The Red Tent

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Permalink Reply by Lynda Keen on July 5, 2009 at 8:38pm

According to the blurb on the back of the book, The Red Tent has "an original insight into women's society in a fascinating period of early history". The novel won the Booksense Book of the Year award and has been a bestseller.
Hard to believe for a historical novel whose history is so glaringly inaccurate that it makes me cringe in embarrassment for the author. I don't think I've read anything so blatantly inaccurate since the Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown acknowledged that he hadn't aimed for historical accuracy. Anita Diamant admits only that there was no red tent used by ancient Hebrew women. So gullible, and ignorant, have so many contemporary readers become that many took the Da Vinci Code as true despite Dan Brown's protestations that it is a novel and fictitious. No doubt many believe the inaccuracies in this book,too. I can't think of any other reason why it would sell millions. It has no believable plot and the characters are laugably inconsistent so there is no artistic merit to carry it into the hands of buyers.
The novel supposedly rewrites the story of Dinah, taken from Genesis 34, from Dinah's viewpoint rather than from that of the males in her family. Dinah was a daughter of Jacob and his first wife, Leah.
This could have been an interesting, feminist retelling of the story but, sadly, isn't.
Anita Diamant turns Dinah's rape into a lovefest. Dinah, daughter of a family of nomad herders, falls in love (at first sight, of course) with the heir to the throne of Schechem. Equally smitten, he wants to marry her. Neither of them wants to follow the tradition of their day by getting married then having sex afterwards. On the contrary, the prince's Egyptian mother connives at bringing them to bed together. Why she doesn't just encourage them to get married in the normal way is never explained yet it is this premarital sex that causes the subsequent problems.
The Cinderella story goes haywire when her Ugly Brothers murder every man in Schechem to avenge their family honour, besmirched by the prince.
Hardly feminist to turn rape into loving sex. Or an "honour killing" massacre into a story of love and loss.
The book begins with inaccurate family trees for Terah, Jacob and Esau, with sons born to the wrong mothers and two sets of twins invented for no apparent reason. Another family tree turns the Hivite prince Schechem into a half-Egyptian, only so that Dinah can later meet her half-brother Joseph in Egypt.
The book turns Leah's eyes, described in Genesis as her one beautiful feature, into distorted, ugly travesties of eyes. It turns Rachel, who in Genesis is described as having a beautiful body, into a thin little girl.
The author attempts to gloss over the fact that slavery existed amongst the ancient Hebrews, by turning Bilhah and Zilpah into two more legitimate daughters of Laban and wives of Jacob. It was traditional ancient Hebrew practice for slave women to be surrogate mothers for barren wives, as Haggar was for Abram's wife Sarai, as Bilhah was for Jacob's second wife Rachel and Zilpah was for Jacob's first wife Leah.
Legitimising the slave women's position could perhaps be seen as a feminist denial of slavery: the women are not slaves but legitimate daughters and wives, with rights. But this interpretation does not work, not only because it is historically inaccurate but also because while pretending that Bilhah and Zilpah are wives, the author invents Ruti, a slave woman who does not exist in Genesis, purely for Laban to abuse. In fact,Ruti is treated so badly by both Laban and by her own sons by him that she commits suicide.
Nothing very feminist in that.
The book has Rachel defiling Laban's idols with her menstrual blood and confronting him openly with the fact, unlike the Biblical Rachel whose subtle way of hiding her theft of the idols by sitting on them and remaining silent was much more effective and impressive.
The book doesn't even get its mythology right. It turns the pagan goddess Anath, Phoenician goddess of war (anath means violence) into "nursemaid, defender of mothers". The rest of the theology in the book is a hotch potch of Mesopotamian, Phoenician and Egyptian deities. The Hebrew one God is a shadowy figure, dismissed because those shown as believing in him, from Jacob through his mother Rebecca to his son Joseph, are all portrayed as horrible people.
Rebecca is shown as living apart from her husband Isaac. She is a powerful prophetess: he is a shrivelled-up, blind nobody. More feminism? No: she is cruel, nasty, vicious, with no redeeming features and Dinah hates her.
She is not a role model for any other woman to follow.
The author can't even get her Hebrew right. Having changed Prince Charming's name from Schechem to Shalem for no perceptible reason, she says Shalem means "sunset". It doesn't. It means complete peace. Shalom comes from the same root, meaning "Peace be with you", as does Jerusalem: city of complete peace.
Apart from historical, mythical and linguistic inaccuracy, nothing in the way of sex and violence is left out of this book. The sex interest includes incest, sex with animals, adolescent boys masturbating openly in the fields while tending their flocks, sodomy, prostitution and rape, as well as circumcision and loving sex between consenting adults and children. It overflows with outbursts of love at first sight - in a society where the concept of romantic love did not exist
The violence includes domestic violence, disfigurement, eyes being put out, murder and mayhem.
As if this were not enough, there are weird ceremonies when a girl's first period arrives, an unmarried virgin employed as a midwife and while every other woman in Schechem is raped and carried off into slavery, Dinah and her mother-in-law are of course left behind unscathed to escape.
Every possible improbability is there in the attempt to make the book a best-seller.
In the end, the baddies get their just desserts and the goodies live happily ever after. The innocent people who have suffered or been killed off along the way are conveniently forgotten.
God has no part in anything anywhere.
If this is "an original insight into women's society", all I can say is God help us, men and women both.