The Red Tent

I just finished The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. It's a fictionalised account of Dinah, daughter of Leah from the book of Genesis. My mother asked me to read this book, it's not one I would have picked up of my own accord, and I can't deny it's well written but it still wasn't my cup of tea.

I got the feeling reading it that it was A Very Important Book. One of those books that supposed to empower women with its great insight into what it's like to be a woman. The book was even organised into three sections that basically embodied the narrator (Dinah, who has no voice in the Bible) as child, maiden and mother. There's an extended Prologue that details the personalities of her "mothers" (Leah and her father's other wives: Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah) and that was really one of the best parts of the book for me. I enjoyed reading Diamant's take on the Bible story. To look at what the women might have been feeling about the events taking place but then it fell to a classic problem of feminist literature.

The men were human and the women weren't. The men in The Red Tent are flawed beings. Most of what they do they do out of greed, or jealousy, or fear, or lust, or some other negative emotion. The women's actions always seemed reasoned when compared to that of the men. It's not that I'd say it was a male bashing book, it was just that the men were portrayed with a negative light that didn't fall on the women. The women had some special insight or power simply because they were women that the men didn't, and couldn't, possess. I don't agree with that. I think men and women have different talents but that doesn't make one gender better than the other or more insightful, it just makes them different.

I also have to admit that I'm a classicist - I don't like when an author changes the original story to suit his or her own needs. In the Bible Dinah is raped by an Egyptian prince. The man does fall in love with her and does offer a bride-price, which I felt Diamant accurately portrayed, but she was not a willing participant. I understand why she changed it to have Dinah love the prince and reciprocate his affections. She wanted the child-maiden-mother structure and that would be difficult to do if Dinah did not bear a child of love. So I can forgive that. What I didn't like is that as a result of her brothers killing all the men of the city in revenge for her rape, or out of greed in Diamant's telling, that Dinah then cursed the name of Jacob. That the author decided to change the renaming of Jacob to Israel from an honour from God to a hiding of the name of his family in shame. That fell a little too far from the original story for my taste. There were other instances but that one in particular coupled the two problems I had with the book: the motivations of the male characters and the divergence from a text that has survived for thousands of years.

So, for mistreating men's motivations, diverging from a classic story and for puffing up its own importance I can only give The Red Tent a 2 out of 5.