Abstract
Blyth is concerned with Delilah’s interpretive and cultural afterlives. Whether in biblical scholarship or the arts, these ‘afterlives’ arise from the imaginative infilling of the many gaps that exist in Jdg. 16. Despite their number and variety, she is struck by the impact that the socially constructed discourse relating to the femme fatale has exerted in shaping the response to Delilah’s character.
Chapter one offers a history of the fatal woman, focusing on particularly vibrant depictions of the character. Beginning with late 19th century fin de siècle art and literature, Blyth discusses her depiction, stressing her ‘hypersexuality and intoxicating allure’ mixed with her ‘shockingly physical’ violence, ‘gender bending’ roles, and ‘foreignness’; all stirred by anxieties surrounding threats to patriarchally defined gender roles by Industrial Revolution and early feminism. In similar vein she follows the figure’s developing depiction in American ‘hard-boiled fiction’ (1920s-40s), 1940s film noir, 20th century fin de siècle and the neo-noir, relating these to contemporary anxieties concerned with gender and sexuality.
Blyth explores Delilah’s ‘afterlives’ in biblical scholarship (chapter two). Noting that the biblical narrator discloses nothing of Delilah’s social identity, race, or sexuality, she relates the filling-in of the text’s ambiguities and gaps to the readers’ need to make her ‘less enigmatic and thus less threatening in her otherness’, which leads to her depiction as femme fatale. She surveys the widespread assumption that Delilah’s relationship with Samson was ‘both heterosexual and consummated’; the ‘hypersexualized’ Delilah enticing, then betraying, her victim. Like the fin de siècle femme fatale of 19th and 20th centuries, Delilah subverts traditionally feminine categories. Her representation as ‘prostitute’, ‘Philistine’ and ‘avariciousness’ are among other aspects brought under scrutiny.
Blyth’s treatment of Delilah’s cultural afterlives in art, film, music and literature (chapter three) follows a broadly similar path, detailing those aspects of her representation that depict her as femme fatale and the anxieties they addressed. Like much that follows, Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) stresses the seductiveness and danger of women and their necessary subordination in the interest of society. As discussion progresses, aspects of Delilah’s afterlives already discerned in biblical scholarship reappear in cultural media, although sometimes more strongly depicted.
In ‘Delilah Redux’ (chapter four), Blyth treats Delilah as narrative subject and reads her story intertextually with two cultural texts (Raymond Chandler, Farewell my Lovely [1944] and the BBC Sherlock episode, ‘A Scandal in Belgravia’ [2012]).
Reading Chandler she considers Delilah’s actions as possibly ‘retaliation’ against one who had subjected her to ‘sexual and physical violation’, thus ‘keeping control’ / ’maintaining her safety’. From ‘Belgravia’ she envisages the protagonists slipping in and out of their dominant gendered roles and asks whether Delilah may have seen her betrayal of Samson as ‘an urgent necessity’ against a ‘dangerously volatile character’.
There is a brief conclusion, bibliography, and indexes of authors and biblical references.
Blyth’s focus on ‘fatal woman’ aspects of Delilah’s depiction in scholarly discussion may require some balance. Although Delilah is certainly vilified, biblical scholarship also presents a less than flattering portrait of Samson, who through his obsession with women endangers himself. Nonetheless, her relating significant aspects of Delilah’s depiction to anxieties concerning the subversion of traditional feminine categories should be taken seriously. Blyth writes well and is right to draw attention to a possible one-sidedness in the way scholarship has resolved textual gaps and ambiguities. The strength of her book lies in articulating the influence exerted by the dominant socially constructed discourse surrounding gender and sexuality on the understanding of Jdg. 16 in academy and culture.