Terrible Silence, Eternal Silence A Consideration of Dinah's Voicelessness in the Text and ...

270 Pages·2008·3.05 MB·English

by  Caroline Blyth

Terrible Silence, Eternal Silence
A Consideration of Dinah’s Voicelessness in the Text
and Interpretive Traditions of Genesis 34

Caroline Blyth

Doctor of Philosophy
The University of Edinburgh
2008
I declare that I, Caroline Blyth, have composed this thesis, that it is entirely my own
work, and that it has not been submitted for any other degree or professional
qualification.
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

The blueprint to a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence.

Adrienne Rich, “Cartographies of Silence”
In loving memory of my mum and dad
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the following people for their invaluable support, assistance, and
advice during the time I spent working on this thesis. Firstly, grateful thanks to the
Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous award, which enabled me
to carry out this research. In terms of academic input, special thanks to Professor
Timothy Lim, my supervisor, whose encouragement and support is always
invaluable. Many thanks also to Professors Graeme Auld, Hans Barstad, John J.
Collins, Kristen Leslie, F. Rachel Magdalene, and Susan Niditch. Thanks also to my
dearest friends Karen Kirk, David Marshall, and Robert Nelson, who continually
give me confidence and reassure me that I really am an ‘academic’ at heart. For her
encouragement and emotional sustenance, heartfelt thanks to my sister Katherine.
Last but not least, a very special thank you to my soulmate Tracy, whose constant
support is indeed a Godsend, and without whom life would not be nearly as joyful.
I could not have written this thesis, nor indeed gained the inspiration behind it,
without the testimonies of the many courageous women who have chosen to break
the silence about their own experiences of sexual violence. I wholeheartedly wish
that their stories had never been written, that they had not had to endure the horror of
rape, which they evoke with such painful honesty and integrity. I only hope that,
throughout this work, I have done justice to their testimonies, and have affirmed for
these women that their words are indeed powerful and that their voices do continue
to be heard.

i
Abstract

In this thesis, the author takes a journey through both biblical and contemporary
patriarchal cultures, contemplating the commonality of rape survivors’ experiences
across space and time, and, in particular, evaluating the insidious and pervasive
influences of patriarchy, which have long served to deny these women a voice with
which to relate their narrative of suffering. Consideration is given to some of the
common contemporary cultural attitudes and misperceptions regarding sexual
violence, commonly known as ‘rape myths’, which appear to be rooted within the
deeply entrenched gender stereotypes of patriarchal cultures the world over, and
which survivors of sexual violence regard as lying at the very heart of their own
voicelessness. The author examines the means by which these rape myths silence
victims of sexual violence, then, using these myths as a hermeneutical tool,
evaluates whether they are likewise given voice within both the text and interpretive
traditions of Genesis 34, a biblical narrative recounting the rape of Jacob’s daughter
Dinah. When these myths do appear to be represented within this narrative,
consideration is then given to the impact that they may likewise have had upon
Dinah’s own experience of her violation and thus, upon her ability to share her story.
Moreover, the author evaluates the representations of Dinah in her interpretive
afterlife, assessing the ways in which biblical interpreters may or may not appeal to
these same myths in order both to attend to her silence and to make sense of her
experience. This thesis therefore has two primary aims. Firstly, there is an attempt
to paint a picture of the world in which Dinah experienced her sexual assault, by
casting light upon the attitudes and ideologies that she would have faced from others
within her own community. In addition, consideration is also given to the narrative
world, which Dinah continues to occupy in the minds of those who read her story,
by looking at the responses she has received and continues to receive from this
interpretive community. This thesis therefore attempts to provide a deeper insight
into Dinah’s own experience of sexual violence, in order that contemporary readers
can better comprehend the meaningfulness and complexity of her silence and grant
to it a rich and new meaning.

ii
CONTENTS

Acknowledgements i
Abstract ii
Introduction 1

CHAPTER ONE: Rape Myths 19

CHAPTER TWO 31
Rape or Seduction? Shechem’s Sexual Encounter with Dinah
in Gen. 34.2

CHAPTER THREE 81
The Marginality of Dinah’s Suffering: Exactly Who Is the
‘Real’ Victim in Genesis 34?

CHAPTER FOUR 130
Redeemed by His Love? The Characterisation of Shechem in Genesis 34

CHAPTER FIVE 160
“She Asked For It”: Attributing Blame to Victims of Rape in Genesis 34 and its
Interpretive Traditions
Conclusions 198
Bibliography 201

INTRODUCTION
Later I went through the ritual of talking to people. It always
seemed as if I were talking through glass or underwater. I could
never tell my mother; she couldn’t bear the pain. Others, it seemed
to me, drew away. I could not bear to be alone, but in company I
felt abandoned, estranged. For months, I looked to my husband for
comfort he could or would not give. A year later, we began a
divorce.1
I had to keep this a secret … If I told, everything would fall apart.
If I couldn’t hold it together, everything would fall apart … I
wasn’t about to let the world that I knew fall apart.2
I had tried to talk to people close to me about [my rape], but I
couldn’t, because nobody would listen. I didn’t even talk to my
mother because she had made it very clear that she didn’t want to
deal with it … When I tried to talk to other people about it, I felt
like I was talking about something I wasn’t supposed to be talking
about.3
As soon as I started talking about my [rape], a hush came over the
room … After I finished there was a long silence … “Well”, our
hostess said, smoothing out the napkin on her lap and turning to
the person on my left. “Shall we get off rape to something …” She
paused, apparently at a loss for words. I feared the next word
would be “agreeable”. It was.4

1 Deena Metzger, “It Is Always the Woman Who Is Raped”, American Journal of Psychiatry 133
(1976): 405.
2 Cited in Kristen J. Leslie, When Violence is No Stranger: Pastoral Counselling with Survivors of
Acquaintance Rape (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 66.
3 Cited in Diana E.H. Russell, The Politics of Rape: The Victim’s Perspective (New York: Stein and
Day, 1975), 194.
4 Nancy Venable Raine, After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back, 126-27.

1
Reading the personal testimonies of rape victims1 really brings home to me just how
terrifying and traumatic the experience of sexual violence is for all those who endure
it. ‘Seeing’ the event through a survivor’s eyes and hearing, in her own words, the
nature of her experience, facilitates a deeper appreciation that she is the one who can
vocalize the pain, the terror and the wrongfulness of rape because she and she alone
lived through it, experiencing at a visceral and emotional level every moment of its
horror. Bearing this in mind, the narrative of any rape event then surely belongs in
the first place to this woman; it is her story to tell, her voice that ought to be heard.
While such a statement may seem somewhat axiomatic, it would appear to bear
repeating when we take stock of the issues raised so clearly by the testimonies I
quoted at the start. As is all too obvious, victims of sexual violence may frequently
find themselves deprived of a voice with which to tell their story, either because they
are too afraid to do so, for fear of social stigma, suspicion, and blame, or, when they
do try to speak out, they are silenced, sometimes by those very people who are
meant to be a source of support and healing. 2 No one, it seems, wants to hear about
this most intimate invasion of the victim’s body; to speak about it is considered both
distasteful and unwelcome, the speaker veering dangerously close to those most
ancient taboos of forbidden sexuality and interior female body spaces.3 As writer
Nancy Venable Raine notes, ‘Rape has long been considered a crime so
unspeakable, so shameful to its victims that they are rendered mute and cloaked in
anonymity’.4 Or, in the words of Deena Metzger, the author of the first testimony,
‘After rape, there is a terrible silence’.5

1 Throughout this work, I use the terms ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’ interchangeably to refer to women
who have experienced sexual violence. I believe that it is important to identify these women as
victims because they do suffer as the result of their rape. However, as Liz Kelly notes, the term
‘victim’ ‘makes invisible the other side of women’s victimisation: the active and positive ways in
which women resist, cope and survive’. These women should therefore not be identified as passive
victims, inherently vulnerable and helpless, but as women who have lived through a terrible and life-
threatening wrong being perpetrated against them and despite this, have survived. See Liz Kelly,
Surviving Sexual Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 163.
2 See for example, Ruth Schmidt, “After the Fact: To Speak of Rape”, Christian Century 110 (January
6-13, 1993): 14-16; Diana E.H. Russell, 20, 23, 194, 226-27; Daniel C. Silverman, “Sharing the Crisis
of Rape: Counselling the Mates and Families of Victims”, in Sexual Assault and Abuse: A Handbook
for Clergy and Religious Professionals, ed. Mary D. Pellauer, Barbara Chester, and Jane A. Boyajian
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 140-65.
3 Raine, 6.
4 Raine, 119, 201.
5 Metzger, 405.
2