I feel sorry for the men...

To all the guys that picked The Red Tent as their novel... I feel for you. As a woman, from time to time this novel makes me want to gag. The imagery, the explanations and the choices of wording make me want to barf. I wouldn't just say this novel is explicit, I would say it is A. graphic and B. you need a strong stomach to enjoy it. As a read I was excited for the more "interesting" parts of the novel but the longer I read it the more I just kind of felt sick and tired of hearing about all the absolutely SICK stuff that happens concerning birth and "other stuff." I do not even want to begin on the "OTHER" stuff. Lets just have a little chat about birth. Thanks to this novel I no longer want to have children. I am going to start having reoccuring dreams about being Bilhah, Leah, Rachel or Zilpah and having to pass some HUGE baby with no drugs on a pile of hay (Yes, that is now the image when I think of birth). I am trying to sort out the meaning of all this nasty talk. The main conclusion I have come to is that the author is trying to say that back then, all that people ever cared about was getting pregnant and making sure to keep the world good and inhabited. I am HOPING that the author is trying to make a little joke about how life all changed with the El came into play. When everyone was polytheistic they only had ONE thing on their mind and it was not anything I would enjoy discussing in a blog that my teacher reads :) This is either the case or Anita Diament is a total freak and I really hope this is her last novel. The GREAT part abou this novel is in essense, it is a total copy of a Bible story BUT it is also very original because of that fact. You cannot read this novel and be trying to pull out Biblical allusions because the entire novel is a Biblical allusion. This makes you have to use even more of your brain to analyze the piece of literature. More than the Bible, more than a Fairy Tale, it makes you have to analyze humans as a whole. The beginning of humans is presented (polytheistic) along with where humans are going (monotheistic). I think this would be the perfect novel to read through a psychological lense. Psychoanalyzing this novel would be incredibly intense as well as analyzation through symbolic archytypes, especially physical ones; Diament gives all the characters their own little special "traits" that definetely hold a lot of weight in their personality and the novel as a whole. I also think that the fact that the beginning of the novel is the most grotesque because it is discussing the lives of the women before Dinah and when Dinah comes along there is more "forward" thinking and everything is not centered around "the" thing :) THANK GOD FOR DINAH.