The Red Tent
by Anita Diamant
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anita DiamantEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-09-15
ISBN: 0312195516
Number of pages: 321
Publisher: Picador
Product features:
- Condition: New
Book Reviews of The Red Tent
Book Review: Investigative Tabloids of Dinah
Summary: 3 Stars
Dinah explains from the first chapter that if you want to know about a woman you must ask her about her mother, then wait and listen attentively. Since she had four mothers: Leah, Rachel, Zilpah and Bilhah--the wives of Jacob (Israel) she builds us up for a thick and complex story. Hebraic devices like the "selah" and touchstones of narrative lifted from Genesis point to the original scaffolding: an ancient, revered document: The Torah.
Anita Diamant claims this story of Dinah is "midrash", or a search and investigation into the life of Jacob's only daughter. The story promises psychological depth and hereto undeveloped perspective as we follow how women participated in the beginning of the Hebrews.
The book's title is a fictional device--the red tent becoming the temporary dwelling of all women in their time of bleeding, illness or other womanly moments (birth, nursing). The red tent is a makeshift community forced by the "uncleanness" of the flowing blood. It was this idea that attracted me, women sharing life together.
The many wives of Israel (a.k.a. Jacob) chuckle and wink about being excluded, we learn that they are far from ostracized or unclean in their red tent. It's really a fantastic excuse to get away from men's life, to be free from: the demands of the lascivious Jacob, their grandfather Laban who is raunchy, debauched and violent so that they might bear children, gossip and nurse babies uninterrupted. Women of Israel unite! From them we experience the Genesis account of Jacob's wooing of his wives from an entirely different angle.
Diamant changes the story and in a Reading Group Guide at the end explains that she always felt bothered at the traditional story which assumes Rachel's beauty and Leah's ugliness. Diamant repairs these details by changing the story, contending much more than illuminating the Genesis account.
Leah, for instance, has no weak eyes, quite the contrary; her eyes were different colors, one blue and one brown. Dinah says she makes other people weak because of them. Leah combines her striking, unusual looks with a tall, full-figure, all the wit, intelligence, business-savvy, management skills that a woman could dare to own, and adds a sexy, long-limbed, flexible and adventurous femininity in bed. We wonder why Jacob wouldn't woo her first.
Rachel, while beautiful, is unripe, frigid and much too young to be married. At the instigation of Zilpah, who, like Diamant, never liked beautiful Rachel much anyways, Rachel refuses to meet Jacob on the wedding day. Zilpah who begins to sound too much like Diamant's puppet, scares Rachel off with stories of women's pain in childbearing and how huge Jacob's phallus must be. At the wedding Jacob receives Leah willingly, he's actually glad to be able to spend his lust on her--so much for Jacob's enduring, hard-won love for Rachel. Diamant writes that the story we know from Genesis is supposedly recreated by Leah and Jacob to protect Rachel from feeling ousted.
Reuben, the oldest son of Leah, loves his step-mother, Bilhah, and she him. This is to explain why Reuben finally gives in to his attraction, bedding her to mutual (as Diamant "midrashes") satisfaction. Jacob transmogrifies into the stingy, jealous husband intent on keeping them apart, later robbing Reuben of his blessing and of course sexual pleasure in his step-mother. Diamant suggests that incest is permissible, given mutual love and blames Jacob for disinheriting Reuben of the full blessing as first born.
She finishes off Israel's reputation by demoting his final prophesy and blessing into the mad ranting of a crazed old man.
Dinah isn't raped, as Genesis explains. She's in love and gives herself willingly, fully in four days drinking her fill of this glorious, Abercrombie-looking Prince of Shechem. Her brother's envy and violence create the demand for mass circumcisions and open an opportunity for annihilation of Shechem men. Dinah, true to the Genesis story, is left widowed.
Joseph is bi-sexual, or perhaps gay, having been both Potiphar and Potiphar's wife's lover--the real cause of his imprisonment. Even as he travels to reap his feeble--and deranged--father's blessing Joseph's eyes wander longingly to the lithe, thin servant boys.
By the end of Dinah's tale, we start to wonder if there are any good men left (and there are some, the story finds them, digging them out of the woodwork). Diamant's heroes are never the ones that YHWH chose in the Genesis story. Few men meet Diamant, and therefore Dinah's, approval.
Diamant seems to be going beyond "midrash", she refutes and undercuts key character traits around which the old story pivots: Joseph's virtue, Dinah's rape, Leah's rejection, Rachel and Jacob's mutual love, Israel's blessing. Genesis already seems to offer enough jealousy, rape, sex and violence without besmirching the small glimmers of goodness.
Diamant's re-writing reaches an embarrassing frenzy as Dinah's anger finally spills. In a rage, howling for vengeance Dinah stands up against her family, the blood of her slaughtered husband drenching her clothes as she curses her entire clan. We are left to believe that it is the mighty Dinah who calls down pain and damnation on Jacob and sons. Her curse becomes the cause for Rachel's death in childbirth, Reuben's incestuous rendezvous with Bilhah, Jacob's quarreling sons, Joseph's disappearance, enslavement and the years of famine.
This is a new mythological Dinah, larger than life, a goddess who can incant pain and destruction when she has been wronged. Dinah's faith is not in YHWH, in fact she clings to the gods her mother Rachel drags from place to place, to the songs to the goddess that Zilpah chants, to the strange feeling she gets when near rivers and to reverence for the strange, coming of age sexual initiations that the women in the red tent follow. The God of Israel, we are led to believe, is strictly for the men folk.
Dinah's account grows increasing less interesting as Diamant departs from Genesis. The tragic bit lies on the last page when Dinah is forced to spout Buddhistic ideas, much as a modern survival incantation. She will live forever she promises, though it sounds almost like another curse on her readers. She will haunt our steps because we have listened to her story. Her memory will endure, she explains, because Dinah was loved.
But I wonder at her being loved and loving so well. She's left kin and mothers, abandoned the women who offered her life and love, cursed her fathers and brothers and failed to reconcile any of her relationships, including her estranged son. Hers is the story of a woman of strength? This is the story of Dinah, a daughter of Israel?
We learn from the back cover that Diamant is an award-winning journalist. She writes well, building in clarity what she lacks in accuracy. She retains every disreputable bit that discredits leading heroes of Genesis and heaps more hypocrisy for effect. She removes and often excuses the woman's behavior. It is her skill in writing that might give those who revere Genesis pause, it weaves its own mythology.
The most prominent endorsement sits centered on the front cover, beneath a sensual and mourning Dinah. James Carroll writes, "The oldest story of all could never seem more original, or more true." This is perhaps its appeal and its pain. Diamant writes more graphically and sensationally than the ancient text.
In the Reading Group Guide, Diamant warns us that this book is a work of fiction and as such is a "radical departure from the historical text." I would agree and wonder at it, too. What happens when women today grow more familiar with her fiction than the age-old story in Torah? It is possible than in attempting to give voice to the silenced female, her "midrash" has further tarnished a story that lives longer and deeper than any of today's fiction.
Summary of The Red Tent
Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the four wives of Jacob. They love Dinah and give her gifts that sustain her through a hard-working youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land. Dinah's story reaches out from a remarkable period of early history and creates an intimate connection with the past. Deeply affecting, The Red Tent combines rich storytelling with a valuable achievement in modern fiction: a new view of biblical women's society.
The red tent is the place where women gathered during their cycles of birthing, menses, and even illness. Like the conversations and mysteries held within this feminine tent, this sweeping piece of fiction offers an insider's look at the daily life of a biblical sorority of mothers and wives and their one and only daughter, Dinah. Told in the voice of Jacob's daughter Dinah (who only received a glimpse of recognition in the Book of Genesis), we are privy to the fascinating feminine characters who bled within the red tent. In a confiding and poetic voice, Dinah whispers stories of her four mothers, Rachel, Leah, Zilpah, and Bilhah--all wives to Jacob, and each one embodying unique feminine traits. As she reveals these sensual and emotionally charged stories we learn of birthing miracles, slaves, artisans, household gods, and sisterhood secrets. Eventually Dinah delves into her own saga of betrayals, grief, and a call to midwifery.
"Like any sisters who live together and share a husband, my mother and aunties spun a sticky web of loyalties and grudges," Anita Diamant writes in the voice of Dinah. "They traded secrets like bracelets, and these were handed down to me the only surviving girl. They told me things I was too young to hear. They held my face between their hands and made me swear to remember." Remembering women's earthy stories and passionate history is indeed the theme of this magnificent book. In fact, it's been said that The Red Tent is what the Bible might have been had it been written by God's daughters, instead of her sons. --Gail Hudson
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