5 - ‘Straitened on Every Side’: Susanna’s Garden Dilemma

Summary

Man does not have, or no longer has, an understanding about the sensible, nor even about the natural – these realities elude him …. [L]anguage is no more than a means to univocally appropriate things, to dominate them from on high starting from an idea that man gets of them.

IN THIS FINAL chapter, I return to where this study began: with the representation of a woman enclosed within a garden and the life-and- death dilemma she is forced to confront within the apparent security of its high stone walls. Like Eve, the popular Old Testament figure of Susanna is equally hemmed in by the Logos; by the gender roles dictated by that Logos; and by the laws laid down by and for it. In this biblical episode, recorded in Daniel 13, and its many medieval retellings, we again see the limitations of worldly marital and filial relationships in their willingness or ability to sustain the woman; and, as in the apocryphal Life, here we witness a God who once more leaves it until the final hour to intervene – again by proxy, and this time via his prophet, Daniel.

Central to both women's dilemmas, too, is a ‘tree of life’ and a ‘tree of knowledge’, introduced to offer some kind of testimony that, in some of the more female-coded treatments of Susanna's story, will ultimately (re)connect the enclosed woman with her own body and legitimise her desires. Indeed, in the light of the arboreal hermeneutics of flourishing deployed by those holy women discussed in my two previous chapters, it is clear that the testimony of trees and their flourishing environs can sometimes prove to be an infinitely more articulate and compassionate facilitator of a woman's access to the divine than the ‘arborescent logic’ constructed under the aegis of the Logos. Even more importantly, the testimony of trees can also pinpoint the major shortcomings of patriarchal necrophilics and assert a woman's right to the type of transcendent becoming through flourishing such necrophilics deny her – whatever the personal cost of that testimony may ultimately be.

In order to trace this development, in this final chapter I examine a number of medieval reworkings of the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders to unpack the levels of misrepresentation, gendered appropriation and, on occasion, the personal investment of the reteller.