Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent: Rescuing Female Figures from the Margins of Biblical Scripture

Katrina’s Review of:
Diamant, Anita. The Red Tent. New York: Picador USA, 1997. 321 pages.

 

Well, I may have gotten to this book about a decade late, but graduate school has severely limited the scope of my reading over these past few years. I’m finally getting around to some of those novels I’ve had piling up in my mental reading list, or physically gathering dust on the endless shelves that wall my ever-expanding library. Picking up The Red Tent (1997) by Anita Diamant the other day at one of those rare used bookstores that have managed to keep their doors open in today’s electronic media-driven world, I immediately recognized the cover illustration – I had seen many of my friends and colleagues reading it years ago – and the simple yet intriguing title peaked my curiosity yet again. It turned out to be a quick, fascinating read, offering its readership with unique insight into the historical basis of the stories found in the Old Testament. While I am generally familiar with the Bible from reading different passages over the years, Diamant’s careful attention to the historical reality of this era in our collective history struck a chord in me as I was finally able to think of these biblical figures not as mythical entities but rather as autonomous individuals with their own unique culture and traditions.

As my readers are most likely already aware, I am a huge fan of historical fiction, and The Red Tent clearly falls within this category, but it accomplishes so much more. Through the text, Diamant not only recreates a story from an earlier time but also simultaneously pushes the limits of Biblical scripture to bring its female figures – usually relegated to the margins of the Bible – to the forefront. The Red Tent tells the story of Dinah, a minor character in the Book of Genesis who appears in the story of Jacob and his sons. Drawing from historical fact and her own imagination, Diamant recreates the feminine world of ancient North Africa and the Middle East through the eyes of Jacob’s only daughter. Set in the Middle Bronze Age somewhere between 1800 and 1500 B.C.E., it explores the reality of women during the time of the Jewish Patriarchs when Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob reigned in Haran (most likely located in what is now Turkey) and Canaan (modern-day Iraq and Syria).

For those readers who are only vaguely familiar with the Bible, or with ancient history, this book will surely provide you with a valuable history lesson. Yet, because Diamant’s novel is so historically rooted, it can also be confusing to readers uninformed about this era, and the family names and geographical references can be hard to follow at times. The value of a book like this, however – and I must admit that this is partially the Literature teacher in me speaking – is that it makes its reader work; it makes us curious enough to do a quick Google search in order to gain more insight into the utterly foreign world of Dinah and her family, or perhaps even to crack open the Bible to read the original story of Jacob. Yet, despite the foreign-ness of the ancient era recreated in The Red Tent, the confiding, affable tone adopted by Dinah, who narrates the entirety of the novel in first-person, engages with the reader and quickly enfolds us within her world. I particularly appreciated (as I always do) the narrative’s central focus on the experience of women during this time. It is through this in-depth examination of female life that Diamant contributes to an expansion of the traditional Biblical story of Jacob, taking Dinah and her mothers from the margins to the heart of the narrative.

The title of the novel reflects the initial frame around which Dinah’s story is structured. The Red Tent refers to the tent to which the women of the clan would retire while menstruating. Canaanite custom dictated that women separate themselves from the male members of the clan during this time in their monthly cycle, which Diamant implies occurred each month with the rise of the new moon (although this timing is not based on proven fact). In the narrative, the cycles of all of the women in Dinah’s extended family – who lived together in a large settlement in the countryside of Canaan – were synchronized, such that they would all enter the red tent at the same time. This provided them with the cherished opportunity to confide in one another and enjoy moments of female solidarity in a traditionally male-dominated world. Certain scholars have called this aspect of The Red Tent biologically inaccurate, since the concept of the natural synchronization of co-habiting women’s monthly cycles is largely speculative and has yet to be proven by scientific studies. Scientifically accurate or not, this monthly experience of female bonding has an important function in the text, emphasizing the unity and solidarity amongst women within the clans of patriarchs like Jacob.

One of the main things that complicated the unity of the female community in Jacob’s clan was his polygamous marriage – and to four sisters, to boot. Dinah begins to recreate her own history through the life stories of the women who she calls her four mothers – her biological mother Leah, in addition to Leah’s three sisters Rachel, Zilpah and Bilhah, who also happen to be Jacob’s other wives. While modern readers may view this relationship as taboo, and it could potentially be interpreted as incest (or at least bordering on it), it was not particularly unusual for pre-modern cultures during that era. Regardless of the cultural norms, the women make it work somehow, establishing and maintaining an impressively harmonious atmosphere within which Dinah is raised. The marriage is not completely devoid of rivalry, however, especially between the two first wives Rachel and Leah, the radiant beauty of one clashing with the incredibly fertile womb of the other. For the purposes of the novel, however, Diamant substantially downplays the rivalry between Jacob’s two main wives, which is presented as a great deal more hostile in Genesis.

By focusing on Jacob’s wives and daughter as the protagonists of The Red Tent and altering certain details from the original Biblical story, Diamant makes a powerful statement about the lack of control that female figures in the Bible had over their own lives. Her revision of the story grants more independence and free will (albeit limited) upon Dinah and her mothers, while simultaneously re-imagining the female sphere of the Bronze Middle Age, a task that very few authors had taken on prior to Diamant’s novel. In this way, The Red Tent reflects on the ancient roots of patriarchy that are embedded within the pages of the Old Testament, a social structure that still exists today – to varying extremes – in many parts of the world.

While Diamant reproduces the tragic tale of Dinah’s ill-fated marriage and her husband’s bloody murder at the hands of her own brothers in The Red Tent, unlike in Genesis, her story does not end there. We follow the grief-stricken, pregnant widow as she flees Schechem and seeks sanctuary in Egypt, where she eventually makes a life for herself and lives out her days in relative peace. Dinah carries on the legacy of her mothers through her midwifery – a practice highly esteemed within ancient Egyptian and Canaanite culture – a fitting tribute to her four mothers who had passed on to their only daughter the gift of life and collective memory through the treasured stories of her ancestors. The central role afforded to midwifery in Diamant’s novel extends the female bonds originally established in the red tent, revealing yet another sphere of female solidarity strengthened by the ties of fertility and maternity. By carrying on in the footsteps of her aunt-mother Rachel (who originally taught her the art of birthing), Dinah prolongs the legacy of the women in Jacob’s family, whose story would live on through the lives of the countless children she helped to bring into the world. In the words of Dinah, “There is no magic to immortality… Egypt loved the lotus because it never dies. It is the same for people who are loved” (p. 321).

Keep Writing,
Katrina Oko-Odoi
Founder & Chief Editor