IRENE CAESAR (ИРИНА ЦЕЗАРЬ): JUDITH WITH THE HEAD OF HOLOFERNES (ARTICLE BY HELEN EFTHIMIADIS-KEITH)
Helen Efthimiadis-Keith (University of the North)
Text and interpretation: Gender and violence in the Book of Judith
Scholarly Commentary and the Visual Arts from the Renaissance Onward (excerpt)
Old Testament Essays 15/1 (2002), 64-84
The analysis of Judith’s depiction by
Botticelli, Donatello, Giorgione, Cranach the Elder,
Caravaggio, Andrea Mantegna,
Gustav Climpt and Irene Caesar (excerpt pp. 70-72)
C TRAVERSING THE BOUNDARIES OF GENDER - JUDITH IN THE TEXT AND ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION
What, then, are we to make of the often-contradictory, dualistic manner in which the highly complex Judith figure has been treated? In my opinion, there are at least three interrelated factors at play here.
First, from a Western point of view, Judith is indeed a heady mixture of dualities: good/evil, chaste/sexually ‘promiscuous’ (sic) or sexually questionable, at least, spiritual/carnal and so forth. As such, Western binary thinking tends to interpret her textual depiction into either one of its components, favouring either her ‘innocent’ or her ‘vampish’ side.
Secondly, as I have already indicated, most interpreters of Judith - commentators and artists alike - have been male until recent times. As males subject to castration anxiety - the fear of losing one’s essential power or manhood to a woman in particular - they have been terrified by Judith’s castrating potential (cf Efthimiadis-Keith 1999a:216-219; Bal 1995:257-258) and produced Judiths of a vampish, disinterested, or downright evil type. These Judiths are manifestations of what Jung has called the negative anima, the archetype which engulfs and destroys men when she is ignored, suppressed or remains an unintegrated, projected aspect of the male psyche (cf Jung 1940:21-25, 73-82; 1953:195-198). Usually, the negative anima is depicted in the form of the femme fatale and finds expression in many of the paintings that I have briefly reviewed above, for example those of Gustav Klimt (Plate 1),2 Massys, Von Stuck and Metsys. However, no other image of Judith expresses the fear of the woman’s castrating sexual potential quite as well as Irene Caesar’s 1996 ink drawing (Plate 2),3 Judith with the Head of Holofernes. I shall return to this drawing a little later.
Irene Caesar, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, ink drawing on paper, 1996
Thirdly, Judith easily traverses - some would say ‘transgresses’ - gender boundaries and stereotypes. She is a woman and yet she acts of her own accord. She does as she pleases without consulting any one (read any male), and neither she nor her sexuality are under the authority of any male. Moreover, she does what is perceived as a man’s job: she fearlessly goes down to the enemy camp and slays Holofernes using everything at her disposal - ‘feminine wiles’, flattery, prayer guidance, sexual armoury, deceit and even Holofernes’ own sword - to conquer him and liberate her people at a banquet at which he had hoped to seduce and conquer her (12:10-13:8). By contrast, the male leadership and the Bethulian men do little more than fortify their city, pray faithless, desperate prayers, and watch her descend to the enemy camp from a distance (4:4-5, 9-15; 6:14-21; 7:19- 29; 10:10). They remain fearfully and faithlessly ensconced behind their city walls while Judith fights the enemy alone. When Judith has returned triumphant, Achior, a seasoned Ammonite warrior, faints at the sight of Holofernes’ severed head (14:6). Moreover, before her arrival on the scene in chapter 8, the men are ready to give up and hand themselves over to their enemy, so as to avoid watching their women and children die of the thirst that the Assyrians have imposed upon them by blocking their main water supply (cf 7:23-28). Whereas this may sound like a noble action, they barely consider its consequences. As Judith rightly points out, surrender would entail the worship of a foreign god, and a return to the slavery from which YHWH had saved them long ago in Egypt (cf 8:18-27). This means that they would effectively be reversing their divine election and the entire process of their becoming a nation under YHWH.4 Furthermore, because Bethuliah was the entry point to the whole of Judea, their surrender would leave the rest of their Judean brethren open to attack, and the destruction of the temple would be sure (8:21-24). Clearly, Judith has a far superior understanding of the situation and its implications than they do, and she is not governed by the fear of destruction, based on some assumed sin before God as they are (cf 7:25, 28). In this way Judith not only traverses gender boundaries, thus blurring them, but she also shows up the men in the story for the cowardly, faithless individuals that they are (cf also Levine 1989:561, 566).
This point is intimately linked with the previous two. It is because Judith ‘usurps’ the male role (Dundes 1975:29) and so the male authority and prescription of what woman should be that she is both saint and murdering seductress, chaste, spiritual and carnal. It is also for this reason that she poses such a great threat to the male psyche, which baulks at the thought of a woman so powerful that she can easily beguile a powerful general and cut off his head. The head, being symbolic of the penal head, then conjures up images of the dreaded castration and concomitant loss of power, life and vitality. This element is clearly depicted in Irene Caesar’s drawing to which I referred earlier. The woman kills the man with her overpowering sexuality - note how the woman’s legs and hair surround the man in vulva formation - thus castrating him and subverting his authority, for it is she who is in control, not he. It is this ‘subversive’ aspect of the text that I should like to deal with next, focusing more particularly on the way that Judith’s depiction in both text and artistic rendition blurs gender boundaries and obfuscates which gender kills, thus setting tongues wagging all the more.
Irene Caesar, Inverts: Judith and Salome (2008)