Judith: Sexual Warrior. Women and Power in Western Culture

Renaissance Quarterly, Autumn, 2000 by Sara F. Matthews-Grieco

Margarita Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior. Women and Power in Western Culture

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. 36 pls. ix 278 pp. $30. ISBN: 0-300-07365-8.

Monographic volumes on female heroines have become something of a genre, providing often insightful but always problematic overviews of legendary women and their longue duree history in Western culture. Margarita Stocker's extensive study of the Judith story and its multiple avatars from the Middle Ages until the present day adds a useful cornerstone to the growing bibliography regarding (in) famous female figures in the literature and art of the West. Marina Warner's Alone of All Her Sex (1976), Ian Donaldson's study of The Rapes of Lucretia (1982), Susan Haskins' volume on Mary Magdalen (1993), Judith Yarnall's Transformations of Circe (1994), and Eleonora Bairati's extensively illustrated Salome. Immagini di un mito (1998), examine theological, literary, and artistic representations of a number of female protagonists who not only provided Europe and North America with "historical" examples of worthy (or unworthy) women but who also served as vehicles for ongoing debates on the superiority/inferiority of t he sexes, gender, power, and the legitimacy of violence over an extremely long period of time, often from classical antiquity or the early middle ages to the present. Stocker's monumental study aspires to go even farther, providing an "alternative history of Western culture" because it "exposes the vested interests embedded in that culture" (251). This claim remains somewhat naive, not only insofar as dissident or alternative behavioral models are as much a part of Western culture as are more normative or dominant models, but also because the revelations promised with respect to the "vested interests" of the West refer, somewhat predictably, to issues of patriarchy, power, and gender hierarchy. Aside from the discrepancy between the aims of the book and its actual accomplishments, however, it has a great deal of merit and will provide a useful supplement to basic research on the figure of Judith, the "woman on top," and female violence in Western (especially European) culture.

In thirteen thematic and roughly chronological chapters, Stocker explores the principal historical and cultural reasons for the periodic resurgence of the Judith legend. Beginning with a brief overview of the treatment of the Judith story in the Old Testament and in medieval apocrypha, Stocker examines the multiple implications of this topos that made it a particularly polyvalent sign in the rhetoric of Renaissance and Reformation propaganda. If Protestant partisans during the Wars of Religion could use Judith's triumph over Holofernes to represent the triumph of reformed religion over the Papacy, so too could their Catholic counterparts use the heroic widow of Bethulia to signify the defeat of heresy by the "true" church. As an emblem of the victory of Virtue over Tyranny, Judith also provides a prototype and a justification for political assassination on the part of women. During the French Revolution, Charlotte Corday was hailed as a "virgin martyr" and courageous modern Judith by the opponents of Marat. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, enobling references to the chaste widow of Bethulia largely disappeared from the arenas of war and political rhetoric whilst the negative connotations of the Judith legend came to the fore. The history of the women's movement is thus enriched by a discussion of the Victorian vision of Judith as a murdering harlot/wife and by the simultaneous rejection of the Judith model by "feminists" as being antithetical to the domestic, maternal role they were advocating for the woman as citizen. More "positive" Judithic models were to reappear with a vengeance, however, in the context of twentieth-century gender politics, where film and literature portray weapon-wielding female assasins, alternately as a symptom of social or governmental disorder (Nikita), or as a drastic solution to the evils of patriarchy, where gender supremacy is determined by physical violence (Dirty Weekend).

Unfortunately such a wide-ranging topic, embracing such a vast chronological period, does not always permit acurate contextualization, and the book suffers from what occasionally appears to be a fairly impressionistic series of vignettes which leave the reader with rather confused ideas as to the exact chronology and geography of this topos. Stocker also tends to be better in her analysis of literary sources than in her discussion of visual documents, where occasional mis-readings lead to erroneous conclusions. For example, sixteenth-century sensualized portrayals of Judith can hardly be called "bordello pictures," even though some courtesans were known to have owned representations of this heroine. Yet another, fairly major drawback of this volume is its cursory scientific apparatus: scanty notes and lack of even a basic bibliography. On the whole, however, this book is a thought-provoking and extremely rich volume, and will doubtless be widely consulted by scholars seeking answers with respect to the reaso ns for the long-term success of this as well as other cultural topoi.