A eulogy for the handwritten letter

Letter signed by Jean Calvin from the papers of Jean Hotman at the Library for the History of French Protestantism in Paris

Academics are supposed to love books. I don’t. Five years working as a librarian – as well as the experience of moving my 600-odd book collection across the world four times – have relieved me of any sentimentality I might harbour on that score.

By this I don’t mean that I have no interest in what books make possible – a conversation with a text. To that extent you’ll still find me haunting the dark reaches of Auckland’s second hand bookshops. But I do mean that if the words can be delivered more efficiently, and with less weight and dust, then I’ll gladly dump most of the books I’ve accumulated so far. I admit that a room full of books can look mighty picturesque, but there are other less cumbersome ways of decorating your environs.

This is why I’ve embraced the e-book revolution with a glad heart. The ease with which I can read and annotate books on my iPad increasingly makes reading a paper book a frustrating experience.

However, last week as I was wandering across campus, I saw a man standing in a patch of sunlight reading a handwritten letter, and I realised that my callousness towards books doesn’t extend to letters. The number of the letter’s days seems even more limited than that of the printed book, but I feel much sadder about the former’s passing.

When someone writes you a letter, their choice of stationery, their handwriting, and sometimes even the coffee stains they leave on the page tell you things (or feel as though they tell you things) that a printed book doesn’t. Even the fact that the letter’s writer has invested time and effort solely for you, conveys something that a book can’t. Sure, effort and choices have gone into the writing, typesetting, binding, etc. of a book, but the printed book doesn’t convey the sense of intimacy that accompanies the presentation of a handwritten letter.

One thing I have noticed about historians is that they are often gossips. Not necessarily malicious gossips, but still the kind of people who delight in the minutiae of other people’s lives. This is why, for my money, reading other people’s letters is one of the best things about being an historian. Your profession gives you licence to do something you couldn’t normally square with your conscience.

Of course, hand-writing a letter involves a kind of self-presentation (e.g. a post-it note left on the refridgerator vs. a thank-you letter to your grandmother) and to this degree the sense of intimacy we feel with the author may sometimes be illusory. But it’s the inadvertent things like the coffee cup stain or the worse-than-usual handwriting betraying the writer’s tiredness (or drunkenness?) that invests letters with a sense of immediacy that a book doesn’t possess.

This makes me think that there is perhaps one thing I will genuinely miss as the number of books dwindles: other people’s annotations and coffee stains. You can’t doodle in the margin of an e-book or drip grease on it (you can theoretically share your notes on an Amazon Kindle, but that feels plain clinical in comparison).

I will also miss the ability we have to write a dedication on the first pages of paper book. When most of my current book collection is at some second-hand bookshop being fingered by a sentimental bibliophile, the books that remain on my shelves at home will be those containing other people’s annotations or the handwritten dedications when they kindly gave the book to me.

Exploring spirituality in the medical humanities

House MD (Fox Broadcasting)

Being great fans of the US medical drama, ‘House’, staff at Auckland’s School of Theology have been especially excited to accept an invitation from the University’s School of Medicine to take part in this year’s Medical Humanities programme. This multidisciplinary programme offers stage three medical students a range of courses that allow them to study medical issues from the perspective of Arts disciplines, including history, law, music, art, comparative literature, philosophy, and theology.

This year, the School of Theology are offering a course entitled, ‘Exploring the Spirituality of Healing’, which will consider some of the beliefs and practices of spirituality within religious traditions and the different ways that these have been associated with healing in medical and mental health contexts. Taking into account such factors as gender, sexuality, cultural context, and religious diversity, the course will focus on a range of topics, including medical ethics and spirituality, models of research into spirituality and healing, the role of personal spirituality for the clinical practitioner, the psychology of healing and forgiveness, and cross-disciplinary collaboration within the healing/clinical environment.

The significance of spirituality and religion for health and healing has been both increasingly well researched and hotly debated over the past decade by both theologians and those working in the medical professions. It is hoped that ‘Exploring the Spirituality of Healing’ will engage the interest of Auckland’s medical students in this fascinating subject and keep the current debate alive and kicking.

Deconstructing the Biblical Femme Fatale

Henri Robert, Salome

It’s amazing the things you discover on the internet. I recently googled ‘femme fatale + Bible’ [purely for research purposes, I assure you] and was directed to a page on wikiHow, entitled ‘How to be a femme fatale’. Among the list of ‘steps’ for achieving this goal were such helpful tips as ‘wear dark, sexy, retro clothes’, ‘speak in a seductive voice’, and ‘hang out in mysterious places’. In addition, readers were also given the essential piece of advice, ‘read the Bible’, because, the author of this wiki explains, there are ‘loads of iconic femme fatales’ within the pages of the Bible, including Eve, Judith, Salome, and Delilah. Presumably, any femme fatale wannabe should refer to the behaviour of these biblical ladies in order to gain some helpful hints to ensure that their femme fatale status is sufficiently convincing.

Gustav Klimt, Judith

Tongue-in-cheek as this wiki guide may be, it is true that biblical characters such as Eve, Salome, Judith, and Delilah have indeed been labelled on numerous occasions in both biblical interpretation and popular culture with the epithet of femme fatale. As a cultural icon, the femme fatale can be found in texts and traditions dating back millennia; however, this female persona really came into her own during the closing decades of the nineteenth century within artistic and literary movements such as Aestheticism, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau. Literally, a ‘fatal woman’, the femme fatale is a woman whose dangerous eroticism and seductive beauty belies her moral corruption and perversities and whose raison d’être appears to be to lure men towards destruction or even death. An antithesis to the traditional roles of ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ commonly ascribed to women within androcentrically-oriented cultures, the femme fatale presents instead a figure of female otherness and danger who poses a real threat to patriarchal authority – she is typically independent, self-aware, sexually autonomous, often foreign, ambitious, beautiful, and erotic; and, perhaps because she is all these things, she is also deadly.

Gaston Bussiere, Salome

The dangerous sexuality that so typifies the femme fatale is illustrated in some of the artistic representations of those biblical women mentioned above from the late 19^th-early20th centuries. Here, Salome becomes an exotic nightclub dancer and Judith an erotic, proud and self-assured sexual warrior. Delilah, with her bejewelled head decoration and smoky eyes is the quintessence of dangerous foreign sexuality, while Eve positively oozes a sensuality that surely Adam must find impossible to resist. As sexually attractive femme fatales, these women all invite the male gaze, yet at the same time may invoke male fears and anxieties at their obvious revocation of traditional qualities of femininity, such as sexual passivity, modesty, and submissiveness, and the threat that they obviously pose to those men who fall under their dangerous influence.

Franz von Stuck, Judith

What is especially fascinating about these representations of biblical women as femme fatales is the fact that they differ quite significantly from the actual depictions of these same female characters within the biblical traditions. While it’s true that Judith does employ her sexuality to lure Holofernes to his death, the pious Jewish widow we read about in the book of Judith is a far cry from Franz von Stuck’s naked knife-wielding sexual warrior.

Franz von Stuck, Salome

Likewise, in the gospel traditions of Matthew 14.3-11 and Mark 6.17-29, the daughter of Herodias (who is not even named in either text but only later identified by Josephus as Salome) does nothing more salacious than dance for her uncle Herod at his birthday celebrations and appears to be manipulated by her mother to request the head of John the Baptist as a ‘reward’.  Yet, within the artistic representations of von Stuck and Gaston Bussiere, she is transformed into a sultry and erotic dancer, more at home in the Folies Bergère than the Herodian royal court.

John LB Shaw, Adam and Eve

Meanwhile, despite being regarded throughout history as temptress par excellence, the Eve we read about in Genesis 2-3 is no more sexually aware or erotically charged than either Adam or the serpent; nevertheless, John Liston Shaw’s painting of Eve evokes a strong sense of her languid yet powerful sexuality, as she subverts traditional gender roles and completely dominates and transfixes a passive and terrified-looking Adam. And, finally, as discussed in a previous blog post, Delilah’s characterization in the narrative of Judges 16 simply omits any explicit [or implicit, for that] references to her sexuality or sexual appeal; it is therefore up to artists such as Alexandre Cabanel to fill in these narrative ‘gaps’ with their own ideations of her erotic allure, creating her in the image of the sultry, exotic, and overtly sexual ‘fatal woman’.

Alexandre Cabanel, Delilah

While these pictures certainly capture the eye and the imagination, we might nevertheless suggest that, in taking liberties with the biblical traditions, images of biblical women as erotic and exotic femme fatales may also perpetuate harmful myths and misperceptions which equate female sexuality, strength, and autonomy with danger, violence, and a threat to male authority. Contrary to wikiHow, identifying a woman as a femme fatale doesn’t rest solely on recognizing her ability to speak in a husky voice or wear the right clothes; it involves the act of labelling her as dangerously ‘other’; to be objectified, avoided, feared, and ultimately rejected. Women who act independently, who take control of their own sexuality and destiny, and who simply don’t ‘fit’ the stereotyped gender mould allocated to them within their patriarchal milieu are thus branded as something dangerously other than the feminine ideal. Perhaps it is time we deconstructed the femme fatale once and for all and showed her up for what she really is – a projection of male uncertainties and anxieties and a dramatic warning against female sexual autonomy and power.

Conference Notice

IWI – CHRISTIANITY – TAUIWI

Hei Kohikohinga Kōrero mō te Hāhi Karaitiana ki Aotearoa

Re-evaluating Christianity’s Influence in Shaping Aotearoa New Zealand c1800-c1860

27-29 November 2012

Pōwhiri, Welcome and Opening: Te Tii Marae, Waitangi, Bay of Islands, 27 November 2012

Plenary Sessions: Copthorne Hotel, Waitangi, Bay of Islands, 28-29 November 2012

For further information about the conference, please contact Alan Davidson: ak.davidson@auckland.ac.nz

Website: www.gospel2014.org

Aspiring David to take on popularity-giant John Key

In the wake of NZ’s general election, the defeated Labour party are reorganizing and in the process of electing a new leader. To the excitement of biblical enthusiasts, the contest for leader is between a number of “David’s” (there were originally three David’s, but now there are two: David Cunliffe & David Shearer). Just prior to the election we paused to consider the political merits and demerits of one of Israel’s most memorable leader, King Solomon. It seems rather appropriate then, to turn our attention briefly to his father, David, especially given this distinctly ‘Davidic’-themed competition.

The young biblical David’s path to kingship was certainly memorable, starting with his infamous encounter with Goliath and reaching its most dizzying heights with the divine promise of an eternal Davidic dynasty that would rule over all Israel. To be sure, before he became king, David was a bit of a hot-headed youth, prone to childish, dangerous japes (e.g. I Samuel 24) and quick to take offence (e.g. I Samuel 25.1-13). He was, however, also rather brave and quick-witted, showing himself as being as adept at getting out of a tight corner when the need arose (e.g. I Samuel 21) as he was at succeeding on the battlefield (e.g. I Samuel 18.20-30). Moreover, once he was crowned king, David appeared to be an adept ruler over his new kingdom, basking as he was in the ever-present glow of divine favour.

It didn’t take that long, however, before things started to go seriously downhill for the house of David. Like his son Solomon, David’s failures as king are attributed more to his personal character weaknesses than to any explicitly acknowledged political limitations on his part. Just as Solomon is said to be led into apostasy by his predilection for foreign wives, so too does David’s royal kudos ultimately start to disintegrate when he indulges his penchant for the ‘wrong’ woman (II Samuel 11-12).

Moreover, it is interesting to note that David’s impressive ability to think on his feet and get himself out of hot water during the years prior to his ascension to the throne seems to have abandoned him once the royal crown was placed on his head. A quick look at his ‘rap sheet’ and we can see at a glance that things seemed to go from bad to worse as David staggered from one disastrously bad decision to another: adultery, conspiracy to murder, failure to keep his own house in order, and finally, that catastrophic census. While his kingship did survive these crises, both his family and his kingdom were subsequently pummelled, punished, and rent apart by the fruits of his wrongdoings. As Joseph Heller has David say in his ‘biographical’ novel based on the king’s life, God Knows, ‘Who would have thought I had dissatisfied so many?’

So, what, if any, advice can this David give to his two hopeful namesakes, vying for their own leadership role? Is he a good model for them to emulate? Well, I’d say not – adultery, murder, and family scandal didn’t go down too well in biblical Israel and they certainly don’t seem to enhance the political careers of those in government today. Perhaps if David Cunliffe and David Shearer are to look to this biblical figure for any inspiration, they would be better learning some lessons from the young David, before the royal crown dulled his judgment: don’t be afraid to stand up to the big guy (I Samuel 17), always appreciate the value of backing down and admitting you were wrong (I Samuel 25.23-44), and always, always remember the loyalty of your friends (I Samuel 18-20, II Samuel 1.17-27).

November Biblical Studies Carnival

Deane Galbraith of the Dunedin School has kindly posted the 69th Biblical Studies Carnival over on his blog (Remnant of Giants). The Carnival chronicles the interesting blog posts on the subject of the Bible and biblical studies from the past month. Caroline’s post on cultural representations of Delilah (a whore or more?) gets a mention, as well as many other reasonably-interesting and semi-interesting posts from other blogs.

Albert Schweitzer wins moustache election in historic landslide victory

The results of our Movember poll (Top 5 Biblical Scholar Moustaches) are in and it appears that one in two voters prefers Albert Schweitzer’s moustache. In what became a tight race for third place, Schweitzer’s “walrus” dominates not only his upper lip but also the voters’ hearts. Sheffield’s Philip Davies came in a not too distant second place. Those who chose to abstain, thereby mischievously subverting the democratic system, clearly missed out on having their opinion heard (well not actually, because you can still vote).