JUDITH AS HEROINE

Book of Judith opens with Assyrian emperor Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of the Near East. As his forces mount the invasion of Israel, the town of Bethulia is besieged by his foremost general, Holofernes. The pass defended by the town is strategically vital: if Bethulia yields, the whole country will fall into his hands.Ground down by famine, the populace begs the city's elders to surrender, and they agree to do so within days should the Lord failto rescue his people. When Judith, a respected widow, hears of this, she summons the elders to a meeting and upbraids them for their lack of faith. Who are they to set time-limits on God? She herself undertakes to save the city within five days, although she will not reveal her plan. However desperate the situation may seem, she avers, God shall overcome.

Divinely inspired and fortified by prayer, she departs for the Assyrian camps. There, claiming to haveforeseen Bethulia's doom and offering to reveal a stratagem for taking the city, she is welcomed. Holofernes himself, much smitten with her remarkable beauty, invites her to a banquet after which he intends to seduce her or failing that, rape her. When he retires to his bed in an alcoholic stupor, they are left alone in his tent.Judith takes up his sword and decapitates him. With his severedhead she steals back to Bethulia. When its general's corpse is discoverd, the Assyrian camp is thrown into confusion. Meanwhile, displaying the head to the Israelites, Judith encourages them to seize their advantage by a rapid surprise attack. They are victorious. From start to finish, Judith is a self-reliant heroine.
Judith is the story of an icon that has been at once central to and yet in some ways denied by Western culture, because it contradicts those conventional values that societies are accustomed to encode into their most cherished myths.

Since we tend to perceive the world through mythic lenses, we subconsciously interpret its phenomena in accordance with myths which stereotype our responses to them.

The Gorgeous Gorgon

"There is not such a woman from one end of the earth to the other,both for beauty of face, and wisdom of words" (11:21). "The Lord gave her also a special beauty... in all men's eyes." God made her a femme fatale.

Traditional view of Genesis was that man was seduced into the Fall by the dangerous sexual lure of womankind, yet in the Book of Judith God was not above using sexuality to vanquish the pagan andsave the chosen people.

Other biblical sirens such as Delilah who betrayed Samson toslavery and blinding at hands of his enemies. Epic of international war abruptly turns at the half-way point into a melodrama of the sex war set in a bedroom.

Like the protagonists, the plot is constructed on a dichotomy, between a narrative of public, political, masculine history and an intimate domestic drama of a more feminine cast: half epic, half romance. The two flow together in the close, where the traditional ritual with which
Israelite women praise the hero's triumph in dance and song (as they do also for David in the Book of Samuel) is, because this hero isfemale, transformed into a feminine event. Medusa effect of Holofernes' head Supernatural, which is assumed to be supra-rational, often identified with femininity (Sophia), just as muses, sirens, and sybyls are female. Mortality and mystery, the ineffability of the supernatural tout court, are signified by feminine Otherness. Both the terror and the magnificence of Judith as Other signify the terrifying mystery of the invisible deity.

Good murderess and sexy celibate: deity Jael (Book of Judges 4:17-22).
When prophetess Deborah inspires General Barak to defeat Israel's enemy, the defeated general Sisera pauses in his flight to rest in the tent of Jael, a goatherd.Doubtless he raped her first, but this is not mentioned. As hesleeps, she kills him by driving a tentpeg through his forehead. Jael a truncated version of Judith, because national heroine hereis Deborah.

Like Judith, Lucretia was an exemplar of chastity, and story is as much a political myth as a moral and sexual one. Crucial difference is that Lucretia's colludes with traditional cultural assumptions about femininity, even though its political theme is revolutionary. Central event in Lucretia's story is her rape by Tarquin, son of the Roman tyrant. Because she is chaste, she confesses what hashappened to her husband and family, and punishes her polluted bodyby taking her own life. Her stabbing herself becomes a replicative penetration of her violated body: an eroticized event frequently exploited in prurient paintings of her suicide. Lucretia, unlike Judith, does not take her own revenge. Her relatives rise up against the Tarquins, abolish the monarchy and establish the Republic.

Lucretia becomes catalyst of Roman liberty. Like Judith's this is a myth of tyrannicide. Lucretia is Judith's analogue in chastity and resolution, but her opposite in terms of sexual narrative. Whereas Lucretia is a hostess betrayed by a guest, Judith is a guest who betrays her host; whereas Lucretia was a victim, Judith was victorious; whereas Lucretia was raped, Judith eluded her would-be ravisher; whereas Lucretia died, Judith killed.

Story of Oedipus mythologizes Western culture's central convictions about family, sex and power; whereas Judith's deploys them in orderultimately to contest them.

Version of Oedipal myth in the Bible is story of David, Judith's male counterpart as head-taker of Israel's enemy. Like Oedipus David usurps place of the Father in order to assume his patriarchal role. David becomes proxy son of Saul, by God's direction and increasingly against the king's will, until they confront each other as king and rebel. Unlike Oedipus, when given the opportunity to kill Saul and take his throne, David resists it; but that is because God has legitimated Saul as king. Symbolic act of parricide displaced into episode where the boy David slays the giant Goliath. In same way, Judith as rebellious daughter or Electra figure, temporarily ousts patriarchal elders of Israel.

Woman with a Gun Movie

: Private Benjamin (1980, dir. H. Zieff) Protagonists forename and surname do similar conceptual work: she is called Judy As in Judy Benjamin this both encodes the Judithic sign of feminism and moderates it by glamour: played by Goldie Hawn, she was a dizzyblonde and a very reluctant woman soldier.

Sign in the name thus accommodates popular entertainment's need at once to evoke stereotpyes (emancipated womanhood) and extract their teeth.Popular entertainment does not achieve mass-market appeal unless it both represents cultural bogeys and consoles its audience that these do not really require a complete overhaul of their mental furniture.

Even women soldiers, shocking innovation though they are, are just charming blondes.

In "Life of Brian" Brian's life in ancient Palestine is a bathetic analogue of Christ's, and his paramour is Judith, the most militant member of the incompetent and rebarbative guerilla movement, the"People's Front of Judaea". When Judith urges her idle male colleagues to stop their incessant talking and do something revolutionary for a change, the leader dismisses her challenge with smug condescension as "another little ego-trip from the feminists."

Glamorized and/or incompetent image proffers a subtextualconsolation to society's fears of subversion. In the 1990s, boththe very successful French film Nikita (1990, dir. L. Besson) andits rapid American remake The Assassin (1993, dir. J. Badham) reflected cultural prominence of the assasination myth and the paranoia generated by doubts about government undercover activity. Nikita's anti-heroine was an anti-social, drug-crazed killer converted into a professional assassin by a sinister government agency.
Once professionalized, she became reluctant to kill, just as the agency transformed her into a socialized, feminine,seductive woman. Normal women are not capable of killing. Fact that film was punctiliously retitled "LaFemme Nikita" on its American release emphasized this message: that if only women would remain as they should be governments would revert to legal proprietyas well.

Image selected for publicity poster was of the accrtess Anne Parillaud in a tight, short black dress and high heels, her gun at the ready. In the Hollywood remake, dark beauty of Parillaud in the black dress (signifying death) was replaced by the All-American blondeness of Bridget Fonda, in a decollete red dress (signifying blood as sex).

The Woman With A Gun signifies both the assertion/contradiction that feminism is jeopardizing patriarchy, which is consoling, and the suppressed anxiety that it really is. Fear and reassurance feed upon each other in her image. She signifies for Western soceity what it fears, what it desires and also what it obscurely knows about the vulnerability of patriarchal power. Which is why the Woman With A Gun remains frightening despite the double-bluff encoded into her.

Like the terrorist, hers is a mirror-image of the weak power. Maybe that mirror reflects an actuality, and patriarchy is indeed weak; but maybe (in this play of illusions)not.

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