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Citation: S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies, V3 N2 (2024)
Red Tents and the Embodying of Women’s Stories
Alisha Pomazon
Abstract Reception criticism is based partially on the idea that a community claims an idea, a text, or an object for its own usage and interpretation. While the idea/text/object may have come from inside the community, outside the community, or indeed, created the community itself, reception criticism allows us to investigate the relationship between the idea/text/object and its claiming community. A key idea in reception criticism is that the community necessarily creates the meaning for the idea/text/object, modifying it to suit the community’s needs. Furthermore, in reception criticism, how communities tell stories about what they have claimed illustrates what the communities are influenced by, and in turn, what they hope to influence in within their own world. Thus, we can see that these stories have much to say about where these communities came from and who they are. In this article, I will investigate these claims to examine how communities have been created, inspired, and shaped by Anita Diamant’s 1997 novel The Red Tent, which is based on Dinah’s story in Genesis 34, the reclamation of silent feminine voices in the biblical text, and the incorporation of ancient goddess and divine feminine traditions. In doing so, I focus on how Red Tent movements (as featured in the documentary film Things We Don’t Talk About: Women’s Stories from the Red Tent) have also re-created, re-interpreted, and re-imagined the original narrative ideas of The Red Tent and goddess traditions in order to form new communities that uphold female voices in society. I also look at how the miniseries The Red Tent further addresses problems within the history of interpretation of Genesis 34 as well as the goddess and divine feminine traditions that Diamant sheds light on with her novel for contemporary readers of the biblical text.
Key Words Wolfgang Iser, Dinah, Red Tent Movements, Anita Diamant, Storytelling, Goddess Traditions, Divine Feminine Traditions
“We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust…. And now you come to me…so free with your tongues. You come hungry for the story that was lost. You crave words to fill the great silence that swallowed me, and my mothers, and my grandmothers before them.”[1] Anita Diamant, The Red Tent.
Why do we want to hear the stories of others? Why do we become captivated by these stories? Why do we hunger for these stories? Why do we retell these stories to others? One reason we tell stories is because we wish to know the stories of our ancestors and those of the people most special to us. Another reason is because we believe that these stories have much to say about where we come from and, as a consequence, who we are. Stemming from this idea is the belief that without knowing where we came from, we do not, or cannot, know who we are. The Red Tent, a re-telling of Genesis 34, by Anita Diamant is a novel that both combines and juxtaposes these ideas through the telling of the generational stories of the main character and narrator, Dinah, and those of her mothers, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah to the generations that come after her. The novel itself is framed by Dinah’s consciousness of this telling to her audience. According to her, they come to her because they wish to know her and the stories of their history and their ancestors that only she can tell. As we see in the quotation above, Dinah addresses her audience directly, understanding that that these stories have been lost, which is why her audience has asked for them. As Dinah laments, “It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why, I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing.”[2] Dinah thus shares their stories with us, “My mother and my mother-aunties told me endless stories about themselves. No matter what their hands were doing—holding babies, cooking, spinning, weaving—they filled my ears…. Their stories were like offerings of hope and strength poured out before the Queen of…
[1] Anita Diamant, The Red Tent (New York, NY: Picador, 1997), 1, 3.
[2] Diamant, The Red Tent, 3.
The whole issue (S/HE V3 N1 2024) is available for purchase.
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