sexuality Archives - A Geography of Reading

A New Midrash—Interweaving History and Narrative

Jezebel is written from a variety of angles. Hazleton mixes a direct retelling of the story based her own translations from the Hebrew Bible with stories of her travels to the historical places (two especially telling anecdotes involve Christian fundamentalists at the site of Armageddon gleefully calculating how much blood it will take to fill the valley and Hazleton’s attempts to find a holy site that has nearly been erased by history). Hazleton also includes imagined looks at the events of Jezebel’s lifetime from the point of view of the queen herself.

“It is easy to forget that [the Bible] was written by specific men in specific times and places, for specific reasons.” – Lesley Hazleton

This unexpected mix of approaches gave me a more complex view of the stories and the players. Shifting through time allowed Hazleton to make comparisons to modern day politics in the Middle East. I like to think Jezebel was like reading a new Midrash (most everything I know about the Old Testament, I know from reading Davita’s Harp).

Reading the Bible through the Eyes of Others

I am no Biblical scholar—I wasn’t raised with any more religion than I could glean from the (Christian) cultures I grew up in and from books. When I tried to read the King James translation for myself, I never got past the begats. That is to say, my experience of the Bible has always been filtered through the experiences of others. So I loved hearing stories of ancient gods, kings, and queens and their struggles for power. It is clear that Hazleton brought to this book an admiration of Ahab and Jezebel. And the comparisons to modern politics were apt and informative. I appreciated that Hazleton was trying to remove the mask of Orientalism and I could see ways in which a religion is shaped by its believers.

What did not work for me were the moments when Hazleton imbued the scenes with what Jezebel must have been thinking. She did a solid job of outlining the character and I liked the fierce strength and nobility that Hazleton attributed to her, but it was more of a leap into story than I was willing to take.

Overall, it was refreshing to get a contemporary, female view of the Bible. But in the end, I realized that the only way to satisfy my need to get my own full understanding will be to learn Hebrew and read the Bible for myself.

Women Aren’t Sexual Beings—We Are Whole Beings

I was intrigued by the idea of a “harlot queen.” The word “harlot” and its brethren “bitch, slut, whore” and so many others are still used against women today and usually in instances that have everything to do with power and nothing to do with sex.

What I found interesting about Jezebel is that Hazleton removes sex from the equation entirely. A book I thought might be about how female sexuality is positive (rather than negative) turned out to be about the power of a woman as a person. Perhaps this is the more important leap because a person is entitled to power and sexuality and entirety.

I realized that my own investigations into sexuality and feminism with my new novel might be limited. I have been fighting to understand female sexuality and have it seen as equal to that of men. Perhaps instead I should be looking at women as whole people. Maybe I have allowed the very people who seek to minimize my sex to set the terms of this battle.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Jezebel: The Untold Story Of The Bible’s Harlot Queen from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

In Lives of Girls and Women, Alice Munro exposes the reader to the inner world of her first-person narrator, Della Jordan. The psychic distance throughout the book is always close, as I would expect in a first person narrative. However, Munro makes use of a full range of narrative distance from distant: “[t]he snowbanks along the main street got to be so high that an archway was cut in one of them” to close: “the thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about at the moment.” When Munro presents scenes of Della’s burgeoning sexuality, she uses the combination of the close psychic distance and a close narrative distance to explore the fullness of Della’s contradictory feelings.

As Della begins to fantasize about Mr. Chamberlain, we are treated to thoughts like: “Mr. Chamberlain’s voice in my mind…acted on me like the touch of rayon silk on my skin, surrounded me, made me feel endangered and desired.” The reader falls in with Della and is treated to her most intimate thoughts as she first begins to see herself as a sexual creature. I felt her naïveté as she mulls over the implications of the conversation she has just heard: “[t]hey mature earlier in those hot climates…A man paid you to let him do it. What did he say? Did he take your clothes off or did he expect you to do that yourself?” The questions she is asking herself reveal the shallowness of her experience, but her observations about Mr. Chamberlain imply how willing she is to explore this new, forbidden realm farther.

“His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.” -Alice Munro, The Lives of Girls and Women

Della begins to fantasize about being seduced by Mr. Chamberlain, but “[t]he moment of being seen naked could not be solidified, it was a stab of light….in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electrically like a blue fluorescent light.” Because I am deep inside Della’s thoughts, I am privy to the innocence of her inability to fully imagine the scene and also to the lustiness and force of her emotions. Although Della’s hormones are coursing through her like mad, she has no concrete experience on which to base her fantasies. If Munro did not place the reader so deep in Della’s mind, it would be difficult to convey the same complexity of Della’s childlike lasciviousness. She could be a Lolita through Humbert’s eyes or a victim, but not as fully both.

I was involved with Della as she read through Fern’s papers and finds the bawdy poetry. I understand Della’s relationship with the word “fuck, which I had never been able to look at….I had never been able to contemplate before its thrust of brutality, hypnotic swagger.” Della is taking a word that she has seen and for the first time is really starting to understand. Mr. Chamberlain has already groped her and she has willingly gotten in the car with him and the word sits out there as a possibility rather than a profanity. Della is on the cusp of asserting her sexuality.

I enjoyed being so intimate with Della. I think more so because this came so late in the book. She was already a friend and I understood her to a certain extent. I felt like I was willing to grow with her through her contradictory emotions. At some points I felt like Munro was pulling thoughts out of my own adolescent head and I think that is due to the tortured duality of the thoughts. As people, especially as adolescents, we experience uncertainty. When Mr. Chamberlain finally exposes himself to Della, her observation that his penis is “[n]ot at all like marble David’s” says everything. The parts of the fantasy she couldn’t quite imagine are right there in front of her and she could (would) never have imagined them in that way.

My narrator in Polska, 1994, Magda, is of a similar age and sexual experience level as Della. As I think back on this book, I realize how much I learned from the realism of the contradictions in Della’s thoughts. And the stark contrast between the fantasy of sexuality and the reality made the reality of Mr. Chamberlain even more grotesque than a grown man molesting a teenager would stereotypically be. At the same time, the naturalness with which Della faces her sexual desires portends the healthy sexual relationship she will have with Garnet. She is not victimized by Mr. Chamberlain, he is simply one step on her path toward sexual awakening.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Lives of Girls and Women from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.