The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: the Talmud and feminine dichotomy

In our time of war and pain, grief and loss, Gila Fine’s The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic transports us to a completely different era and place, ideology and concerns. Her wonderful scholarly text reminds us of the simple pleasure of reading and, indeed, rereading familiar texts, and drawing out new meanings that cut to the core of modern identity and contemporary authenticity. 

The title of Fine’s book can be traced to a groundbreaking study of feminist literary criticism from 1979 titled The Madwoman in the Attic, a phrase drawn from Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre. In the novel, Edward Rochester’s wife (real name Bertha Mason) is kept secretly imprisoned in an attic of the house by her husband. 

Professors Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the authors of the 1979 study, argued that female writers in the 19th century had to contend with what Gilbert and Gubar termed the “paradigmatic polarities” that male writers had imposed upon female characters, that they be either angels or monsters. Though Fine does not mention Gilbert and Gubar, she does reference the “madwoman” of Jane Eyre and connects her to Talmudic stories about women, which were solely crafted by the rabbis, and ostensibly fell prey to the angel-monster binary, with the sages investing in a few other female archetypes as well. 

Fine's approach

But Fine refuses to succumb to a surface impression, and her book’s extended argument is that although one can find ample evidence for these stereotypical depictions of women in Talmudic literature, a more careful analysis can reveal subtle reversals of these clichés and, at times, a subversive defense of female agency and ability.

The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic discusses the six women in the Talmud who are cited by name, and matches them with six paradigms of the female, both in art and in life: Yalta “the Shrew”; Homa, “the Femme Fatale”; Marta “the Prima Donna”; Heruta the “Madonna/Whore”; Beruria “the “Overreacherix” (Fine’s term for a woman who “overreaches” her station); and Ima Shalom, “the Angel in the House.” 

Fine’s methodology throughout is clear and consistent. Each of the paradigms is initially described, and then illustrated through a myriad of examples in global literature and art, from antiquity to the present, before Fine turns her gaze to the Talmudic character. The prototypical passage in the Talmud, where the character’s ostensibly defining trait is put on display, dissected, and reconstituted in Fine’s analysis, demonstrates that there is far more complexity here than one might suppose. Each chapter concludes with Fine briefly offering a “moral of the story” – ethical questions that readers can take away when considering the narrative they have just consumed.

It is in her close readings of the Talmudic texts that Fine’s work exhibits a bold creativity. A good example of her approach can be seen in the discussion of Heruta, in which Fine guides us to understand that although the Talmudic passage seems to reinforce a platitude of “dangerous” female sexuality, the rabbinic lens in these pages is broader than the supposed binary being discussed. 

In Fine’s words, “The rabbis may not have been able to transcend their patriarchal culture entirely, but there are certain instances in the Talmud where they show themselves to have been way ahead of their time. In a world steeped in the feminine dichotomy, the story emerges as an exceptional critique of the madonna/whore paradigm. 

“Women, it implies, are not simply reproductive or sexual creatures. 

“No woman is wholly pure, as no woman is wholly promiscuous. No one, the rabbis seem to say (centuries before Kant’s famous categorical imperative), should be treated solely as a means to an end. No person should be reduced to a role or function that they fill for you.” 

Certain readers may be taken aback by Fine’s rereading of rabbinic intent and charge her with imposing on the sages certain modern proclivities and categories that are ill-fitting. How, in the end, can we discern what the rabbis “truly had in mind”? And do they really echo our contemporary perspectives, or is this just wishful thinking?

The question of “authorial intent” was a raging debate in mid-20th-century literary circles. As articulated in the New Criticism, championed by Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, and others, one should not “read in” one’s own speculations about what authors might have secretly or esoterically intended. The apex of this argument can be found in C.S. Lewis, who espoused an almost literalist view of authorial intentionalism, believing that a text’s meaning is only what the original author intended when he or she wrote it. In Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, he writes: “The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.” 

But Lewis’s certainties are not quite convincing. For one thing, who can even say what the original intent was? 

As Fine concedes, why go through a tortuous process of close reading to “uncover” the rabbis’ true moral sensibilities? Why don’t the rabbis just own up what they really think? Fine’s own explanation for the rabbis’ thorough concealment of their own “proto-feminist empathy” is that they were deliberately seducing us into making the moral errors of hasty judgment and stigmatization, the better to realize our mistakes and force us to become closer and more careful readers. This is no small accomplishment and one that has lifelong consequences.

I began this review by alluding to a time of war and pain, subjects that, unsurprisingly, we accord gravitas and world-shaking implications. In contrast, reading books (and books about reading books) may seem, at best, a kind of scholarship we solemnly admire but then marginalize to the hinterlands of our cultural landscape and preoccupations. 

As such, the simple act of reading can be devalued to the point where it seems like something that one need not worry about disturbing. The novelist Ian McEwan once noted that if he were playing tennis, no one would walk onto the court and ask him what they were having for dinner, or what he was doing on Sunday. But people see nothing wrong with interrupting all the time when one is reading a book.

Our lack of esteem about the role of reading indicates a basic misunderstanding of how central a place that pastime plays in our lives. Whether perusing the speeches and rhetoric of politicians or scanning the cultural landscape, the art of reading, closely and accurately, is one of the most fundamental acts we engage in as human beings. And the actual reading of texts, especially ones that have been central in forming the attitudes among Jews for millennia, towards the reality around (and above) them, is not only a journey of sacred importance but of existential necessity. May The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic find a large audience, and may we blessed with readers like Gila Fine.

The writer was professor of literature at the University of Toronto and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. For more of his writing, go to emalamet.substack.com

THE MADWOMAN IN THE RABBI’S ATTIC: REREADING THE WOMEN OF THE TALMUD

By Gila Fine

Maggid

288 pages; $30