Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority (review)

Most of us know something of the story of Lot and his womenfolk in Genesis 19. Robert Polhemus presses the unwelcome realization that we have also reenacted it. The parts are as classic, indeed as compulsory as other versions of family romance, from the Oedipal complex to the Passion. The story mixes motives and motifs that, according to Polhemus, characterize centuries of relations between older men and younger women, fathers and daughters. In the Bible, Lot, to defend his two houseguests from being seized and raped by the Sodomite men at his door, offers his virgin daughters to the mob instead. Fortunately the guests, revealed as angels, rescue Lot, his daughters, and his wife from the damned cities, which are consumed in fire and brimstone. Lot's wife disobediently looks back at the burning cities of the plain and is turned into a pillar of salt. Father and daughters, seeking refuge in an isolated cave, appear to be the last earthly survivors, and the daughters fear that the race will die out. The eldest daughter plots with the younger to ply their father with wine so that each of them in turn can have sex with him and conceive a son—each son the father of a lasting people.

Polhemus acknowledges the squeamishness provoked by this story, but without encouraging tolerance of incest or exploitation of girls, he finds surprising potential in the "Lot complex" as it develops in recent centuries. The narrative centered on the father desperate to gain immortality (or self-gratification) through his daughters gives way to the recognition of young women's strategies to appropriate the patriarch's potency and to carry forward a cultural legacy. Polhemus is right to emphasize that the daughters often take pleasure in the power of seduction, and that a patriarchal culture will often represent its potential for progress or immortality in the figure of the young girl while directing hostility toward the older woman. And this rich volume convinces readers that the biblical narrative condenses scenarios that have been reenacted throughout the cultural history of the west.

Lot's Daughters ranges across millennia and media, from early Christian commentaries to 1930s film and contemporary scandals. The discussions are inventive as well as learned, presented in brief segments cleverly titled and peppered with wordplay. Lot's Daughters has something in common with comparative myth criticism and psychoanalytic criticism, recalling the work of Dorothy Dinnerstein and Northrop Frye, Frederick Crews and Harold Bloom. Myth criticism has fallen by the wayside, perhaps ossified because it looks back. But it has continuing potential and can be refreshing in contrast with the labored materialism and contextualization, the disciplinary hair-splitting of many studies in the humanities today.

The volume is handsomely, even seductively designed, with fine illustrations. I was less pleased by the sparse endnotes, the scanty index, the lack of a bibliography, and the unusually frequent misprints. The lightness of documentation suggested oversights, particularly for this reader in regard to feminist or Victorian studies. Biblical scholars, art historians, or other specialists might have comparable queries about their own fields.

Polhemus strives for the beauties of exegesis, and his conjunctions of texts and life histories can have the brilliant intentional excess of metaphysical conceits. But the historical narrative he writes is too eager to integrate the lives of real people with myth, and it invites contrary examples and arguments. In the chapter on Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, and Soon-Yi, Farrow's adopted daughter who became Allen's lover and wife, Polhemus recapitulates his historical argument:

The Lot-Scripture had daringly suggested that civilization and the future—the father's seed—would be preserved through the agency of daughters....But that story was compromised by illicit sexuality and the revulsion of incest. The Victorians ...tried to salvage and use the great potential of Lot's daughters by purging the story of sex and imagining innocent young girls as...