of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. A partially nomadic shepherd tribe, they dwelt for a time near the settled town of Shechem. The prince of Shechem, also named Shechem, is reported to have abducted and raped Dinah, after which his father, Hamor, the lord of Shechem, offered a handsome bride price to Jacob for his daughter’s hand in marriage to his son. As part of the negotiations with Hamor, Jacob demands that all the men of Shechem undergo circumcision, a price to which they agree. But afterwards, while the men are incapacitated, at least two of Jacob’s sons descend into Shechem and sack the city, slay the men, abduct the women, and seize the riches, unbeknownst to Jacob, who curses his sons upon learning of their actions. Dinah’s own voice is absent in the text, as are any details of her life after this traumatizing event. 

Anita Diamant’s retelling is from the perspective of Dinah, constructing a hypothetical myth in the space afforded by Dinah’s silence. The central event, called a rape in the Bible, is instead flipped into a charming and consensual love story between Dinah and Shalem, the prince of Shechem, who is a gentle and compassionate husband. The biblical story is recast as a false propaganda pushed by two of Dinah’s brothers who retaliated against the men of Shechem for previous slights in their trading with the tale rape as an excuse. The betrayal and murder of the men of Shechem by her brothers is the act against her will and consent, not the so-called abduction and rape. 

Furthermore, Anita Diamant structured her novel with the biblical event as the center surrounded by extensive prequel and sequel sections. Most of the energy and focus of the novel goes to these parts rather than the biblical story, reducing it to a pivotal but not defining event in Dinah’s full life. The prequel begins well before the event, giving us the backstory of Jacob’s time with Laban and of meeting Rachel and Leah, the formation of his family, and so on. Dinah is later born and raised by four mothers in the midst of all the sons of Jacob. After Dinah’s brothers kill the men, including Shalem, Dinah is brought to Egypt by Hamor’s wife in hopes that Dinah is pregnant with Shalem’s unborn child. They go to the house of a relative in Egypt, a professional scribe, and keep the details of the attack secret. Dinah turns out to indeed be pregnant with a son. The grandmother adopts the son as her own, names him Re-mose rather than Dinah’s preferred Bar-Shalem, and reduces Dinah to the status of surrogate mother and wetnurse. Dinah nonetheless experiences a full second life in Egypt in the household, raising her son, becoming a master midwife, finding a new love with a skilled carpenter, new friends, and so on.

There is an amusing and ironic twist near the end. Re-mose, who grows up to be a skilled scribe, is assigned to work for the vizier to the pharaoh of Egypt, named Zafenat Paneh-ah. This is of course the pseudonym of Dinah’s milk brother Joseph, famously sold to slavery in Egypt by his jealous brothers, only to rise to power there. Joseph and Dinah rediscover each other when Joseph’s concubine is struggling with an arduous childbirth and Re-mose suggests to his master to make use of his mother’s midwife skills. He brings his mother to his master and they recognize each other. They partially reconcile, and Dinah accompanies Joseph to visit their father Jacob on his deathbed. The experience is awkward and unsatisfying for everyone involved, but Dinah derives some satisfaction from the fact that, years later, the scandal of the butchery at Shechem and her name remain well known. 

The author describes the different characters and demeanors of Jacob, his wives Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah, and all the twelve sons that surround Dinah. These characters are not equally developed, nor are the different relationships between the combinations of them, but there is plenty to make it interesting and believable as a large family. Dinah is unique in her position of having four mothers rather than one with three aunts. The men go off to tend the flocks as they age, leaving the women in the camp. The sexes work for the house in different and separate roles, both with their own skills and songs. Dinah finds the men of her house foreign and off putting at times when they return for feasts or events, since they in fact were foreign to the tents of the camp, rarely spending time there after maturity. Diamant does a fine job making the nomadic lifestyle seem difficult but noble, drawing on research into the lives of many Near Eastern traditions beyond that of the ancient Hebrews. She emphasizes the international flavor of Canaan as the crossroads between Egypt and Africa to the south and Mesopotamia and Anatolia to the north. There are many interracial and intercultural relationships in the story, in keeping with the biblical source as well. The namesake red tent, reserved for the use of women during menstruation, has no historical basis among the Hebrews but was a practice among similar tribes in that time and place. 

Anita Diamant balances between giving the novel an ancient air but remaining appealing and comfortable to contemporary tastes and novelistic standards. This is not really a historical novel, nor was that the intention, meaning that despite the research done by the author in the pursuit of verisimilitude, there are intentional and unintentional historical inaccuracies. It is more like a mythical novel. Dinah is presented as both at times a character in the story and an omniscient narrator speaking to the reader, which is clearly intended to be a woman. Dinah tells the reader that she is offering the women’s knowledge from the House of Jacob that was forgotten by the men who carry the religion from generation to generation. Dinah offers this knowledge to the reader who strives to reconnect with her after sensing that there is something missing.

The novel discusses the archetypal ideas of womanhood in how it manifests in the lives of the women characters. Features of womanhood include menstruation, childbirth, motherhood, daughterhood, labor (as in working), and romantic love. Dinah is at the swirling center of all the feminine attention of the family as the collective daughter of four mothers and a kind of repository of the women’s ways and love. Each month, all the women in the House go into a red tent reserved for their use during menstruation, during which they do not work. Other days they are busy cooking, preparing textiles, carrying children, etc. In this environment they are safe and secure, enjoying songs together, massaging each other, etc. This symbolic club or group membership is not the only one for the women - young girls are welcomed into further stages of womanhood when they first have their period (joining womanhood), when they marry and have sex, and when they first give birth (joining motherhood). This is associated with increasing knowledge but also an increasing secrecy, at least with respect to the men.

I noticed that the four archetypes from the book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover are present in the novel, both in their original masculine forms and in interesting feminine parallels. Through the several midwife characters, primarily Dinah both in her apprentice and master periods, the midwife is presented as a kind of “magician” archetype. The midwife has access to secret knowledge and possesses great skill. At one point, an Egyptian priest discovers that Dinah uses a knife to cut out a baby from a dead mother, and the priest is furious that this is done by a midwife rather than a surgeon. The priest’s reaction shows two things; first, and more bluntly, the priest looks down on “women’s work;” and, two, the midwife's profession is very skilled but secretive. The midwife knows many herbal remedies, concoctions, songs, and surgeries - it is a compassionate and professional entity. The other archetypes are there as well, but are less of a focus. The “mother” is similar to the “father” and is seen in several places, including in the way Jacob’s wives run the house, as well as the matriarchal figure of Rebecca. The novel evokes the “warrior” in the commonly drawn parallel between battlefields and childbirths. And the “lover” is pervasive in its romantic and non-romantic forms. 

Jacob is a true representative of the “father” archetype, using his authority to create a space in which there is law and firmness but also love and compassion, allowing the inhabitants of the space to flourish. In Genesis, the patriarchs are presented as flawed characters with jealousy, weakness, etc, but nonetheless possess this fatherly authority. Jacob’s flock and family flourish and Dinah notices, acknowledges, and explains to the reader her impression of the powerful patriarchal figure. 

In the text, it is the men (primarily Jacob and to a lesser extent his sons) of the family who practice the veneration of the Jewish God through sacrifices and the eschewing of other local, competing gods and goddesses. This god is called the “god of my fathers” by Jacob or “the god of Jacob’s fathers” by others, and this is meant literally, as it is only these men who worship this god. Everyone else has their own preference from among the various pagan gods. But most notably, the women of Joacob’s House venerate certain Mesopotamian or Sumerian gods and goddesses associated with fertility and motherhood. They perform their own kinds of sacrifices such as by symbolically offering the blood of Dinah’s first period into the soil of the earth as part of a connection between the fertility of the land and the people. 

Ancient Judaism is depicted as somewhat foreign and mysterious since we see it from the viewpoint of the women who are not really inducted into its details, although through Jacob’s successes (e.g. his expanding flock of animals and expanding family) and certain minor miracles (e.g. the incident of his wrestling with an angel) the religion is shown to be powerful and “real.” This religion, and the other Abrahamic religions by association, is nonetheless depicted as ignorant of important stories and wisdom kept by the women and as an inherently anti-feminist force replacing a world of religions that were more natively feminine. For example, this ancient Judaism was described as ignorant of fertility, menstruation, and other features of womanhood. 

This ignorance is complemented by a routinely negative depiction of the men of Canaan as brutish and violent. Some of this feels excessive, especially in the story of Werenro, one of the servants of Rebecca who is later randomly raped and nearly murdered by Canaanite men. The story is told to Dinah during her time in Egypt and is but one of several damning comparisons drawn between the civilized men of Egypt and the barbarians of Canaan. Perhaps there is a statement being made about the importance of civilizing forces on the violent nature of men. 

In my reading of the novel, at first my impression was that this did not seem like a feminist plot. The women’s lives and passions are dominated by “traditional” matters such as wanting to be mothers, domestic affairs, children, etc - things that are conventionally in the domain of womanhood. At first I felt that this book overly emphasized that women do or should focus on these things. The women are not idle 1950s housewives and do not pursue ladylike daintiness - they are also providers and laborers. There are many waves of feminism with differing (and sometimes at-odds) goals such as pursuing entry of women into men’s domains, total agency for women, full valuation of traditional womanhood, etc. However, I realized that the novel is aspiring to be a mythical novel and trying to access some of the archetypes of womanhood, so the focus was justified. The fullness of the women’s inner lives and their agency in navigating the world, as well as their access to archetypal womanhood, present what I believe is an interesting and uplifting feminist message.

 

What did I learn? I came to this novel with specific goals related to improving my writing. I am still processing the meta-information in the book and its archetypes and trying to apply it to contemporary characters and plots. I also am trying to discover further stories to read in this line of pursuit. I think I will read something more contemporary and possibly “radical” in its rejection of the conventional and archetypal womanhood, in order to better understand the world today. 

In addition, I want to further consider the differences between concepts such as “woman,” “womanhood,” “femininity,” etc. These are overlapping but quite different, although I may have lapsed in my use of the terms above rather than making careful distinctions. Additionally, the very act of studying this may or may not be in conflict with contemporary trans thinking, which I want to learn more about. Regardless, even in their rejection, I think these archetypes are foundational to our society and our stories and I find it useful and enjoyable to learn more about them.