The story of Susanna and the Elders, related in the Book of Daniel, was a popular subject for artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and no wonder. Susanna, a virtuous, beautiful young woman, is bathing in her garden while two older men spy on her. The men suddenly accost her and demand that she submit to rape; if she resists, they warn, they will ruin her reputation by claiming that they caught her with a lover. The tale offered painters an irresistible opportunity to replicate a similar kind of voyeurism. Tintoretto depicted the scene several times; in a version painted in the fifteen-fifties, which hangs in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, he portrayed Susanna as serene and abstracted, towelling a raised foot and regarding herself in a mirror, unaware of a bald man who is concealed behind a rose trellis and peering between her parted thighs. In a treatment by Rubens from half a century later, on display at the Borghese Gallery, in Rome, Susanna is shown reaching for a shawl, realizing with horror that she has been exposed to two leering men. Sometimes the violence threatened against Susanna is indicated in the tableau: in a version by Ludovico Carracci that hangs in the National Gallery in London, one of the elders is tugging at Susanna’s robe, pulling it off her body. Giuseppe Cesari (known as Cavaliere d’Arpino) made a painting that enlists the viewer’s participation in the lasciviousness it represents: its naked subject looks almost seductively out from the canvas, coolly brushing her golden hair.
A very different Susanna is offered by Artemisia Gentileschi, who was born in Rome in 1593, and who painted the scene in 1610, when she was seventeen. In her version, two men emerge from behind a marble balustrade, violently interrupting Susanna’s ablutions. Her head and her body torque away from the onlookers as she raises a hand toward them, in what looks like ineffectual self-defense. Strikingly, her other hand shields her face. Perhaps this Susanna does not want the men to identify her or see her anguish; it’s equally likely that she does not want to lay eyes on her persecutors. In its composition, execution, and psychological insight, the painting is remarkably sophisticated for a girl in her teens. As the scholar Mary Garrard noted, in a 1989 appraisal titled “Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art,” the painting represents an art-historical innovation: it is the first time in which sexual predation is depicted from the point of view of the predated. With this painting, and with many other works that followed, Artemisia claimed women’s resistance of sexual oppression as a legitimate subject of art.
What we did take with us was a box that contained the last of the cookbook’s print run. It was shelved in the attic of our new house, along with the barbies I was too old to play with, but hadn’t been able to throw away. When I left for college a few years later, I took a copy with me, proof that the place where I was from existed in some material way beyond my memory. In my writing workshops, I wrote thinly veiled fiction about our family’s old life in Maine. The feedback I received was consistent: it all sounds very bucolic, but what does the character want? To me it was obvious: I wanted to go home, but no route could take me there.
In the late 1930s something strange was happening in the semis and terraces of suburban Britain. Tables bucked and strange stigmata appeared on the bodies of quiet people living dull lives in Putney and Bexley. Wardrobes were particularly vicious, apt to slam their doors whenever they felt threatened. These poltergeists (from the German “noisy spirits”) were very different from the genteel rectory ghosts of earlier times. Rowdy, rebellious and frankly a bit common, they were deeply engaged with the new world of mass consumption, happy to turn up and make mischief at Woolworths, or the giant new cinema opposite the bus station.
“Here is what happens when a man is chainsawed in half in the public square of a village,” reads a sentence in “Missionaries,” the beautiful, violent and almost perfect new novel by Phil Klay. It’s not the first sentence in this long, winding journey across the killing fields sowed by the American empire. But it gives a flavor of its brutality and raw power.
there must be a way
to enter your poetry