‘Feelings’ at First Sight: Genre, Gender, Ethnicity, and Emotion in Aseneth

TY - CONF

T1 - ‘Feelings’ at First Sight:

T2 - Capturing the Green-Eyed Monster: Gender and Jealousy in Antiquity

AU - Glass, R. Gillian

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - Genre acts as a communicative shortcut between storyteller and audience. Depending on the genre, the audience has certain expectations regarding a story’s structure, content, and purpose. This is particularly true of romance stories, where one expects to find characters with heightened emotions, and miscommunications and misadventures which delay the protagonists’ ultimate union. When read in this generic light, Aseneth—a Hellenistic Jewish novel—certainly fits the paradigm. The heroine, Aseneth, falls madly in love with Joseph, the hero, the very first time she sees him (6.1). The romantic rival, the son of Pharaoh, also falls madly in love at his first sight of Aseneth (23.1); but, as Aseneth is already happily married, the son of Pharaoh is cast in the role of the jealous rival. He attempts to kidnap her, she is saved, and the story ends happily ever after. But what if we change the generic paradigm? In this paper, I study the parallel scenes of ‘feelings’ at first sight in Aseneth. I argue that Aseneth and the son of Pharaoh should be understood as foils for each other, which participate in a rhetorical discourse on emotional propriety; and that, furthermore, this discourse is inseparable from the story’s use of class, gender, and ethnicity to convey ‘right’ morality. Ultimately, I show that, although readings Aseneth’s emotion as ‘love’ and the son of Pharaoh’s as ‘jealousy’ are not inherently wrong, this romance-driven interpretation relies more on generic assumptions than on the descriptions of these characters’ reactions or the manuscript traditions. In exploring the ambiguity of these psycho-somatic descriptions, in their codicological contexts, we are invited to reconsider what the story is attempting to convey about emotions and their social significance.

AB - Genre acts as a communicative shortcut between storyteller and audience. Depending on the genre, the audience has certain expectations regarding a story’s structure, content, and purpose. This is particularly true of romance stories, where one expects to find characters with heightened emotions, and miscommunications and misadventures which delay the protagonists’ ultimate union. When read in this generic light, Aseneth—a Hellenistic Jewish novel—certainly fits the paradigm. The heroine, Aseneth, falls madly in love with Joseph, the hero, the very first time she sees him (6.1). The romantic rival, the son of Pharaoh, also falls madly in love at his first sight of Aseneth (23.1); but, as Aseneth is already happily married, the son of Pharaoh is cast in the role of the jealous rival. He attempts to kidnap her, she is saved, and the story ends happily ever after. But what if we change the generic paradigm? In this paper, I study the parallel scenes of ‘feelings’ at first sight in Aseneth. I argue that Aseneth and the son of Pharaoh should be understood as foils for each other, which participate in a rhetorical discourse on emotional propriety; and that, furthermore, this discourse is inseparable from the story’s use of class, gender, and ethnicity to convey ‘right’ morality. Ultimately, I show that, although readings Aseneth’s emotion as ‘love’ and the son of Pharaoh’s as ‘jealousy’ are not inherently wrong, this romance-driven interpretation relies more on generic assumptions than on the descriptions of these characters’ reactions or the manuscript traditions. In exploring the ambiguity of these psycho-somatic descriptions, in their codicological contexts, we are invited to reconsider what the story is attempting to convey about emotions and their social significance.

M3 - Paper

Y2 - 6 December 2024

ER -