The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
I am the son, brother, partner of and eventual father to feminists. As a teacher, I spend a lot of time and energy focusing on women in science, history, literature, and philosophy. Now hopefully those caveats will prevent a misunderstanding about my critique of The Red Tent.
The Red Tent is an ambitious book. It attempts to write women into the masculine, patriarchal, chauvinistic, and oppressive narrative of Genesis. And for the first 50% of the book, Diamant does an amazing job of providing a literary presence for the women who are given names and little more in the Hebrew Bible. But Diamant does more than that. She writes Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah as real characters with more than just passing emotional complexity. She weaves their lives into the sophisticated socio-economic tribal milieu that was the Holy Land more than 3,000 years ago. For the first half of the book, she takes the barest mention of Jacob’s wives from out of the Hebrew Bible and creates something truly real in a wonderful, creative, and conscious voice.
The majority of the story is told by Dinah, Leah and Jacob’s only female child and the only daughter amongst Jacob’s famed 12 sons. As narrator, Dinah does a good job of putting the Biblical stories into context. One particularly well-written section is about Jacob’s flight from his father-in-law Laban, Jacob’s reconciliation with his brother Esau, and his eventual settlement in Shechem. More importantly, she explains the female role in this society. But in the course of narrating the family’s struggle to immigrate to and set up their own small tribe in Canaan, Diamant’s flaws begin to rear their ugly head. In Genesis, Jacob is supposedly accosted and beaten by a stranger who may or may not be an angel. This hard-to-decipher section of Genesis is equally hard to interpret in The Red Tent. That Diamant felt obligated to include it in her book indicates a strange writing choice. Genesis in particular is an inaccurate history, written by at least four separate authors with competing agendas, none of which included an expressed goal to give women a place in Semitic tribal culture. In the first half of the book, Diamant presents one strong narrative voice in Dinah with an expressed goal to give women their due place in Semitic tribal culture. Yet Diamant seems to have felt bound by Genesis as a master text from which she could not deviate. When Genesis gets detailed and specific, as in the case of Jacob and his wrestling-assaulter, Diamant feels compelled to include the same detail – all this despite the fact that she spent the first half of the book deviating in very political and gender-specific ways from the master text.
The first half of the book works because Diamant does a masterful job in fleshing out the barebones story of Jacob and his wives and giving those Biblically minor characters a vital voice; the second half of the book fails because Diamant felt obligated to stay close to a more detailed (and flawed) master narrative. Diamant created a covenant, so to speak, with her readers: I will tell you the true story including the half that was left out by oppressive patriarchal Biblical writers and compilers. It was a brilliant covenant, honestly and deftly executed. Unfortunately, she broke her covenant with readers and, to the book’s detriment, deferred back to the Hebrew Bible, at the very point when that narrative breaks down.
The Hebrew Bible tells us that in Shechem, Dinah is abducted and raped (“seized her and lay with her by force” in the NRSV) by the prince of the Shechem’s ruling family who is also called Shechem. Diamant retells this as a love story between Dinah and the prince. So far, so good – she keeps her covenant with the readers. Genesis goes on: Shechem and his father the king ask for Dinah in marriage, and Jacob and his sons declare that every man in the town of Shechem must get circumcised in order for their families to unite. This certainly seems a case of Biblical hyperbole, but Diamant stays faithful to her source. The men of Shechem are circumcised, all of them. Shortly after, as the men are recovering, the Hebrew Bible tells us that two of Dinah’s many brothers, Simeon and Levi, steal into the town and murder all the men for the defilement of Dinah. Again, Diamant makes a baffling decision to remain true to her source material, and has the exact same thing happen in The Red Tent. You know its hyperbole when you’re thinking to yourself, “How could two guys kill every man in the whole town? Even if they were recovering from circumcision?” Diamant’s Dinah is of course horrified by the actions of her brothers and spends the rest of her life avoiding and latter and reconciling with parts of her family (primarily famed brother Joseph while living in Egypt) while trying to recover from the ghastly atrocity of having her lover murdered in her bed. This is made all the more difficult because she as pregnant with Shechem’s baby when her brothers murdered Shechem. When Jacob fought the mugger/angel and Diamant chose to include that in her narrative, it was irritating in a small way but by no means a deal-breaker for me. When she chose to keep all of the details from the Shechem part of Genesis, I found myself losing interesting in both the theory and narrative of The Red Tent.
One of my favorite post-colonial books is The Empire Writes Back. One of the things this book explores is how the creative output of colonized peoples constitutes a critique of the powerful influence of European ideas about creative work. Now, Diamant is more obviously in the feminist school of literary theory rather than postcolonialism, but her unstated goal is very similar to that described in Empire: to give voice to the marginalized women of Genesis and allow that voice to critique its predecessor. I admire this goal, and I think Diamant does justice to it in the first half and perhaps latter fourth of the book. However, her own text suffers when it allows itself to be dictated to by the Hebrew Bible. And, let’s face it, it’s the worst facets of Hebrew Bible ideology that overwhelm The Red Tent: male oppression, xenophobia, and the tendency towards violence. Diamant tries to bring the narrative full-circle in the last quarter of the book; she goes back to the things that made the first half of the book so successful: an engaging, instructive narrator carving a place for herself in an oppressive patriarchal world. But the Shechem interlude, itself so illogical and counter-intuitive, is foundational for he latter part of the book, and it really is a disastrously poor foundation.
I praise The Red Tent for its original creativity and its rebellious nature. It is well-written to boot and for those reasons I highly recommend it. Furthermore, despite my critical misgivings, The Red Tent is a must-read if for no other reason than to further discuss and explore my own critique with other thoughtful readers.
