Review of Arbel, Forming Femininty in Antiquity

H-JUDAIC BOOK REVIEW:

Vita Daphna Arbel. Forming Femininity in Antiquity: Eve, Gender, and Ideologies in the Greek Life of Adam and Eve. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 256 pp. $74.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-983777-9.

Reviewed by Nancy Klancher (University of Pittsburgh)
Published on H-Judaic (June, 2012)
Commissioned by Jason Kalman

Metonymic Eve: As Eve Fares, So Fare All Women?

In her new reading of the Greek Life of Adam and Eve (GLAE), Vita Daphna Arbel redeploys the study of literary antecedents and tradition histories in the service of a Bakhtinian-feminist analysis of the GLAE’s literary and ideological “multivocality,” “reading against the grain.” She defines her subject as “the multiplicity of voices, cultural traditions, and countertraditions that seem to be embedded in the GLAE framework and their relations to power, ideological stances, and gender conceptualizations” (p. 7). In so doing, she moves beyond the long-standing scholarly prioritizing of theological readings of the GLAE, and in particular of the figure of Eve. She instead focuses our attention on the diverse and contradictory representations of Eve that coincide in this complex text and their relationship to “specific theological traditions, exegetical views, as well as gender ideologies and cultural norms of the time” (p. 113).

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