The Accused: Susanna and Her Readers

1. I rely exclusively on the more familiar Theodotion version rather than the briefer account found in the LXX.

2. 'In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness' (L. Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen 16/3 [Autumn 1975], pp. 6-18 [11]). Feminist film theory has been instru mental in underscoring the importance of the masculine gaze, and I shall rely on many of its findings in my analysis of Susanna. Obviously, there are differences between a written text and a film; notably, in a written text one does not actually `see': a reader is not a spectator. Nonetheless, with its insistence on the importance of the elders' gaze, Susanna raises theoretical questions about the relation between the representation of gender and 'looking' as a gendered activity. According to Mulvey, `film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpreta tion of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle' (p. 6). I shall argue that Susanna similarly reflects and reveals the socially established interpretation of sexual difference both in ancient Israel and among critics today.

3. 'Any positive view of a female character has to be re-evaluated for its recuperation within male interests' (M. Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], p. 2). In this article, I am only marginally interested in the question of whether Susanna is repre sented positively (she is); I am rather concerned to shift 'the critical focus from the issue of the positive or negative representations or images of women to the question of the very organization of vision and its effects' (M.A. Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Women's Film of the 1940's [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], p. 176).

4. See A. Bach, 'Breaking out of the Biblical Framework (Gen. 39)', in A. Brenner (ed.), Feminist Companion to Genesis (Feminist Companion to the Bible; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), pp. 318-42, for an extended treatment of this phenomenon.

5. H.G. May and B.M. Metzger (eds.), The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 214 of the Apocrypha; B.M. Metzger and R.E. Murphy, The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical Books: New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 180.

6. A partial list of relevant scholarship includes: Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure'; Doane, Desire; T. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); T. de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

7. Bal, Lethal Love, p. 21; see M. Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) for a detailed presentation of her approach.

8. The framework of the narrative describes the elders as evil (v. 5); this 'external' view of the elders suggests a limit to the validity of their vision. However, as the story progresses, what they see shapes what the reader 'sees'. See Bal, Narratology, pp. 110-14, for a discussion of 'levels of focalization'. In Susanna, the narrator and reader 'look over the shoulders' of the elders as they gaze at Susanna.

9. 'The critical reaction to any given text is hermeneutically bound to another and preexistent text: the doxa of socialities: Plausibility then is an effect of reading through a grid of concordance' (N.K. Miller, 'Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction', Publications of the Modem Language Association 96 [1981], pp. 36-48).

10. M.J. Giovanni ('Woman: A Dominant Symbol within the Cultural System of a Sicilian Town', Man 16 [1981], pp. 408-26) analyzes six types of women, e.g. virgins and wives, as symbols of the health and well-being of households in a con temporary Mediterranean culture. A household's prestige is inextricably linked with its ability to protect its women from the sexual advances of outsiders.

11. The representation of femininity rests on this assumption in the narrative of Susanna. Woman as spectacle functions in an analogous fashion in film.

The apparatus of looks converging on the female figure integrates voyeurism into the conventions of storytelling, combining a direct solicitation of the scopic drive with the demands of plot, conflict, climax, and resolution. The woman is framed by the look of the camera as an icon, an image, the object of the gaze, and thus, precisely, spectacle ... It is the male protagonist, the 'bearer' of the spectator's look, who also controls the events of the narrative, moving the plot forward... In this manner, both visually and narratively, cinema defines woman as image: as spectacle to be looked at and object to be desired, investigated, pursued, controlled, and ultimately possessed by a subject who is masculine, that is symbolically male (de Lauretis, Technologies, p. 99).

12. M. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 123. Miles's brief analysis of the narrative of Susanna is one of the most insightful commentaries on this work that I have read.

13. C.A. Moore, Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah: The Additions (AB; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), p. 97.

14. R. Dunn, 'Discriminations in the Comic Spirit in the Story of Susanna', Christianity and Literature 31 (1980-1981), pp. 19-31.

15. 'Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the two looks to be unified technically' (Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure', pp. 11-12).

16. A. Lacocque, The Feminine Unconventional: Four Subversive Figures in Israel's Tradition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), p. 22.

17. Dunn, 'Discriminations', p. 24.

18. M.P. Carroll, 'Myth, Methodology and Transformation in the Old Testament: The Stories of Esther, Judith, and Susanna', SR 12 (1983), pp. 301-12, esp. p. 307.

19. Dunn, 'Discriminations', p. 25.

20. Lacocque, Feminine Unconventional, p. 21.

21. I would like to avoid the reductionist idea that men read one way and women read another way. Some women may permit the masculine gaze to shape their perceptions entirely, while some men may resist having their perceptions controlled by the masculine gaze. My purpose in considering the responses of women readers to this narrative is to open up the question of the multiplicity of readings and the intersection of readers' codes with the text's codes.

22. Naturally, a man can be the object of a woman's gaze; a woman can be the object of another woman's gaze, or a man of another man's gaze. What I an empha sizing here is the case that has come to be an important part of the gender code: man as voyeur, woman as object of voyeurism.

23. See the discussion of Mulvey and de Lauretis in Doane, Desire, pp. 6-8. How does one account for women's pleasure as spectators of film, or readers of such literature as Susanna? Simultaneous or oscillating identification with both the masculine gaze and the feminine as image is a major component of such pleasure.

24. 'The analogy that links identification-with-the-look to masculinity and identification-with-the-image to femininity breaks down precisely when we think of a spectator alternating between the two, as is inevitable' (de Lauretis, Alice, pp. 142-43).

25. 'How can the female spectator be entertained as subject of the very movement that places her as object, that makes her the figure of its own closure... No one can really see oneself as an inert object or a sightless body; neither can one see oneself altogether as other. One has an ego, after all, even when one is a woman' (de Lauretis, Alice, p. 141).

26. Moore, Daniel, pp. 90-91.

27. Readers may also be interested in the treatment of Susanna in M. Bal, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 138-76, which appeared after I completed work on this article.