Beyond the whore, the angel, and the shrew

Quick, name a few stereotyped roles for women in literature. Whore with a heart of gold, overachiever, shrew. Victorian angel in the house, femme fatale, prima donna. Where do these archetypes come from, and why do so many cultures have them? What can those of us who don’t want to see gender roles in such hackneyed patterns learn about them?

The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic—the title is a play on Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s groundbreaking book The Madwoman in the Attic—is part of a wave of books by Orthodox Jewish women spurred by programs that encourage those who are learned to take the next step and publish books. Written by Jerusalem-based scholar Gila Fine, it is one of the first by the women who are participating in the Word-by-Word fellowship sponsored by the Sefaria library of Jewish texts.

Fine cleverly shows how the classic archetypes for women characters are both upheld and subverted in rabbinic literature, masterfully evoking a variety of tropes and types of artistic models. She discusses movies, plays, and works of visual art as well as the texts from classical rabbinic literature that are the basis for her exploration. Fine’s wide assortment of models is not chosen at random: each one adds something different to our understanding of the text, whether in subverting its usual hierarchies or changing how those hierarchies are understood. In this way, Fine follows after British models of an earlier generation: Jonathan Sacks and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, who are known for using secular literary sources and motifs to elucidate Jewish texts. What Fine does exceptionally well in each of the six sections of her book is to break down the archetypical categories, show how they are used in various literary and other texts and artifacts, and then examine how rabbinic texts work through those same clusters of ideas.