Loving Yusuf: A Story of Taboos

Distance and Proximity: Reading Against the Grain of Ourselves The story known as 'Joseph and Potiphar's wife' (Gen. 39; Qur'an 12) is a classical site of misogyny, specifically, of women's unreliability and betrayal. However, this story can be read against the grain of its classical readings. When seeing it as an obvious case of the unreliability, the treacherousness of women, the feminist potential remains to consider it as a token of male fear and insecurity. I propose to read it instead in terms of three keys to (canonical, traditional) love stories. These issues are words, as the medium of myth; fantasy, as the substance of it; and the taboo on seeing as the classical ideology of many such stories in iconophobic cultures. Three issues in the story are relevant for the history of love in world religions: words, to be taken literally, a mode of reading called 'literalism'; fantasy--the story, as most love stories, feeds fantasy; and the meaning of the face, as the object of seeing and what must not be seen. In such a reading, the story can serve not to condemn the danger and betrayal of women but instead to enhance the moral point of such stories. That point is to posit taboos and solicit sympathy at the same time. It can be seen as an account of the doomed nature of the love a woman feels for a man when this love occurs on her initiative. This point comes across when we reflect on the reasons for the taboo. In the Joseph story, these are varied: he is younger, from a different culture, and the woman's subordinate or guest in her household; and she, allegedly, is 'married.' But the latter word, 'married,' alerts us to an anachronistic misreading. That qualification makes little sense in the ancient Egypt where the story is set. 'Marriage' was an alliance more than a love relationship, a formal connection of an anthropological, rather than a psychological nature. To think in terms of marriage, marriage vows and marital fidelity is therefore by definition anachronistic. To remedy this risk I take one step back toward a more abstract interpretation; the story does not put marriage but rules, not sin but transgression, not betrayal but social restrictions on the table. In other words, this story is best read as one of the oppressive nature of the rules of canon or law (these two words meaning the same thing) when a woman dares these rules and loves out of her social circle. I make the case for an alternative reading with the help of a very simple tool: comparison. Instead of projecting on the Genesis story all kinds of preconceptions from today, I call on one of the culturally most influential later 'versions,' that of the Qur'an. Indeed, in the contemporary world, reading Genesis 39 and Sura 12 together makes symbolic sense on many levels, on the condition that this co-reading does not preconceive of chronology as priority. Instead, in the ancient texts, and Genesis 1-3 to begin with, 'later' often implies further development; more sophistication. (1) In order to estrange the stereotypical interpretations, the Joseph character in both these versions is here indicated as Yusuf, and the nameless woman, as Mut. The latter name occurs nowhere in either ancient story. This is short for the name Thomas Mann gave her in his long novel, and it means 'dying' in Hebrew, 'courage' in German. Estranging the overly known name distances us from the victimization that appears graven in stone; giving a nameless woman a name turns her into an individual character instead of a stereotype. These two moves, then, make it possible to read the story against the grain of our own preconceptions. Words One of the most detailed studies of the Genesis text is In Potiphar's House by James Kugel, an authoritative biblical scholar. (2) Kugel's study stands here for the discrepancy between belief in the text's 'precise wording'--literalism--and the belief that the questions are located in the text--a potentially 'fundamentalist' attitude. …