Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority
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Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority
456Hardcover(1)
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Overview
Robert Polhemus terms this ongoing human drama—the mutual attraction between young females and older males—the "Lot complex," and illustrates his theory with a wide-ranging series of portraits that analyze and dramatize the lives and work of famous men and women who, in very diverse ways, have made the world care more deeply about the destiny of daughters.
In witty, probing chapters on an entertaining selection of daughters that includes women as varied as Lewis Carroll's Alice, Shirley Temple, Mia Farrow, and Monica Lewinsky, Polhemus tells the story of men's ambivalent desire for young women and of women's quest for authority. It is an indispensable work on male-female relations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804750516 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/03/2005 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 456 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
lot's daughters
sex, redemption, and women's quest for authorityBy Robert M. Polhemus
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8047-5051-3
Chapter One
IntroductionTHE LOT COMPLEX
Now follows the text about Lot and his daughters. It perplexes both the Jews and our own people, and causes them to ask many questions. Our fathers generally passed it over, either because they were hindered by other endeavors or because God so directed it. -Martin Luther
I. Back to the Source
Let me begin by reviewing the shocking old story that haunts modern life and literature and has worked to make us what we are.
To seek his own good and avoid family strife, an ambitious young owner of herds heeds the advice of his wise uncle, a heaven-blessed nomad leader, that they part. The nephew heads for fertile country and moves into a rich city. God-fearing, well-meaning, but worldly-a compromiser-he dwells and prospers with his wife and daughters among wicked men in a thriving but doomed community. Meanwhile, the aged uncle is visited by divine messengers who tell him, first, that his barren old wife will miraculously conceive a child, and, second, that God means to destroy the bad city where his nephew dwells. The uncle, however, thinking of his relative, pleads and bargains with God to sparethe place.
Two angels, posing as men, do come to observe the nephew's city, notorious for its evil ways. He rushes to welcome them, bowing and scraping, and presses them to take shelter, knowing that the men of the town, wild for "strange flesh," will try to ravish the visitors.
He is right. A violent horde masses around his house. The townsmen demand that he give up the two strangers so that they can know and use them. Frantic, terrified, believing his sacred duty to God requires him to defend his guests, he improvises a desperate plan. Wheedling, he calls the men "brothers" and tells them if they leave his two guests alone, he'll give them his own daughters to use sexually. Caught up in choosing what he sees as the lesser of evils, he opts to sacrifice his own female flesh and blood, and he chooses, for God's sake, the safety of his visitors and his sacred duty of hospitality over the life of his girls.
But the townsmen scream that he has no right at all to tell them what to do; they mean to break into his house, do what they want-rob, rape, or kill whomever they like. Then they maul him and try to force entrance. At this point, the two archangels reveal their power, rescue their host, pull him inside, and blind the men of the crowd, leaving them outside, stunned and groping to get in. God, the angels say, has now passed judgment and will obliterate the place. They tell the man to take his family and get out right away. He tries to rouse his prospective sons-in-law, but they laugh, doubt his story, and think him ridiculous. In the morning, the two divine visitors tell the man again to hurry up and take his wife and daughters and flee. The man delays, but the angels grab him and the three women and whisk them out of the city. The voice of the Lord tells them to escape for their lives, head for the hills, and under no circumstances look back.
Soon God unleashes a rain of fire that burns up their former home, the people in it, and all the surrounding cities and land. The man and his daughters are spared, but his wife disobeys the command, look backs at the searing destruction, and then hardens into a pillar of salt-a bitter monument of death. She becomes a part of the suddenly arid, dead landscape-female flesh turned into a geological fossil.
Perspective switches momentarily to the righteous uncle. This patriarch-safe and removed-gazes out from high ground, watching the whole plain and its cities go up in smoke. His survival casts irony over all that follows. The nephew and his daughters have no idea that anyone else survives the holocaust.
Surrounded by ruin and horror, the man and the two girls, desperate refugees, flee to the mountains where they find a cave to live in. In flat contrast to their final hours in the city, when, in a panic, their father treated them as sex objects to trade, the young women now become decisive, action-taking subjects; it's their father who becomes a thing to manipulate. The daughters look to the future. Thinking the rest of humanity has been obliterated, the elder conspires with the younger to save the race. Their father is old, she says, and there are no other men left to mate with. It's up to them to begin repopulating the world by seducing him-to "preserve the seed of our father," she says.
But that means incest. Together, it seems, they must take responsibility for species survival by breaking the law and mating with their sire. The situation between father and daughters is completely reversed from what it was in town. Then he sought to dispose of their sexuality to preserve life. Now, they seek to control and manage his sexuality for what they determine to be the general good, no matter what he thinks or wills. The plotting older daughter assumes that the incest taboo is so powerful that their father would not rationally choose to have sex with them. Therefore they must overwhelm his inhibitions. On successive evenings, they ply him with wine, get him drunk, and then each-the older on the first night, the younger on the second-lies down naked in the cave with the oblivious man. They both get pregnant by him and have sons from whom two peoples spring (people destined to be scorned by the uncle's seed). That's the tale. After two nights of drunkenness and venery, nothing more is ever heard of the father, nor, after they give birth, of his daughters.
The story, of course, is scriptural-mainly from Genesis. The man is Lot, that morally equivocal, bumbling, God-struck, put-upon, incestuous founding father-the patriarch, so to speak, in the closet (more precisely, in the cave). The uncle is Abraham, whose wife becomes the postmenopausal mother, Sarah; the petrified, nameless woman of salt is Lot's wife; the city is Sodom; the crowd of men are Sodomites; the punishment-like the punishment of Hell-is fire and brimstone; the once-fertile land is the land of the Dead Sea (also known as the Sea of Lot); and the conspiring, incestuous girls are Lot's daughters, whose respective issues are the Moabites and the Ammonites-nations alien to Israel. But scriptural history makes the elder daughter the mother of Moab, and thus the ancestor of the virtuous Moabite daughter Ruth, whose canonized Book of Ruth shows how the sexual relationship between a father-figure and a younger woman can be redeemed, legitimized, and blessed. From Ruth eventually descends the great poet-king David, the wise Solomon, the House of David, and, hence, in the Christian Bible, the genealogy, family, and holy figure of Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word. Thus the scandalous Lot family may be seen not only as figures representing the disreputable history of heathen, marginal peoples-outsiders, others-and the repressed incestuous history of human civilization and its origins, but also as the indispensable generating agents of female subjectivity, the integration of peoples, catholic sensibility, moral redemption, and even of Holy Scripture itself.
II. Defining the Lot Complex and Disovering its History
Stories as well as people have their biographies, and it's the vibrant life of the Lot's daughters narrative I want to tell. In it, I find the origins of what I call the "Lot complex," a dynamic configuration of wishes, sexual fantasies, fears, and symbolic imagery that has worked to form generational relationships and structure personality, gender identity, religious faith, and social organization. By the term "complex," I mean a convergence and drastic condensation in human psychology of personal and social experience, images, drives, motives, and impulses that can be seen both to form and represent a pattern. A "complex"-as I use and define the term-is constituted out of the interaction between members of different generations and the history of adult-child relationships. As an organized and organizing group of ideas, memories, and powerful unconscious feelings, a complex serves to shape the psyche-its emotions, attitudes, and behavior. I don't claim that the Lot complex is universal, but I do argue that, given the similarity of certain historical, psychological, and biological conditions, it is general and prevalent, and I contend that in modern times especially, the evolving Lot story permeates imaginative life.
The Lot complex, as I read it in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, features the drive or compulsion to preserve, adapt, and/or expropriate the traditional paternal power to sustain, regenerate, define, represent, and transmit life and civilization-the patriarchal seed of culture in history. It thus plays a central part in the high drama of the change in the status of women and the liberation of female aspirations. Future-oriented, Lot expresses the agonizing demand to sacrifice the past, as you can read in Jesus's famous command, "Remember Lot's wife" (Luke 17:32)-the succinct biblical verse that popularized Lot and the Lot complex in the minds of millions. "Remember Lot's wife," an oxymoronic command, means you must give up the past with its memories to which you are wed-the past which has mothered you-and make yourself ready, under any circumstances, to give birth to the future. "Remember Lot's wife" is an injunction to look to the past so that you will not look to the past, but forward. It offers a logical contradiction, a "double bind"-always remember to forget-and makes the ability to accept and live with that contradiction the key to the preservation and flourishing of humanity.
In Lot the father-daughter relationship becomes indispensable in the making and preservation of culture, but Lot, with its image of young females conspiring to take power and act also contains the seeds for transforming that patriarchal culture. The Lot story includes wish-fulfilling symbolic projections, unconscious longings, resentments, fears, rationalizing defense mechanisms, conflicts, and transgressions of both fathers and daughters-of both women and men.
It's a perplexing myth whose meanings have always been contested. Why is this incest canonized in Scripture? What impact has it had on human consciousness? How does it work on people? Did Lot and his daughters do right or wrong? Readers from the beginning have wondered about it and differed. Full of ambivalence and irony, the problematic Lot-Scripture often gets repressed in religious history, but, like the repressed, it always returns-old wine in new vessels.
What you can see figured in Lot are desires that shake the world: the desire for immortality through progeny; the desire to continue life under any conditions; the desire for sexual pleasure without guilt or responsibility; the desire of women to control the action of men to whom they traditionally have been subject and take an active role in determining fate and history; the desire of men to preserve themselves, conquer time, remain potent, and keep on wooing the future.
My subject, therefore, turns out to be a very large one, but my approach and the structure of this book are quite simple. In Part I, Chapters 2-5, I identify and lay out the rich heritage of this biblical narrative of incest, with its major historical and cultural implications. In Part II, I look closely at some important, representative modern daughters of Lot-both real and fictional-and the male figures whose relationships with them generate conceptions of the way we live now and might in the future. There, in Chapters 6-11, I discuss the lives and significant Lot stories of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll and William Stead, Sigmund Freud and his "Dora," Shirley Temple, and Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. In Part III, the concluding section, I end with two recent, substantial Lot's-daughters narratives set in the modern Mecca of power, Washington, D.C. These Potomac testaments, one by the African-American writer Carolivia Herron and one featuring Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and Chelsea and Hillary Clinton, make clear the full power-personal, political, and global power-that the evolving Lot complex still holds in the imagination of the world at the turn of the century.
Overall my main aims are (1) to stress the comparatively underestimated importance of father-daughter, older male-younger female relationships in history, particularly in the last two centuries of developing female ambition and progress for women; (2) to explore, as a test case, the complex ways that an important literary text from the past goes on living in social history and popular culture by showing how the effects and aesthetic processes of Lot over time can and do work on the human imagination-how, that is, a specific, written narrative can fuse indelibly into unfolding history, individual lives, and works of art; and (3) to make clear the historical reasons and ideas that would cause James Joyce, one of the true anthropological geniuses of the twentieth century, to end his last book with the voice of the dying mother merging into and becoming the regenerating voice of the daughter. In light of gender history and social flux, remembering Lot's daughters as well as Lot's wife becomes an urgent matter, but such remembrance of things past keeps on taking new meanings and forms.
III. A Grid Through Which to View the World
The patterns, figures, and imagery of Lot have such explanatory power for reading the history of human relationships that-especially for times and texts concerned with women's subjectivity, the emergence of once marginalized people, and the nuances of social and familial power-shifts-they can form a useful grid through which to view the world. And the Lot complex can help redress and clarify the pervasive influence of the Oedipus complex and myth with its inherent narrative biases stressing male desire and action. Like Oedipus (with which it clearly has much in common), Lot brings together diverse ancient legends and living impulses. Oedipus features unwitting patricide and the intercourse of son and mother; Lot features the divinely ordained death of the wife and mother and the intercourse of father and daughters.
Continues...
Excerpted from lot's daughters by Robert M. Polhemus Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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