Reimagining Delilah’s Afterlives as Femme Fatale: The Lost Seduction
2018; Eisenbrauns; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/bullbiblrese.28.3.0471
ISSN2576-0998
Autores ResumoIn this monograph, Caroline Blyth studies the characterization of Delilah in Judg 16, using the idea of a femme fatale as a conversation partner. She begins by examining the idea of the femme fatale as a cultural icon in ch. one, focusing on three particular periods of its use in culture. First, she demonstrates how the femme fatale in fin de siècle art, literature, and music of the 19th-century in Europe possesses hypersexuality and intense allure, which make her physically, emotionally, and spiritually dangerous for the males around her. In addition, she bends gender norms through rejecting common female roles such as mother and obedient wife. Second, femmes fatales acted in similar ways in the hard-boiled fiction and film noir of the early 20th century through the connection with violence and gender bending. Racism enters the picture as well, with femmes fatales connected to the “Other.” However, it was essential that the femme fatale be punished at the end of these stories. Third, neo-noir of the latter part of the 20th century continues the trends outlined above, though she more often survives the tale. Blyth argues that the femme fatale is derived from cultural concerns about gender norms as a way to defeat any females who dare to challenge tradition. Blyth comments, “Fantasy and reality thus intertwine, and the fictional femme fatale becomes Everywoman, while every woman is suspected of having the potential to be a femme fatale” (p. 50).In the second chapter, she examines the text and interpretive reception history of Judg 16, largely seeking to show how many gaps and uncertainties are present in the story. These include the meaning of the name Delilah, whether Samson and Delilah engaged in sexual intercourse either before or after the cutting of the hair (does 16:19 refer to sexual assault?), Delilah’s motivation, the level of gender inversion in the story, her nationality, and her fate. The author then shifts her focus to the cultural reception history of the story in chapter three (the most substantial chapter of the book at 65 pages), which is structured according to types of media: literature, art, music, and movies. She finds that these presentations of Delilah generally fill in the gaps in Judg 16 to portray her as a dangerous femme fatale because of the cultural background of the creators of these media: “And, despite the fact that these characteristics are granted no explicit voice in the biblical text, the creators of Delilah’s interpretive and cultural afterlives insist on their veracity, or at least their plausibility, all the while sidestepping other, equally plausible interpretations of her character” (p. 147).In the final chapter, Blyth seeks to present a more positive portrayal of Delilah by bringing in two final cultural items: Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel Farewell My Lovely and an episode from the BBC series Sherlock, “A Scandal in Belgravia.” These texts allow us to see Delilah in a “place of rage,” where she must be violent as a means to survive her toxic environment. In other words, these texts do not deny the identity of the femme fatale but draw attention to her situation and help us see the world through her eyes. “Each text invites the possibility that a woman’s capacity for violence is indelibly interwoven with the patriarchal discourses and power structures that construct her sociocultural location, forcing her into intolerable situations—places of rage—beyond her control” (pp. 152–53).Studies such as this that focus on reception history are particularly helpful in showing interpreters common threads that can be assumed for contemporary appropriation, even when they are not necessarily clearly present in the text. While the vast majority of interpreters have seen Delilah in a certain light, perhaps it is time to challenge some of these traditional gap-filling answers. Thinking about the cultural background of these interpretations can also expose unconscious biases in their readings of Scripture. However, this observation can cut both directions: Blyth’s goal of seeing many correct ways of filling the gaps in the text perhaps reflects her cultural climate as well. It also would have been helpful to pay some attention to portrayals of the femme fatale in cultures that were closer to the biblical text. The danger of using modern examples is that it can impose one’s own cultural presuppositions, which remain unchallenged when other cultural texts are not examined.While Blyth has helpfully showed the many ambiguities in the text, she seems to have overplayed the level of uncertainty in filling gaps. It would have been helpful to engage the scholarly literature on the role of gaps in Hebrew narrative (such as Meir Sternberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading, Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987]). In some cases, we must hold our opinions on gap-filling with a very low level of certainty (such as the meaning of Delilah’s name). However, in other cases, biblical narrators expect readers to fill in the gaps based on knowledge already provided (to fill in every gap explicitly would be redundant for a finely constructed narrative). For example, given the large amount of money provided to Delilah, the narrator would expect the reader to fill in the gap about Delilah’s motivation. If the gap was to be filled a different way, then the narrator would most likely have provided other information to guide the reader (even if this information was provided later in the story).The idea of a femme fatale is certainly an interesting motif to use to discuss Delilah and corresponds well in many ways to her character (as it has been traditionally defined). In spite of some gaps in the argumentation, this book is a fascinating study of a contemporary cultural icon and its helpful role in leading us to understand Judg 16.
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