Disorderly Women and the Order of God: An Australian Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark 9780567674111, 9780567674159, 9780567674142

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DISORDERLY WOMEN AND THE ORDER OF GOD

DISORDERLY WOMEN AND THE ORDER OF GOD

An Australian Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark

Michele A. Connolly

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain in 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Michele A. Connolly, 2018 Michele A. Connolly has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7411-1 PB: 978-0-5676-9253-5 ePDF: 978-0-5676-7414-2 eBook: 978-0-5676-8061-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my parents, Una and Desmond Connolly, who believed in educating girls

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

xi

INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter 1 THE POSTCOLONIAL RELIGIOUS WORLD IN AUSTRALIA 7 1.1 Contemporary Australia as a Site for Reading 8 1.2 The Thesis 10 1.3 The Methodology 10 1.4 Postcolonial Criticism 11 1.4.1 Postcolonial Criticism in General 11 1.4.2 Vernacular Hermeneutics 12 1.4.3 Postcolonial Biblical Criticism 14 1.5 Feminist Criticism 15 1.5.1 Feminism in General 15 1.5.2 Postcolonial Feminist Biblical Criticism in Australia 17 1.5.3 The Role of Language in Postcolonial and Feminist Criticisms 20 1.6 Conclusion 23 Chapter 2 COLONIAL AUSTRALIA AS THE IMPERIALIZED READING CONTEXT 27 2.1 British Government Decision to Found a Colony in the Great South Land 27 2.1.1 Imperial and Industrializing Britain of the Eighteenth Century in the World Context 28 2.1.1.1 General European Imperialism in the Late Eighteenth Century 28 2.1.1.2 The US War of Independence and British Loss of the US Colonies 29 2.1.1.3 British Industrial Revolution: Poverty and Crime in the New Urban Classes 30 2.1.2 Theories of Social Organization in Late-EighteenthCentury Britain 31 2.1.2.1 Theory of Crime and Punishment 32 2.1.2.2 Theory of Sexuality, Gender, and Population Growth 33 2.1.3 Reasons for the Establishment of a Convict Colony in New South Wales in 1788 33

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2.2 The Role of Female Convicts in the Foundation of the Colony in New South Wales 35 2.2.1 Identity of the Female Convicts Sent to Botany Bay 36 2.2.2 Conditions of Imprisonment and Transportation of Female Convicts 38 2.2.2.1 Women Imprisoned in Gaols and Hulks 38 2.2.2.2 Women Transported in Ships 40 2.2.2.3 Women Landed at the Colony 42 2.2.2.4 Women Manufactured in Female Factories 46 2.2.2.4.1 Isolated by physical restraints 47 2.2.2.4.2 Isolated on the basis of virtue or vice 47 2.2.2.4.3 Isolated from feminine identity 48 2.2.2.4.4 Isolated from legal rights and protection 50 2.3 English Narrative of Female Crime and Convict Transportation 50 2.3.1 The Unrestrained, Shameless Woman: A Proto-convict 52 2.3.2 The Reformed Female: Shameful, Deferential, Silent 53 2.4 Conclusion 56 Chapter 3 THE MYTH OF COLONIAL AUSTRALIA IN AN IMPERIAL WAR 59 3.1 Australia’s Involvement in the First World War as a Dominion of Great Britain 60 3.1.1 The Outbreak of the First World War: Conflict between Imperial Powers 60 3.1.2 Australian Involvement in the Imperial War, the First World War 61 3.1.3 The Postcolonial Significance of Australia’s Entry into the First World War 63 3.2 The Gallipoli Campaign 66 3.2.1 Male Australian Participation in the First World War 66 3.2.2 Female Australian Participation in the First World War 66 3.2.2.1 The Home Front 67 3.2.2.2 The War Front 68 3.3 The Anzac Legend 72 3.3.1 The Anzac Legend: Its Significance 72 3.3.2 Definition of the Legend 73 3.4 Postcolonial Feminist Critique of the Anzac Legend 76 3.4.1 Editor of the Legend, George Robertson 76 3.4.2 Writer of the Anzac Legend: C. E. W. Bean 77 3.4.3 The Anzac Book 79 3.4.4 The Official History of the First World War 81 3.5 Conclusion 86

Contents

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Chapter 4 THE GOSPEL OF MARK, A CHRISTIAN NARRATIVE OF THE FIRST CENTURY CE 87 4.1 Literary Features of the Gospel of Mark 87 4.1.1 Marginalization by Plot 88 4.1.2 Denigration, Containment, and Silencing by Characterization 95 4.1.2.1 Denigration by Association with Disorder 95 4.2.1.1.1 Apocalyptic eschatology 96 4.1.2.2 Containment by Compulsory Relationship with an Authorizing Male 99 4.1.2.3 Silencing of Female Characters: The Issue of Voice 101 4.2 Mark: A Narrative of the First-Century CE Roman Imperial Context 102 4.2.1 Provenance of the Gospel According to Mark 102 4.2.2 Genre of the Gospel According to Mark 104 4.3 Conclusion 109 Chapter 5 JESUS AND FAMILIAL WOMEN IN MK 1–12 5.1 Markan Stories Featuring Women 5.1.1 The Mother-in-law of Simon (Mk 1:29-31) 5.1.2 The Mother of Jesus (Mk 3:21-22, 31-35) 5.1.3 The Daughter of Jairus and her Mother (Mk 5:21-24, 35-43) 5.1.4 The Daughter Saved by God’s Order (Mk 5:25-34) 5.1.5 Herodias and Her Daughter (Mk 6:14-29) 5.1.6 The Syrophoenician Woman and Her Daughter (Mk 7:24-30) 5.1.7 The Great Gap (Mk 7:31-14:2) 5.1.8 The Widow of the Temple System (Mk 12:41-44) Chapter 6 JESUS IN THE MIDST OF FUNCTIONAL WOMEN, MK 14–16 6.1 The Woman Who Anoints Jesus (Mk 14:3-9) 6.2 The Maidservant Who Exposes Peter’s Betrayal (Mk 14:66-72) 6.3 The Path to the Death of Jesus (Mk 15:1-32) 6.4 A Reprise of Female Characters in Mark 1-14 6.5 The Death of Jesus (Mk 15:33-39) 6.6 Women, the Last to Appear on the Markan Stage (Mk 15:40-41, 47; 16:1-8)

111 112 114 121 124 128 133 140 147 151 157 157 162 167 170 173 174

Chapter 7 CONCLUSION 183

x Contents

Appendix 1 CONTRAPUNTAL READING OF THE STORIES ABOUT WOMEN AGAINST THE MAIN MARKAN THEME, JESUS 187 Appendix 2 TRIANGULATED RELATIONSHIPS IN MK 6:17–29

188

Bibliography Index

189 199

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is a revision of the doctoral thesis I presented to the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, in 2008. In gratitude for the support I have received in writing this book I wish to acknowledge a number of people who have assisted along the way. First, I thank my academic advisor and chair of my doctoral committee, Professor Mary Ann Tolbert of the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, for her warm support, her clear guidance, and her excellent advice. Mary Ann taught her students to think about the Bible as a document marked by its history, yet inspiring us still to live with justice and compassion for one another. In particular, I thank Mary Ann for never losing faith in me as I wrote this dissertation while working full time, faraway in Australia. Her stalwart encouragement of this student from the antipodes expresses her commitment to people from the world outside the great centers of power and privilege in the north. I thank also the other members of my doctoral committee, Professor Barbara Green, op from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley, and Professor Mark Griffith from the Department of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. They worked very generously with me in a tight time schedule to bring the dissertation to completion. From my Australian context, I thank first of all my religious congregation, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Lochinvar and their leaders, who supported me financially through the lengthy process of completing the PhD degree. I thank my colleagues at the Catholic Institute of Sydney who provided me with study leave and a sabbatical to enable me to complete the dissertation. I deeply appreciate their support over a long period of writing and their rejoicing that the task is now complete. I thank my brothers and sisters and many friends at home who have always encouraged me enthusiastically. In particular, I thank Dr. Megan Brock rsj, my community companion, who traveled the journey of writing the doctoral dissertation with me, starting her own PhD after me and finishing before me. For her wisdom, her unwavering and warm encouragement, her belief in the value of my work and for laughter in the midst of it all, I will always be deeply grateful. I am grateful to David Clines of Sheffield Phoenix and Dominic Mattos of T&T Clark Bloomsbury for accepting this book and encouraging me to bring it to publication. Finally, I thank my parents Una and Desmond Connolly, who believed in educating girls. My mother modeled to me perseverance in pursuing a goal and belief in my own dignity. This dissertation is testimony to her life in ways only she would know.

INTRODUCTION

In this book, as a contemporary Australian Christian woman, I read the Gospel of Mark, a Christian narrative of the first century CE. I read this ancient narrative from the deliberately chosen perspective of postcolonial Australian feminism. This is a complex perspective from which to read. I maintain that this manyfaceted approach takes account of some important realities that are always present when we read, especially when we read an ancient text that intends to have and in fact has had a very powerful effect on human beings in history. Two of these important realities have to do with the contexts in which both I as a reader and the text I choose to read were formed; and they have to do with the ideologies about human beings that prevail in each of those contexts. Addressing first the matter of context, a significant common feature of the contexts of both myself as an Australian reader and the Gospel of Mark, the text I will read, is that both have their origins in an imperial-colonial relationship, that is, the relationship between an imperial power and one of its provinces or colonies. Modern Australia was founded in 1788 by the British Empire, as a place to which convicted criminals could be sent. Through the coerced labor of convicts, Great Britain founded a colony that grew into a nation, ruled over constitutionally by the British Crown. Australia still has the crowned head of England as its Head of State, with Australian political organization and social structure in many ways still reflecting that colonial link to the former imperial center. For its part, Christianity arose from a phenomenon known as the “Jesus movement,” which flourished in the first-century CE Mediterranean as a result of the preaching of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, who declared that this Jesus was a Son of God who was crucified under Roman imperial authority but was raised from the dead by God. Palestine, where Jesus lived, was a province of the Roman Empire of ancient times. The life, death, and proclaimed resurrection of Jesus and the production of the Gospel of Mark, a narrative about Jesus, all occurred under the imperial power of Rome. This common element, that the foundation of my own nation and the founding events of my religious tradition both took place within an imperial-colonial relationship, invites interpretation precisely from the perspective of imperialcolonial relationships. Postcolonial criticism provides insights for reading from the imperial-colonial context: insights about the reader and about the text to be read. This approach to reading is an ideological critique that scrutinizes imperialcolonial relationships, wherever they have occurred in the world and in whatever state they continue to operate or to have an ongoing impact.

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Disorderly Women and the Order of God

The very many different kinds of imperial-colonial relationships that have occurred in the world mean that there are many different forms of postcolonial critique. While I acknowledge the main forms of postcolonialism as it has emerged in its brief history, I will use what the scholar R. S. Sugirtharajah calls “vernacular criticism,” an approach to postcolonial experience that takes account of elements in the culture of the interpreter, to scrutinize imperial-colonial dynamisms. Since I am writing intentionally from the Australian postcolonial experience, I will choose from among the many models of postcolonial critique whatever aspects enable me to analyze the distinct imperial-colonial experiences that gave rise to contemporary Australia. Living in Australia, as well as being constantly reminded of our national foundation as a convict colony of the British Empire, I also experience the sexism that I will argue in this dissertation is part of the heritage that both contemporary Australia and ancient Christianity foster. Therefore, at the same time that I read Mark with Australian postcolonial awareness, I am particularly interested in the sexism that I will expose as operating in the imperial-colonial relationship, that is, the very strong tendency in this kind of context, to value people unjustly and untruly on the basis of their gender. In the imperial-colonial relationship, what is cast as “masculine” tends to be valorized and what is cast as “feminine” tends to be denigrated, in a way that misrepresents both male and female persons and that does long-term harm to human society. For this reason, I will also use feminist criticism to assist me to read the Gospel of Mark, alert to the way in which gender is portrayed there. My own approach to feminism has been hesitant, even reluctant, although I have always wanted a way to resist the ever-present, debilitating sexism I experience still to this day in Australian Christian circles. Yet through the 1980s and 1990s I found little to inspire me in the religious feminism that I encountered in Australia. The opportunity to study in the United States in the late 1990s led me to understand that much of the religiously focused feminism that I had met, but found wanting, was imported into Australia from the United States. It properly reflected the concerns, history, and values of feminists in the United States, but it was received in Australia as universally normative. Coming to understand the history and ongoing emergence of US feminism, with the phases organic to its context, I realized that what I was searching for was a feminism that emerged out of the history and concerns of Australia, where I live, that spoke in its distinct imagery and resonated with its foundational experiences. My task then was to find a way to construct a specifically Australian postcolonial feminist lens with which to read the Gospel of Mark, for the way it evaluates human beings on the basis of their gender. I have produced this lens by studying narratives about two foundational events of Australian history, both of which relate very strongly to Australia’s experience of the British Empire and in both of which narratives, characters are strongly evaluated on account of their gender. The two events are the enforced foundation of the colony of Sydney by convicts, particularly female convicts, condemned to transportation to the unexplored

Introduction

3

continent, terra Australis; and the participation of the new nation Australia, as a former colony of Great Britain, on the side of Great Britain, in the First World War. The two documents coming from each event are a tendentious novel about an idealized, reformed female convict, Margaret Catchpole; and a collection of writings known as the “Anzac Myth,” valorizing male military achievement while obliterating female participation in an early campaign of the First World War, the struggle for the Gallipoli Peninsula. With interpretive insights gained from reading these two writings from Australia’s foundational imperial-colonial experience, I read the foundational Christian narrative that is the Gospel of Mark, produced in the imperial-colonial context of the Roman Empire. In order for me to read the Gospel of Mark in this way, the book has the following structure. Chapter 1 presents modern Australia as a nation in which a particular kind of imperial-colonial history directs the self-aware Australian to find postcolonial criticism a useful tool with which to shape an intentionally Australian reading of Mark. Vernacular criticism is explained as the form of postcolonial criticism the dissertation will use. Feminist criticism is then discussed in much the same way; the connections between postcolonial and feminist criticism are listed briefly, and the chapter concludes with a review of what postcolonial feminist biblical criticism aims to do. Chapters 2 and 3 present first the history and then an interpretation of the narratives arising from that history of two events of Australian history that reveal intensely the character of the imperial-colonial relationship of Australia with Great Britain. Chapter 2 surveys the history of the foundation of Australia, focusing particularly on the way female convicts were treated and were interpreted, in their journey to Australia and their incarceration once they arrived, in a “Female Factory.” Against this background I read a novel of the period, The History of Margaret Catchpole: A Suffolk Girl, to reveal the gender bias against females that operated in the context of an imperial-colonial relationship. Chapter 3 treats the Gallipoli Campaign of the First World War, in which soldiers from Australia and New Zealand served as the ANZACs.1 From the military failure of the Gallipoli Campaign, Australian soldiers, writers, and a determined publisher fashioned the “Anzac Myth.” A close study is made of the writing and the editing of the documents that made this myth, to show that there was a deliberate policy to valorize male military performance and to marginalize and denigrate female contribution to what was felt to be a major national performance on the world stage. Chapter 4 turns the focus from the Australian reading perspective to the Gospel of Mark as the text to be read. This chapter presents a distinct structure for reading the Gospel of Mark from a feminist perspective, informed by postcolonial critique. The feminist reading of Mark is made in two ways, first by selecting material to read and second by reading with a certain focus or lens. First, a selection of stories from the gospel is made on the basis of gender, highlighting a secondary literary 1. ANZAC is an acronym for Australian New Zealand Army Corps.

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structure that functions below the surface in the gospel. This secondary structure is made up of the sequence of the narrative’s eleven stories about women as they occur in Mark, set around two sections of the gospel, one lengthy and one brief, featuring Jesus. In these two sections Jesus appears first with male disciples only and then he is progressively deprived of all support until he is completely alone. A literary account of this structure, in terms of making a contrapuntal reading of the women’s stories against the portrayal of Jesus, is given. Second, the feminist reading of Mark is made possible by using the lens ground from the study of Australian experiences made in Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 4 explains that Chapters 2 and 3 show that in the Australian imperialcolonial experience, the predominant tendency in the portrayal of people by gender is to present females as associated with disorder that threatens to destroy male ordering of society. Chapter 4 concludes by presenting a brief survey of general introductory matter on the Gospel of Mark, such as its provenance, conventional literary structure, and genre, with a reference to the capacity of other narratives of the time when Mark was written, namely the ancient Greek erotic novel and the Jewish novel of the period, to present female characters who had initiative, who could speak, and who could make an impact on the plot. Chapters 5 and 6 read the eleven stories about women in Mark, using the lens of disorder over against order. The reading finds that the portrayal of female characters in the Gospel of Mark is complex. They are strongly and consistently associated with disorder, in contrast to the order that Jesus proclaims, the order that is the reign of God. The women in the Gospel of Mark are isolated, denigrated, and mute. First, their stories are isolated from one another. Since each woman has only one cameo appearance, no woman in Mark has any continuity of presence and therefore has little capacity to affect the plot, as do the male characters such as Jesus, the voice that speaks from heaven, Jesus’s ever-present disciples, and Jesus’s opponents. Second, the female characters are denigrated by their being consistently portrayed in silent isolation within their own individual story, in which, by bringing disorder of various kinds across Jesus’s path they obstruct his proclamation of the order of God. Third, women’s speech is very severely curtailed in the Gospel of Mark; the only time women speak together, they cause the death of an innocent man and refuse to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus. Chapter 5 reads the seven stories about women that occur in Mark 1–12, where Jesus pursues his public career as a preacher, culminating in his triumphal entry to Jerusalem and his fatal controversies there with the authorities, both religious and political. As detailed immediately in the preceding paragraph, the portrayal of women in this part of the gospel contrasts strongly with the depiction of Jesus instructing his male disciples in the ways of the order of God, in the course of six chapters in the central section of the gospel. Finally, in Chapter 6, the stories of the women in the Passion Narrative are read in contrast to the brief narrative of the death of Jesus. Here, as he dies, Jesus is portrayed in ways that cast him very much like the women in the gospel who are isolated, denigrated, and mute. That is, Mark portrays the dying Jesus as isolated from all support, both human and divine. From his entry into Jerusalem, the

Introduction

5

murmurs of opposition to Jesus grow to become deadly accusations of blasphemy turning into derision of Jesus by all who surround him as he dies. In this context, the rhetorically triumphant Jesus of the parables and the successful verbal contests against his co-religionist opponents falls strangely silent. The Gospel of Mark is not an easy text for women to read. It is an attractive, dramatic narrative, but it is very concerned with disorder, with the apocalyptic clash with evil that will culminate in the death of Jesus on the cross. In this gospel, as in other texts coming out of imperial-colonial contexts, masculine power over disorder is valorized and females are portrayed as highly susceptible to disorder and therefore as needing to be controlled, limited in the way they impinge on male order. While Jesus portrays order, female characters in this gospel consistently are associated with disorder. It is the task of male ordering to put female disorder to rights. Yet, when evil has its moment of triumph over Jesus, the demeanor of the Son of God resembles most that of the female characters who have appeared in the narrative. That is, as female characters have been isolated and marginalized, denigrated, and silenced, so is Jesus of Nazareth as he dies in the Markan portrayal of this event. The Gospel of Mark endorses firmly the full vision of apocalyptic eschatology, namely the resurrection of Jesus from the death and burial that the forces of evil bring upon him. This gospel is very conscious of the threatening power of evil. By their portrayal in strong association with disorder, female characters are used in this gospel to portray the impact that evil has. When the narrative wishes to portray the cosmically disordering moment of triumph of evil over good, namely the death of Jesus at the hands of people driven by envy, female characteristics mark the portrayal of the Son of God. This literary ploy is sexist, a dangerous, insidious abuse of the female person to make a theological point. It is particularly dangerous when this strategy occurs in a text that has been canonized by the Christian community, carried forward through twenty centuries as inspired by God and as revelatory of God in a unique way. Living as a woman in Australia alerts me to the reality of deeply entrenched sexist attitudes in a society that likes to project itself as easy-going, fair to all but especially to the “underdog,” as welcoming and straightforward as its sunlight and open skies. I love Australia: it is my native land; but Australia’s postcolonial culture is still riddled with a long-settled antipathy to the female as a hindrance to the progress that solely male order would bring. My nation still needs to mature from its admiration of the resplendent male, into an ability to cherish the wonderful abilities of all of its citizens to contribute to public life, including its women. On first acquaintance, the Gospel of Mark is a lively, engaging narrative in which Jesus is kind to women and has many moments of gentle, compassionate encounter with them. I love the Gospel of Mark: it is my Christian “native” land, but I have learned to be wary of the sexism that lies not far beneath its surface. I strongly affirm the values that the Gospel of Mark proclaims: the abundance of God for all; that all are welcome in the reign of God; that in the reign of God there is to be no lording it over of one by another, but rather mutual service of one

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another; and most fundamentally, the promise of resurrection to life beyond the power of death. However, I believe that all Christians, not just feminists, need to mature in our reading of this text, to recognize and repudiate the unbalanced estimate of human value, expressed in its literary portrayal of gender, which pervades the pages of the Gospel of Mark. As I will show, while the Gospel of Mark promises all the values named above, its literary portrayal of female characters leaches out of the image conveyed of them in this narrative, the sense that they are affirmed equally with their male counterparts by this narrative as narrative. Rather than being welcomed wholly and shown enjoying God’s abundance in full mutuality with other characters such as the male disciples, they are “lorded over” by the narrative itself which relegates female characters to a confined, isolated, and marginal space in which speech is meted out to them parsimoniously. There is a tension in the Gospel of Mark between what it proclaims to all people and what it allows to the female characters constructed by the literary devices that make up this narrative. I recognize that we are still at a point in Christian history where it will be the work of feminists, and by and large women, to make this point, and to do so with vigor. Despite its best intentions, the Gospel of Mark has not fully realized in its narrative rhetoric the promise of welcome to all and of abundance for all that the gospel proclaims in so many ways. Women reading the Gospel of Mark need to be aware of this tendency of the Gospel. To claim the resurrection promise the gospel offers, women need to resist the tendency of a narrative coming from an imperialcolonial context, to approve women only when they are isolated, mute, and have no impact on society. Christian women need to speak clearly, their determined belief that in God’s new order, God’s abundance is given to all who love God, female and male alike, seated at the table of God’s feast together.

Chapter 1 THE POSTCOLONIAL RELIGIOUS WORLD IN AUSTRALIA

On January 1, 2001, the Commonwealth of Australia celebrated its centenary as a nation. It did so as a constitutional monarchy under the British Crown, half a world away. Fourteen months beforehand, on November 7, 1999, Australians had voted to remain under that British Crown, rather than to declare their independence as a republic. It has been argued that political manipulations in phrasing the option put to the Australian people may have caused this result, which misrepresents the actual desire of the nation to be politically autonomous.1 The fact remains that Australia began its second century still formally constituted as a nation under the political authority of another nation, with that nation’s crowned monarch as the Head of State of Australia. This is hardly the image of itself that Australia cares to project. Australians like to present themselves as independent, answering to their own judgment, not owing deference to extraneous authority, especially one that expresses itself 1. When Australians went to the polls on November 6, 1999, they voted either “Yes” or “No” to establish the nation as a republic and to replace the Queen and her governorgeneral with a president appointed by a two-thirds majority of the Commonwealth (i.e., federal) Parliament. Under the monarchist prime minister, John Howard, the vote for or against a republic was put to the electorate not in principle, but in terms of a specific form of republic which Australians did not want. For this reason and perhaps also because the minimalist model settled for by the promoters of the republic did not clearly ally itself with pressing political issues for Australia, such as reconciliation with the Aboriginal peoples, the integration of modern Australia’s strongly multicultural society and ecological issues, the republic was not achieved. These reasons and others are discussed in detail by Mark McKenna, who argues strongly that it was the minimalist nature of the proposed republic that failed to win the overwhelming support of the Australian people. See Mark McKenna and Wayne Hudson, Australian Republicanism: A Reader (Carlton, VIC, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 1–9; 249–52; 273–75; Mark McKenna, The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia 1788-1996 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Mark McKenna, This Country: A Reconciled Republic? (Sydney, NSW, Australia: The University of New South Wales Press, 2004).

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Disorderly Women and the Order of God

with considerable pomp and ceremony. How can this contradiction prevail? How can a nation glorying in a certain rugged independence and irreverence toward established power be so firmly tied to it, and by its own decision? Australia is one nation among many in the world today that is negotiating a path forward from a colonial past, from its origins as a colony of the British Empire in the late eighteenth century, to being a contemporary autonomous nation, yet one owing allegiance still to the crowned head of another state. Questions about national identity raised by this state of affairs provoke other questions for anyone proposing to read an ancient religious text, such as the Gospel of Mark, in the contemporary context, whether of Australia or the wider world. In the contemporary context, questions of autonomy are asked not only about groups such as nations but also about the individual. Today those questions are asked particularly about the individual as gendered and specifically about the female individual who still struggles today, including in Australia, to attain full autonomy, full freedom to operate with all her abilities and to be rewarded equally with her male counterparts for what she contributes to society’s good. What light does reflection on the contradictory state of affairs of postcolonial Australia’s political history and identity shed on reading the Gospel of Mark? And what might questions asked about the portrayal of gender in material coming from Australia’s colonial origins lead us to ask about the portrayal of gender, especially female gender, in the Gospel of Mark? To make it possible to address these questions, this chapter will consider modern postcolonial Australia as a reading site for the Gospel of Mark from the perspective of both postcolonial and feminist criticisms.

1.1  Contemporary Australia as a Site for Reading Modern Australia began in 1788 as a penal colony of Great Britain. More than two hundred years later and a century after the formal federation of its separate colonies into the one nation of Australia on January 1, 1901, Australia has still not managed to declare its independence. This dissertation argues that modern Australia shows itself to be still in major ways colonized by Great Britain and other powers. Australia has not been able to move itself formally out of a colonial relationship with the Northern Hemisphere nation with which it has so little in common in terms of self-consciousness, social structures, and experience of living in the land. Further, in the global economy of the twenty-first century, Australia has also become caught in the neocolonial web spun by dominant Northern Hemisphere economies since the Second World War, especially the United States. Australia is thus enmeshed in the web of global relations known as globalization. While Australia acts in most ways in the world as its own sovereign power, in many significant ways it bears the marks of being subservient to other nations or even corporations based almost exclusively in the Northern Hemisphere. These nations



1. The Postcolonial Religious World in Australia

9

or corporations are larger in global influence than Australia, economically more powerful and culturally dominant, and able to set the trends and pace which Australia must match if it is to survive.2 The significance of this state of affairs for New Testament interpretation in Australia is that both the site of production of the New Testament and Australia as a reading site are marked by the relationships that operate between an imperial center and the colonial margin. There is a marked sympathy of situation between the first-century CE Mediterranean origin of the New Testament documents and twenty-first-century CE Australia as a place of reading. Both the Roman Empire and the British Empire were the largest known powers of their day.3 This dominance was achieved and sustained by military might and by economic manipulation of the colonies for the sake of the metropolitan center on which the empire was based. Within the context of this imperial dynamism, both the early Christian movement out of which Mark speaks and the penal colony of New South Wales from which modern Australia developed began their existence in violence carried out by an imperial power to maintain its dominant position in the world of its day. The difference of two millennia between production and reception must be taken seriously into consideration. Indeed, this book argues that modern readers must take this difference of context seriously. At the same time, however, there is a strong similarity between the power dynamics of the Roman Empire as the context from which both the content and the writing style of the New Testament arose, and the British and current global empires in which contemporary Australia is enmeshed. This similarity suggests a way of reading the New Testament, in which Australia’s past and present colonial experience can serve as interpretive guide. Alerted by our own history to the practices of the empire-colony relationship, Australians can be aware of those practices operating not only in the events depicted by the New Testament documents, but also in their literary construction. 2. For example, while Australia’s economy is fundamentally strong, its currency fluctuates with the Euro against the long-established, powerful currencies of the United Kingdom and the United States. Australian audio-visual media, both at the cinema and on television, are dominated by the productions of the United States in particular, to the extent that Australia must legislate that television networks broadcast at least a specified minimum amount of Australian-produced material. The US presence in Australia (as elsewhere in much of the world) is evident in its ubiquitous fast-food chains, computer and other electronic technology and popular music. Australians buy, hear, see, eat, and drink US culture as part of a dollar-driven US economic imperialism in which Australia is colonized as surely as it was by the British with their muskets and cat-o’-nine-tails. 3. Edward Said, for example, argues that British imperial power was unique among other empires of its day because it was “bigger, grander, more imposing than any other.” Said lists the combined territories of Britain and France as “Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean, large swatches of Africa, the Middle East, the Far East and the Indian subcontinent in its entirety.” See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), xxii, 5–6.

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In particular, the Gospel of Mark can be read as both attempting to address Roman imperial power and being still subject to its control. A consciously postcolonial Australian reading can be pointedly alert to the dynamics that produce such an ambiguous document. A hermeneutic of suspicion of empire can operate alongside a hermeneutic championing the best intentions and achievements of the Gospel of Mark. The hermeneutic of suspicion alerts the reader to the fact that empire infiltrates all products of the world it controls, even attempts to speak in non-imperial ways, of values other than those of empire, as the Gospel of Mark does. The stance choosing to hear the Gospel’s vision of a human community marked by mutual service, complete absence of power-focused arrogance and abundance for all can encourage the reader to promote the values of the Gospel, summed up in the Markan metaphor of “The Reign of God.” Finally, this kind of reading will necessarily be aware of the ways in which the Markan narrative compromises its own project, particularly with reference to gender, specifically, the ways in which female characters are portrayed in the narrative.

1.2  The Thesis The thesis is that in the Gospel of Mark, despite its own explicitly stated values of mutual service, complete rejection of power-focused arrogance, and abundance for all, the impact of empire is detected in the literary construction of the narrative, in the sexism that pervades the portrayal of its female characters. The danger to which this argument seeks to alert readers of the Gospel of Mark is that along with its explicit proclamation of the mutually serving, non-oppressive, and abundantly generous reign of God, the Gospel narrative in its literary dynamism implicitly conveys the notion that in the reign of God, male persons properly predominate and female persons are relatively insignificant. Given the canonical status of the Gospel of Mark in Christianity and its highly privileged use for two millennia, this sexist proclamation of the reign of God makes it too easy to assume that such gender imbalance is normative in Christian society and should be preserved in all ecclesial structures: social, ministerial, and governmental.

1.3  The Methodology This thesis sits in conversation with scholarly theory about imperial-colonial relationships and about sexism, that is, postcolonial and feminist theory. Each of these theories is immense, reflecting the vast range of human experience around the earth, whether collective or individual, that has given rise to these theories. Therefore, it is necessary to explain how both postcolonial theory and a feminist critique can assist a liberating reading of the Gospel of Mark for the Australian context. The remainder of this chapter will address these challenges, concluding with a brief explanation of what a postcolonial, feminist approach to reading Mark reveals. The following two chapters will explore in more detailed fashion the



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historical features of the two imperial contexts that are brought together when a contemporary Australian reads the Gospel of Mark.

1.4  Postcolonial Criticism As I indicated in the Introduction, the form of postcolonial criticism that I will use to read the Gospel of Mark has been designated by a major scholar in the field of postcolonial biblical study, Rasiah S. Sugirtharajah, as “vernacular hermeneutics.” Before I explain this in detail I will first explain postcolonial criticism, especially as it relates to the Australian context. 1.4.1  Postcolonial Criticism in General Postcolonial criticism is a form of cultural criticism which investigates the particular set of power relations operating between cultures, when an imperializing nation takes possession in some manner of another’s land and culture.4 Postcolonial criticism was developed initially by scholars exposing the very stark form of imperialism practiced in the modern era, in which nations of Western Europe claimed territories in the so-called New World, very often establishing colonies 4. Treatments of postcolonial criticism may be found in a number of works published in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin eds., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (Routledge: London, 1989) is an early sample of using postcolonial criticism to study the literatures of English-speaking countries which had been British colonies at one point in their history. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin eds., Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (Routledge: London, 1998) defines concepts used by the methodology. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995/1999) collects together eighty-six articles, often abbreviated, by writers from around the globe, exploring the range of postcolonial reality. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen eds., Colonial Discourse / Postcolonial Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) publishes papers given at a symposium on postcolonialism held in Essex in 1991. Like The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) collects together major writings in the field, many of them “classics” from which representative selections have been made. Other, single-chapter length overviews are provided by Homi K. Bhabha, “Postcolonial Criticism,” in Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn eds., Redrawing the Boundaries (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 437–65; Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What is post(-)colonialism?” in John Frow and Meaghan Morris eds., Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 30–47; and Stephen D. Moore “Postcolonialism,” in A. K. M. Adam ed., Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2000), 182–88.

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of their own people on the lands they occupied, often by military force. R. S. Sugirtharajah states that postcolonial criticism’s major achievement so far is “to inaugurate a new era of academic inquiry which brings to the fore the overlapping issues of empire, nation, ethnicity, migration and language. Where it differs from earlier critical theories is that the postcolonial discourse implicates academic learning in colonialism.”5 In the case of Australia, because of the particular way in which the British established the initial colonies in Australia, namely by convict settlements of its own people, a distinct form of the relationship between the West European nation, Great Britain, and its other, the colonies of Australia, operated. That is, the Australian settler colonies were begun by an “other” that imperial Britain made from its own British citizens. It was not volunteer settlers taking the risk to establish new lives in the New World who established the colonies in the Great South Land. Rather, Britain claimed land by using as the occupiers its own “other,” that is, its own citizens, convicted as criminals and sentenced to transportation to New South Wales and other sites, removed as far from Britain as was physically possible. The British Empire alienated part of itself, a criminal class from within its own people, to do the work of colonization as forced labor under military guard. These colonists operated in a very ambiguous relationship with the founding metropolis. On the part of the British Crown, the act of founding a national colony was at the same time the act of banishing from the nation those who would affect that foundation. These expelled, enforced colonists established British life on captured soil, but they did so as convicts enduring penal discipline under harsh, deliberately punishing conditions. In the complex situation of being both expelled from the founding metropolis yet compelled agents of that metropolis, the convict colonizers of Australia operated in a particular kind of interstice shot through with ambiguity, highly likely to produce cultural hybridity and various forms of opposition. This experience creates a location from which to read the evidence of imperialism, alert to its strategies. R. S. Sugirtharajah’s postcolonial reading approach, which he calls “vernacular hermeneutics,” is a particular way of doing this. 1.4.2  Vernacular Hermeneutics Sugirtharajah defines vernacular hermeneutics as “the indigenization of biblical interpretation.”6 This practice, by which the postcolonial critic relates with the biblical text, is very much an attempt to reassert the dignity of indigenous 5. R. S. Sugirtharajah, “Biblical Studies after the Empire: From a Colonial to a Postcolonial Mode of Interpretation,” in R. S. Sugirtharajah ed., The Postcolonial Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 12–23, 16. 6. R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 177.



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peoples’ cultures and cultural expression, while engaging the Bible and Western interpretations of it. Sugirtharajah defines this vernacular criticism as “a call to self-awareness, aimed at creating an awakening among people to their indigenous literary, cultural and religious heritage.”7 Vernacular hermeneutics focuses on culture, both that which produced the biblical text and the cultures of the interpreters of the text, as a means of interpretation. Sugirtharajah outlines two ways of accessing this cultural focus, beginning intentionally with the culture of the interpreter. First, the cultural content of the interpreter may be categorized under three headings, namely “ideational (world views, values, and rules), performantial (rituals and roles), and material (language, symbols, food, clothing, etc.).”8 Second, the critic may read for cultural insights by means of “at least three modes of vernacular reading— conceptual correspondence, narrativel [sic] enrichments and performantial parallels.”9 In this latter approach, the critic uses various manifestations of cultural content in the interpreting culture that, by their similarity with the culture of the texts to be interpreted, offer access to meanings or value of the texts for the interpreting culture, or shed otherwise unsuspected light on the texts. In both approaches, interpretation moves from the interpreter’s own culture to the text being interpreted, proceeding by analogy to detect connections between each by means of similar cultural content or values. As Sugirtharajah sums up this strategy, which he says is not new but indeed age-old, “What in effect, such readings have done is to make culture an important site for hermeneutics.”10 In this book, the major category of cultural content that will be used is the ideational, seeking for world views and values that a postcolonial feminist may draw out of study of the Australian imperial-colonial experience, to inform a reading of the Gospel of Mark. Where relevant, the other categories Sugirtharajah isolates, namely the performantial and the material, will be used. With regard to modes of reading, I will use “narrativel enrichment,” by which Sugirtharajah refers to the use of the literary or narrative heritage of a culture which can be placed “along-side biblical material, in order to draw out their hermeneutical implications.”11 This book reads from the oppositional positions that can be found in the imperial textual record, both in the history of Australia and in the Gospel of Mark. I will use a postcolonial interpretation of the Australian context as indicated above, to focus the interpretation of the Gospel of Mark. This will join similar interpretations that 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 182. 9. Ibid. See fuller descriptions of these three modes of reading on pp. 182–90. Conceptual correspondences refer to conceptual similarities found in both the culture of production of a text and the culture seeking to interpret it. Performantial parallels refer to “ritual and behavioural practices which are commonly available in a culture” and which thus provide a cultural commonality between two cultures. 10. Ibid., 182. 11. Ibid., 186.

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have already been made by other scholars, studying the impact of the Bible on other imperial-colonial locales. In these recent studies, a new critical methodology has begun to emerge in biblical scholarship, which may be termed “postcolonial biblical criticism.” 1.4.3  Postcolonial Biblical Criticism Postcolonial biblical criticism is a new discipline that emerged in the late 1980s but which has already produced a substantial body of literature in which the meaning of the term “postcolonialism” itself is debated.12 Since the mid-1990s at least, R. S. Sugirtharajah has been writing on the interpretation of the Bible in Asian postcolonial contexts, particularly India. He has been a foundational writer, editing a number of volumes that present postcolonial biblical interpretation from all over the globe.13 Focusing on the large context of Asia, Sugirtharajah’s work has held together the many interpretations emerging from its various subcontexts and from the different phases of Asia’s encounter with imperialism.14 However, his comprehensive grasp of the development of postcolonial biblical criticism means that he has been able to identify trends in its development beyond Asia and in the theologies that it helps to produce.15 It is this comprehensive grasp of postcolonial biblical criticism that has enabled Sugirtharajah to articulate the idea of a vernacular hermeneutics in approaching the Bible, which has already been mentioned above. This clear designation of the way of proceeding in postcolonial biblical studies is possible because of Sugirtharajah’s work in providing theoretical accounts of both the focus and modes of interpretation of texts used in postcolonial biblical criticism. He cites another major scholar in this field, F. F. Segovia, to state one goal of postcolonial biblical critique, namely the scrutiny of ideological dimensions of the imperial-colonial relationship, as it manifests itself in both the construction and reception through 12. See Sugirtharajah, “Biblical Studies after the Empire,” p. 15, fn. 3 for a list of books written in this field, throughout the 1990s. 13. See, for example, R. S. Sugirtharajah ed., The Postcolonial Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998); R. S. Sugirtharajah ed., Vernacular Hermeneutics (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999); and R. S. Sugirtharajah ed., Voices From the Margin: Interpreting The Bible in the Third World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). 14. See R. S. Sugirtharajah, Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism: Contesting the Interpretations (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998); R. S. Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 15. See the coedited work, Virginia Fabella and R. S. Sugirtharajah eds., Dictionary of Third World Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000); and also R. S. Sugirtharajah ed., Frontiers in Asian Christian Theology: Emerging Trends (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994).



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time, of biblical texts. Thus, Sugirtharajah sums up a comprehensive overview of postcolonialism in biblical studies constructed by F. F. Segovia as identifying “three postcolonial optics—the shadows of empire in the production of texts of Judaism and early Christianity; the colonial imperatives that surround Western interpretations of Jewish and Christian texts; and the emergence of biblical critics from the former empire who are trying to subvert the received readings.”16 I am writing as one of the people identified by the third optic: a biblical critic from the former British Empire who aims to subvert the existing readings of the Gospel of Mark, particularly those that ignore the imperialist and sexist tendencies of Mark. I do so by exercising the first optic: scrutinizing the Gospel of Mark for the way that the dynamics of the ancient Roman Empire leaves traces of its value system in this text. This critical approach obviously takes the human context of production and reception of texts seriously. Foundational studies in postcolonial criticism have focused first on context itself. Only in more recent work has the issue of gender been shown to be intrinsically connected with a postcolonialist study of the Bible; to this we now turn.

1.5  Feminist Criticism 1.5.1  Feminism in General The other methodology I wish to use is feminist biblical criticism. This form of criticism has been in existence longer than postcolonial criticism, but it shares with postcolonial criticism similar interests in the human predicament, similar strategies for resisting oppression and faces similar risks in the way it goes about its task. I will first discuss very briefly the state of contemporary feminism with particular reference to Australian interests, and one fundamental strategy that feminism uses, namely a critical analysis of the power of language in social relations. Then I will move to show how this form of criticism is used in biblical interpretation. Modern feminism began in late-eighteenth-century England and the United States, when Western women began to address the social oppressions they suffered. Two centuries of feminist thought has led feminists to see, sometimes under vigorous protests from women who found themselves oppressed by a limited yet universalizing feminism, that the concerns of all women are not adequately named by white, educated, middle-class women from the Northern Hemisphere. Not only women from the two-thirds world largely in the Southern Hemisphere but also women of color within Northern nations have protested that

16. Ibid., 19. See F. F. Segovia, “Biblical Criticism and Postcolonial Studies: Toward a Postcolonial Optic,” in R. S. Sugirtharajah ed., The Postcolonial Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 49–65, particularly pp. 54, 56–63 for the full development of the argument that Sugirtharajah sums up here.

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their claims for justice have been drowned out and rendered apparently irrelevant unless they are expressed in the terms of first world feminism. Feminism has now proliferated into many forms, as it has become aware that women are oppressed not only by way of gender as it is constructed in first-world cultures but by gender linked with other factors. These linked factors may be race; economic status and its manifold implications; cultural values specific to ethnicity; religion and even international relations or world politics, to name but a few.17 Kwok Pui-lan cites Anne McClintock describing gender in British colonial situations as not “simply a question of sexuality but also a question of subdued labor and imperial plunder; race is not just a question of skin color but also a question of labor power, crosshatched by gender.”18 Therefore, now that it recognizes that various locations—geographic, national, ethnic or racial, socioeconomic—particularize women’s oppression, by enmeshing women in diverse gender-linked systems of exploitation, feminism today insists that all readings must attend particularly to location. In fact, postcolonial and feminist criticisms are similar in that each focuses specifically on location as a significant element of oppression. Where a person or a group of persons is situated physically, politically, economically, and socially determines powerfully what such persons experience and perceive of life. The US feminist poet Adrienne Rich writes of the impact of location on shaping consciousness, speaking of “the facts of blood and bread, the social and political forces of . . . time and place.”19 For her, “blood” refers to the complex of connections to the world that come from the family, race, and religion(s) into which we are born; “bread” names the political and economic place from which we approach the world. Developing this metaphor, Mary A. Tolbert argues that everyone is located by the realities of blood and bread and is influenced by the politics of that location. Since blood location very often determines bread location and thus a person’s access to wealth and power, the fact that some people are favored with blood and bread locations that afford them ease and dignity while others are not, creates “a yearning for a different reality, . . . in which one’s actions and quality of heart, spirit, and mind matter more than the 17. Amy-Jill Levine has written extensively protesting the tendency of Christian feminists writing about first-century-CE Judaism in such a way as to vilify the ancient Jewish culture in the effort to show Jesus as a proto-feminist relieving people of Judaism’s oppression of women. See, for example, Amy-Jill Levine, “Misusing Jesus: How The Church Divorces Jesus From Judaism,” Christian Century 123 (December 26, 2006): 20–25; “The ‘Teaching Of Contempt’ And Ecumenical Publications,” Ecumenical Review 57 (4, 2005): 433–45; and “The Disease Of Postcolonial New Testament Studies And The Hermeneutics Of Healing,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 20 (1, Spring 2004): 91–99. 18. Kwok Pui-lan, “Making the Connections: Postcolonial Studies and Feminist Biblical Interpretation,” in R. S Sugirtharajah ed., The Postcolonial Biblical Reader (Malden, MA, 2006: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.), 45–63. 19. Adrienne, Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York, NY: W. W. Norton: 1986), 171.



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‘facts of blood and bread.’ . . . It is this yearning that can form the basis of group solidarity and of political action.”20 Being born female in a nation living out the consequences of being founded as the colony of a great imperial power locates this writer in a form of the politics of blood and bread. Since both postcolonialism and feminism are praxis-oriented, they are committed to changing patriarchal oppression in all contexts in the world, and thus they share a focus on location as ready allies of one another. In a country such as Australia in which the nation is very focused on its own uncertain place in the world, the attention to location provided by a combined postcolonial feminist biblical criticism is all the more important as the next section will show. 1.5.2  Postcolonial Feminist Biblical Criticism in Australia As distinct from US feminism, feminism in Australia until very recently has been markedly secular.21 In a society where religion was not a hallowed part of the national myth of origin and the Bible was not quoted to underwrite social conventions, the Bible was neither a particular foe nor a special ally for the Australian women fighting for the vote, for the right to work after marriage, the right to freedom from violence, especially physical and sexual, the right to earn and keep a just wage, the right to control their own bodies’ reproductive function. Rather, Australian women based in the cities, especially Melbourne in the 1890s, fought for these rights on the basis of democratic principles under a temperance banner that saw male alcoholism as the major social problem of the day. A very important early leader was Bessie Harrison Lee, whose childhood exposure to hard-drinking male miners in a country mining town was formative for her. Patricia Grimshaw reports that Bessie told a Melbourne Town Hall audience that she “had been brought up to believe that a woman’s place was to stay home and say nothing. Her experience of the misery caused by excessive drinking, however, had

20. Mary A. Tolbert, “The Politics and Poetics of Location,” in Fernando F. Segovia and Mary A. Tolbert eds., Reading from this Place. Vol. 1, Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 305–17, p. 313. 21. See Marilyn Lake, “A History of Feminism in Australia,” in Barbara Caine ed., Australian Feminism: A Companion (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 132–42. Lake defines five phases of feminism in Australia, beginning with the “woman movement” of the 1880s and 1890s, campaigning for social reforms, through the push for full citizen rights in the first third of the twentieth century, followed by a third phase focusing on equal access to opportunity in the 1940s to 1960s, the sexual revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and fifth, the most recent. Lake says that this current phase “might be characterized as post-colonial feminism, meaning that . . . the assumption that the category ‘women’ is a meaningful one for theoretical and political purposes, has been powerfully challenged by indigenous women and women of non-Anglo background.” Ibid., p. 135.

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convinced her otherwise.”22 Bessie Lee’s movement, founded in 1887, addressed not only the liquor question but “involved itself in a generous range of issues relating to women’s social position, reflecting the character of the American parent body: the conditions of women’s work, treatment of women under the law, and the ‘social evil,’ or prostitution.”23 It is significant for this study that the confined, silent (uncomplaining) behavior enjoined on Australian women to which Bessie Lee referred echoes the instructions for women in 1 Cor 14:33b-36, yet Bessie did not set out to contest the Scriptures themselves, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton did. I suggest from my own experience of the role of the Scriptures in Australian life that this is because they were not explicitly used in quite the way they were in the United States.24 Gisela Kaplan observes that Australians, like few other western people excepting the British, have a complex set of rituals of non-verbal cues that indicate, ever so subtly, approval or disapproval, inclusion or exclusion. Australia is a culture of concealment rather than of exuberant self-expression. “Sensitive” matters are often not discussed but expressed by such subtle cues that there is no mode of discourse available to respond to them. Prejudice, particularly racism, is expressed in such ways.25

If Scriptural notions of gender-appropriate behavior in any way underwrote social conventions of respectability that directed the construction of women in Australia, it was in this inarticulate fashion. However, because such conventions were not explicitly quoted from the Bible, they could not and need not be addressed by a specifically biblical feminist struggle for basic human rights. This relationship between the Bible and the shaping of the female in nominally Christian Australia has continued until the very recent turn to the Scriptures by some Christian feminists as a potential support in the struggle for liberation.26 22. Patricia Grimshaw, “‘Man’s Own Country’: Women in Colonial Australian History,” in Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns eds., Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), 182–209, 204. 23. Ibid., 205. 24. In my own early encounters with US feminist biblical criticism it seemed to me a tedious intellectual exercise to be always focusing on texts like 1 Cor. 14:33b-36, when I thought there was so much else that was hopeful in the Scriptures, including even Paul, whose major ideas I read from a quite innocent, Catholic perspective as actually liberating. It has only been on acquaintance with a number of US women who have convinced me that the anti-women texts of the New Testament had been used consistently and explicitly against them as a means of control that I have come to see the point of this critical exercise. 25. Kaplan, Meagre Harvest: The Australian Women’s Movement 1950s-1990s (Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 196. 26. See Jill Ker Conway, The Road From Coorain (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). Conway, the Australian woman who became the first woman president of Smith



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Yet, Australian biblical feminists need to beware of certain dangers in the way they go about their task. They need, for example, to select judiciously from the many feminist biblical criticisms available in the market place, the most accessible being from the United States. US biblical and theological feminism, imported into Australia in both academic and popular form in glossily packaged writings and by means of lecture tours given by US feminists since the mid-1980s, has helped to create the impression, especially at a popular level, that the perspective of US feminism is definitive. This has been, in effect, yet another form of colonization of Australia, in which Australians have been willing participants as consumers of a product they were prepared to believe as superior to anything they could produce for themselves. While this is not necessarily the intention of US feminists individually or corporately, and while it is the Australian penchant for the overseas (i.e., Northern Hemisphere, English-speaking) expert that underwrites it, the practice nevertheless effectively means that Australian biblical feminists have only relatively recently begun to find their voice and to articulate a biblically based feminism that speaks consciously to the Australian location.27 For example, in the context of both the future of theology and of feminism in Australia and also of critical issues in feminist Christology worldwide, Elaine Wainwright has asked how a specifically Australian, feminist biblical response might be made to the Gospel question of Jesus’s significance, “Who Do You Say That I Am?” Wainwright reads this question as a way into constructing a Christology she says Australians need to do for their specific context rather than perpetuate “the tendency for Australian theologians to participate in a global College, writes of her English-imitation education at a prestigious Anglican girls’ boarding school in Sydney in the 1940s, that they might as well have been in Sussex. In particular, with reference to Biblical studies, Conway says, “Once a week, we read scripture, sticking to the Old Testament and learning its geography as a distraction from its bloodthirsty tribal battles. Nothing in the instruction suggested that this sacred subject bore any relation to our daily lives, although because we read the Bible, we were supposed to be particularly well behaved during this class” (p. 99). The entire chapter from which this excerpt is taken, “Schooling,” pp. 83–120, details the impact of British cultural colonialism on the education which Conway was actually privileged to receive. 27. See the appearance of works such as Elaine Wainwright’s doctoral dissertation, Towards a Feminist Critical Reading of the Gospel According to Matthew (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991) and edited volumes such as Morny Joy and Penelope Magee eds., Claiming our Rites: Studies in Religion by Australian Women Scholars (Adelaide, SA: 1994) and Dorothy A. Lee, Maryanne Confoy and Joan Nowotny eds., Freedom and Entrapment: Women Thinking Theology (North Blackburn: Dove, 1995). The June 1997 issue of the Australian theological journal Pacifica, entitled “Feminist Theology: The Next Stage,” featured articles by four Australian female feminists and an article by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza in which she reviewed her own scholarly work in the context of quite vigorous debate with some of the Australian Biblical Feminists.

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theologizing which may not touch the specifics of the Australian locale and . . . may have a particular impact in relation to women whose attentiveness to experience has become more acute.”28 Wainwright points out that this question which “has received little attention in Australian feminist theology to date . . . will . . . require the fruits of feminist theological imagination as Australian Christian communities take the next steps into the future.”29 Thus, the submergence of biblical sexism within the general inarticulateness about why women had to be constructed as they were gives the turn to the Bible by Australian feminists its own problematic. On the one hand, as we have seen, there is not a legacy of explicit, anti-woman use of the Scriptures to be faced. On the other hand, this fact can lull women into naively hopeful expectations about how the Bible can fund their spiritual lives and their struggle for women’s dignity. I believe this can be true for some Catholic women in Australia who turn to the Scriptures as a new, untried resource within the Christian tradition, at a time when the devotional practices of the pre-Vatican II era no longer function for expressing and generating a lively faith. In 1990, Mary A. Tolbert described the Bible as functioning for US Protestant women as “a source for experiencing, hearing God or God-in-Jesus in each present moment of life [but as problematic because] .  .  . this same Bible is often misogynistic and anti-Semitic, thoroughly androcentric and patriarchal, and steeped in ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic mythology.”30 This description fits the expectations I believe many Australian Catholic women now have of the Bible. It also at the same time indicates the kinds of awareness about these texts that the critically informed feminist biblical critic needs to help raise, if the Bible is to help liberate from, rather than re-inscribe, anthropologies and theologies, that no longer serve the unfolding of the reign of God. It is necessary to alert Australian women to the fact that the Scriptures subtly underwrite the sexism in the name of the respectability and “common sense” under which they have been constrained. When Australian feminists do this they are able to develop a more nuanced relationship to the Scriptures as a dialogue partner in the struggle for freedom and social change. 1.5.3  The Role of Language in Postcolonial and Feminist Criticisms Finally, as I have argued above, any attempt to build a more nuanced relationship with a text needs to be alert to the way language is working in it. Two Australian 28. Elaine Wainwright, “‘But Who Do You Say That I Am?’ An Australian Feminist Response,” Pacifica 10 (June 1997): 156–72, 168. 29. Ibid., 157. This points to the value of my own proposed dissertation work which will make a feminist reading of the way the Markan Jesus’s identity is brought to its full literary completion and final point of revelation in the Passion Narrative. 30. Mary A. Tolbert, “Protestant Feminists and the Bible: On the Horns of a Dilemma,” in Alice Bach ed., The Pleasure of Her Text: Feminist Readings of Biblical and Historical Texts (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 5–23, 12.



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theorists, a philosopher and an historian, offer reflections on language that relate on the one hand to the feminist and on the other to the postcolonial dimensions of this study. The Australian feminist philosopher Genevieve Lloyd suggests two major strategies for building nuance in interpreting texts in an ambivalent context. Discussing how Australian feminists should read philosophical texts and also manage their own positions as philosophers in a male-determined environment, Lloyd recommends paying attention to both the imagery in texts and to the speaking positions of women in texts and in real life. Lloyd follows the French philosopher Michèle Le Dœuff to find that texts are full of pictorial language, of imagery, which can often be the point of entry into interpreting a work. Lloyd argues, “The images around which philosophical texts are structured are often closely related to the dominant images—the guiding fictions—of a culture. Imagery, and the affects associated with it, can persist when the explicit doctrines associated with them have been left behind.”31 Such a strategy clearly can be helpful when the “doctrines” operating in a text are not explicit or are operating contrary to what the text explicitly says. Second, Lloyd notes that Australian feminists have taken seriously Luce Irigaray’s insistence on the speaking position of people excluded from the mainstream of influential or powerful discourse, which Irigaray names as “other.” Lloyd wants to avoid making such a marginal speaking position be absolutely and simply female. She elaborates on the different kinds of exclusion experienced in the Australian context by indigenous people, both male and female, on the one hand, and women of the white invading British race, on the other.32 Nevertheless, Lloyd recognizes that when the “other” is identified as the feminine, it can clarify the positions of the voiced, speaking male figure and the inarticulate, nonspeaking female figure. Lloyd writes about philosophical texts of all kinds but her insights about imagery and speaking position hold for both the “text” of the female convict experience in Australia and the construction of female characters in the Gospel of Mark. In Chapter 2 we will see that the image and the speaking position of convict women can shed light on the construction of female characters in the Gospel of Mark. Chapter 2 will show the degree to which female convicts were forcibly marginalized in the worldview of Great Britain and quite specifically forced into silence. Chapter 3 will show that Australian writing about the nation’s participation in the imperial war, the First World War, celebrates masculine achievement but relegates the contributions of women to the margins or to silence. In Chapters 5 and 6 I will use the strategy that Irigaray calls “mimicry,” in deliberately speaking from the position of silence that almost all the female characters in Mark occupy. In this way I hope by “speaking from a position that is ‘outside,’ . . . to make visible

31. Genevieve Lloyd, “No One’s Land: Australia and the Philosophical Imagination,” Hypatia 15 (2, 2000): 26–39, 27. 32. See Ibid., 30–37.

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that excluded space which structures ‘male’ discourse; [so that] the maleness becomes visible from the perspective of the excluded feminine.”33 From a historical perspective, the Australian historian Alan Atkinson shows that the British founders of the imperial settlement in Australia were very conscious of the power of language to shape people and history. Atkinson makes an important point about a very fundamental level at which the eighteenth century approached the evaluation of women. Writing on Australian historical foundations, Atkinson thematizes the communication that underlay the British settlement of Australia under the categories of “talk” and “writing.” Under “talk” he argues that in the eighteenth-century imperial English mind, the right to speak in public was reserved to the male and the Christian. In fact, the English language was revered for being distinctly masculine. Atkinson cites a late-eighteenth-century article on language that praised the virtues of English as manly, compared in its eloquence to the Nile River, which “preserves a majesty even in its abundance; its waters roll rapidly, notwithstanding their depth, it never roars but when its banks are too narrow, nor overflows without enriching the soil.”34 Further, Atkinson argues that the English were happy to think of their language as “‘somewhat courser’ [sic] than the Latin tongues (French, Italian and Spanish), less subtle and polite, but at the same time it was more truly masculine because it was ‘more open, honest and undesigning.’”35 On such an understanding, public speech or speech on matters of great public import would clearly not be appropriate for women. Indeed, women who dared to assume such a role would be castigated for breaching the code of proper gendered behavior, examples of which Atkinson cites.36 It is curious that the same gendered estimation of language can be found in the Roman Empire. Francoise Desbordes describes the very masculinized view of the Latin language held by the late-first-century CE teacher of rhetoric, Quintilian. Quintilian, she says, celebrates what he sees as the rugged masculinity of Latin, as compared with the greater facility, but dangerously effeminate glamour, of Greek. Tracing Quintilian’s argument through Book XII of his Institutes, Desbordes shows that Quintilian argues for the superiority of Latin over Greek very largely by feminizing the Greek language and rhetorical style that he repudiates and masculinizing the Roman language and rhetorical style. She says that reading

33. Ibid., 29. 34. Alan Atkinson, The Beginning, Vol. 1, The Europeans in Australia: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press Australia, 1997), 15. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 14–15. The examples Atkinson cites at this stage of his argument are drawn from the early life of British colonists in the new American settlements, where female religious leaders or property-holders who demanded to be able to speak in the community assembly were refused, and regarded as having overstepped the appropriate limits of proper female behavior.



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Quintilian “one has a hard time of it not to be persuaded that the Latin language must be, in effect, something quite rough and ‘shaggy-haired.’”37 Desbordes cites Quintilian, arguing that what Latin lacks in delicacy, it must make up with power. “The less we find of assistance in the language, the more it is necessary to arm oneself with the spirit of invention. Are we not able also to be delicate? We must be stronger. Are we surpassed in finesse? We must carry it by weight. Does a much greater precision rest with them? We must be conquerors by abundance.”38 In Desbordes’ summation, “The old Romans of Quintilian are, like Latin, hard and rough, and their poverty is virtue, but they have force, robur uiris dignum (10.1.43). In the Latin imagination and not only for Quintilian, virile force is associated automatically with simple roughness, harsh, disheveled and without elegance.”39 On this basis, Quintilian argues for Latin as the language of a public orator, obviously the kind of language that would suit the largest imperial power of its own day. As would be the case with English eighteen centuries later, such a language could not be spoken publicly by women, on topics that concerned the people as a whole. It is more than curious that the two major empires of Rome and Great Britain that are brought together by this study should each boast of their language as powerful, properly masculine and therefore inaccessible in its true nature, to women. It is highly significant that public speech is not readily available to women in either empire. Postcolonial feminist readers of the Gospel of Mark will be prepared to recognize the significance of the fact that the women in Mark’s Gospel rarely speak, and that when they do, their speech nearly always has negative, dangerous connotations of inappropriate female behavior. Feminists need to be aware of currents such as this running in imperial domains about female public speech and work to resist the restrictions it can put on their lives and freedom. This awareness can be heightened by recognizing the ways in which imperialist sexism operates in other contexts, to which we now turn.

1.6 Conclusion This postcolonial, feminist approach to reading Mark proceeds by comparing the Gospel of Mark with other narratives produced in imperial contexts. The 37. Francoise Desbordes, “L’Idéal Romain dans La Rhétorique de Quintilien,” Ktema 14 (1989): 273–79, 277. The translation from the French is mine. Fuller treatments of the construction of ancient Roman masculinity through rhetorical education can be found in Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) and Erik Gunderson, Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in The Roman World (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 278.

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sexism operating in the Gospel of Mark is detected by analogous argument from the discovery of sexism in documents of similar literary mode (i.e., narrative) coming from an arguably similar political environment, namely that of the BritishAustralian imperial-colonial environment. These other narratives tell stories of significant moments in foundational Australian history. First, an examination of the portrayal of gender and particularly of female characters in these Australian narratives discovers tendencies in narratives produced in imperial-colonial contexts to treat male and female characters differently, to the disadvantage of female characters. That is, such narratives tend to be marred by anti-female sexism. Second, with the sexism of foundational Australian narratives from the imperialcolonial context confirmed, a study of the way male characters are treated in the Gospel of Mark demonstrates that the narrative is capable of portraying those characters with a much greater range of narratival presence, verbal expression, plot impact and positive “moral” evaluation than is used for the female characters. Third, this sexist disparity in Mark is further clarified by comparison of the Gospel of Mark with some other literature contemporaneous with it (i.e., the Greco-Roman romance novels and Jewish novels of the same era), in which female characters are portrayed with a much greater range of literary presence and color. They occupy much more “space” in the writing; not only do they affect the plot in the sense of having an impact on things that happen, they effect the plot, in the sense that they actually make highly significant things happen. Without their decisive actions, the plot would not go forward; these female characters speak a great deal more than they do in the Gospel of Mark, often as much as male characters do, and their speech is positive in the sense that it constructs a positive image of them: it is the means by which they do good in the narrative’s moral world and by it they drive the plot. In the Gospel of Mark, it is found that male characters are constructed by the narrative as the normative, authoritative, value-bearing figures engaged in a large project of bringing order to their world, while female characters tend to be problematic, threatening to disorder the male project of ordering the world. Male characters occupy center stage of the narrative, always present, initiating its action, creating its drama, articulating its values, even if this exposes some of them as moral failures. Importantly, they do so as a group, supported by the company of their own gender. All these features of the narrative reinforce implicitly a sense of the male person as normative in the world associated with Jesus. Female characters, by contrast, appear in the narrative mostly as single individuals, making single, brief cameo appearances in which they rarely speak. They usually have no explicit gender support. On the two occasions (Mk 6:14-29 and 16:1-8) when women are portrayed speaking together, they either collude to cause the death of a good man (John the Baptist, in 6:14-29) or refuse to announce the resurrection of the ultimately good man, Jesus (Mk 16:1-8). Other than these two exceptions proving the rule, female characters in Mark do not speak in direct speech. Further, as the discussion of the individual stories about female characters will show, the narrative tends to cast them as obstructions to the male



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project headed by Jesus, of bringing to the world the good ordering of the reign of God. Female characters are primed by the narrative to be left behind as the male characters go ahead with the project of announcing the reign of God. For these reasons, I argue that female characters in the Markan narrative world are isolated, marginalized, and denigrated. This sexism works ultimately to the disadvantage of women in communities that look to narratives such as the Gospel of Mark for inspiration for life. It is time that such sexism be recognized and named, so that people who choose to read such narratives can be cautioned against its influence.

Chapter 2 COLONIAL AUSTRALIA AS THE IMPERIALIZED READING CONTEXT

2.1  British Government Decision to Found a Colony in the Great South Land On August 18, 1786, the British government decided after considerable deliberation to establish a colony of convicts in the “Great South Land.”1 This land was at that time not yet fully charted, but had been discovered anew for British consciousness by the famous Captain James Cook during a voyage of scientific exploration in the vast Pacific Ocean, in 1770.2 In the eighteen years after Cook’s discovery of the land in the South Pacific, the Industrial Revolution in Britain had gained pace, producing as a side effect, a massively restructured society. The rapid transformation of British society caused stresses that were to issue, among other things, in the transportation out of Britain of thousands of its citizens as convicted criminals. In order to see this expulsion of citizens in a clear light, it is necessary to sketch the larger context of the development of imperialism among the European powers of the late eighteenth century and of industrialization in Great Britain. Associated with these developments were the growth of population in Britain, especially of a new urban working class; new ideas about how this different society should be managed; and the shifting worldview produced by voyages of physical discovery on the oceans, especially the Pacific. All of these elements played their part in causing British convicts to be sent to colonize Australia.

1. See C. M. H. Clark, From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie, Vol. 1, A History of Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1962), 69 for this date and pp. 59–70 for a detailed discussion of the process that led to this decision. The details of the decision will be treated later in this chapter. 2. See Glyndwr Williams, “The Pacific: Exploration and Exploitation,” in P. J. Marshall ed., Wm. Roger Louis gen. ed., The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 2, The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 552–75, for Cook’s two voyages of discovery, 1768–71 and 1772–75.

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2.1.1  Imperial and Industrializing Britain of the Eighteenth Century in the World Context 2.1.1.1 General European Imperialism in the Late Eighteenth Century By the late eighteenth century, Great Britain was heavily committed to building and maintaining an empire. She was not alone in this project: since the late fifteenth century, European nations led by Spain, Portugal, and then the Netherlands, France, and Germany had competed with each other to claim overseas territories on every continent and establish trading colonies with them.3 Britain’s experience with colonies grew out of the establishment of colonies to its west in the seventeenth century—first in Ireland as part of Cromwell’s attempt to control it by settlement and then on the east coast of North America. From this experience, the British learned that they could establish colonies based on their concept of Roman colonies, overseen by a mixture of English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh people.4 By the 1640s the British had established sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean, which proved to be so financially successful that it stimulated food production and trade with the colonies in New England and gave rise to a wealthy British plantation class living on the islands.5 While the American colonies might claim that a major motive for their initial foundations was the desire for religious freedom, by the late seventeenth century the driving force of settlement had become commerce. Nicholas Canny argues that the economic value of colonies was accepted in England by then, and that this was the basis of an idea of Empire that “involved the assertion of dominion over foreign places and peoples, the introduction of white, and also black, settlement in these areas, and the monopolizing of trade with these newly acquired possessions.”6 A century later the late eighteenth century saw competitive imperial growth among the European powers come to a head in the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63.7 This war was fought partly because of colonial rivalry between Great Britain and 3. See James S. Olson, Robert Shadle, Ross Marlay, William G. Ratliff, and Joseph M. Rowe, Jr., eds., Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) for treatments of the modern imperial projects of Spain (pp. 576–87); Portugal (pp. 502–21); Holland (pp. 183–88); France (pp. 222–36); and Germany (pp. 247–50). 4. For this information I rely on Nicholas Canny, “The Origins of Empire: An Introduction,” in Nicholas Canny ed., Wm. Roger Louis gen. ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 1–33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7–15. Canny maintains that educated Europeans saw the Romans as civilizing colonized peoples first by military conquest and then by imposing Roman order and civility through establishing towns and cities on the Roman model in these colonies, as centers of control. 5. See Ibid., 30. 6. Ibid., 22. 7. See Olson, et al., eds., Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism, 623–24 for a succinct treatment of this war and of the Treaty of Paris of 1783 which concluded it.



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France. The Treaty of Paris that concluded it saw the transfer of vast territories— Canada, the Floridas, and other islands in the West Indies—to Great Britain. Some British leaders had misgivings about acquiring too many colonies, having been taught that the Roman Empire declined because it had overextended itself territorially. Nevertheless, says P. J. Marshall, “for the majority of British opinion there could be no going back. To surrender territorial empire would be to surrender the assets that enabled Britain to keep France at bay. Too many interests, in commerce, in the ownership of new lands, and in official posts in new colonies, were now locked into territorial empire.”8 Not only France, but also Spain was seen as a threat to British imperial interests, especially in the south. Glyndwr Williams calls Britain’s entry into Pacific exploration “predatory,” arguing, “Since Drake’s circumnavigation of 1577–80, the Pacific had caught the English imagination not as a vast, trackless ocean but as the western rim of Spain’s American empire.”9 Thus, Britain’s imperial expansion across the globe became motivated by commercial profits; by rivalry with other major European imperial powers for territories; and was untroubled by its imposition of white control and culture in the lands they occupied.10 2.1.1.2 The US War of Independence and British Loss of the US Colonies  British imperial power, however, was significantly checked by the loss of the thirteen American colonies as a result of the American War of Independence of 1776– 83. At the Peace of Paris that ended this war, Great Britain lost the immensely promising financial resources and strategic position of these thirteen colonies, and took a blow to British pride.11 As well as that she also lost something very practical, namely the right to ship to these colonies convicted British criminals sold into indentured labor for a certain period of years, usually seven, but sometimes fourteen. A profitable business had developed around the transportation of these British citizens and the dispersal of them among the US colonists. When the colonists would no longer accept these British convicts, the British government had to house them in Britain instead. Eventually, overcrowding in the gaols had reached such proportions that the British government began to house convicts 8. P. J. Marshall, “Introduction,” in P. J. Marshall ed., Wm. Roger Louis gen. ed., The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 2, The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–27, 8. 9. Williams, “The Pacific: Exploration and Exploitation,” 553. 10. Jan Kociumbas, The Oxford History of Australia. Volume Two: 1788-1860: Possessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press Australia, 1992), 7–8 summarizes the process whereby, during the English Revolution of 1688–89, men with land or wealth or in high positions in the army, church, and legal profession gained control of Parliament. It was they who connected their progress with that of the nation, prosecuting four major wars with France from 1702 to 1783 and turning empire building into business. 11. See Olson, et al., eds., Historical Dictionary of European Imperialism, 623–24 for the details of the Treaty.

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in “hulks,” de-commissioned warships moored in the Thames, in which convicts were subject to even worse conditions than in land-based incarceration.12 Before we consider the problems this new arrangement made for the British government, some other elements of late-eighteenth-century Great Britain must be mentioned. First, industrialization in Great Britain caused massive population growth, social and demographic upheaval, and destitution for many people who found themselves powerless against the seasonal rhythms of the new urban industries. Second, government decisions were influenced by new theories being developed in Britain and elsewhere, about ways in which this changing society should be managed. Third, Enlightenment confidence sent British subjects out exploring the planet. One of the great explorers, Captain James Cook, investigated part of the fabled “Great South Land”; his findings were to hand when the British government had to settle on a place to send increasing numbers of convicts that they were not prepared to house in Britain itself. 2.1.1.3 British Industrial Revolution: Poverty and Crime in the New Urban Classes  The increase in convicts in British gaols was caused by a combination of the loss of the American colonies and the economic and social changes brought into British life by the enclosure of common lands and the small beginnings of industrialization. Pushed off the lands that had sustained them, rural workers turned to the towns and cities where small factories used inventions like the steam engine and the spinning “jenny.” The factory owners paid wages as low as possible, so that women and their children were forced into factory work, the children beginning as young as six years of age. Work was not always constant, so that people traveled to look for work, especially to the large cities. Combined with this new social instability, there was a massive increase in population, from approximately six and a half million in 1750 to nine million people in 1801. This increased population gathered in the ports and manufacturing cities that did not have the physical or social support systems to manage this influx. As a result, working people lived in 12. See Clark, From the Earliest Times, 60–64 for a detailed treatment of the US system. It had begun in the 1600s but increased sharply from 1718 onwards, when the British government passed a Transportation Act. Between 1718 and 1775 some forty thousand convicts were shipped from England, Scotland, and Ireland to the US colonies. The government paid shipping contractors £3, increased later to £5, a head for each convict, whom the contractors then sold on to plantation owners in the North American colonies. When the American War of Independence broke out, this arrangement was no longer feasible and the numbers of convicts needing to be housed on British soil began to grow beyond the capacities of its existing goals. See also Alan Atkinson, The Beginning, Vol. 1, The Europeans in Australia: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press Australia, 1997), 28–29 and Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London: Collins Harvill, 1987), 40–41 for similar treatments. Hughes notes that the legal basis for transportation can be traced back to a law of 1597, which enacted banishment from the kingdom to “parts beyond the seas” for hardened criminals, who were under threat of death not to return.



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terrible squalor, enduring lives that were an endless round of labor and drunken attempts to escape drudgery through the cheap corn-based alcohol, gin. In such an environment, it is hardly surprising that the crime of theft should increase.13 While the lack of any organized police force until the establishment of the “Peelers” in 1829 meant that not every criminal was caught, changes in the law meant that those who were convicted were more likely to be sentenced to death, or to transportation.14 Jan Kociumbas writes that while there were fifty capital crimes in 1688, “187 more were added to the statute books between 1660 and 1819.”15 He notes that for many of these crimes, mostly against property, only about half the convictions ended in execution, the rest being commuted to transportation. Thus, “by 1765 . . . some 1200 people were hanged annually, while the number transported rose to almost 1000.”16 C. M. H. Clark cites a treatise of 1797 that estimated that “ in London at the end of the eighteenth century one hundred and fifteen thousand depended on crime for a living.”17 2.1.2  Theories of Social Organization in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain Numerous serious thinkers were trying to understand the relationship between the various elements of economic life so as to devise better ways of organizing them. The distribution of land, population growth, human sexuality, labor, the economy, and systems of criminal punishment were all speculated on by major theorists of the early and middle Enlightenment period. In England, John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Malthus all proposed theories on some or all of these topics, in the course of the late seventeenth to early nineteenth century.18 These 13. See Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 8–9 for a brief treatment of the effects of early industrialization and Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 19–25 for more extended discussion. In C. M. H. Clark ed., Select Documents in Australian History, 1788-1850 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1950, 1973 reprint), 1–9, a number of documents present contemporary accounts and interpretations of land enclosure, the difficulties working people had in making a living, the resulting poverty, the growth of slums and alcoholism, and the inability of the old parish relief system to cope with the needs of the new poor. 14. See Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 26 for information on Peel’s Police Act, June 1829, establishing an organized police force in Great Britain. 15. Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 10. 16. Ibid. 17. Clark, From the Earliest Times, 95. Clark’s reference was to P. Colquhoun, A Treatise on The Police of the Metropolis, 4th ed. (London: 1797), vii–xi, 88–90, 158–59. Robert Hughes notes that Colquhoun was guessing and that his statistics were laughed at in his own day. See Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 165. 18. See a concise summary of the relevance of these thinkers to the foundation of convict settlement in Australia, in Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 11–18. For more extended treatments of the Enlightenment mindset that directed the thinking about founding a colony at Botany Bay see Atkinson, The Beginning, 51–52, 66–67, 83, 296. Atkinson discusses the

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were the new ideas of their age, bringing the confidence of the Enlightenment to interpreting and managing human society. They were implemented in a fashion in the British imperial colonization of Australia. 2.1.2.1 Theory of Crime and Punishment  First, crime and its punishment were theorized in England preeminently by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832).19 For the supervision of convicts Bentham devised a building called a Panopticon, which made it possible for prisoners confined to individual cells in a circular building to be seen at all times by their gaoler, but by nobody else.20 Bentham’s design was a study in inhumane efficiency, operating on ideas about the reformation of human beings and aiming to use to greatest effect the elements that were part of the dynamic when people were gathered together in a prison. Thus, the Panopticon was designed to exploit visibility and invisibility so that prisoners never saw one another but were always potentially seen by the supervisor. This arrangement placed power overwhelmingly in the hands of the supervisor, reducing the individual prisoner to the impotence of complete isolation. Thus, says Foucault, “the major effect of the Panopticon [was] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”21 This plan was to be realized in colonial fashion in the Australian colonies, in institutions for housing female convicts, called the “Female Factory.” In these, as we shall see later in this chapter, women were subjected to processes that aimed to shape them to a certain image and to a certain voice deemed acceptable to prevailing theories of gender-appropriate behavior of the imperial power, Great Britain.

ideas of Locke, Rousseau, and Bentham in the context of English political theory as it dealt with the issues of convicts and their treatment. 19. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 200–09 for his incisive discussion of Bentham’s role in the development of the prison as a system of power, aiming to produce the “docile” reformed body of the inmate. Other treatments of Bentham’s significance in the context of the Australian penal colonies can be found in Atkinson, The Beginning, 296 and Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 11–12. See John MacDonell, “Bentham, Jeremy,” In Vol. 2, BEALBROWELL, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee eds., The Dictionary of National Biography, 268–80 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917) for an extensive survey of Bentham’s life and works. This article explains that the Panopticon was originally an idea of Bentham’s brother Samuel, who had planned for the Russian government a closely supervised factory to help in establishing English industries there. 20. Bentham worked on this design through the late 1780s and 1790s, writing letters about it to major leaders of the time and preparing to construct a Panopticon at Millbank. The scheme failed, but Bentham’s ideas were eventually published as a series of letters on the Panopticon in 1791 and in his “Principles of Penal Code in 1811.” See John MacDonell, “Bentham, Jeremy,” 271–72, 279. 21. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.



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2.1.2.2 Theory of Sexuality, Gender, and Population Growth  Second, the theorists thought seriously about how the sexual energies of human beings should be managed in the case of convicts founding a colony. The most influential thinker on this issue was the Anglican clergyman Thomas Malthus who wrote on political economy and population growth.22 Malthus relied on classical authors such as Plato and Aristotle but principally on other thinkers of his time such as Robert Wallace, Adam Smith, Joseph Townshend, and the French political philosopher, Charles Montesquieu. Malthus saw a cause and effect relationship between resources and population growth, setting out the principle that “population increases in a geometrical, and subsistence only in an arithmetical ratio,” and argued from this for a kind of natural law whereby the tendency of the imprudent poor to overpopulate was checked by hunger.23 What exercised theorists’ imaginations was the question of whether—or to what degree—industry’s need for a surplus pool of labor was economically efficient, given that maintaining an intermittently employed labor force was a drain on public funds. In this theory the sexuality of the working man and woman was seen as one of the resources of the economy and, thus, something that needed to be managed. In the context of the settlement of colonies, male sexuality was seen by some as normally “aggressive, procreative,” just the thing that was needed in men establishing a new colony who were “necessarily barbarous, energetic adventurers.”24 Female sexuality, however, was valued largely because it was reproductive, making available the next generation of laborers. It also was envisaged as providing a proper focus for male sexuality, preventing it from turning aside into homosexuality, a persistent concern of the leaders of British society of that time. Jan Kociumbas argues that such a view had a serious impact on the lives of female convicts in the early settlement since “for laboring women it meant being regarded less as human beings than as human capital . . . whose sexuality was an exploitable resource.”25 This perception predisposed the managers of the convict system to treat women convicts with marked disrespect. 2.1.3  Reasons for the Establishment of a Convict Colony in New South Wales in 1788 All of these ideas lay in the background of the decision to found a colony at Botany Bay and to aim to do so in a certain manner.26 It is important to settle, insofar 22. See Leslie Stephen, “Malthus, Thomas,” In Vol. 12, LLWYD-MASON, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee eds., The Dictionary of National Biography, 886–90 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917) for a detailed survey of Malthus’ life and work. 23. Ibid., 887–88. 24. Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 14. 25. Ibid. 26. In this section of the chapter I rely heavily on the work of historians of Australia, especially Atkinson, The Beginning; Clark (ed.), Select Documents in Australian History,

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as it is possible, why the British established the penal colony at Sydney Cove in 1788.27 In doing so, the British Empire took possession of an enormous land mass in the South Pacific by using enforced convict labor. This was imperial-colonial possession carried out in a distinct manner that is part of the larger picture of imperial behavior. The exact intention of the British Empire in founding the colony at Sydney Cove has been a regular topic of debate among historians of Australia. The debate seesaws between focusing on a few formal statements of intent and on what slowly eventuated both in the course of decision making and in the early years of establishing the convict settlement. Favoring the latter approach, I argue that under pressure from far more important matters such as the loss of the American colonies after the American War of Independence of 1776–83 and continuing conflict with France following the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63, the British government settled an aggravating domestic issue provisionally, with one major, short-term goal in view and a readiness to trust that other potential benefits might develop incidentally. C. M. H. Clark describes the decision to send convicts to New South Wales as protracted and haphazard. From 1779 to 1786, parliamentary committees and ministers of the Home Office and the Admiralty considered proposals for sites ranging from Canada through the West Indies, West and East African locations, and Gibraltar as well as Botany Bay in New South Wales.28 Ultimately, a riot in March 1786 at Plymouth in which eight people were killed and many wounded gave the newspapers sensational material for months. In August 1786 the parliamentary research committee decided on Botany Bay, citing in the “Heads of a Plan” it submitted to the Treasury, the overcrowding of the gaols with the risk this posed for physical disease and the moral corruption of the inmates. The plan suggested that the benefits outweighed the cost of transporting convicts halfway around the world and mentioned that flax, timber, and materials from Asia might also be a benefit. Thus, says Clark, “in a perfunctory, slapdash way, some of the commercial arguments for New Holland were tacked on to the Botany Bay solution for the evil of over-crowded gaols.”29 1788-1850; Clark, From the Earliest Times; Hughes, The Fatal Shore; Kociumbas, 17881860: Possessions; and various chapters from the study of the British Empire in Roger Louis (editor in chief), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Five Volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99). My reliance on information and ideas from particular scholars will be detailed where relevant. 27. Although Sydney, the founding colony, is the focus of this study, it was not the only penal colony established by the British Empire in the Great South Land. Other penal colonies were established independently in other locations that eventually grew into separate states, such as Tasmania, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. It is the boast of the state of South Australia that it was established entirely by free settlers and thus never suffered the “convict stain.” 28. See Clark, From the Earliest Times, 60–68 for a chronicle of this meandering process. 29. Ibid., 69.



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This was hardly a grand imperial-colonial foundation. It was indeed a very ambivalent foundation. While there were no clear plans for long continuance, the settlement was nevertheless imagined as something more than a temporary holding place for convicts. Botany Bay warranted the expense of transportation because it was so faraway from England that convicts would find it nearly impossible to return “home.” This fact meant that in all likelihood, some form of community would develop there. Alan Atkinson argues that eighteenth-century English ideas of the rights of the Englishman, protected above all by male free speech, provided the basis of hopes that such a community would be viable. Those who foresaw any future for the new colony saw it as a land of Englishmen where the rights inherent in living conversation . . . would prevail. At Botany Bay, so it was thought, the convicts would be peasants in a country of their own. Their labor would serve no great imperial purpose. New South Wales was to be an addition to the old empire, a configuration of old masculine liberties, a ragged but real commonwealth.30

But what was to be said of feminine liberties? When the First Fleet sailed from Plymouth on May 13, 1787, it carried 189 female convicts.31 When the “configuration of old masculine liberties” of which Atkinson writes was applied to them, it made English liberty, based on freedom of speech, look like something else altogether. British imperial speech, that ruggedly masculine form of English virtue, would be used in a concerted attempt to force them to conform to views of the female held by the leading classes of society in the British Empire. It is to the realities of these convict women, first in England, then on the voyage out and finally in New South Wales itself, that we now turn.

2.2  The Role of Female Convicts in the Foundation of the Colony in New South Wales Female convicts have become a major theme in the study of Australian history. They offer a promising topic for feminist historians: a distinct group of females at the beginning of British colonization of Australia, acting as enforced labor in severely 30. Ibid., 58. 31. See Clark ed., Select Documents in Australian History, 1788-1850, 41–42 for the excerpt from the journal of Lieutenant P. G. King in which he lists each of the ships in the First Fleet, their tonnage and cargo, with exact figures for numbers of persons by category on each ship. Of the six ships carrying convicts, only four carried female convicts. While there were 189 female convicts, there were 637 male convicts. Altogether, when the transport ships left to return to England, males remaining in the new colony would have outnumbered females by 975 to 189, approximately five to one.

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constrained circumstances and enduring repressive conditions at the hands of the imperial power. The study has developed from reconstructing the features of female convict life to critiquing the categories that have been used to describe female convicts, both in their own times and in current historical scholarship. Joy Damousi, among others, has reviewed the history of this scholarship in the interests of pushing “beyond the origins debate” to investigate the way that language about female convicts has constructed meaning.32 Damousi has argued that a number of resonant themes gather together under the topic of convict women. These themes, such as the language of purity and pollution, the body itself, and the women’s resistance to control and punishment all make it possible to consider gender as a distinct element of historical research. These themes contribute well toward the two that I highlight in this study, namely the image and speaking position of women in various contexts, but in this case, of convict women. History done on this basis provides a strategy for reading the imperial construction of convict women in Australia so as to create a lens for reading the construction of female characters in Mark, a narrative reflecting its Roman imperial context of composition. It is necessary to outline briefly some features of the experience of convict women. First, it is important to know something of who these women were because that helps explain some of the dynamisms of the power relationship that operated between them and the British authorities. Second, the journey out to Australia is a discrete part of the whole convict experience in which many of Damousi’s themes are intensely demonstrated. Third, the management of the female convicts in the colony, most particularly in the Female Factories of Parramatta and Hobart, show how the British Empire acted on its own transported female citizens in an attempt to construct them according to an extrinsic set of gender expectations that we today would call sexist. Finally, the horror expressed by contemporary observers of these convict women gave rise to language that began some of the discourse patterns Damousi wants to investigate. 2.2.1  Identity of the Female Convicts Sent to Botany Bay As we have seen, late-eighteenth-century Britain saw a massive increase in convict numbers. Those convicted came overwhelmingly from the working 32. See Joy Damousi, “Beyond the ‘Origins Debate’: Theorising Sexuality and Gender Disorder in Convict Women’s History,” Australian Historical Studies 27 (106, April 1996): 59–71. See also Marian Aveling, “Bending the Bars: Convict Women and the State,” in Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans eds., Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 144–57 and Deborah Oxley, “Representing Convict Women,” in Ian Duffield and James Bradley eds., Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration (London, UK: Leicester University Press, 1997), 88–105 for their insightful surveys of the history of convict women and of historical writing about them in the past twenty years.



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class, being very often displaced rural workers or urban factory workers driven to crime by the fluctuations of the labor market. Deborah Oxley says that of the 24,000 convict women who sailed to Australia in the course of the transportation system, one-third were English while three-fifths were Irish. They were mostly young, more than eighty percent of them being between seventeen and thirty-six years of age. Oxley cites the first modern census in England, conducted in 1841, to show that at that time about half the employed females were classed as being in domestic service.33 Domestic service was difficult work: it was often physically demanding, low-paid, in power circumstances in which the servant was vulnerable to the sexual demands of the employer.34 Annette Salt explains how easily a female servant could be forced into sexual service and then dismissed. She cites a police report of 1816 in which a witness said, “I think many prostitutes upon the town are servant girls, who have been driven there through the caprice of their masters or mistresses, who frequently discharge them, and refuse to give them any character.”35 This point raises the issue of the classification of the convict women as prostitutes, a major register of Damousi’s “purity or pollution” theme. While there is no doubt that many women were prostitutes either by choice or by necessity, the term was also applied by upper-class men to lower-class women who did not conform to genteel expectations of women. Working-class women who lived in de facto or common law marriages without being formally wed, women whose manners offended middle-class mores, and women who competed for “male” jobs were all labeled “whores.”36 Combined with the prevailing belief in a criminal class, this led, says Oxley, to a belief that while convict men were professional criminals “the women . . . were professional prostitutes. Why? Because whoredom symbolized the failed and fallen woman.”37

33. See Deborah Oxley, “Packing Her (Economic) Bags: Convict Women Workers,” Australian Historical Studies 26 (102, April 1994): 61–65 for this information. 34. See Annette Salt, These Outcast Women: The Parramatta Female Factory 1821-48 (Sydney, NSW: Hale & Iremonger, 1984), 18. This monograph is the major study of the Female Factory institution. 35. Ibid. 36. See Oxley, “Representing Convict Women,” 93–99 for an account of the dissonance between working-class reality and the expectations of proper female behavior held by the middle and upper classes. The more vigorously that working-class women violated conventional norms of conduct, the more shrill the condemnation of them by those wielding power and authority in the society. See Salt, These Outcast Women, 21, 23–24 for the contest between women and men for work in the changing industrial landscape and pp. 26, 28 for the information that women who cohabited outside marriage or who were political agitators were classed as prostitutes. 37. Oxley, “Representing Convict Women,” 99.

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This practice accompanied the convict women to the new colony, so that, for example, when the clergyman Samuel Marsden drew up a list of colonial women in 1806 he categorized any woman who was not married as a “concubine.” It is significant that as a result, says Annette Salt, “women without the legal protection of a husband became analogously tainted.”38 As we shall see in succeeding chapters, the dynamisms involved in requiring a woman to be “protected” by an authorizing male can be seen to operate in similar ways in ancient Roman society, in the Gospel of Mark, and in British imperial-colonial society in Australia. Awareness of this dynamism from their own history can alert Australian feminists to the sexist ideas at work in the Gospel of Mark. Finally, despite this taint of sexual immorality around them, the crime for which most female convicts were in fact sent to Botany Bay was petty theft, no doubt resorted to in some cases out of dire need. C. M. H. Clark writes that “from the year 1826, when the indents of convict ships began to publish the crimes for which convicts were transported, down to the end of transportation to eastern Australia in 1853, the thieves predominated. . . . There is no reason to believe these proportions differed in the period before 1826.”39 2.2.2  Conditions of Imprisonment and Transportation of Female Convicts It is particularly from consideration of the imprisonment of convict women in England in gaols and the hulks, on the transport ships out to Botany Bay, and in the Female Factories to which many were confined shortly after their arrival in the colony that material emerges that is instructive for the Australian postcolonial feminist reader of the Gospel of Mark. In the reality of this experience and in the rhetoric of discourse about it, we can see both a range of images of women and the speaking positions convict women were able to occupy that can inform a critical reading of the Gospel of Mark. 2.2.2.1 Women Imprisoned in Gaols and Hulks  Conditions in the British gaols were appalling because the nation’s penal system was not designed to accommodate the numbers of displaced people who flooded into the cities. In the women’s prisons, cells were often filled to twice normal capacity. Conditions were very poor—food, clothing, hygiene, and medical care were utterly inadequate for the number of women and children housed in woefully small spaces, often for months or years on end.40 Deborah Oxley states that in Newgate prison “three hundred women . . . 38. Salt, These Outcast Women, 35–36. 39. Clark, From the Earliest Times, 95. 40. See Clark ed., Select Documents in Australian History, 1788-1850, 19–23 for reports from the late eighteenth century documenting the appalling conditions in women’s gaols. See Kay Daniels, Convict Women (St. Leonard’s, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1998) and Sian Rees, The Floating Brothel (Sydney, NSW: Hodder Headline Australia, 2001) for recent monographs detailing at length the experience of convict women.



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plus their children were crammed together into 190 square yards of space.”41 When the gaols were incapable of holding convicts, both female and male, numbers of them were conferred to “hulks,” decommissioned naval vessels moored in the Thames. Even these rapidly became overcrowded and manifested the same problems as in the gaols. Women faced court and the day of either their execution or transportation to Australia from prison accommodation that must at times have seemed like bedlam. The image that emerges from contemporary descriptions of these women is that of wild beasts. The speaking position is of barely contained rage, sometimes wittily coherent, at other times tragically not. Many of the women in these gaols had lived by their wits, fending for themselves in an unforgiving society. Contemporary reports portray them as far from genteel in their language, demeanor, or dress. Observers visiting the prisons described the women they saw both as intensely lacking in the virtues considered proper to a woman and also as actively vicious. In a statement that contains many of the themes of the time, two male journalists studying London’s prisons described female prisoners as utterly barbarized . . . without the faintest twinge of moral sense to restrain their wild animal passions and impulses; so that in them one sees the most hideous picture of all human weakness and depravity—a picture the more striking because . . . in connection with a being whom we are apt to regard as the most graceful and gentle form of humanity.42

Thus, female prisoners were reduced to the level of animals, cast as symbolic of the worst of humankind. As these journalists explain unselfconsciously, the reason that they saw these women in such extreme imagery was that they compared them to the prevailing middle-class approved image of the female and found the dissonance startling. The speaking position of women in the prisons shows their intense experience of confinement. As Oxley remarks, “What really dismayed observers were not the conditions but the women’s behavior, . . . [such that] ‘on all sides the ear was assailed by awful imprecations, begging, swearing, singing, fighting, dancing, dressing up in men’s clothes.’”43 If nobody else would comment on their conditions, the women themselves protested about it in virtually the only means available to them, aggressive speech. Interestingly, Oxley says that this was made to be an offence: that these women were seen as “guilty of singing, dancing, whistling and using profane language, even in the punishment cells.”44 Their songs were protest

41. Oxley, “Representing Convict Women,” 95. This amounts to two-thirds of a square yard of space for each woman, not counting the children. 42. Oxley, “Representing Convict Women,” 94. 43. Ibid., 95. 44. Ibid. The emphasis is mine.

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songs—contesting the power of all the officers of the prison by putting into the air little ditties about them. Women were not supposed to contest power in this brazen fashion. Not only were they to be deferentially silent before authority; their demeanor was to be submissive as well. The journalists Mayhew and Binny reported that they saw “not one abashed face or averted tearful eye .  .  . whilst many grinned impudently on meeting our gaze.” This left them to conclude that the most outstanding feature of the London female convicts was their “utter and imperturbable shamelessness.”45 Yet it was precisely the feisty refusal of these women to succumb to the expectations of upper levels of society that helped some at least to preserve some level of sanity. They refused to be confined to the parameters of female conduct decreed by the ruling classes of British society that intended to use their lives and labor to take possession of a foreign territory. Oxley cites evidence of severe mental distress reported in some female convicts, manifesting in selfmutilation, destruction of property, and manic resistance to all means of control. In the circular reasoning imposed by social commitment to a rigid view of the well-behaved female person, women displaying such symptoms were accused of feigning madness and were described as “the ‘dregs of society,’ ‘England’s social sewage’ and . . . [as being] simply . . . ‘violent and obstinate’.”46 For women cast in such imagery, there could be no credible or persuasive speaking position. 2.2.2.2 Women Transported in Ships The British Empire’s management of female convicts in all contexts shows that its leadership regarded women as a quite dangerous source of chaos. This fundamental perception underlies the interpretation I will offer here of the convict women’s experience within the British Empire, an interpretation that provides an insight into the Gospel of Mark. I take this insight from the work of Joy Damousi who writes about the meaning of the British Empire’s management of women on its convict transport ships. Damousi says that the driving concern of the British Navy in managing female convicts was the control of disorder. For the British Navy, used to running all-male ships, the embarkation of women represented chaos that had to be managed. Relying on studies of the political significance of space, including on ships, Damousi says that “space . . . embodies ‘by its very nature . . . power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordination.’”47 Usually on ships, says Damousi, whereas “the ‘public’ was the realm of order, rationality, control, regimentation and routine . . . on female convict ships, a ‘private’ space became 45. Ibid., 96. 46. Ibid., 97. 47. Joy Damousi, “Chaos and Order: Gender, Space and Sexuality on Female Convict Ships,” Australian Historical Studies 26 (104, April 1995), 352. See also footnotes 6 and 7 in this chapter for studies on both navy politics and the relationship of the place and politics of identity.



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the arena of chaos and disorder, unsettling the imperatives of efficiency, order and rank through sexual promiscuity.”48 Females virtually created the category of private space on the ship, giving rise to an anxiety about the ambiguous spaces that inevitably occurred where the public and the private met and mingled. The “private” space was the space below decks where the female convicts slept, without supervision. Joy Damousi says that “on these ships the private was also an invisible realm, which made it even more insidious.”49 This description of the private as invisible shows that the female convict quarters on the transport ship reversed the strategy of the Benthamite Panopticon. There, as we have seen above, the prisoner had no privacy ever, but was always potentially under the scrutiny of a single supervisor. This reversal of power in the prisoner-supervisor relationship on the female convict transports caused very great anxiety for the authorities because they could not control women whom they could not see, locked away below decks. Thus, argues Damousi, “it is for this reason that ‘mutiny’ and ‘rebelliousness’ among women was defined on the ship in sexual terms: the potential for disruption differed in nature and scope from that of male convicts.”50 From this reflection we can see already in principle the image of women as a source of chaos, giving rise to the need to confine them to private space and to regulate severely their occupation of public space, especially by something as potentially dangerous as speech. In this context, chaos was to be rendered orderly by separating women from men and containing women rigidly in terms of space, time, and behavior with a readiness to blame women, especially on account of their sexuality, for any diversion from the set pattern.51 First, the authorities devised methods of control that tried to win back genderbased power. One method, a punishment used specifically on female convicts, managed to use spectacle in a way that disempowered women precisely in their gender identity. Unruly convict women had their heads shaved so that they had to appear in public, on deck in front of the all-male crew, with no hair. In the construction of femininity of the day, this manipulation of their personal image was extremely difficult for the female convicts to bear. As Damousi observes, “The theatre of headshaving engendered feminine humiliation and shame.”52 The culturally approved, deliberate use of shame to control women, an infantilizing 48. Ibid. 49. Damousi, “Chaos and Order,” 352. On the convict transports there appear to have been no female officers such as the “matron” found in British prisons. 50. Ibid. 51. See Ibid., 353–55 for details of changes made after c. 1817 to the daily timetable, to the structure of ships to accommodate female convicts, amount of private sleeping space allocated (18 inches), punishments used on female convicts and the kind of relationships that operated between officers of the ship, especially surgeons and the female convicts. 52. Ibid.

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strategy, is a recurring theme through the stories of both the convict women and the women of the Gospel of Mark. On the other hand the ship’s surgeons, whose task was to ensure the well-being of the convicts, often developed paternalistic relationships with women who were amenable.53 There are strong suggestions that in return for favors the surgeon could bestow, the female convict reciprocated sexually.54 Thus, the female convicts on the transport ships were subject to controls that related to them specifically as gendered persons, either in punishment or in the creation of sexually repaid dependence. Second, of course, the women tried where possible to turn the ambiguities of the situation to their advantage. In the case of surgeons ready to act the father role, says Damousi, “Women often exploited this to undermine the unequal relations which defined their interaction with the authorities to negotiate a space for themselves.”55 In the case of humiliating punishments like headshaving, women responded as they had in the gaols, with noise—with “improper language, quarrelling and being boisterous in ways not available to men, who were physically restricted because they were chained in irons.”56 Thus, the three-month long journey in closely packed society helped forge patterns of relationships between the female convicts and the officers of the British Empire on their way to found a colony. The image of women that emerges from this phase, while not as wild as in the gaols, is still of women as a threat to order. The speaking position is still that of clamoring noise, not that of rational speech. Things were not to improve on first landing in the new colony. 2.2.2.3 Women Landed at the Colony  The first landfall of convicts in the new land was made not at Botany Bay but at another site further north, Sydney Cove.57 The female convicts were held on board ship until the site had been sufficiently prepared to hold a ceremony at which Governor Phillip’s royal commission could be read aloud, which he vowed on the Bible to uphold. At that ceremony, Phillip warned the convicts against riotous behavior, threatening to shoot any men found in the women’s camp. This followed the first night the convict women had spent on terra nullius, where amid a tropical storm, men and women cavorted in complete abandon. In yet another image drawn from animals, Robert Hughes says 53. See Ibid., 355 for descriptions of the ship surgeon’s powers and responsibilities. 54. See Ibid., 358–61 where Damousi details investigations into the number of convict pregnancies occurring on the convict transports the Friendship (1818), the Janus (1820), and the Providence (1826), involving crew and high-ranking officers. 55. Ibid., 353. 56. Ibid., 363. See p. 353 for Damousi’s comments that before 1817 when certain reforms took place on convict ships, women had been flogged and sentenced to wearing irons. 57. See Clark, From the Earliest Times, 85–87, for an account of the realization that Botany Bay was not suitable and the fortunate discovery in half a day’s sailing of the much more promising site of Sydney Cove to the north, in the harbor now called by that name.



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“the women floundered to and fro, draggled as muddy chickens under a pump, pursued by male convicts intent on raping them.”58 This image introduces a period of great difficulty for female convicts at the beginning of the British Empire’s colony in Australia. As we have seen, most of the convict women had been employed in domestic service in England but in the new colony there were no homes for them to work in. The work was of the most basic—clearing and plowing land, building rudimentary dwellings and roads, exploring the new terrain. All of this was deemed to be male work, for which women were considered not suitable. Very quickly, female convicts were seen to be unproductive and an expense on the colony, since they and the children they produced had to be fed and clothed by the government.59 Unlike the male convicts, who, upon emancipation for good behavior or expiration of their sentences, were granted thirty acres to farm, land was rarely granted to women in the early days.60 Jan Kociumbas sums up that it took ten years for the colony to develop sufficient economic resources to enable women to “subvert the reproductive aims of the system and play an economic role in the capitalist society being created.”61 As a result, female convicts in the new colony, where men heavily outnumbered women by at least four to one, were very dependent on a male protector.62 In the very early years of the colony, before the colonists developed successful farming methods for the new environment, food became scarce to the point of near-starvation; before the Second Fleet arrived in June 1790 bringing supplies but also hundreds more convicts, even clothing was in desperately short supply. Women with children were the hardest hit by these circumstances. Even when their sentences expired, women had no chance of working their passage back to England as crew on a ship as did the males, so they were confined to the colony. Finally, once the colony was established, the governors ran a system of “assigning” convicts to free settlers and emancipated convicts who had served their sentences. This was a mutual benefit system, since the government did not have to feed the assigned convict and the land-holder got labor for the price of the convict’s upkeep. It is hardly surprising that when female convicts were assigned, they were commonly used for sexual labor as well as for house-keeping. The fact of explicit protests against this practice in official dispatches from England as late as 1810

58. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 88–89. Hughes relies on the comments of a surgeon from one of the ships of the First Fleet for this reconstruction. 59. See Oxley, “Packing Her Economic Bags,” 70–72. 60. See Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 23, 32 for details of the land grants given to male and female convicts. 61. Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 22–23. 62. For the following information I rely on Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 22–23 and Atkinson, The Beginning, 134–39.

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indicates how entrenched it was. The letter of May 4, 1809, from a local settler, T. W. Plummer, to Governor Macquarie in New South Wales complains that on the arrival of a female convict ship, the custom has been to suffer the inhabitants of the Colony each to select one at his pleasure, not only as Servants but as avowed objects of intercourse, which is without even the plea of the slightest previous attachment as an excuse, rendering the whole colony little better than an extensive Brothel.63

Yet again, the sexualized perception of women affected both their political position in the colony and the way they were described. In the prevailing circumstances, all advantage was on the side of males. Convict women could be had for the asking with apparently no rights of objection for the woman. Many women felt that to be chosen by a man who had at least enough interest to protect his choice against other men was better than being completely alone in the raw circumstances of the new colony. From the outset the governor strongly recommended the security of marriage to the convicts, but the price of a marriage certificate was prohibitively high for a class of people who were in fact accustomed to de facto or common law marriages.64 Whether they were assigned convicts or common law wives, their male companions often treated women in these relationships cruelly. Robert Hughes writes that an observer of the time, a Canadian transported from Quebec for political disturbance, “was disgusted by the way the local free men, Emancipists, guards and police treated their women. At night, the huts around the stockade would resound with the shrieks of women being thrashed.”65 If these women were found to be truly unsatisfactory they may well be traded between men for money or goods. Alan Atkinson notes that “customary prices for women under these circumstances . . . were ‘a gallon of rum, some five pounds and so forth.’”66 Erin Ihde has argued that this practice was merely the colonial development of wife-sale rituals used by the lower classes in England and that “they did not necessarily entail the degradation of women, but could in fact be a positive event in which the women were frequently willing participants.”67 Ihde maintains that women may well have used this 63. See Historical Records of Australia: Series I: Governors’ Despatches To and From England Vol. VII, January, 1809–June, 1813 (The Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1916), 204–05. See similar protests on pp. 84, 252. 64. See Salt, These Outcast Women, 37–38 on the issue of marriage practices and the cost of marriage licenses. Kociumbas 1788-1860: Possession, 26 mentions Governor Bligh’s (1806–08) acknowledgment that convict women had no choice but to go with the men who selected them. 65. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 261. 66. Atkinson, The Beginning, 211. 67. Erin Ihde, “‘So Gross a Violation of Decency’: A Note on Wife Sales in Colonial Australia,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 84 (1) (1998): 26–39, 27.



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practice to improve their lot and that therefore they were not treated as objects in this process. However, the ritual used, in which “the most important requirement, which was a feature of most sales, was that the wife either be brought to the sale led by a halter or have one put on her at the sale,” makes visible the notion that the woman is an object, like an animal who may be led by her male owner, by means of a controlling headpiece.68 That is, the ritual creates an image in which the woman, even if only briefly, is reduced from her humanity to a subhuman condition. Independently of whether the transaction may in some instances have been to her advantage, the ritual portrayed her as a commodity, whose monetary worth could be compared with things like alcohol or clothes.69 In the midst of these difficulties, convict women did the one thing for which they would be valued, even though with some official misgivings. That is, they gave birth to children in surprising numbers. Officials were eventually glad to see the increase in population in the colony because it gave it stability and stimulated the economy, even though they were anxious about the character of convict offspring. When T. W. Plummer complained in 1809 about the wholesale distribution of women to all-comers, he also wrote that the consequence was that “it is estimated there are actually at this time about one thousand illegitimate children in the colony of this description.”70 Since the government stores had to support women not claimed by a man and their children, once the colony became more settled, the governor set out to bring these very mobile women and their illegitimate children into some sort of organized structure. Following theories of education of the day stemming from Rousseau’s Emile (1762) and Bentham’s Panopticon, the colonial administration planned to shape the colony through controlling young, impressionable lives. Jan Kociumbas writes that “an ideology of ‘rescue’ . . . rationalized the practice of rounding up the destitute young and incarcerating them in miniature workhouses or factories designed specially to house the young.”71 In this new spate of organization, not only the children were to be incarcerated. Their mothers, convict women not claimed by assignment or in marriage, were to be placed in a “workhouse,” where they would be employed in producing cloth from locally grown flax and wool. By August 1804, Governor King had announced

68. Ibid. 69. See Ibid., 333 which cites a report of an 1839 wife sale in colonial Australia, which calls the wife-sale ritual an “ordeal” and notes that more was paid for the woman’s clothes than for the woman herself. 70. Historical Records of Australia: Series I, 205. Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 27–29 explains that the ideal child-bearing age of the convict women and the lack of diseases in the colony meant that many children were born and survived. In 1799, 828 of the 862 children in the colony depended on government stores. 71. Kociumbas, 1788-1860: Possessions, 29.

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that he would establish a “Female Factory” in the first floor of the new gaol at Parramatta that had been built to house refractory male convicts.72 The image that emerges at this stage is of a landless, unemployed woman with dependent children, who is for sale as a commodity. While she may have a great deal to say she had very little status or position from which to speak persuasively. In the new Female Factories she would be even more restrained both in body and in speech. 2.2.2.4 Women Manufactured in Female Factories  In discussing the Female Factory as the culmination of the imperial-colonial management of female convicts in New South Wales, I argue that we see in it an attempt to construct women according to ideals held by the rulers of the imperial society that had convicted these women and transported them to the other side of the planet. While reasons for the establishment of a Female Factory were stated, expressing values of the day about women, the gradual realization of it in the new colony came to mean one thing for the authorities, but another for the individual women and men in the colony. Most interesting for this argument is that in the Female Factory serious attempts were made to construct women according to values held by those Englishmen appointed as rulers over the convict women. The most basic ideal expressed about the management of female convicts was that they should be separated from the rest of the community. T. W. Plummer wrote in 1809 that “Public Asylums should be established for all those who are not living with their Husbands, in which they might maintain themselves by their own labour.” 73 Viscount Castlereagh from the Foreign Office in London instructed Governor Macquarie to keep the female convicts apart until they could be “properly distributed in such a manner as may best encourage attention to industry and character.”74 As can be seen in these two statements, there was also from the beginning, a concern to use female labor productively and to shape the women morally. Envisaged at the outset in the first decade of the nineteenth century as having many purposes, the Female Factory was always a multipurpose institution. Annette Salt sums up the Factory’s character through its heyday in the 1820s–40s as “destined to become work-house and labor bureau, marriage bureau and regulator of morality, gaol and hospital, and at the same time, to relieve the financial burden on the administration of female convicts and their many children.”75 72. Parramatta was a center of farming and administration around twenty-three kilometers or fifteen miles northwest of Sydney Cove. See Hughes, Fatal Shore, 254–55 for a description of the journey there. There was at least one other Female Factory, at Launceston in Tasmania, but most of the comments here are drawn from study of the Factory at Parramatta. 73. Historical Records of Australia: Series I, 207. 74. Ibid., 146. 75. Salt, These Outcast Women, 44.



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In attempting, with inadequate physical, financial, and administrative resources, to accommodate British colonial society’s needs about convict women, the Factory proved true to its name in more than one way. While it was a place where women did process wool and flax into cloth, it was also a place where strenuous efforts were made to manufacture the convict women themselves into a form of femininity that conformed to the ideals of middle- and upper-class respectability of then Imperial England. These efforts included the classification of female convicts according to virtue, the various ways in which the women were physically contained, especially by gender-based shaming but also by other bodily restraints, and the various injustices to which they were subject, including outright exploitation. In various ways, these strategies isolated women from potential sources of power in an effort to make them more amenable to the reconstructive influence of the Factory. 2.2.2.4.1 Isolated by physical restraints  Annette Salt reports that it was Governor Darling’s “acknowledged purpose in extending the Factory .  .  . to help separate these classes.”76 This theme of separation is important because it is one of the ways that imperial authority sought to break the power of the convict women. Governor Darling’s Factory was intended to separate the women in several ways: from the rest of colonial society, from each other, from their children, and from their own sense of themselves as female and as possessing dignity. The physical separation from society was to be achieved by refurbishing the factory with “a high wall, a moat and an imposing (even forbidding) stone structure.”77 2.2.2.4.2 Isolated on the basis of virtue or vice  Once within the Female Factory women were organized into groups based on an estimation of their relative moral virtue. There were at least two major schemas over time, the system introduced by Governor Darling in the mid-1820s being the more precise. In Darling’s system women were categorized as first, second, or third class, with the second class acting as a buffer between the other two.78 The third class was for women classed as criminals because of offences such as theft in the colony or within the Factory. With regard to these women the Factory served thus as a place of secondary punishment. The second class was a category that allowed movement up or down between the two extreme classes and was thus important in the motivation system. The first class was made up of convict women new 76. Ibid., 72. These were classes or categories into which the women were divided as explained below. 77. Ibid., 69. See contemporary sketches of the Factory in Salt, These Outcast Women, 79, 103. See also http://www.femalefactory.com.au/FFRG/launceston.htm#Building for a description of the Female Factory built in 1834 at Launceston, Tasmania, which was clearly designed on the lines of the Panopticon. 78. See Salt, These Outcast Women, 70–72, 85–87, 90–93 for detailed discussion of the class system, especially the third class.

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to the colony or judged to be deservingly poor. In all these classes, differences were marked by the food, clothing, sleeping arrangements, employment, and recreation opportunities, especially contact with the outer world, each class was allowed. In this way, categories of women were isolated from one another and set in competition with one another. 2.2.2.4.3 Isolated from feminine identity This separation was surpassed by another separation which the Factory practiced as a punishment, namely the denial of the women’s sense of themselves as attractive women, as feminine. In an institution that sought to produce an idealized female product, this punitive denial of femininity is strangely perverse. However, it results from a clash between class-based notions of femininity. The upper- and middle-class British males who determined policy and supervised its execution at the Factory hankered for something quite different from what the mostly working-class and often Irish female convicts considered to be normal female conduct. If the women failed to conform to the imposed ideal of their gender, they were punished by being denied all recognition of their gender identity. As Joy Damousi writes, “In response to women’s recalcitrant behavior, the authorities sought to defeminize and masculinize them.”79 This is a most fundamental way of denying the convict woman a credible image and thus of refusing to let her occupy a persuasive speaking position. This denial of femininity took various forms. One form of it was that during their time in the Factory, the convict women were separated from any of their children over four years of age, who were sent to the Orphan school until their mothers were released from the Factory.80 Another form was intense physical punishments that were used on offending women in the Factory, included whipping, wearing an iron collar, being forced to work a treadmill, and being put in solitary confinement on bread and water for days.81 To these punishments were added others such as breaking rocks and doing heavy lifting work in the grounds of the Factory, which were generally classed as male activities. For women who refused to produce the kind of behavior identified as virtuously female, the coercive force brought to bear on them was to force them into malecoded activities as punishment. Yet, the punishment which the women resented most vigorously was the shaving of their heads, a practice that continued from the transport ships. While this did not push the women to any physical exertion, it did offend them 79. Joy Damousi, “‘What Punishment Will Be Sufficient for These Rebellious Hussies?’ Headshaving and Convict Women in the Female Factories, 1820s–40s,” in Ian Duffield and James Bradley eds., Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), 204–14, 212. 80. Ibid., 78. 81. See Salt, These Outcast Women, 90, 92–93, 97 for details of these punishments. After 1817, women were not permitted by English Law to be flogged.



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grievously precisely in their identity as females with dignity, as “feminine” in their understanding. In the women’s reactions and in the commentary of the time on this practice, we see a number of themes that can be useful in reading the female characters of Mark’s Gospel. First, Joy Damousi points out that shaving women’s heads was “one of the most effective means of inscribing punishment on women’s bodies and instilling shame.”82 I argue that it is because this punishment actually used women’s bodies as the register of punishment that it was most shameful. While the women protested about this punishment, often violently, they eventually had to submit to part of their bodies being subject to someone else’s will because the other person had the power to impose it. The prominent colonial clergyman, Samuel Marsden, commenting on an uproar over headshaving, decreed that the convict women “must be kept under . . . . All the officers who saw their riotous conduct will be convinced of the necessity of keeping them under by the hand of power.”83 For any person to bear on their bodies the mark of someone else’s superior power over them is a profoundly humiliating subjugation. Second, the fact that the punishment showed on their heads has some important ramifications. Damousi points out that most descriptions of convict women in official records cite them as pock-marked and sallow. Since they were mostly too poor to afford cosmetics to cover their prison pallor, convict women relied on their hair to make them feel successfully feminine.84 The loss of their hair therefore hit them very hard. Precisely because the head is so visible, when women with shaven heads went outside the Factory, they were conspicuous and presumably subject to general social disapproval. In particular, says Damousi, it was the derisive gaze of males outside the Factory that caused shaven-headed women to suffer, because “true shame and humiliation occurred when these women entered the ‘male dominated space’ beyond the factory walls. The gaze of men outside of the prisons . . . engendered a particular anxiety.”85 Thus, male power to acknowledge females or not was used to control the female convicts. The long-term effect of this punishment seems to have been that it destroyed a woman’s confidence in her image in society and thus in herself. If, as Damousi sums it up, the shaved head “denoted feminine shame—with their vanity undermined women were desexed and defeminized,” then the women were left with nowhere to “stand” as human beings.86 This did drive some women to violent protest or even to make headshaving be the point of rebellion, but it seems that few chose this path. Rather, it appears that convict women were thereby denied an effective speaking position and were largely silenced.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Damousi, “‘What Punishment Will Be Sufficient?’” 204–14, 205. Ibid., 208–09. See Ibid., 211–12. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 207.

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Thus, not only did the shaving of their heads deny them a presentable “face” in the world, it also deprived them of a voice. Thus the women had no option but to endure injustices.87 Alan Atkinson’s liberty protected by the rugged speech of the Englishman does not operate for these women. 2.2.2.4.4 Isolated from legal rights and protection  Perhaps the greatest injustice was that most of the female convicts held in the Female Factory were doubly punished. Having been sentenced to transportation, they were then imprisoned at the destination, ostensibly to protect them from abuse and exploitation. Yet the protection was a form of punishment, virtually for the crime of being female. Annette Salt says that when female convicts did get the chance to speak to a governor of the colony, Governor Gipps, they argued that “they had been sentenced to be Transported, but not to be imprisoned after Transportation .  .  . in a place where the discipline is as severe as in the Penitentiary, and the privations and discomforts greater.”88 To this injury, there was added the insult of exploitation. When the convict women were admitted to the Factory, any money they had was taken from them and some given to the poor, the rest not being accounted for.89 Awareness of this ironic abuse of women’s property rights by an imperial power will prove to be enlightening when we come to read the stories of the widow in Mark 12:41-44 and the women observing the death of Jesus in Mark 15:40-41. Joy Damousi writes of the “iconography and symbolism associated with cutting hair.”90 The head symbolizes the human capacity to see, understand, think, and speak. The symbol of the bald-headed convict woman gives rise to the image of a woman physically confined and exhausted, emotionally shamed, and disabled in her gendered identity and voice. This is the image that emerges from a review of Imperial Britain’s attempt to reform female convicts into “proper women” in colonial Australia. We turn now to see how British literary imagination transformed a female convict into just such a model of female virtue.

2.3  English Narrative of Female Crime and Convict Transportation All of the issues discussed so far—poverty, criminality, ideals of feminine propriety in speech and action, and punishment by transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales—come together in a very revealing English tale of the midnineteenth century. The History of Margaret Catchpole: A Suffolk Girl was written by an Anglican clergyman, Richard Cobbold, in 1845 and was reissued a number

87. 88. 89. 90.

See Salt, These Outcast Women, 81–82. Ibid., 83. See Ibid., 76. Damousi, “‘What Punishment Will Be Sufficient?’” 212.



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of times across the next century and beyond.91 The History spends over 350 pages telling the story of a village girl from Suffolk, who committed two crimes for which she was first condemned to death but then sentenced to transportation. The narrative is based on the life of an actual Margaret Catchpole who was transported to New South Wales in 1797 for horse theft and for escaping from jail.92 The novelist bends his art in telling this history to convey the message that it was because of her own uneducated passion, subject to a lover’s criminal influence, that Margaret Catchpole came to her fate as a transported convict. All commentators agree that Cobbold embellished the story far beyond any of his resources, whether written or oral. The embellishments reveal a great deal about the views that middle-class people of the mid-nineteenth century in Britain held about the working class and crime. This novel is valuable for this study because it shows how a narrative building on historical events aims to thrill its readers about femininity gone wrong and to instruct them about how the proper woman conducts herself. Written fifty years after the event, the novel shows how not only 91. See Richard Cobbold, The History of Margaret Catchpole: A Suffolk Girl, with an introduction by Clement Shorter (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1845, 1923). All quotations from the text are taken from this edition. Useful background information on the history of Margaret Catchpole, Richard Cobbold, and the social context of the time can be found in Ronald Blythe, Introduction to The History of Margaret Catchpole: A Suffolk Girl, by Richard Cobbold, facsimile ed. (Ipswich: Boydell Press, 1847, re-issue, 1979), v–xviii. See Richard Cobbold, The Character of Woman: In a Lecture Delivered at the Hanover Square Rooms, April 13, 1848, for the Benefit of the Governesses Benevolent Institution (London: Francis Cupiss, Albion Printing Office, 1848), 54–56 for Cobbold’s considered view of women. Cobbold acknowledges that “the female mind is quite as capable of the severity of abstruse scientific pursuit, as that of man.” However he speaks much more encouragingly about female usefulness and humility. He writes, “When the female mind exercising its pure and heavenly faith, permits that feeling of practical utility, to predominate . . . it is wonderful how cheerfully active, how generously energetic, how amiably useful the female character becomes. The void of being nothing soon passes away before the loveliness of humility; and she . . .—now finds an interest in every thing.” 92. Margaret Catchpole was born in Suffolk, probably at Hoo, in 1762. She worked for Richard Cobbold’s mother for eighteen months. She did assist in the theft of a horse, riding it away and was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, from which she escaped only to be recaptured. She was sentenced to death but then given the reprieve of transportation for seven years to New South Wales. She eventually took up land there and farmed it by herself, having refused several offers of marriage. She died at the age of fifty-seven in 1819. Accounts of her life may be found in Richard Barber, “The Real Margaret Catchpole,” in Richard Cobbold, facsimile ed., The History Of Margaret Catchpole: A Suffolk Girl (Ipswich: Boydell Press, 1847, reissue, 1979), x–xviii and in Joan Lynraven, “Catchpole, Margaret (1762–1819),” in Vol. 1, A–H, A. G. L. Shaw and C. M. H. Clark eds., Douglas Pike gen ed., The Australian Dictionary of Biography, section (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1966).

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actual social practices but also the powerful agency of narrative can be used in the attempt to mold people—in this case convict women—to external conventions of gender-appropriate behavior. It alerts the reader of Mark to similar strategies of narrative writing in the imperial context. 2.3.1  The Unrestrained, Shameless Woman: A Proto-convict One of the strongest impressions that Cobbold creates in his narrative is that a physically vigorous female who acts with initiative so that she attracts notice and is in danger of being overrun by her passions. Cobbold’s tale begins with the young servant-maid Margaret taking command of a scene in which her mistress has collapsed. Margaret orders the other servants to assist the mistress, while she mounts a horse in the stable-yard and rides it bareback, unbridled, and at breakneck speed to the town of Ipswich to fetch the doctor. The mistress survives as a result of Margaret’s action, but Cobbold’s tale does not celebrate Margaret’s initiative. Without explicitly condemning her, the tale hints in various ways that Margaret acted without due heed. She did not ask permission to take the horse, described as “a fiery little Suffolk Punch”; she did not stop to tell her mother where she was going; she rode so fast that she outran a young dandy on a fine horse; she was the talk of the town for her extraordinary feat, a scandal that recurs as a leitmotif throughout the rest of the novel.93 Tina Picton Phillips explains how it is that commentary on what might seem a brave action is portrayed as a source of shame for Margaret. She says, “A female whose actions lay beyond the domestic sphere was placing herself beyond control, supervision and chaperonage of parents, husband or employer. By being in the world and on horseback she was seen to confront the prescribed social order in which women were in need either of protection or control.”94 Phillips comments that Margaret offended also against class expectations in this event by “challenging the convention that actions by plebeians (particularly women) should be reactive, not proactive.” Picton calls this convention “a specific code of social class . . . that . . . assigned a leadership function to the dominant class [and that such action] . . . was expected to come from a man.”95 Thus, even at thirteen years of age, Margaret is constructed as deviating from the social code that the English middle class expected of rural, working-class females. Phillips reads Cobbold’s narrative closely to support her argument that Cobbold’s real purpose in writing the tale was to show his own mother in a good light. Margaret had worked in service for Elizabeth Cobbold, Richard’s mother. Cobbold sought to remove the stain of association with a convict by having his mother bring about a moral transformation in Margaret before she sailed away 93. See Cobbold, The History Of Margaret Catchpole, 5–9. 94. Tina Picton Phillips, “Margaret Catchpole’s First Ride?” in Ian Duffield and James Bradley eds., Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration, 62–77 (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), 65–66. 95. Ibid., 65.



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from England. In the process, says Phillips, Cobbold’s narrative “reinforce[s] .  .  . the contemporary social constructions of gender and class difference [and] reveal[s] the influence of the social theorists of the mid-nineteenth century through its subscription to the belief in the existence of a specific ‘criminal class.’ Additionally, Cobbold’s narrative contributes to the negative stereotyping of transported female convicts.”96 Two other major scenes in the novel that reveal these values are Margaret’s adult theft of a horse and attempt to sell it and Cobbold’s treatment of Margaret’s moral transformation at the time of her second trial and conviction. The first of these scenes, the deliberate theft of a horse, occurs two-thirds of the way through the novel, the event that brings all to a climax. Margaret was in love with a smuggler, William Laud, for whom she was induced to steal a horse and sell it. It is typical of Cobbold’s moralizing style to comment that Margaret “yielded to the artful duplicity of this wicked man, and agreed to . . . put their wild plan in practice. But . . . the excitement . . . brought on an attack of fever that very night, and she was laid up for many days.”97 Cobbold’s description of Margaret riding the stolen horse further confirms her as deviating from proper female behavior. To disguise herself, she wears male clothes that she has stolen from a groomsman; she knows the tricks of horse thieves for keeping a horse quiet and for choosing where to sell a horse; she rides the seventy miles from Ipswich to London in eight and a half hours, a prodigious physical feat; and disports herself “in as off-hand a manner as if she were a real groom.”98 As in her childhood ride, she attracts attention, so that “many were the eyes directed towards her, both on account of the remarkable character of the horse and the singular appearance of the rider. Margaret took no notice of any one, but pushed on her willing steed.”99 Cobbold tells us that “her spirit was up as well as Crop’s [the horse]” and that she “rode on, reckless of all the ills that might await her, and thinking only of the lover that she was to meet at the end of her mad journey.”100 As Ronald Blythe comments, “Hard-riding women used to have great sexual significance.”101 2.3.2  The Reformed Female: Shameful, Deferential, Silent When Margaret’s theft is discovered, and she is arrested and condemned to hang, Cobbold has the opportunity to show how true religious feeling can educate the runaway passions of the lower classes. Margaret’s former employer, Cobbold’s mother, prepares Margaret to face her death with the thought, “Oh! That your end 96. Ibid., 64. 97. Cobbold, History of Margaret Catchpole, with an introduction by Clement Shorter, 226. In many instances throughout the novel, Cobbold connects Margaret’s emotional excitement with illness or physical collapse. 98. Ibid., 233. 99. Ibid., 232. 100. Ibid., 229. 101. Ronald Blythe, introduction to The History of Margaret Catchpole, v.

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may be as you wish it, a warning to all your sex, and especially to those in your situation of life, never to let passion get the upper hand of virtuous principle.”102 Phillips argues that this advice indicates that for people like Cobbold, “Passion became an indicator of social class and was ascribed to the subordinate class.”103 That Margaret does come to the point of repentance where she hopes her death will instruct other women is a mark of how much she has changed under Elizabeth Cobbold’s influence. Cobbold registers this by the way he describes Margaret’s physical appearance, her moral shifts, and her emotional state. Each of these ways of presenting Margaret reveals the values of the society in which Cobbold can speak as a moral authority, while Margaret should only ever speak in deference to such authority. First, Cobbold insists that despite conventional expectations of criminal females, Margaret was not “a bold, athletic female, of a coarse and masculine appearance.” Rather, she “was dressed in a plain blue cotton gown, and appeared to be deeply dejected.” A few paragraphs later, Cobbold insists again that “her figure was not masculine. She was tall, and rather slender. She had a dark eye, dark hair and a countenance pale from emotion.”104 What seems to be important here is that Margaret has left behind the ambiguous gender-blurred behavior of her horseriding escapades and presents herself visually according to the conventions of appropriate feminine appearance. Thus, Margaret conforms to the image of female propriety for which Cobbold stands. Next, Margaret is shown to have repented and to conform to the prevailing ideas of right and wrong, expressed in nineteenth-century Christian terms. When she speaks in court, she acknowledges both her guilt and the justice of all the authority figures around her: her employers, the judge and his court, and, finally, God. She says to the judge, “I do not ask forgiveness of the law, because I have no right to do so. I have offended, and am subject to the penalty of death. I hope your lordship will forgive my words, though you must condemn me for my actions.”105 The authorial voice assures us in the following chapter that Margaret, having had her sentence of death commuted to transportation for seven years, experienced a religious conversion and became a model prisoner. “In fact, she became an invaluable person in the gaol. She exercised a moral influence over those of her own sex who were inmates of the prison, such as no matron could hope to attain.”106 Thus, Margaret’s speech and reformed behavior reinforce the male-dominated structures of Cobbold’s society.

102. Cobbold, History Of Margaret Catchpole, with an introduction by Clement Shorter, 290. 103. Phillips, “Margaret Catchpole’s First Ride?” 69. 104. Cobbold, History of Margaret Catchpole, with an introduction by Clement Shorter, 246–48. 105. Ibid., 248–49. 106. Ibid., 257.



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Finally, as Cobbold constructs it, it is Margaret’s emotions that bring her both to ruin and to moral reform. Before her trial, Margaret writes to Mrs. Cobbold that while she had been admired by some at Newgate prison for being “a brave girl, . . . clever and courageous,” she now notes how much fear she feels and counts the Newgate admirers “not half such sincere friends as those who told me, as you did, the greatness of my offence, and the probable extent of ultimate punishment.”107 When Margaret is condemned to death, Cobbold says she responded less to the sentence than to the judge’s kind words. “She respectfully curtseyed to him and . . . fell into her father’s arms. She was conveyed back to the gaol in a swoon.”108 Fear, gratitude for kindness, and unconsciousness are far more desirable feelings for a woman than bravado and cleverness. Cobbold approves of Margaret when she is emotionally repressed or contained. Thus, in court she was “pale from emotion.” When Mrs. Cobbold came to see her after she was arrested, Margaret “was terrified beyond measure at the idea of encountering the sight of her mistress,” and fell on the ground in a “dreadful state of agitation.” The author tells us that Margaret “felt better after this . . . with a heart very much humbled.”109 Clearly, the best feeling state for a woman is emotionally drained humility. Tina Phillips sums it up in two ways. First she notes that especially in her relationship with the smuggler Laud, Margaret “was portrayed as a victim of her emotions.”110 This is a very important point because it makes it possible to control Margaret—and all women—by the strategy of shame. As we have seen, shamebased strategies of control were used against the convict women of early New South Wales, causing them much distress. As we will see in later chapters, shame is used to control women in the cultures of the first-century Mediterranean and therefore operates in Mark’s narrative. Australian feminists who attend to this use of shame as a controlling device against women in their own recent history can be all the more alert to it when it is seen to function as a normal way of controlling women in the Gospel of Mark. Thus they can be prepared to recognize this cultural practice as associated with imperial control and can reject it as normative for Christian faith. Second, Phillips notices that Cobbold constructs Margaret when she is on the path of reform as properly deferential to her superiors, especially men in authority. Phillips writes, “Cobbold reinforced Margaret’s ‘potential for reform’ through a scene in which she is described as actively endorsing the hegemonic discourse of the patriarchal social order.”111 Phillips makes this assessment on the basis of a scene in which Margaret, having fallen at her master’s feet, implored his protection against male fellow employees who were shaming her with sexually 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

Ibid., 240. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 238, 239. Phillips, “Margaret Catchpole’s First Ride?” 67. Ibid., 68.

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suggestive taunts. In this scene the doctor whom she fetched on the original horse ride also protected her. This doctor recognized her as the “high-spirited girl” who had tried to save her mistress. When Margaret collapsed at his feet, overcome by conflicting emotions this doctor accurately interpreted her feeling and “raised her up.”112 In this scene, two masterly males have the skill and power to resolve the problems caused by Margaret’s unruly feelings. This theme resonates with the attitudes that almost exclusively male designers and administrators of the British imperial settlement of New South Wales held and enacted toward convict women. There are also some strong resonances with tales of women in the Gospel of Mark who, in shameful circumstances, are depicted as in some way prostrate before Jesus, the only one who can help them.113 Again, the Australian feminist made aware of these assumptions of male mastery over women can resist the implication of Mark’s narrative that this gender imbalance is normative in Christian relationships. From Margaret Catchpole’s story we see that British expectation of the proper, acceptable female is that she is demure, moderate in emotions, speaks only deferentially, and is neither high-spirited nor sexually provocative. Instead, she is religious, humble, a model of morality, and repents any ill-doing or uncontrolled, unfeminine behavior in which she might be said to abandon her femininity. By acting in this way, she avoids intruding on properly male theaters of action and notice. She is the literary antithesis of all that the convict women were, creating out of convict women’s experience, a fantasy woman who never was.

2.4 Conclusion We have seen that eighteenth-century Great Britain gave rise on the one hand to the developing British Empire and on the other to domestic stress leading to poverty-driven crime, overcrowded prisons, and the transportation of convicts to found a new colony in the Pacific. We have seen that prevailing ideas about females contributed to their oppression both in the actual management of female convicts and in the narrative construction of the life of one such woman. There is no dispute about the criminality of most convict women, although the stress of an industrializing society surely accounts for the sudden increase in crime and the severity of punishment for petty theft. The point of this chapter is that in both the history as we can retrieve it and in the narrativized recreation of it, we see the drive of Imperial Britain to control women by constructing them as respectable when they behave within certain 112. Cobbold, History of Margaret Catchpole, with an introduction by Clement Shorter, 93. 113. See Chapter 5 for the discussion of the stories of Peter’s mother-in-law (Mk 1:29-31); Jairus’ daughter (Mk 5:22-24a, 35-43); the bleeding woman (5:24b-34), and of the SyroPhoenician woman and her daughter (Mk 7:24-30). In all these stories, women are either lying on a bed or falling at Jesus’s feet, telling him everything or begging him for help.



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limits. These limits were established by approving of restrained behavior in the form of silence, dependency, and submission even in situations of great injustice; and disapproving of female initiative, energy, and speech. In all these ways, the imperial-colonial construct of woman makes her yield to the male as the human being who truly exhibits the superior virtues of empire, especially those of clear intelligence, bold initiative, and powerful speech. Awareness of this approach to women prepares the Australian feminist reader, aware of the sexism that can go hand in hand with imperial power, to recognize such control systems in reading the Gospel according to Mark. The insights developed in this chapter will be brought to bear on the portrayal of female characters in the Gospel of Mark, in Chapter 5 of this book. There is yet another major event of Australian history that shows that in the imperial-colonial world, females may not be allowed to distract from the focus on the male in writing that establishes a view of reality. In this event females who actually participated were intentionally written out of important reports about it. The event was the military campaign at Gallipoli in the First World War at which Australian (and New Zealand) soldiers, the Anzacs, fought on behalf of the British Empire. These soldiers fought heroically in a hopeless situation and became the stuff of legend. As we shall see, even in writing that purports to be matter-of-fact empirical history, the facts of female presence and of their heroic contribution to this event was considered no good reason to write them into the picture. It is to legends about men in imperial service and the marginal roles ascribed to women in these legends that we now turn attention, in preparation for reading the Gospel of Mark.

Chapter 3 THE MYTH OF COLONIAL AUSTRALIA IN AN IMPERIAL WAR

In this chapter we leave the initial years of Australia’s colonial origins to move to another event considered to be foundational in Australian history. In contemporary Australia, perhaps the most important annual celebration of nationhood is Anzac Day, on April 25. Since the late 1980s this day has assumed larger and larger significance in Australia, especially for young people for whom it has become a rite of passage to visit the site for the annual dawn service of commemoration. The event that Anzac Day celebrates is the beginning of a military campaign in 1915 on the Gallipoli Peninsula, part of the then Turkish Empire, in which Australian troops fought as part of a British imperial force against Turkey in the First World War. The campaign failed at immense cost of lives for all combatants, but Australian troops acquitted themselves bravely and with some flair in the process. As the first appearance of Australians in force on the world stage, it assumed for the newly federated group of colonies that Australia had just become at that time a significance expressed in terms such as “birth of the nation,” “baptism in blood,” and “heroic sacrifice.” In Australia today, Anzac Day is celebrated much more intentionally and with a much greater sense of gravitas than is the official national day, Australia Day. That day is held on January 26, the day the first convict ships sailed into Botany Bay. This difference in value between the two feasts is telling. Weather plays some part in it. Australia Day occurs in the height of the southern summer when it is too hot to do anything except sit beside or play in water, drinking cool fluids; Anzac Day falls in mid-autumn when mornings have become crisp and people have returned to work and school. More importantly, calendar collaborates with meaning to give Anzac Day the edge. April 25 is very often quite close to the Christian feast of Easter so that even in the secular press, Australians often hear very similar rhetoric used about the meaning of Anzac Day and about the meaning of Easter. In editorials and opinion pieces, the language of noble sacrifice by a heroic figure or figures for the sake of the freedom and well-being of a community is used to interpret both events. Across the years, some commentators have reflected quite specifically on this connection. So, even in allegedly secular Australia, people are accustomed to Anzac Day being treated in association with the central event of Christianity, and thus, having a certain sacredness about it. This element was strong in the early

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celebration of Anzac Day and is enjoying a resurgence at the present time. By contrast, it is quite challenging to make something serious of the beginning of British colonial settlement in the form of a penal colony of convicts. As with the example of female convicts discussed in the previous chapter, both the actual event of the Gallipoli Campaign and the representation of it in writing reveal aspects of Australia’s history within an imperial-colonial relationship with Great Britain and of the particular way in which sexist attitudes to women were expressed in that context. In this chapter we will see, first, how Australia’s involvement in the First World War reflects her colonial relationship with Great Britain and, second, how the celebration of the Gallipoli event in an interpretive myth known as the Anzac Legend betrays sexism in various aspects of the writing, editing, and publication of the materials that gave rise to the legend. Scrutiny of this event, but even more so the elaboration of the event, adds to the body of knowledge about how imperial-colonial systems operate, in the relationship between the imperial center and the colony and in the representation of women. This understanding can then help to focus a reading of the Gospel of Mark as a text betraying both its origins in an imperial-colonial context and a sexist tendency to marginalize female characters in order to focus intensely on male characters.

3.1  Australia’s Involvement in the First World War as a Dominion of Great Britain 3.1.1  The Outbreak of the First World War: Conflict between Imperial Powers The First World War broke out in August 1914 as the culmination of decades, if not centuries, of imperial rivalry between the great European powers.1 The halfcentury that preceded 1914 saw the growth to national unity of Germany and continual imperial rivalries between the major combatants in the war, particularly Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey over against Great Britain, France, and Russia. While it occurred in a remote part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the 1. For this brief introduction to the First World War, I depend on the following reference works. Where specific writers make particular points, I will indicate them in the course of this overview. See C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); J. P. T. Bury, “International Relations, 1900-12,” in G. N. Clark, J. R. M. Butler and J. P. T. Bury eds., The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 12; David Thomson ed., The Era of Violence, 18981945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 300–28; Gordon Greenwood, The Modern World: A History of Our Time, Vol. 1, From Early European Expansion to the Outbreak of World War II (Sydney, Australia: Angus And Robertson, 1964); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988); and J. M. K. Vyvyan, “The Approach of the War of 1914,” in G. N. Clark, J. R. M. Butler and J. P. T. Bury eds., The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 12, The Era of Violence, 1898-1945, 329–58.



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assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian activist expressed some of the tensions created in that part of the Balkans by centuries of intervention by European imperial powers into the territories and destinies of other peoples. That this apparently out-of-the-way event propelled the great European nations into a war that involved virtually the whole world is a consequence of worldwide European imperial rivalry. 3.1.2  Australian Involvement in the Imperial War, the First World War It was in the campaign to take the Gallipoli Peninsula that Australian troops saw their first major involvement in the First World War.2 Australia found itself at war in support of Great Britain, simply as a result of being one of Great Britain’s former colonies, but still bound closely to Great Britain, as part of the empire. In 1901, after a decade or more of meetings both within Australia and with Westminster, the former separate British colonies in the great south land had been formally united as the Commonwealth of Australia, as a constitutional monarchy under the English Crown. This process, referred to as federation, was ratified by voting in each separate colony as to whether to join the proposed Commonwealth of Australia and was then validated by the British Parliament at Westminster on May 21, 1900, as the Act to constitute the Commonwealth of Australia.3 Most important for this research is the fact that even after federation, Great Britain still directed Australian foreign and defense policies. At the time of federation, Australia’s navy was a haphazard collection of minor craft owned by the individual colonies. Frank Welsh suggests that it was a distinct advantage to Australia, insisted on by its first prime minister, Edmond Barton, to continue to be protected by the British Navy and to have the British Foreign Office make and negotiate Australian foreign relations policy.4 2. In this section on Australian involvement in the First World War, I depend heavily on the following works: C. M. H. Clark, The People Make Laws: 1888-1915, Vol. 5, A History of Australia (Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1987); Donald Denoon, P. MeinSmith and Marivic Wyndham, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000; 2002 reprint); Michael Hickey, Gallipoli (London, UK: John Murray, 1998); Stuart Macintyre, 1901-1942: The Succeeding Age. Vol. 4, The Oxford History of Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press Australia, 1986); and Frank Welsh, Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia (London, UK: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2004). 3. See Clark, The People Make Laws, 140–56, 174–75 for extensive and colorful accounts of these events; Welsh, Great Southern Land, 281–91, 298–304, 320–30 for more matter-offact treatments. 4. See Welsh, Great Southern Land, 357–58 for this argument, where he calls Australian subjugation to British Foreign Relations a “neat pushing of Australian problems onto the British plate.” See, however, that later on pp. 367 ff. Welsh argues that there was in fact no substance to this fear because existing British treaties kept nations with Pacific interests,

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This meant that while Great Britain was responsible for defending Australia, Australia was obliged to assist the mother country when required, in war. This may be seen in more than one light. On the one hand, hard-nosed reality may have made it necessary from Australia’s point of view. On the other, historians document the marked enthusiasm of Australians to join British military projects. The reason for this is that Australians wanted to be recognized on the world scene as part of the British Empire, but primarily to be valued by the imperial power which had created this new nation from colonies made initially from her own convicts, expelled as far from herself as England as could arrange. The important implication of this arrangement is that in the way it broke away from Great Britain, Australia actually rebound itself to the imperial founder. While Australia had apparently declared itself to be a sovereign nation, made up of a union of former British colonies, it had made this move not as a clean break away from the imperial founder, but as a graduated shift, negotiated with and formally authenticated by the great legal center of Empire, the British Parliament in London. Australia had declared her separation from the place that many Australians still called “Mother England” and “Home,” but in the very process of making this claim to her own nationhood, Australia had in some important ways reinforced the ties. Thus, when news of the British declaration of war on Germany on August 4, 1914, broke in Australia, it was taken for granted that Australia was also at war. The only question was the degree of Australia’s commitment. As Stuart Macintyre writes, Before [the British Prime Minister] Sir Edward Grey’s ultimatum to Germany, Australia had put its navy at the disposal of the British Admiralty and offered to send a contingent of 20 000 soldiers to any destination required by the War Office. No legislation was necessary, indeed [the Australian Federal] parliament did not meet until October when it simply voted £100 000 to Belgium and provided the executive with further powers under a War Precautions Act.5

Second, Australian citizens supported the British Empire in the First World War, not only because of the constitutional obligation that bound the government in a continuing colonial-imperial relationship with Britain but also because the broad mass of Australians grasped it as a way to reclaim their cultural and ethnic heritage. Australians felt removed from this heritage by physical distance but much more forcefully by the social and cultural dynamisms that made a collection of former colonies feel inferior to their imperial master. Convict origins were not something namely France, Russia, Japan, and the United States, friendly to the Empire. The only likely threat in the Pacific was Germany, which was very preoccupied with the European theater of war. Nevertheless, the first Australian action of the war was the occupation of German New Guinea and Rabaul on September 12, 1914. 5. Macintyre, 1901-1942: The Succeeding Age, 142.



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that Australians dwelt on consciously at this time, but its lingering impact can be seen in the widespread enthusiasm among Australians at the outbreak of the First World War, for identifying themselves as being of British descent, and absolutely imperial. The First World War presented Australians with the chance to represent themselves on the world stage as a nation alongside other nations, one that had grown beyond its “convict stain.” In entering the war, however, Australia reinscribed the imperial-colonial ties of its foundation. There were those who opposed the war but in the prevailing atmosphere their voices were drowned out. Newspaper editorials and the Irish could see the great distance between Australia and the European theater of war; they could see that fighting a war chosen by other nations, for reasons that may be of no direct interest to Australia and in circumstances not under Australia’s control, was madness.6 Against this view, however, there was the appeal for the colonial of seeing the Old World and of showing it how “good” he was. For the greatgrandsons of convict forebears this was a way to return to the Old World from which their families had been expelled and to wring from it grateful admiration for the colonial skills that made him now such an asset to Great Britain. As Denoon and Mein-Smith observe, “It was in the Old World that New World heroics must be performed. The Soldiers generated the Anzac legends in Europe and the Mediterranean.”7 3.1.3  The Postcolonial Significance of Australia’s Entry into the First World War Even after the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed, its relationship with Great Britain was still conducted through the Colonial Office, whose officials “adopted a patrician tone towards the colonials in their memoranda and the scribbled notes they wrote to each other about them. As one commented, ‘The Australians, who have never had to face any diplomatic difficulty, seem to think that we can treat France like a Tonga.’”8 T. B. Millar sums up the tensions in this relationship thus: “Ministers and civil servants in London saw their counterparts in Australia as brash, abrasive, immature, demanding; to those counterparts they were often pompous, dilatory, evasive. Yet when a crisis arose, the colonial leaders were imperialists almost to a man.”9 In relying on its Australian colonials to return to the Old World to join the war on her side, Great Britain reversed its basic action in founding the colony—from expulsion under pain of death not to return, to call to return to fight to the death in the interests of the imperial founder. For Australians, this call proved irresistible in the short term. In Sydney alone, the largest city of the nation and site of the 6. See Clark, The People Make Laws, 369–70; T. B. Millar, Australia in Peace and War: External Relations since 1788 (Botany, NSW: Australian National University Press, 1991), 64. 7. Denoon, Mein-Smith and Wyndham, A History of Australia, 270. 8. E. M. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian Relations During World War I. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17. 9. Millar, Australia in Peace and War, 70.

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founding convict colony, 10,000 enlisted in the space of ten days.10 By the end of August 1914, 20,000 men had enlisted in recruitment centers in the state capitals around the nation. Within six weeks, after a very basic induction preparatory to further training in England, these recruits were embarked on a convoy of ships and on November 1, 1914, set sail for England. Some perspective on these figures is provided by a range of data. First, E. M. Andrews makes the point that despite the initial rapid enlistment, by the end of 1914, 93.6 percent of eligible men had not enlisted. Second, Andrews writes “The truth is that in Australia, as in Britain, voluntary recruiting was not to provide sufficient manpower, and, apart from the surge after Gallipoli, the numbers soon fell off.”11 This drop in recruiting led to a huge and divisive debate in Australian society about whether to introduce conscription to provide troops for the war. The fact that the Australian public refused to allow conscription elevated the Australian First World War soldier’s value: he was always a volunteer. As we shall see shortly this was an important element in the Anzac Legend constructed out of the Gallipoli Campaign. Third, a significant proportion of those who enlisted with the Australian forces in the First World War were actually British-born, who thought of themselves very much as British.12 Finally, enlistment in the ordinary ranks came predominantly from the working class. Once the war began, the existing economic balance of trade was disturbed, especially in exports. Thus, many Australians found themselves out of work, and ready to “take the King’s shilling.” As the war progressed and news of the heavy loss of life in protracted, miserable conditions began to break in Australia, people began to notice that it was “unemployed men [who] gathered outside Victoria Barracks in Melbourne eager to enlist to obtain food, shelter and clothing for their families while Mr Fat Man rolled past Victoria Barracks in his motor car. Mr Fat Man was getting richer: the poor, poorer.”13 Names and command structures of the Australian military forces reveal the hybrid imperial-colonial aspect of Australia’s involvement in the First World War. The Australian troops were named the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) by 10. For data on initial enlistment see Macintyre, 1901-1942: The Succeeding Age, 142–45; Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, 42–43; and Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974), 280–82 provides analytic tables of enlistment figures across the whole war, while noting that figures for this war are markedly unreliable. 11. Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, 45. 12. Ibid., 44. Andrews cites figures on pp. 11–12 to show that in the decade before the war, government assisted migration from England to Australia had increased, with 146,602 British migrants entering Australia in 1912 joining a nation whose population in 1914 was only 4,733,359. Andrews makes the point that these British subjects came via British transport to a nation where British culture in language, law, and the Anglican established church held sway. 13. Clark, The People Make Laws, 397.



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their Australian commanding officer, Brigadier-General William Bridges, aiming to uphold Australian identity within the imperial military enterprise. Against the British desire to have Australian (and New Zealand) troops made available to Britain, who would insert them into exiting British divisions, filling up gaps, Australia insisted that her troops would fight as separate units, with their own command structure and a code of discipline fitting to volunteers.14 Nevertheless, the campaigns in which these soldiers would fight would be commanded overall by officers of the British Army, who determined both strategy and tactics. Soggy campgrounds on the Salisbury Plain in England meant that the Australian convoy was diverted from there to Egypt to continue their military training; Turkey’s entry into the war led to the Australians being used first in the Gallipoli Campaign rather than on the Western Front. When they arrived in Cairo, the Australians were organized into two divisions, one made only of Australians and the other of Australians and New Zealanders. A member of Birdwood’s staff devised the acronym ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps; henceforth Anzac) for convenience.15 Ironically, as Manning Clark points out, the diversion of the Anzacs from England to Egypt to form a corps under the British general William Riddell Birdwood meant that “they were destined not for the heart of the Empire, but only its periphery.”16 From the preceding study of the colonial-imperial relationship between Great Britain and Australia, I argue that when the tie of culture and language is more powerful than the hostility caused by the colonial experience, the hybrid colonial subject is ready to endure a great deal in the hope of reclaiming unsullied cultural reputation/heritage. The more subtly a colonial-imperial relationship operating within the one culture is enmeshed with notions of colonial inferiority to the imperial founder, the more the colonial will try to prove his or her worth, rather than to reject the imperial center outright as foreign and oppressive. Australian endurance of appalling loss of life at Gallipoli in a war remote from any Australian concern—not ignoring the appalling loss of British lives and of other colonial troops in the same conflict—demonstrates this. There is no domination more effective than the one in which the dominated party actively seeks to connect with the dominator and to help the dominating party to maintain its system of control. We turn now to study an instance of this imperial domination of a one-time colonial nation in the Australian part in the Gallipoli Campaign of the First World War. Because the focus of this project is on the construction of gender, I will deal with the well-known story of male Australian participation in summary mode but will treat female Australian participation in detail. Because the Gallipoli Campaign is such a discrete element of the First World War in the strictly military sense, it is possible to examine Australian male engagement with the war under 14. See Ibid., 377–81 and Macintyre, 1901-1942: The Succeeding Age, 142 for these details. 15. See Macintyre, 1901-1942: The Succeeding Age, 147. 16. Clark, The People Make Laws, 388.

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that aspect alone. Female Australians’ participation in the war, however, cannot be defined so precisely to just one event. Therefore my treatment of female Australians’ activity during the war, while focusing on the Gallipoli Campaign where possible, will refer more widely to the war in general. This will provide the basis on which to conclude the chapter with a feminist postcolonial critique of the literary construction of the supposedly quintessential Australian who emerged from this event, the Anzac figure.

3.2  The Gallipoli Campaign 3.2.1  Male Australian Participation in the First World War The salient facts of the Gallipoli Campaign may be told briefly.17 The aim of the campaign was to relieve the stalemate on the Western Front by breaking into Europe through Constantinople, over-running the “old man” of Turkey so as to attack Germany and Austria-Hungary from their rear. The plan sounds reasonable, except for the fact that the British Navy had already attempted to take Constantinople by naval bombardment but had been kept at bay by mines that the Turks had sown across the Dardanelles Strait. When the navy was forced to retire after losing two battle ships and their men, the young first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill, determined to get past the blockade by sending troops overland. Among those troops would be the Anzacs training close by in Egypt. By this time, however, the element of surprise was lost and the Turks proved to be much better fighters than the Allies had expected, while the terrain over which the Anzacs had to make their attack—from a tiny beach up almost sheer cliffs—gave every advantage to the Turkish defenders perched on top. The Anzacs attacked before dawn on April 25, 1915. Instead of being landed according to plan, a miscalculation of the tides and the use of poor maps meant they were landed a mile further north, on a tiny beach from which rose almost sheer cliffs. The soldiers clung to their cliff faces, fighting the enemy and the diseases of trench warfare for eight months and dying in large numbers, until they were evacuated on a single night, without loss of a life, on the night of December 19–20 of that year.18 3.2.2  Female Australian Participation in the First World War Turning to Australian women, we find that they played many roles in support of the nation’s effort in the First World War. However, the ways in which women were 17. See Macintyre, 1901-1942: The Succeeding Age, 147–52; Clark, The People Make Laws, 398–400, 401–06, 408, 416–17, 421–22, 424–26; 53–113 for treatments at varying levels of detail of the campaign. 18. Part of the legend rehearsed each Anzac Day is the resourcefulness of the Anzacs who rigged up rifles to fire spasmodically to disguise the fact that they had departed.



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permitted to participate in this effort betrays sexism in the imperial context, which may legitimately be called imperialist sexism. On the one hand, women were refused enrolment in activities that were conventionally regarded as belonging to the male domain in that they carried authority or were associated with danger and bravery which were reserved to males. On the other hand, Australian women were allowed to serve in the armed forces only as nurses and at home in very stereotypical female roles, providing comforts for the soldiers in various ways. As we shall see at the close of this chapter, these forms of participation in the war were interpreted both during and after the war in ways that disadvantaged Australian women and delivered them very little social credit for the major contribution they had made. 3.2.2.1 The Home Front  At home in Australia, women engaged with the war effort in a variety of ways. Some campaigned for the war, encouraging enlistment, while others lobbied against it.19 Most contributed by way of organizations that provided assistance either at home or abroad for the soldiers. In one of the earliest pieces of critical writing about the interpretation of gender in the First World War Australia, Carmel Shute lists a number of such organizations, of which perhaps the most symbolic are the Socks Fund and the Wool Spinning Guild.20 As an expression of practical support, the Socks Fund produced 1,354,328 pairs of socks for soldiers during the First World War.21 The ideal Australian woman was to maintain hearth and home, leaving public affairs to men. While the Australian man was out in the world encountering the drama of war, she was to comfort him from home, to which he might eventually return as hero or wounded warrior. Her particular form of participation in this event was constructed as grieving for the men she produced for the war. In a study on “The Sacrificial Mother” of the First World War, Joy Damousi argues that “women giving their sons become [sic] the quintessential emblem of feminine sacrifice.”22 As the location of Gallipoli provoked comparisons between the Anzacs and ancient heroes who sacrificed their lives for the nation, so the woman in Australia was constructed preeminently as the mother or wife who sacrificed her sons and husband for the needs of the nation and the empire. Shute cites a striking example of this manipulation of women in a soldiers’ newspaper, the National Leader, 19. See Carmel Shute, “Heroines and Heroes: Sexual Mythology in Australia 1914–18,” Hecate 1 (1, 1975): 6–22, 7–12 for accounts of organizations such as the National Council of Women which vigorously supported men’s enlistment for the war compared with the Women’s Political Association and the Women’s Peace Army, which just as vigorously opposed it. 20. Shute, “Heroines and Heroes,” 15. 21. See Joan Beaumont, “Whatever Happened to Patriotic Women, 1914-1918?” Australian Historical Studies 16 (31, 115, October 2000): 280 for these statistics. 22. Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 30.

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telling women in August 1917, late in the war, that “Sparta stands not alone in the heroism of its women. The spirit which said ‘Return with or on your shield’ is burning brightly in the land.”23 3.2.2.2 The War Front  Over against this work of the vast majority of Australian women in the First World War was that of women who served at the war front. Although women in Australia had, in Shute’s words, “repeatedly offered their services to the military as ‘woman . . . ANYTHING’ [sic]” they were never afforded the structure of groups such as the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACs), Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), or Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) in Great Britain.24 Those Australian women who did work at the battle front were all involved in the one female-coded activity that could be tolerated close to the war, namely care of the sick. Yet even here, sexist practices predominated, with the overwhelming majority of female medical carers acting in the role of nurse even though Australian women who had degrees as doctors of medicine volunteered their services.25 The single dominant female role in the Australian armed forces in the First World War was that of nurse. Australian nurses worked in all the European theaters of war as well as others ranging from Mesopotamia to India to Vladivostok.26 The number of nurses who served in what came to be called the Australian Army Nursing Corps (AANS) is generally cited at a little over 2,000. Some 25 lost their lives, while 388 received awards for service, from the British Empire (CBE and OBE) and from other nations.27 In his survey of the medical aspects of the Gallipoli Campaign, Michael Tyquin comments that the fact that only a small number of nurses was deployed close to the fighting during the Gallipoli Campaign was due partly to “the Victorian attitudes of senior medical officers (both Australian and British).”28 However, Australian nurses did serve on hospital ships within sight and sound of the battle, on nearby Lemnos Island where a field hospital was established, 23. Shute, “Heroines and Heroes,” 10. 24. Ibid., 14, emphasis in the original. See Beaumont, “Whatever Happened to Patriotic Women, 1914-1918?” 275–76 for information about the British military forces for women. Those forces were the WAAC, WRNS, and WRAF. 25. For a study of heroic individual Australian women doctors, nurses, and others in the First World War and the Second World War see Susanna De Vries, Heroic Australian Women in War: Astonishing Tales of Bravery from Gallipoli to Kokoda (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2004). 26. See http://www.skp.com.au/memorials/pages/00010.htm, accessed August 29, 2005, for the list of places where Australian nurses served in the First World War. 27. See http://www.defence.gov.au/dpe/dhs/infocentre/history/army/raanc.htm, accessed August 29, 2005, for this information. 28. Michael B. Tyquin, Gallipoli: The Medical War: The Australian Army Medical Services in the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 (Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press, 1993) 154.



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and at large hospitals in Cairo and Alexandria caring for thousands of patients.29 By 1917, once the quality of their work had been demonstrated, Australian nurses began to be posted at clearing stations at the front lines, indicating how valuable their work had proven to be.30 Especially at the beginning, these women served under unnecessary difficulties caused not by the war but by the sexism of the time. The difficulties can be classed on the one hand as pragmatic and on the other as matters of ideology in interpretation. The pragmatic issues relate to conditions of living and working and the payment of Australian Army nurses while in service of their country. Certainly, some of these problems arose from the ad hoc nature of army nursing at the beginning of the First World War. For example, the first seven Australian nurses to go to the First World War simply volunteered their services for a hospital ship being prepared in Sydney and sailed on it on August 30, 1914.31 Forms of disadvantage that female nurses suffered because of this lack of adequate organization were the inappropriate costs they bore for food, clothing, and shelter. In Egypt, the nurses complained about having to pay mess fees for basic food provided by outside contractors. This was made worse by the fact that the nurses were paid less than males for the same work. At first, the nurses also found that they had to provide their own clothing. One of the women wrote, “We were not provided with anything—brought [sic] our own uniform—given no money to pay for it—we have never been repaid the cost of our uniforms etc.”32 Finally, both in settled places like Cairo and Alexandria and in camps close to the front, the standard of accommodation for the nurses was consistently below that of their male counterparts. The Fetherston Report of 1915–1916 looking into the poor administration of the Australian Army medical services in Egypt found that in Cairo “the Officers’ quarters are comfortably furnished, the nurses’ poorly.”33 On Lemnos, where the male officers had a recreation tent organized for themselves while the nurses had no bath tent, General Fetherston was reportedly “very angry about the accommodation for the sisters”; unfortunately, the improved housing he arranged for them was only ready just before the nurses left Lemnos at the end of the Gallipoli Campaign.34

29. For detailed treatments of the work and lives of nurses during the Gallipoli Campaign see Marianne Barker, Nightingales in the Mud: The Digger Sisters of the Great War 1914–18 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989) 29–48; Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (Melbourne: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 32–52; and Rupert Goodman, Our War Nurses: The History of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps 1902-1988 (Brisbane, Australia: Boolarong Publications, 1988), 20–47. 30. See http://www.awm.gov.au/1918/medical/nurses.htm, accessed August 29, 2005. 31. See Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 32; Goodman, Our War Nurses, 27. 32. Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 32. 33. Goodman, Our War Nurses, 45. 34. See Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 50.

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All of these problems can be seen as rising from something more systemic and ideological, namely a sexist view of women pervading Australian society that hindered the development of the structures needed for effective collaboration between men and women in the army medical services. One of the prominent nurses at the time later described the early AANS as “a disconnected body going to all and sundry officers for advice.”35 This lack of clear identity and authority structure meant that the female nurses’ status within the AIF was confused and therefore vulnerable within the institution. This status vulnerability disadvantaged the nurses in a number of ways. First, the most obvious example of this disadvantage was the “Jane Bell Affair” in 1915.36 A dispute over roles, authority, and chain of command broke out in Egypt between three top-ranking male medical officers and the Principal Matron of the AANS, Miss Jane Bell. A four-person power struggle eventuated, resulting in a formal War Office Inquiry. The inquiry exonerated all parties, declaring Miss Bell “a decidedly capable matron and fit for her position . . . [who] undoubtedly had the interests of her nurses at heart.”37 Nevertheless, while James Barrett managed to transfer to the Royal (British) Army Medical Corps, Miss Bell and the other Australian officer had their appointments terminated. Despite applying for other positions in the AANS, Miss Bell was never again appointed to any. Jan Bassett identifies “weaknesses in the structure of the AANS .  .  . and the ineffective leadership of both Australian and British medical services in Egypt” as major factors in this event.38 However, it is clear that in this context a woman who contested the authority of powerful men lost a struggle she could never have won. The failure of the Australian Army to devise an authority structure that recognized substantially the integrity of the all-female AANS betrays a male view of women as beneath this status. Second, from the outset, nurses were in a position of ambiguity on a number of levels. All nurses were affected by lack of clarity over their rank within the AIF; as women on the margins of the male-identified space of the battlefield they were subject to contrary pressures; and in the final representation to the Australian nation of its participation in the Great War, the nurses were barely mentioned. The issue of rank, says Goodman, “remained one of uncertainty throughout the war.”39 The reason for this problem was that the AANS developed in the course of the war from a volunteer organization that was never, during the First World War, formally part of the Defence Force. Instead, AANS members were “appointed” by the governor-general—the representative of the Crown in Australia. Goodman writes that the first surgeon-general of the AIF medical 35. Ibid., 34. 36. See Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 36–39; Goodman, Our War Nurses, 31, 33 for detailed treatments of this incident. 37. Ibid., 39. 38. Ibid., 37. 39. Goodman, Our War Nurses, 26.



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services presumed that the British would assume leadership in this area and that “any emergent problems would be resolved by the British administration.”40 Thus, in the still-enmeshed state of imperial-colonial relations between Britain and Australia at this time, the colonial partner failed to claim its own identity and act strongly on its own behalf, to the disadvantage specifically of women serving the Australian effort in the war. During the war the army did attempt to bring the nurses into the military system, with the result that “all members of the AANS were granted honorary rank in 1916, much against their wishes, as a form of social control.”41 This rank was like that of officers, but the nurses were nevertheless paid below officer rate, at the level of “other ranks.” At the end of the war, nurses suffering ill health (nearly twenty percent of those who served) were eligible for a disability pension, but found that “in spite of being ‘honorary officers,’ [they] were again paid as other ranks.”42 Thus, while serving their country they had been subject to military structures but were not fully recompensed for their service according to those same structures. Joan Beaumont writes that nurses “defy easy categorization because they supported the notion of separate spheres for men and women, and yet were included on the margins of the male world of the battlefront.”43 Katie Holmes argues that the nurse was “marginal to the ‘real’ meaning of the war—the ‘discovery’ of Australian manhood—. . . because in her marginality she was an ambiguous, uncertain figure.”44 Holmes locates the ambiguity of the First World War nurse in her relationship to the weakened soldier: healthy women caring for often severely disabled men in a context where male and female stereotypes were overdrawn. While men in the battlefield context were challenged to live up to the warrior hero image, women were constrained to operate entirely out of a nurturing mother image. From a study of nurses’ diaries and letters home, Holmes finds that nurses “constructed themselves within [the] categories of . . . mother, sister or ‘lover’ . . . and . . . moved between them.”45 Thus we see that Australian women were very engaged on the warfront, usually in the role of nurse. Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi argue that the Australian management of the female on the First World War battle front consisted of two strategies: “One response was to clothe the nurses’ body in an austere uniform; another was to relegate her to the margins in the histories and commemorations of 40. Ibid., 26–27. 41. Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 3. 42. Ibid., 99. 43. Beaumont, “Whatever Happened to Patriotic Women, 1914-1918?” 273–86, 278–79. See Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 3 for a similar view. 44. Katie Holmes, “Day Mothers and Night Nurses: World War I Nurses and Sexuality,” in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake eds., Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 43, 43–59. 45. Ibid., 46.

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war.”46 We have seen that nurses were constrained by rigorous restrictions on their dress and social life; at the end of this chapter we will see how they were relegated to the margins in writing about the Anzac event. As Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi sum it up, for both women and men “Australia was proving paradoxically more susceptible to traditionalist ideas about gender relations than the old country.”47

3.3  The Anzac Legend It is true that 8,141 Australian lives were lost in the eight months of the Gallipoli Campaign, without achieving the aims of the campaign.48 This resulted from a combination of elements: poor forward planning by the British military leadership; poor execution of military leadership by some of the British commanders at the site; blunders and genuine accidents that saw raw Anzac troops landed at the wrong site, presented with a completely impossible task but required to attempt it nevertheless at appalling cost to life. This happened because imperial British military leadership could not organize itself to replace incompetent leadership where required, to decide on the necessary evacuation, and to rethink the war strategy.49 3.3.1  The Anzac Legend: Its Significance This much blood spilled, this much cost to the nation, meant that something needed to be made of it. Something was made of this barely postcolonial participation in an essentially imperialist war. In a fashion that is marked with the values of colonies in imperial systems, what Australians made of the Gallipoli Campaign was the “Anzac Legend,” a mythos of the Anzacs in which certain male-marked characteristics were glorified. Among other effects, this did three things in the Australian consciousness that are significant for this research. First, it aggrandized Australian (and New Zealand) masculinity while it denigrated actual female participation in and self-sacrifice at the same event. In the creation of the Anzac Legend, female participation in the Gallipoli Campaign 46. Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi, “Introduction: Warfare, History and Gender,” in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake eds., Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, 1–20 (Cambridge: UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8. 47. Lake and Damousi, “Introduction: Warfare, History and Gender,” 6. 48. Figures of deaths at Gallipoli vary; for Australians, they range between 7,600 and 8,141. See Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, 52; Welsh, Great Southern Land, 368. 49. See Macintyre, 1901-1942: The Succeeding Age, 149–51; Clark, The People Make Laws, 422, 424; and Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, 53–60 for discussion of the failure in decisiveness of British leaders, especially Hamilton and Kitchener. For a succinct discussion of the Anzac Legend that grew out of the Gallipoli Campaign see Denoon, Mein-Smith, and Wyndham eds., A History of Australia, 267–89.



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was deliberately marginalized to the point that it was effectively erased from general consciousness. Second, the legend ascribed the creation of the Australian nation in blood, the “birth” of modern Australia, to males. This ascription of a distinctly female capacity used female-coded language to name male activity in an imperial context. Thus, to this day, Australian apprehension of this event, which yearly grows in importance for a nation still trying to define itself on the world stage, is overwhelmingly and misleadingly of male sacrifice, male heroism, males giving birth to the nation but in terms of male-marked values and behaviors. Third, the legend obliterated awareness that any other nation fought at Gallipoli for the Allies. In fact, British, French, Newfoundland, and Indian troops fought at various sites on the Gallipoli Peninsula, losing life at even greater rates than that Anzacs.50 It is only now being insisted on in the rhetoric of this event that nations other than Australia fought bravely and died in heroic numbers in this campaign. As Frank Welsh remarks, the legend was “a myth which denigrated the British share of the fighting, and which has resisted many attempts to present the facts . . . preoccupied with heaping praise on Australian soldiers, and failing to compare them with those of the other nations present.”51 Against this background of imperial-colonial relationships in the event of the First World War, I turn now to study the creation and content of the “Anzac Legend” from a feminist perspective. 3.3.2  Definition of the Legend In the shock of introduction to large-scale war, the Australians absolutized what was a new experience for them. Their appearance on the world stage, combined with the realization that war was not glamorous but mostly a hopelessly muddled, brutal, and prodigal waste of life, brought about a new consciousness in the young nation. Australians wanted this new awareness of theirs to be globally significant. Telling the story of the event in a strongly interpretive fashion, various writers forged a new mythology for Australia that became known as the Anzac Legend. Adrian Caesar situates his discussion of the Anzac Legend against an understanding of myth as evolving systems of meaning that “operate in society to foster beliefs which in turn make it ‘natural’ to look at things, events, people in specific, ideologically freighted ways.”52 Caesar notes that the Anzac Legend works together with an already existing “bush myth,” both about national character. As it happens, both of these myths focus on male figures in Australian history. As Caesar explains, the Anzac Legend is built on “an agglomeration of words and 50. Welsh, Great Southern Land, 368 cites 9,798 French; 2,431 New Zealand; and over 30,000 British deaths at Gallipoli. 51. Ibid. 52. Adrian Caesar, “National Myths of Manhood: Anzacs and Others,” in Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss eds., The Oxford Literary History of Australia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 147–59, 147.

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images which, through being often repeated and carrying meanings significant but not necessarily inherent, may come to have the appearance of truth.”53 The Legend is not stated formally anywhere, but any Australian school child can recite it. It is the tale of how brave and beautiful young Australian men, having volunteered spontaneously to help mother England rescue hapless Belgium from the German menace, leaped to the fray against the Turks at Gallipoli where they fought like the heroes of old, sacrificing their lives in the thousands to protect their mates and uphold their national honor. The “second verse” laments mother England’s military incompetence, shown up by the outstanding skills of her colonial troops. Finally, the legend speaks of these colonial warriors giving birth to the nation and of baptizing it in their blood. Despite the fact that the campaign actually ended in defeat and silent retreat from the battlefield, the Legend counts the Anzac performance in the Gallipoli Campaign as a triumph of the human spirit over death and despair. Adrian Caesar sums up the legend well, as the idea that “the Australian ‘character’ was tried, tested, and not found wanting in the crucible of war, so that Australian nationhood was confirmed on the heights of Gallipoli in 1915.”54 It is true that the Anzacs fought bravely and doggedly on Gallipoli, winning admiration even from their enemy. It is true that in a campaign that was hopeless from the start, the troops maintained their spirits and their commitment to the battle, despite appalling conditions and death rates. That is not denied here. However, the focus here is the way in which, the reasons why, and the significance for gender issues in particular, of the fact that Australians made such a sacred matter out of Gallipoli. First, there is no doubt that the Anzac Legend is sacred in Australia. In a country that is generally regarded as secular, the Anzac Legend echoes the language and values of the Christian religion held by the British founders of colonial Australia. The Legend is a tale of life and death, of the sacrifice of life so that others could be free, of young men heroically spilling their blood in selfless love of their God and country. It was stressed that men died nobly, for the highest possible cause, doing their duty in a way that should make their parents proud to sacrifice them. The echoes of the story of the salvific, sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in the language of grief used at the time of Gallipoli are very obvious. Joy Damousi cites some of the consolatory descriptions of dead soldiers sent to these men’s families.55 For example, a sympathy letter explicitly cites words from the Gospel of John (15:13) with which Jesus speaks of his own death, to interpret a soldier’s death, thus: “Your great pride in his gallant memory will help to ease the blow you have suffered. For what more could a man do than that he lay down his life for his friends.”56 53. 54. 55. 56.

Ibid. Ibid. Damousi, The Labour of Loss, 11–16. Ibid., 15.



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Robin Gerster names a number of other indicators of how Anzac was made sacred in Australia. The very word “Anzac” was protected by an act of Parliament, at first under the War Precautions Act and after the war under a specific statute that prevented the word being used in trade or business. During the war, the early forms of the myth, dispatches from war correspondents at Gallipoli, were printed and sent to schools for the inspiration of senior students in the state of New South Wales.57 Inga Clendinnen cites the First World War cartoon in which an Australian soldier was asked his religion. “‘What are you? Church of E, RC, YMCA, what?’ Answer: ‘AIF, mate.’”58 Decades later in a novel of the mid-1960s, a young boy “confuses the burning of Remembrance Day poppies with the burning of little wooden crosses on Ash Wednesday. To his horrified companion, ‘That was a blasphemous idea, anti-Anzac.’”59 In these latter two examples we see a number of transactions happening around the Anzac mythos. First, it is equated with other ecclesial denominations within Christianity. Second, the Australian soldier gives his religious allegiance to the Australian Imperial Force, from which the Anzacs came. Third, an Australian narrative decades after the First World War credibly portrays a child’s mind blurring together the Christian ritual that leads to Easter and a ritual commemorating the First World War. The logic that discriminates between these two rituals in another child’s mind takes Anzac as the center of gravity of meaning for Australians. To blur Anzac with Christianity is blasphemous to Anzac. In this narrative scenario, for the new generation in Australia, the definitively sacred is Anzac, against which Christianity must position itself. A final telling measure of just how sacred this event was made to be in Australia was that when women attempted to participate in the dawn service that became a ritual of remembrance of this event from 1916 onwards, they were “named as intruders onto the sacred male site of mourning and ritual.”60 Damousi notes that this rejection of the female from remembrance of an event claimed for males only occurred in the year 1938, the celebration of 150 years since the founding of the first British colony in Australia in 1788. In that same year, at the celebration of Australia Day on January 26, the date the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay in 1788, Aboriginal Australians had demonstrated against the British imperial invasion of their land.61 In a curious way in 1938, British imperialism and sexist rejection of women came together in the celebration of these two most significant national days of commemoration.

57. See Ibid., 25. 58. Inga Clendinnen, “Pilgrims, Saints and Sacred Places,” Boyer Lectures, Australian National Broadcaster, Lecture 2: Sunday November 21, 1999. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ boyers/stories/s67981.html. 59. Ibid., 20. The novel was Randolph Stow’s The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965). 60. Damousi, The Labour of Loss, 38. 61. See Ibid., 37–38.

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3.4  Postcolonial Feminist Critique of the Anzac Legend Having traced the major outline of the Anzac Legend and the meaning it acquired in Australia from its beginning, it is necessary to survey the writers, editors, and publishers who produced the Legend in order to show what a critical appraisal of both the legend and its process of production contributes to a postcolonial feminist reading of the death of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. 3.4.1  Editor of the Legend, George Robertson While writers create legendary narratives, the Anzac Legend was made possible by the powerful influence of a prominent publisher of turn-of-the-century Australia, George Robertson.62 George Robertson was born in England in 1860 to Scottish parents.63 At the age of twelve he was apprenticed to a bookseller in Glasgow; when he was nineteen he spent some years laboring in New Zealand before going to Sydney, Australia, in 1882 where he found work in the book trade, rapidly rising to owning a bookselling business of his own. Robertson developed an interest in Australian literature and began publishing in a serious way in 1895 with what was to be an Australian classic, A. B. Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River. In the course of the next forty years, while building one of the most powerful publishing houses in the country, Robertson published material that created and sustained the Anzac Legend. He published popular poetry and prose as well as the official, multivolume national history of the war, all of which played a role in establishing a certain view of Australia and Australians. Caroline V. Jones has studied the archives of George Robertson’s business (Angus & Robertson) to show how “George Robertson’s . . . insights into national cultural identity and literary convention influenced the kind of editor he chose, the manuscripts he accepted and the way in which they were shaped to manufacture national sentiment and legends of male mateship and egalitarianism.”64 Jones argues that Robertson’s publishing “shaped and crystallized a national cultural identity which even today forms a significant part of a quintessentially Australian narrative.”65 One of Robertson’s strategies according to Jones was to “encourage[e] his authors to change their approach towards a national narrative, exaggerating 62. In this final section of the chapter I depend very heavily on recent research on the impact George Robertson’s publishing had on Australian culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This research was presented by Caroline Viera Jones in 2004 to the University of Sydney as a doctoral dissertation, under the title, Australian Imprint: The Influence of George Robertson on A National Narrative (1890–1935). 63. For the following biographical details, see Anthony Barker, “Robertson, George (1860-1933),” in Geoffrey Serle ed., Australian Dictionary of Biography. Vol. 11: 1891–1939, Nes-Smi (Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1988), 414–15. 64. Jones, “Australian Imprint,” i. 65. Ibid.



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Australian egalitarianism, mateship and national sentiment according to how each title was marketed and distributed.”66 The issue of gender bias arises from this strategy of Robertson. Jones argues that once the editing of authors’ work is revealed, the First World War writers should be reappraised as not being guilty of gender bias.67 Jones shows that the main responsibility lies with Robertson or with editors he hired. Robertson was not necessarily intentionally misogynist but Jones shows that he was prepared to denigrate female characters in order to protect, legitimate, or celebrate male characters who represented the national traits Robertson wanted to promote. Whatever may be thought of Robertson’s intentions, the effects of the works he published can be seen to be sexist in the image they promote of women and men and the speaking positions they allow to them. The cumulative effect of this publishing before, during, and after the war made the Anzac Legend possible and sustained it, despite its inherent sexism, through to the present time. With Jones’s assistance, but reading her with some reservation, we turn to see how this national narrative was created. 3.4.2  Writer of the Anzac Legend: C. E. W. Bean The Anzac Legend is not a single document or oral tale but a view of the Anzacs at Gallipoli that is told in a number of ways. Before the First World War broke out, popular writers such as Henry Lawson, A. B. Paterson, and C. J Dennis had created the image of the bushman as a distinctly Australian figure—the man (and sometimes the woman) who had by that time come to terms with the environment to which Britain had sent her citizens.68 In the process the bushman had developed special skills in both work and life, as well as emphasizing certain aspects of personality that began to be drawn as distinctively Australian. This writing proved to be persuasive because by the turn of the nineteenth century, there was a growing appetite for the creation of an Australian mythology. This appetite was focused by the notion held by many Australians who thought of themselves as transplanted Britons, that Australia’s brief British-based history lacked anything truly historical to celebrate which could thus focus the nation’s self-identity. The proclaimer par excellence of the Australian bushman in the guise of the Anzac soldier was Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean (1879–1968). Bean was born in Australia but effectively raised an Englishman. He was born to English parents in 66. Ibid., xiii. 67. Ibid, xii presents her discussion of Marilyn Lake’s feminist critiques of Australian society. 68. Henry Lawson (1867–1922) and A. B. Paterson (1864–1941) wrote both poetry and short stories for George Robertson in the period leading up to the First World War. C. J. Dennis (1876–1938), also published by Robertson, wrote during and after the First World War, creating an urban figure who called on the skills of surviving city life to become an Anzac hero.

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the large inland country town of Bathurst in New South Wales, where his father was headmaster of a private boys’ school.69 When Bean was nine years old, the family moved back to England, where he completed his education at Clifton College and at Oxford, where he read Classics. Having failed to qualify for the Indian Civil Service but having been called to the Bar of the Inner temple in 1903, Bean returned to Australia in 1904. There he worked for a few years as an assistant on the country legal circuit of New South Wales. From this experience he began to write articles about the bush for the major Sydney newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald. Bean wrote about the Australian wool industry, about life along the great Darling River, and, not long before the First World War, in 1911, about three battleships that England was building for the fledgling Royal Australian Navy.70 His experience traveling around outback New South Wales, where he encountered “a procession of squatters, shearers, rouseabouts, boundary-riders, swagmen, bullock teams, flocks of sheep, plagues of rabbits and many varieties of natural and human disasters,” gave Bean the image of the Australian bushman that he strongly admired.71 It was this image that Bean took with him when he went to Gallipoli in 1915 as official Australian war correspondent, where he landed on the day the attack began and stayed until the day before the evacuation. Bean wrote dispatches back to Australia as the campaign progressed, but he also wrote notes filling some three hundred volumes, about daily life and work on Gallipoli. Bean wrote two other works that are credited with creating and sustaining the Anzac Legend. They were, first, a single volume of contributions produced by the men at Gallipoli and edited by Bean as a souvenir item for the troops, known as The Anzac Book; and second, a twelve-volume history of the First World War, titled Official History Of Australia In the War Of 1914–1918.72 These two pieces of writing are markedly different in style and volume but they can be compared in the weight of influence they had in establishing the image of the Anzac soldier. The single-volume The Anzac Book is a motley collection of soldiers’ poetry, prose, and cartoons filling 165 pages, whereas the official history is twelve volumes of prose written under editorial direction to produce a consistent line and tone appropriate to an official national history. Yet, no doubt because of its brevity as well as its humor and sense of immediacy, coming from the men at Gallipoli itself, The Anzac Book was by far the more readily known. Robin Gerster claims 69. For biographical details of C. E. W. Bean see “Bean, C. E. W,” in William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews, eds., The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 2nd ed. (Melbourne and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 85; Caesar, “National Myths of Manhood,” 152 for other typical biographical sketches of Bean. 70. See C. E. W. Bean, Flagships Three (London: Alston Rivers, 1913). 71. Wilde, Hooton and Andrews eds., The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, 85. 72. See C. E. W. Bean ed., The Anzac Book: Written and Illustrated in Gallipoli by the Men of Anzac (London: Cassell and Cpy, Ltd., 1916) and C. E. W. Bean, gen. ed., Official History of Australia In the War Of 1914-1918, twelve volumes, various editions (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1937–42), particularly Vols. 1–2.



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on the evidence of sales that it probably was the war book found most frequently in Australian homes.73 3.4.3  The Anzac Book D. A. Kent has argued that The Anzac Book made the first presentation of the Anzac “digger,” that is, soldier, and that because of Bean’s enormous effort in selling the book it made an initial and lasting impression on Australian consciousness.74 Kent writes that the Anzac Legend is built out of “the men who displayed the characteristics which Bean was to popularize in The Anzac Book and enshrine in The Official History until their image encompassed all.”75 Thus, both of these literary productions can be seen as being very influential in shaping Australian consciousness at the time of the First World War. What is particularly important for this book is that these two works shape a young nation’s celebration of its heroism in a way that lionizes male behavior but disallows or obliterates female participation in a major event of the community’s history. Awareness of this tendency in constructing a story can alert people to a similar tendency in reading the Gospel of Mark, the narrative of a young community still seeking self-definition in an imperial-colonial context. As we shall see in the last two chapters of this book, very many tendencies of the sexist fascination with the male and with marginalization of the female that we have seen in the narrative treatment of convict women also operate in the Gospel of Mark. In order to show this strategy also at work in the treatment of Australia’s participation in the First World War at Gallipoli, we will look more closely now at C. E. W. Bean’s work in The Anzac Book and then The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918. The Anzac Book was produced during 1915 as a result of contributions that Charles Bean sought from Anzacs. The contents are both written and pictorial, ranging from the formal to the informal in both genres. The contributors include all ranks from private to the lieutenant-general (Sir W. R. Birdwood) who commanded the Australians. Recurring themes in the book are the heroic nobility of the Anzac troops, the marvelous camaraderie between them, and the strong connection of mutual esteem between the Anzacs and the Empire. In tone, the book moves from laconic humor about daily life and toil at Gallipoli to more formal and sometimes grandiose reflections on the meaning of the suffering and death of the Australian soldiers at that place, so rich with ancient military history and epic, with which at least some contributors were familiar. 73. Robin Gerster, Big-Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1987), 28. 74. See D. A. Kent, “The Anzac Book and The Anzac Legend: C. E. W. Bean as Editor and Image-Maker,” Historical Studies 21 (84, April 1985): 376–90, especially pp. 387–90 where Kent details Bean’s efforts to sell the book, which realized sales of at least 104,000 copies. 75. Ibid., 378.

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Adrian Caesar comments that starting from the British flag serving as the backdrop to the wounded Anzac soldier on the front cover, the book “might be easier in some respects to read . . . as propaganda for the British Empire than as a statement of idealistic nationalism.”76 Still at the formal level, a poem “Wandering Spirits” accompanies a full-page drawing of men in Elizabethan-era costume landing from sailing ships on a shore very like that of Anzac Cove. The poem addresses as “fathers” these Elizabethan explorers, founders of the British Empire, expressing the Anzacs’ intention to “defend your Empire or be slain.”77 This dying is portrayed as heroic martyrdom. An untitled poem starts: “Oh, sweet and seemly so to die, indeed, / These are our martyrs, and their blood the seed / Of nobler futures.”78 The poem “The Trojan War, 1915” declares the Hellespont freshly “historic” and “made sacred by our Southern dead.” In place of Homer’s figures, “Australian backblock heroes slain, / With Hector and Achilles lie, [where] In honour to plain Private Bill / Great Agamemnon lifts his hand!”79 Immediately below, the poem “The Price” calls Gallipoli “Horror . . . and carnage,” but also “Part of the price of peace.”80 C. E. W. Bean himself contributed a fourstanza poem, “Non Nobis,” hoping that from the “cedar trees” of fallen Australians “a taller pride / . . . May clothe one day the valleyside.”81 Caroline Jones comments that “Bean wanted to believe that the Anzacs bequeathed a noble legacy which could atone for the excesses of war.”82 She cites Bean writing that for the Anzacs “life was very dear, but life was not worth living unless they could be true to their idea of Australian manhood.”83 The informal genres deal with both the great and the small aspects of fighting at Gallipoli. Fighting off vermin, eating army food, enjoying the relief of tobacco, but enduring the tedium of endlessly fetching water, living permanently in dugouts, are all reflected on humorously. Perhaps, however, the strongest impressions of Australian character, cast in a strongly masculine manner, are conveyed by cartoons. C. E W. Bean sketched “The Real” soldier as burdened by kit and carrying water, to contrast with “The Ideal” on guard with rifle at the ready.84 In four fullpage cartoons, David Barker mocked military rigor, depicting a battered, unkempt soldier looking more drunk than heroic; a sentry far from alert at 4:30 a.m.; a wounded soldier whose foot has been blown off who objects “D’yer think I’m 76. Caesar, “National Myths of Manhood,” 149. 77. Bean ed., The Anzac Book, 14–15. 78. Ibid, 26. 79. Ibid., 104. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 11. 82. Jones, “Australian Imprint,” 209. 83. Ibid., citing Bean, Story of Anzac, Vol. 1, 1921, 607. 84. Ibid., xv. See also his “Portrait of an Australian soldier returning from the field of glory at Helles, May 11, 1915,” where the warrior becomes beast of burden, his great coat bulging with provisions, carrying firewood and water, p. 40.



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doing this for fun?” as he is carried by two laconic, cigarette-smoking diggers; and a soldier bug-eyed with rage or disbelief that the jam is “Apricot Again!”85 These cartoons in particular suggest that under intense pressure Australian men are unfazed, refusing to take conventional military values too seriously and inverting ordinary values since they care little about pain but have passion to spare for food. Australians reading this book would have gained the impression that the Anzacs were immensely heroic but casual about their bravery as only the truly great can afford to be. They also would have been led to believe that this strong demonstration of Australian character on the world stage was entirely male, since not a woman is to be heard or seen in The Anzac Book except perhaps in the reflection on “My Lady Nicotine.”86 For the Australian reader familiar with Paterson, Lawson, and Bean’s prewar writing, this character demonstrated all the virtues of the recently created bushman figure—tough, resourceful, devoted to his mates, a man of few words but driven by the endless struggle with a harsh environment to appreciate the essential values of life. However, Bean’s writing about Gallipoli was edited to minimize women’s presence at the scene and in support. In this way the field of glory for Australian national consciousness that Australian writers and editors made of Gallipoli was created as a male-only domain. In effect, the Australian character that was forged in writing about Gallipoli made the distinctive, notable Australian character to be solely male. This was a masculinization of Australian consciousness in an imperial context. 3.4.4  The Official History of the First World War After the war, Bean used his meticulous notes, which he had ensured were safely returned to Australia, to edit a twelve-volume official history of the First World War, of which he himself wrote the first six volumes. The project was paid for by the Australian federal government and published by Angus and Robertson in Sydney, the publishers of Lawson, Paterson, and Dennis, to whose influence in the publication of Bean’s writing we will come shortly.87 As the project came to its close, Bean became involved during the Second World War in creating the Commonwealth Archives and planning the National War Memorial in the new national capital, Canberra. Thus, his professional life was steeped in presenting the Australian involvement in war, especially the First World War. Bean’s style of writing The Official History reveals important values he held about his subject, values which contributed to the image he produced of the Anzac soldier. Bean’s style of writing flows out of the fact that he had gathered his material 85. Ibid., 22, 29, 43, 142. 86. Ibid., 142. 87. See Caesar, “National Myths of Manhood,” 152; Jones, “Australian Imprint,” 174–76 for a summary of the twenty-three years, 1919–42 that it took Bean to complete the writing and editing of these volumes.

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in daily observations on the scene at Gallipoli and in the trenches in France, among the soldiers. Thus he wrote from the ground up, from the experience of the soldier in the field. Caroline V. Jones writes that as an experienced journalist, Bean had an eye for the significant, ordinary detail and a practiced ear for plain English that communicated well to the masses. He “believed in attempting to send back the truth rather than exaggeration from the trenches.” Thus, says Jones, “his approach was one of minutiae rather than grand history.”88 In the first volume of The Official History Bean introduced his legendary Anzac figure in a way that implicitly put aside the convict character of Australia. In place of a convicted criminal in chains, cowed and controlled by the overseer’s whip, the Anzac soldier “possesses a ‘peculiar independence of character,’ ‘vigorous and unfettered initiative,’ any restraints being self-imposed rather than the product of external authority. His ‘reputation for indiscipline’ is offset by ‘self-control’ in ‘critical moments.’”89 As he closed this first book, Bean wrote that the Anzacs were always “true to their idea of Australian manhood.”90 As many have argued, however, the manhood that Bean saw was the romanticized view that an Englishman held of the colonials that he admired, a view coming from Bean’s late-nineteenth-century English public school education. It is of course the ultimate irony that it was an Englishman who created this legend of Australian identity. Even in his moment of apparently greatest self-definition, the colonial was still being formed in the hands and the mind of the imperial master. As Adrian Caesar argues, “Australia and Australians proved themselves, excelling not principally in their own terms but in militaristic ideas of manhood inherited from the Empire.”91 In this elevation of the Australian from convict to celebrated member of the British Empire through the creation of the Anzac Legend we see yet again that it was achieved entirely in terms of the male figure as envisaged by the dominant culture, that of the Empire. That is, the Anzac figure is a sexist, imperialistic fiction. Despite the reality of the contribution that Australian women made to the war effort, the Anzac Legend celebrates the male only. It takes a postcolonial feminist critique to discern this. Of course, one person’s truth may not be another’s. As Jones shows in her work, Bean’s approach brought him into conflict with George Robertson, publisher of the history, who considered that Bean’s plan was not grand enough for a national history. From her study of the correspondence between Robertson and various writers and editors involved in producing The Official History, Caroline V. Jones sums up that “George Robertson’s insistence that Bean introduce The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 in a manner which glorified Australia’s contribution within the context of the Allied effort, and his belief in a meticulous 88. Jones, “Australian Imprint,” 176. See also Denoon, Mein-Smith and Wyndham eds., A History of Australia, 274 on this point. 89. Cited in Caesar, “National Myths of Manhood,” 152. 90. Ibid., 153. 91. Ibid.



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literary revision, altered the kind of narrative which was written and the concept of national character it encapsulated.”92 As a general comparison with The Anzac Book, which we have seen presents Australian male soldiers only, The Official History does describe the participation of Australian women in the First World War, but does so in such a restricted fashion that their engagement in the national effort is effectively removed from the reader’s awareness. Caroline Jones’s study of the correspondence between writers and editors and of the drafts of The Official History through four stages of development shows the steady elimination of women from the account of the war. This elimination process happened both at the macro-planning level of the project and at the level of writing. First, at the level of conceiving the whole project, Bean had proposed to open the official history with a chapter on the volunteer effort on the home front, which Robertson rejected, calling Bean “‘a Wanterwriteandcant.’” Furthermore, Robertson rejected Bean’s idea that Gallipoli was the “birth of the nation.” Having published the work of Lawson and Paterson and others in the nineties while Bean was at school in England, Robertson believed that Australia already had a sense of itself. Thus he scoffed that Bean “will never be able to see that it is tosh to say that the AIF ‘created the history of their country,’ or that they ‘won’ something Australia already possessed when they A.I.F.’d.”93 At the structural level The Official History was expanded from an originally planned single volume to twelve, so that although Bean had described nurses at the front and the patriotic work of women and children at home, “in the published version, this was reduced to the final sentence of Chapter One.”94 In his original draft of Volume One, describing the female nurses’ actions as an instance of Australian “mateship,” Bean had written, “The Australian nurses in France when the 2nd Australian Casualty Clearing Station was bombed near Steenwerk moved about amongst their helpless shell-shocked patients while a second aeroplane droned overhead.”95 However, in the published text, this sentence about the nurses was replaced by a general reflection on the awareness (including in Britain) of Australian character that was produced by the war. Second, this marginalization of women’s involvement in the First World War occurred also as the writing passed through various hands, under the editorship of Bean and the scrutiny of the publisher, George Robertson. Jones shows that three chapters on women, children, and the home effort prepared by a writer called Heney were reduced in four significant ways when they passed into the hands of another writer, Professor Ernest Scott. First, Heney’s three chapters which had been described by Bean as “vague and mushy” were reduced to one by eliminating

92. 93. 94. 95.

Ibid., 174. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 201.

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the first two and retaining only the third, on the raising of patriotic funds. Second, Jones found that in the course of this rearrangement, “women’s removal from the Anzac legend was also exacerbated by the splitting up of the original first chapter into an introduction and first chapter, and the siphoning of most of the domestic front material to volume eleven.”96 Third, since Scott was interested in economic history the chapter on raising patriotic funds focused not on the grassroots people but on the chief organizers, the elite women who organized the aid societies. Thus, writes Jones, “an analysis of upper-class women’s administration of patriotic funds took precedence over ordinary women and children’s volunteer efforts and an entirely different kind of history was the unfortunate result.”97 Indeed, Jones goes on to say that “one of the few examples of positive female participation and working-class sacrifice lifted from Heney’s manuscript was merely inserted in a footnote.”98 Fourth, and in keeping with the tenor of The Anzac Book, women were represented in The Official History in rigidly stereotypical and demeaning roles. While Scott portrayed the Anzac soldiers as “Adonis-like” he retained from Heney’s manuscript a “description of the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ of women, . . . lifted out of context and . . . the harsher for it.”99 Scott also kept in what Jones describes as “Bean’s favourite extract on farewelling the troops pre-dawn.” Not surprisingly, the description of women emotionally steeling themselves against grief as they prepare to pray and suffer, ends with the somber assessment, “Such is women’s part in war, how bitter and hopeless, only a woman knows.”100 Thus, the image of Australian women emerging from The Official History is of a figure only marginally involved in a great national enterprise, one properly relegated literarily to a section of a chapter, a sentence, a footnote. Despite great inventiveness and daring on the part of many individual women, the Anzac Legend acknowledged the Australian woman only in very stereotypical fashion, in the shadow of the Australian male who had proven not only himself, but indeed the whole nation in the imperialistic war between the European powers that was the First World War. Such a woman does not speak—her voice is not heard as an Englishman (C. E. W. Bean) and a Scotsman (George Robertson) become “colonials” tell the tale of a new nation. In her summation, Jones writes, “By producing an official history which celebrated the country’s soldiers, Bean and his publisher encouraged a young and 96. Ibid., 200. Another way to get some sense of proportion on the representation of women’s participation in the national war effort in the First World War is to see that The Official History consisted of eleven volumes, of which the shortest was 366 pages long, the rest varying between 600 and 1,000 pages. In this collection the section on women in Volume Eleven was 42 pages in length. 97. Ibid., 171. 98. Ibid., 172. 99. Ibid., 171–72. 100. Ibid., 172.



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masculinist side to the depiction of Australian cultural identity and enshrined the Anzac legend and Gallipoli with the national narrative.”101 The other aspect of this depiction is that in the nation’s sense of itself that was celebrated from 1916 onward on April 25, Anzac Day, males were constructed as the quintessential carriers of the nation’s virtues. In the Anzac Legend that was made out of thousands of lives lost, maimed, and constrained by the strictures of war, only a portion—the male portion—of the nation’s actual character and resources of spirit was proclaimed. Women had tasks to perform, true enough, but when the nation was to be envisaged and celebrated in its most noble and glorious form, it was utterly masculine. Thus, the Anzac Legend denied recognition to women for the burdens they actually carried in the First World War, with all the consequences in deprivation of social esteem, power, and freedom that attends acknowledgment of national heroism. It also denied to the young nation the benefit of fully realizing the stalwart heroism and creativity of its women. It was to take the Second World War and succeeding waves of feminism to redress this imbalance, in a project that is not yet complete. At the end of three chapters drawing postcolonial feminist categories from the experience of modern Australian history of the imperial-colonial relationship with Great Britain, it is possible to sum up a list of items of interpretation with which to approach the Gospel of Mark. First, we can suspect that stories produced in an imperial-colonial context will tend to focus on struggles for possession of lands or people. Second, the primary content of such narratives will be the will to dominate in male-on-male competition; initiative, creativity, and daring in these contexts will be properly male. Therefore, male voices will tell the story, from a male point of view, and the most attractive, engaging, and interesting actions will be performed by male characters who will determine the plot. Third, prized values in these stories will be absolute loyalty to and self-sacrifice in an all-male environment, for which there will be appropriate rewards, usually in a hierarchical system. Finally, male bonding will be the preeminent form of human social organization. By comparison, female characters will often be those who are possessed or captured in some way. They will rarely be shown to dominate, especially over males; if they display initiative, creativity, or daring their sexual identity or sexual honor will be considered suspect. Female voices will rarely be heard in direct speech, nor will we be often given a female point of view. Females will not determine the plot and will tend to appear only incidentally, to illustrate the male story, as distinct from constructing it as equal parties. Female characters will still be expected to give absolute, self-sacrificing loyalty to the dominant males in this system, but they will not get the same rewards as males for this effort, if they receive any at all. Finally, the preeminent importance of male bonding means that females must exist to serve this social arrangement; if they do not, they will be construed as threats to the social order and thus, evil.

101. Ibid., 174–75.

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3.5 Conclusion I have spent three chapters accounting for the perspective of a particular group of readers, that is, those who read through the lens of Australian postcolonial feminism. This is the perspective of a particular kind of context of reception for ideas or a text. I will now spend one chapter to introduce the final two, which will focus on the text to be read, namely the Gospel of Mark. This intervening chapter will first discuss the first-century CE Roman Imperial context of production of Mark. It will establish the Roman imperial context of the first-century Mediterranean in which Jesus of Nazareth lived as a provincial of Judaea and the Gospel of Mark was written. Second, the chapter will argue that the Gospel of Mark is a narrative influenced by conventions of Greek narrative writing of the late first century CE. To do this, the chapter will survey Greek principles of narrative writing and some examples that show how female characters are ordinarily constructed. On the basis of this historical context and literary background the chapter will set up the possibility of reading the Gospel of Mark as a first-century CE koiné Greek narrative, from the perspective of the postcolonial feminist categories of interpretation that have been developed in the first three chapters.

Chapter 4 THE GOSPEL OF MARK, A CHRISTIAN NARRATIVE OF THE FIRST CENTURY CE

The postcolonial reading strategy named vernacular hermeneutics, as outlined in Chapter 1 and demonstrated in Chapters 2 and 3, prepares us to read the Gospel of Mark from a postcolonial feminist perspective. We have noted in these latter two chapters the marginalization of women by means of the way their image and voice were presented in narrative constructions of significant events of Australian life, in which women played a part. Given the tendency observed so far in this study, to marginalize and silence female characters in narrative, we come alerted to the possibility of the same thing operating in the Gospel of Mark. In this chapter, we turn from considering the Australian context of reading that shapes a postcolonial feminist lens, to examining the text of the Gospel of Mark. A basic assumption I make in reading the Gospel of Mark is that it functions as a narrative, and thus can be analyzed under the constituent elements of narrative, such as plot and character. In the first section of this chapter I will use these two narrative elements, plot and character, to enable me to construct a way to read this gospel from a feminist perspective. Second, I will review briefly some features of Mark as a Christian narrative of the first century CE, such as its provenance and genre, especially when seen in relation to other similar compositions in Greek of the period.

4.1  Literary Features of the Gospel of Mark In this treatment of the literary features of the gospel I will discuss two major elements of Markan literary technique, namely the construction of plot and characterization. With regard to the construction of plot, I will present an alternate literary structure of Mark that will enable me to read the gospel from an intentionally feminist perspective. This alternate literary structure for the Gospel of Mark is built on the stories about women in the gospel. This structure highlights a sexist practice of the narrative’s plot, by means of which women are marginalized in this Gospel. Since it operates at the large structural level of the work, I will treat it fully in this chapter and then assume it in the following chapters. Against

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this unconsciously sexist strategy of the Markan narrator, I assert a contrapuntal reading of the women’s stories to counteract the destructive impact of the malefocused Markan narrative. Markan characterization is a second form of sexist literary practice, which denigrates, contains, and silences the already-isolated female characters. I will describe this characterization in general terms in this chapter and then treat the characterization of each woman in the individual stories in Chapters 5 and 6. In this chapter, I will outline the way in which Mark’s treatment of female characters, identifying them by relationship to a family male figure and allowing them extremely limited voice, creates the sense that female characters in Mark are regarded as disorderly, needing to be kept strongly under male control. 4.1.1  Marginalization by Plot The first, most obvious, reductive strategy of the Gospel of Mark that marginalizes women is the way stories about them are plotted in the large structure of the Gospel of Mark.1 I readily acknowledge that the Gospel is written to narrate the life, death, and proclaimed resurrection of its chief male protagonist, Jesus of Nazareth. As indicated in Appendix 1, the life of Jesus in his career of preaching and healing, culminating in his journey to Jerusalem and arrest there, his execution, burial, and proclaimed resurrection provides the structure of the plot. Occurring at irregular intervals throughout the gospel plot are isolated stories about female characters, each of whom is, generally, the only female character in her story. In contrast to the sustained presence in the narrative of the character, Jesus, the stories about women are notably isolated from one another in the large structure of the plot of Mark. They are placed irregularly across the narrative of Mark, in which male characters, by contrast, occupy every scene and almost always have the companionship of one another as they drive the plot toward its climax and denouement.2 Until the very last story about women, each female character has a single appearance only in the narrative; no female character has a repeat appearance. No woman talks to another woman in the Gospel, except for the severely disapproved-of Herodias who plots capricious, retaliatory murder with her daughter and the similarly disapproved-of women who flee the tomb, abandoning 1. My comments in this section relate to my proposed alternate structure of Mark, based on the placement of the women’s stories in the plot of the narrative. This structure is provided in graphic form in Appendix 1. 2. The only occasions when male characters are portrayed in the narrative as being alone for any significant period of time are Jesus’s forty days of testing in the wilderness (Mk 1:12-13), his private prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mk 14:32-42) and Jesus’s death on the cross where he is abandoned by all including God his Father (Mk 15:33-37). The only time when Jesus is not “on stage” in Mark is during the story of the beheading of John the Baptizer (Mk 6:14-29).



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the resurrection kerygma at the end of the Gospel. In both these exceptional stories where women talk together, the outcome for males is disastrous. The exception thus proves the rule: women in this Gospel are to be treated in isolation from one another. If they are allowed to congregate, even in twos or threes, they have a very negative effect on the work that good men try to do, spreading the word of God. In this aspect of their representation in the narrative, the female characters are strongly reminiscent of Australia’s founding female convicts, subject to deliberate isolation strategies in a variety of ways in the Female Factory, because they were famously judged to be “contumacious, ungovernable and incorrigible.”3 I do not argue that Mark deliberately constructed into his Gospel’s form the secondary voice or countersubject that I will identify as that of the women’s stories.4 However, I do assert that the women in the Gospel of Mark may be read as a coherent countersubject, such as we may hear in an intentionally contrapuntal reading. Sounding rather more as isolated phrases than as easily detected and connected sequences of sound, the stories of women will be found nevertheless to present an accumulating image of women that is matter for postcolonial feminist reflection on the meaning and value of the Gospel of Mark, and particularly of its climactic scene, the death of Jesus in Mark. Choosing to highlight the placement of the women’s stories in the overall narrative structure of the gospel and to connect the stories about women in Mark as a coherent countersubject creates the alternate literary structure presented graphically in Appendix 1.5 This is a subversive counter-structure produced by linking the women’s stories rather than focusing on the stories featuring the clearly 3. See the characterization of female convicts as uncontrollable in their speech in Kirsty Reid, “‘Contumacious, Ungovernable and Incorrigible:’ Convict Women and Workplace Resistance, Van Diemen’s Land, 1820-1839,” in Ian Duffield and James Bradley eds., Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), 106–23. 4. See Joanna Dewey, “Mark as Interwoven Tapestry: Forecasts and Echoes for a Listening Audience,” CBQ 53 (2, 1991): 221–36 for a study of the composition of Mark as fugal, in which the views of many other scholars on Mark’s structure are surveyed. 5. For a schematic view of the following remarks on structure and counter-structure in Mark see Appendix 1. Against a very simplified narrative structure based on Jesus’s career in Mark, the Table shows the placement of the stories about women in Mark. The Table shows the large structures of the familial females of Mk 1–12 framed by widows and the functional females of Mk 14–16, framed by anointing women. Within this large structural level, the Table shows two substructures within Mk 1–12. The first is built on mothers and daughters who appear in Mk 1–7. The second features two individual women who, as teacher (7:24-30) or teaching material (12:41-44) ironically frame Jesus’s intensive yet failed attempt to teach his disciples in Mk 8–12. The story of the Syrophoenician woman in Mk 7:24-30, common to both substructures, holds them together, as a hinge. After her story, no woman seeks help from Jesus; rather, women begin to relate to Jesus much more functionally, in connection with his death, burial, and resurrection.

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intended main characters, the males such as Jesus, God, the disciples and Jesus’s opponents, both Jewish and Roman. The prominent structure of the Markan narrative is built on the patterned progression of Jesus from his baptism, through controversial ministry in Galilee and beyond, to Jerusalem where Jesus’s conflicts with the leaders of his own religious tradition lead to his arrest, trial and execution, and burial and resurrection.6 6. Most scholars would see seven major phases in Mark, all focused on what Jesus does. The first phase opens the Gospel and tells of Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptizer; the second treats Jesus’s early success and conflicts in ministry, beginning either at the arrest of John at 1:14 or at Jesus’s calling of the first four disciples at 1:16. The third phase begins at 3:7 after the first notice that Jesus’s opponents intend to kill him (3:6); some scholars delay this phase until 3:13, when Jesus appoints and empowers twelve named males as apostles. This phase shows Jesus moving further into conflict with the authorities and his family, giving extended parabolic teaching in Chapter 4 and demonstrating powers over the sea, demons, and death that some find frightening. The opening of the fourth phase is the most disputed by scholars: in a survey of twenty-one proposed structures, there are as many as nine different starting points. Most name one point or another in Chapter 6, either the beginning of the chapter; or Jesus’s sending out of the twelve on mission (6:7); or the beginning (6:14) of the interpolated story of the execution of John the Baptizer; or the disciples’ return to Jesus after mission (6:30); or turning to him when people need food (6:35). Yet other scholars find no breaks in Chapter 6 at all. This fourth phase includes two miraculous feedings of large crowds of people, another demonstration of Jesus’s power over the sea by walking on it, provocative teachings by Jesus about ritual purity and some further healings. The fifth phase starts either at 8:22 where Jesus heals the first of two blind men or at 8:27 where he asks the central question of the Gospel, namely who people and particularly his disciples, think he is. The fifth phase tells the journey of Jesus and his disciples from Caesarea Philippi in the far north of Palestine to Jerusalem, the capital city of Judaea, in the south. In the course of it, he predicts three times that he will die and rise from death. Despite his glorious transfiguration in the sight of his inner circle of three disciples, continuing miraculous healings and insistent teachings, this phase shows Jesus as unable to lead his disciples to see and hear him authentically. The phase closes with Jesus restoring sight to a blind man who follows him gladly on the way on which Jesus’s own disciples have begun to drag their feet. The sixth phase begins at 11:1 when Jesus makes his triumphal entry to Jerusalem in which he and the religious authorities debate for the next two chapters, ending with Jesus’s apocalyptic judgment against the Temple system, in Chapter 13. Chapter 14:1 opens the seventh phase of the gospel, the passion narrative, in which Jesus takes a last Passover supper with his disciples, is arrested in Gethsemane, tried, condemned and executed, dies, and is buried. Most scholars see this phase carrying through to the conclusion of the gospel at 16:8, where the women who have discovered Jesus’s tomb empty and been told to proclaim him as raised, run from the tomb and say nothing out of fear. Some see these final verses (16:1-8) as an eighth phase. For a survey of the structural frameworks of seventeen major scholars see Joanna Dewey, “Mark as Interwoven Tapestry,” fn. 3. For Markan structures proposed by other major commentators see also C. E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel According to St Mark:



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Female characters in Mark are placed occasionally along the route of this journey of males to Jerusalem. Female characters are interesting stopping places on the way, but as the story is discoursed they are not a permanent part of the core characters or groups—exclusively male—who move the narrative forward. When the women’s stories are examined for a structure operating among them, they throw attention onto patterns not otherwise stressed in this narrative, but which can be observed nevertheless. Once these patterns have been detected, they can be used in an intentionally feminist reading to resist the male-focused drive of the narrative and to read the Gospel alert to its inherently sexist agenda. I turn now to detailing these patterns among the stories about women in Mark, discussing first the larger levels and then the finer points of connection between individual stories. The structural patterns that the women’s stories make in Mark operate at both the large, overarching level and at smaller sublevels. At the large level, the women’s stories fall into two groups corresponding to two large phases of the narrative, namely Jesus’s public ministry and journey to Jerusalem in Mk 1–12 and the Passion Narrative of Mk 14–16.7 Within the two groups of stories at this large level, there are further substructures connecting smaller groups of stories together. It is the Passion Narrative, late in the Gospel, that draws attention to the women as such, since it is clearly framed by contrasting stories of women who anoint Jesus.8 This is a framing technique typical of Mark, but the fact that the frame in question features women results from the constraints of Mark’s rhetorical strategy at this stage of the narrative, and from the fact that women are traditionally associated with the tasks of death—mourning and preparing the body for burial.9 I develop this aspect of the rhetorical constraints on the evangelist’s composition fully in Chapter 6, where I deal with the second of the two anointing stories, Mk 16:1-8. Taking up the hint offered by the anointing women’s frame around the Passion Narrative, I return to the beginning of the gospel. There I find that in the first large An Introduction and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959, 1977), 13–14; Mary A. Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel: Mark’s World in Literary-Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 311–15; Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to Saint Mark (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, Second Printing, 1997), 27–29; and Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1999), 62–64. 7. In the intervening apocalyptic chapter, Mk 13, in which Jesus gives an extended judgment on Jerusalem’s fate, there are no stories about women, although the particular suffering of mothers at the time of the end is referred to in Mk 13:17. 8. That is, the story of the woman anointing Jesus in Mk 14:3-9 and the story of the women coming to the tomb in the early morning to anoint Jesus’s corpse, at Mk 16:18. 9. To appeal to his reader’s sense of pity, Mark presents Jesus in the Passion Narrative as abandoned to a solitary death by everybody, including God. As a result, only women never mentioned beforehand are available to witness the fact and manner of Jesus’s death, the fact and place of his burial and to receive the angel’s proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection from the tomb.

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section, Mk 1–12, the first and last stories about women also form a frame around those chapters. Here, women identified by their similar familial status make the frame. First, Mk 1:29-31, only the second healing miracle in the narrative, tells of Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law (penqera.) of fever. However, in first-century CE Mediterranean culture, the fact of a mother-in-law living in her son-in-law’s home suggests that she has no husband (or son) to provide a home for her.10 So we may reasonably deduce that she is in fact a widow (ch,ra). In the last woman’s story, Mk 12:41-44 shows Jesus commenting on the minuscule contribution that a poor widow (mi,a ch,ra ptwch.) makes to the Temple treasury. Thus, stories about women who are widows frame Mk 1–12. Ch,ra derives from the root Ca, which is also the basis for cate,w, ch/toj, cwri,j, and ca,ssasqai.11 Cate,w (I crave, long) and ch/toj (a want or need) both express intense need; cwri,j (separately, apart, by oneself) and ca,ssasqai (to draw back, retire from) convey the sense of separation or being apart or withdrawn from others.12 The social identity of these two women, the only way given to us to know them, stresses their isolation from primary relationship and thus their needy status. As Chapter 5 will demonstrate, their very vulnerability makes each widow in her own way, a locus of disorder and a threat to male ordering of the world. The first widow, Peter’s mother-in-law, is used by Mark to show the benefit that the reign of God preached by Jesus can provide. The second, the story of the poor widow in the Temple, shows in a deeply ironic fashion, how urgently the reign of God is needed. Thus, two similar yet also contrasting stories of women frame Mark’s presentation of Jesus’s public ministry and thereby invite a feminist reading of these and of all other stories about women in between. All of the stories about women in Mk 1–12 are about familial women, that is, women named in terms of their status in a family. In all but one instance (12:41-44), they are specifically named as mothers or daughters and nearly always identified in relationship of some kind to familial males. This mother or daughter role is not merely incidental to their presentation: in each story, but in various ways, it accounts for the way they come into the narrative and thus also for their connection, even if remote, with the main character, Jesus. By contrast, the women in the second large section, the Passion Narrative (Mk 14–16), are functionary rather than familial. The first story in this section features an unnamed woman (gunh, 14:3.) whose sole identification is that she anoints Jesus. The second story that contains a woman is really focused on Jesus’s disciple, Peter; nevertheless, the woman, one of the maidservants of the high priest (mi,a tw/n paidiskw/n tou/ avrxiere,wj 14:66), replicates her master’s function by scrutinizing Peter on his identity while the high priest tries Jesus on pain of his 10. A fuller discussion of the social circumstances of women in the first-century CE Mediterranean culture is provided later in this chapter. 11. See H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 8th ed., revised throughout, (New York: American Book Company, 1897), 1726. 12. See Ibid., 1717, 1726, 1750, 1706.



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life, on his. In performing her function toward a major male figure, first Jesus and then Peter, each of these women functions very significantly for the Markan narrator’s rhetorical strategy. The first woman shows Jesus to be truly a prophet whose death is to be revered. The second shows Peter to be the traitor Jesus had predicted he would be. In each of these stories, the narrator’s prime focus is on Jesus and the relationship of his male disciples to him. However, in Chapter 6 below I will pay attention to the impact this focus on the male has on the image of women conveyed by these two characters. Similarly, the next two stories about women in Mark’s Passion Narrative (15:40-41, 47; 16:1-8) perform functions both for a character in the narrative (Jesus) and thereby also for Mark’s rhetorical strategy. The two groups of women who observe Jesus’s death and burial and two days later go to anoint his corpse, each do contain one woman who is identified as a mother. However, in each story she is only one of three named women and the interest of the stories is focused much more strongly on the women’s function: their observation of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection and through this, their rhetorical impact on Mark’s reader at this point of the gospel. Within each of these two sections of the alternative narrative structure built on the women’s stories, there are further substructures which I will call subsections. In the first section, Mk 1–12, which contains seven of the eleven stories about women in Mark, I identify two major substructures. First, in Mk 1–7 there are all the stories about women who are named as mother or daughter. Second, Mk 7–12 contains only two stories about women, but these frame quite significantly chapters 8–12, Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem, in which he intensely educates his disciples. These two subsections are held together by the hinge story in Mk 7:24-30 about the Syrophoenician woman’s encounter with Jesus. This story acts analeptically and proleptically as a double frame. It is the last story mentioning a mother and a daughter, showing a woman who teaches Jesus his own theology. In this sense it matches the story about the poor widow in the Temple whom Jesus uses as teaching material, a living metaphor for the way the reign of God works. Thus, within the large section of familial females in Mk 1–12 there are two smaller subsections: one about mothers and daughters (Mk 1–7) and the other about women who facilitate learning about the reign of God (Mk 7–12). Within the first subsection (Mk 1–7) are two further groups of stories. While Jesus’s miraculous power is still strong, there are four stories about women who are healed. The last female to be healed is the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman in Mk 7:24-30. After this chapter, no more females are healed in Mark, although Jesus continues healing males throughout chapters 8–10.13 Still within Mk 1–7, the subsection of women named as mother or daughter are two stories about women that do not focus on healing. None of the three women 13. Jesus’s journey to Jerusalem is framed by two healings of blind men, at Mk 8:22-26 and 10:46-52. Before the journey, Jesus heals the deaf and dumb man in 7:31-37 and in the middle of it he heals the epileptic boy at Mk 9:14-29.

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in these stories encounter Jesus. The first woman, Jesus’s mother, attempts to do so but is provocatively rejected precisely in her claim as mother by Jesus himself (Mk 3:31-35). The second story is the true wild card of the women’s stories, the tale of how Herodias and her daughter manipulated the death of John the Baptizer. This story makes no mention at all of Jesus yet it is ominous with warning for him. Its account of John’s ministry, the hostility he generated, his arrest and the politically contrived sentence of death arrived at so swiftly and casually, his perfunctory execution and burial by his disciples are a Gospel in miniature, foretelling Jesus’s fate. Yet Herodias and her daughter operate completely outside Jesus’s sphere of influence in the Gospel story-world. These two stories about women who do not encounter Jesus invite a feminist reading of Mark. In quite different ways, both stories open the possibility within Mark’s story-world of a place in which women may stand at a critical distance from Mark’s Jesus. Such a place is crucial for a feminist reading. While there is no place in Mark’s story-world free from Mark’s sexism, these women show that there are stances in which it is possible to be distant from or unaffected by Mark’s persistently active, heroic Jesus. The poor widow in Mk 12:41-44 and the persistent maidservant of Mk 14:66-72 further widen this space of critical freedom offered by women who are not automatically—simply as women—uncritically loyal devotees of Jesus. Mark’s narrative does not direct us in any of its regular ways to find this place of resistance. A feminist reading must make this place of resistance from the opportunities presented inadvertently by a narrative preoccupied with creating literary patterns serving other, very different ends. In contrast to the stories in the first section, no women are healed by Jesus during the Passion Narrative. Rather, the pattern is reversed, when the first woman in this section anoints Jesus’s head, which he interprets as anointing his body for burial (Mk 14:3-9). This first story of a woman who anoints Jesus matches the story at the very end of the Passion Narrative, which is also the end of the gospel itself, of women who intend to anoint Jesus’s corpse (Mk 16:1-8). This literary frame contains the Passion Narrative with an ironic contrast between the first, effective anointing, which had a valid purpose, and the second, which had no valid purpose and met with no success. Thus, I find that it is possible to construct, out of the apparently random sequence of the stories about women in Mark, a coherent theme or countersubject. As we saw in Chapter 1, the postcolonial literary critic Edward Said offers the image of a contrapuntal reading of literature. This image, taken from classical music, identifies different melodic voices or themes which are played one against the other in the form of musical composition called counterpoint.14 In true counterpoint, of which the fugal compositions of the Baroque master Johann 14. Treatments of counterpoint in music can be found in a succinct survey by Roger Bullivant, “Counterpoint,” in Denis Arnold gen. ed., The New Oxford Companion to Music, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 501–06 and in great detail in Kurt-Jürgen Sachs and Carl Dahlhaus, “Counterpoint,” in Stanley Sadie ed., John Tyrell exec. ed.,



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Sebastian Bach are the quintessential example, not one melodic line, but two or three are played against one another over and over in marvelously inventive ways. In the hands of a composer of genius such as Bach, not only do these separate voices, known as “subjects” sound clearly, but their interaction with one another is so well devised that it not only emphasizes all the more intensely, the distinct character of each voice, but also harmonizes one with the other beautifully. By asserting this countersubject built on the stories about women in Mark, I counteract the sexist tendency of the Markan narrative to focus very heavily on male characters. Pointing out this countersubject brings these women into focus in a way that is not regularly recognized when all attention is given to the principal subject, the story of Jesus. 4.1.2  Denigration, Containment, and Silencing by Characterization In combination with the isolation of female characters by means of the plot, which my delineation of a countersubject opposes, there is a second reductive strategy at work on the female characters in the Gospel of Mark. This strategy is really a composite of techniques of characterization that work to denigrate, contain, and silence female characters. These techniques operate literarily first at the thematic level and then more strictly in the Markan strategy of characterization. 4.1.2.1 Denigration by Association with Disorder  First, at the thematic level, female characters in Mark are always associated with the theme of disorder. Second, women are contained in this narrative by the way they are identified, usually in relationship to a male person and then by other ways of rendering their presence in the narrative, such as whether or not they speak and what impact their speech or non-speech has on the story. I will treat each of these literary strategies in order, treating where necessary any thematic, historical, or social background issue that throws light on why Mark would have been inclined to construct his female characters as he did. Turning first to the theme of disorder, it is important to recognize that it is a very significant theme in Mark as a whole, since the gospel operates on the basis of a contemporary religious theory of history that saw God as acting to vanquish the forces of evil which wrought disorder and chaos in the world. This system is known as apocalyptic eschatology, and will be explained briefly in the next section. The consistent Markan association of women with disorder denigrates women as a point of weakness for evil to exploit, a threat that must always be contained by male control.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 6 (New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 2001), 551–71.

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4.2.1.1.1 Apocalyptic eschatology The Gospel of Mark presents the story of Jesus of Nazareth against the backdrop of apocalyptic eschatology. Apocalyptic eschatology is a religious view of history that prevailed in Jewish consciousness from at least the early second century BCE well into the second century CE or beyond. Thus, it was an interpretive framework available to the early followers of Jesus, appearing in the letters of Paul, in the Synoptic Gospels, and in the Book of the Apocalypse. Apocalyptic eschatology tends to emerge in times of great stress; it presents the world as being in the grip of severe conflict between forces of good and evil, characterized as God and Satan in Christian theology. Apocalyptic eschatology sees this conflict as occurring primarily in the heavenly realms and only in something of a lesser realization on earth. It posits absolute hope in the ultimate conquest of evil by good, when God will vindicate those who have persevered in faith, even through death, with resurrection to life beyond the reach of the power of evil.15 In contest with the disorder that this force of evil brings into the world, Jesus proclaims a form of order which he calls in Mark “the reign of God.” This expression sums up an entirely different way in which the world operates, when it functions according to the values of God. It is Jesus’s mission to proclaim this new order, where the hungry are fed abundantly, where the sick are healed regardless of time or place or ethnicity, where the members of God’s reign serve one another in mutual humility, not lording it over one another. When people relate to one another according to these values, they are living according to God’s desire for the universe, collaborating with God’s ordering of all creation to abundance for all people. This order of God is what Jesus proclaims as “the reign of God.” Against this backdrop, the Gospel of Mark portrays the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. One way to characterize Jesus’s career in this narrative is to see him as an agent of God, come to announce and to initiate the definitive regime of order, the reign of God, on earth. From centuries beforehand through prophetic words, God had declared an intention to bring God’s own order, God’s ways and path into human existence, prepared by an announcer (Mk 1:2-3). In due time, John the Baptizer declared the imminent arrival of this announcer who would saturate John’s listeners in God’s Holy Spirit (Mk 1:4-8) and who would declare God’s own imminent arrival in power, either to save or to destroy. The announcer is Jesus, whose very designation at his first entrance in the narrative as the beloved and deeply pleasing son of one who speaks from the heavens (Mk 1:911) propels him into intense confrontation with Satan in the wilderness, where the denizens of heaven, angels, minister to Jesus as he withstands prolonged testing by Satan (Mk 1:12-13). 15. The classic definition of the genre of apocalyptic eschatology and its features as summarized here can be found in J. J. Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979), 1–19. See also Tat-siong Benny Liew, Politics of Parousia: Reading Mark Inter(con)textually (Leiden: Brill, 1999) which studies Mark from the perspective of apocalyptic eschatology.



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When he returns to ordinary life after this period of testing, Jesus comes announcing a new interpretation of time, declaring a new order in reality. Mark writes, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news’” (Mk 1:14-15).16 Time is no longer that of waiting for some event: it is at its point of realization. What this moment brings near is the dominion of God, who will bring a new order to existence. Thus, in its opening fifteen verses, the Gospel of Mark has introduced both order and disorder that originate from the spiritual realm of the heavens, but which also manifest themselves in the domain of earth. God has always intended and has now begun to effect a new order on earth, based in some way yet to be fully revealed, on the activity of one designated as God’s beloved son, Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee. However, the appearance of this son instantaneously provokes an encounter between the Spirit, which is presumably the same as the Holy Spirit, and Satan, taking place within or upon the person of the son, Jesus. God’s order, embodied in Jesus, attracts the countervailing disorder of Satan and his minions. The aetiology of this heavenly conflict is not explained in Mark but works as the operative background. Where the interest of the narrative lies is in the person of Jesus, in whom the narrative declares this conflict to be now made manifest on earth. Where Jesus appears, bringing God’s order, the reign of God, the reader should expect disorder to obstruct him. Disorder will be anything that stands in the way of the progress of God’s kingdom. In the Gospel as it unfolds, we will find that while both men and women are capable of being sites which disorder can occupy, it is female characters who consistently prove to be disordered or disordering. By comparison with male characters, whom Jesus calls explicitly to be his disciples (Mk 1:16-17, 19; 2:14), who follow Jesus “immediately” (Mk 1:18, 20) “on the way” (Mk 10:52) and at least initially are able to use the powers Jesus bestows on them (Mk 3:13-19; 6:7) to expel demons and heal sick people (Mk 6:13), no specific female character is said as plainly as this to be called, to have followed or to have been empowered by Jesus.17 There is never a moment in the narrative where a female character is not in association with disorder of some kind in a way that hampers the inauguration of the order of God that Jesus brings. Even the anointing 16. All quotations from the Bible used are taken from the New Revised Standard Version, unless indicated otherwise. 17. I would argue that this does not render illegitimate the historically based arguments of scholars such as Winsome Munro, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and Elaine Wainwright, to name just a representative few from the history of scholarship who have argued that various tensions in Mark’s text, even the very rigid control that he exercises over female characters, indicate that in the initial Jesus movement, there were women who scandalously were called, did follow and were empowered by Jesus to preach, cast out demons, forgive sins and heal illness.

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woman of Mk 14:3-9, of whom Jesus declares that “what she has done will be told in memory of her,” is the cause of internal strife among Jesus’s followers, forcing Jesus to defend her to declare the meaning of her action. Instructed by this perspective on the women in Mark as a likely site of disorder, we read Mark focusing on the construction of female characters in stories leading to and surrounding the portrayal of the death of Jesus, regularly recognized as the climactic scene of the narrative. Tracing the theme of the female as a consistent locus of chaos, we find that in all eleven stories which feature women in the Gospel of Mark, women are associated with disorder. They either embody it in illness (1:29-31; 5:24-24, 35-43; 5:25-34; 7:24-30); provide an opening for it through their active instigation of evil (6:14-29) or their unwitting, passive collaboration with it (12:41-44); or they threaten the new order Jesus announces, that of the reign of God, either by their opposition or challenge to him, their ultimate abandonment of him (3:20, 31-35; 7:24-30; 16:1-8) or by threatening to disturb the exclusively male bond Jesus has with the disciples he calls “to be with him” (14:3-9; 14:66-72; 15:40-41, 47). Following Mark’s narrative from beginning to end, we see that in the first seven chapters the stories about women portray almost entirely the healing of women, with only two other different kinds of stories placed among them (3:20, 31-35; 6:14-29). Thus, the strong impression created by the stories about women in the first seven chapters of the Gospel is that they nearly always need to be healed. After Mk 10:46-52, the healing of blind Bartimaeus, there are no more healings of any character in Mark. Instead of candidates for healing, the women who feature in narratives from Mk 14:3-9 (the story of the woman anointing Jesus) onward are identified as much by their function in relation to Jesus as they are by familial relationship to a male. Interwoven with this theme of healing is the theme of women obstructing at least for a time, the mission of Jesus and his male followers. As the Markan narrative progresses from beginning to end, Jesus is depicted at first, as competently managing this chaotic impact of women in the world. As the story draws closer to its end, however, Jesus exercises less and less control both over women and also over the surrounding chaos in which both he and the women are caught up. Thus, in the first half of the Gospel, Jesus successfully banishes the disorder of illness in the fevered mother-in-law, the near-dead twelve-year-old daughter, the bleeding woman, and the possessed daughter of the Syrophoenician woman. Against all of these manifestations of disorder, Jesus successfully and fairly easily (even unconsciously, in Mk 5:24b-34) asserts the healing power of the reign of God. Associated with the disorder of women is, nevertheless, a frequently recurring theme of service. Service is a highly important theme in this Gospel since it is one of the ways in which Jesus as Son of Man defines himself. In response to a hostile reaction by the disciples to his third, climactic and very detailed prediction of his impending suffering, Jesus declares that “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mk 10:45).” Women very often serve others in this gospel but they have other relationships to this theme. In



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their need for healing they attract the service of the physician Jesus, who dispels the disorder of their illness. The quintessential example of this combination of disorder and service comes in the first story about a woman in the Gospel, that of the mother-in-law of Simon, who both is healed of a disordering fever and then serves Jesus and his followers. Indeed, all four stories about the healing of women in the Gospel show Jesus serving them by restoring order in their lives. In return, the healed women serve Jesus, either literally as did the mother-in-law of Simon or literarily by offering Jesus the opportunity to regard each one as a “restored daughter.”18 In this way, the latter three healings serve Jesus by demonstrating his power as the beloved son of the household of God who has the authority to designate people as members of that household or not (see Mk 3:31-35). However, where the power of Jesus does not prevail, the disorder of females does disservice to Jesus’s mission. Thus, Jesus’s own mother; Herodias and daughter; the questioning maidservant of the high priest and ultimately the women at the tomb all act against service of Jesus. Jesus’s mother attempts to obstruct his mission; Herodias and her daughter ominously portend Jesus’s death under the auspices of disorder; the maidservant provokes the rupture of the bond of loyalty between Jesus and Simon Peter; the women at the tomb refuse to proclaim Jesus’s resurrection to his (male) disciples. 4.1.2.2 Containment by Compulsory Relationship with an Authorizing Male  Second, women are contained in this narrative by the way they are identified. They are rarely accorded an individual identity established by their personal name, as most significant males in the narratives are named. Rather, they are presented in the customary fashion of first-century Mediterranean Jewish culture, in terms of their relationship with men. In the first part of the Gospel this characterization is effected by naming women only in terms of their role in the extended family, always in relationship to an authorizing male. In the latter part of the narrative, women are still nearly always named in relationship to some male, but they also have functional identities that are necessary for the plot. Even so, it is not until the very end, when the narrative needs verifiable witnesses, that women are individually identified by name. In these ways, women are kept anonymous, distinguished from one another only by the relationship they have or the function they perform with regard to a male in the narrative. A feminist postcolonial reading will ask about the relationships that operate between the genders and the evaluations of persons by gender, the obligations or constraints that press on them on account of the constructions of gender in that culture. In first-century Mediterranean and particularly Palestinian Jewish peasant culture, females were required to be always under the supervision of an 18. See the restoration of the daughter of Jairus (Mk 5:22-24, 35-43); Jesus’s designation of the woman healed of the twelve-year bleeding disorder as “Daughter” (Mk 5:25-34) and the restoration of the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman (Mk 7:24-30).

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authorizing male head of household.19 As a female moved through the different various phases of life, the familial arrangements needed to provide this state of embedded protection varied. The father of the household into which a child was born was the first head of household under whose authority she came. At marriage, while the male usually remained in the household into which he was born, the female moved from her father’s household into that of her husband, frequently that of her husband’s father, her father-in-law.20 That is, the new bride left the home of her family of origin and the authority of her father and moved to live in the extended family of her husband, coming formally under the authority of her husband and ultimately also his father.21 This could lead to difficulties, as Carolyn Osiek points out, since “one of the most antagonistic relationships is between mother-in-law and daughterin-law, for the latter finds herself in constant competition with the former for her husband’s affection.”22 The reason for this competition is easy enough to see. In a situation where women were so heavily under the tutelage of men, the production of a son, a future man whom the mother could bond to herself as her champion in the extended family, was a great prize in life. Thus, the challenge presented by a resident daughter-in-law for the prime emotional allegiance of the son would be intense. If a marriage ended, either by divorce or the death of the husband, there were various options for the woman, ranging from the respectable to the dishonorable. 19. See Leo G. Perdue, “The Israelite and Early Jewish Family: Summary and Conclusions,” in Leo G. Perdue, Joseph Blenkinsopp, John J. Collins and Carol Meyers eds., Families In Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 191, for the information that “A daughter remained under the authority of her father until her arranged marriage. She then came under the authority of her husband and the senior male in his household.” This is corroborated by Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology, 3rd ed., Revised and Expanded (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 159. 20. Malina, The New Testament World, 158–59 explains that in the first-century Mediterranean family, marriage was “a process of disembedding the female from her family and embedding her in her husband—and his family.” This society is described as patrilocal or virilocal since “a newly married son customarily brought his wife to live in the family house. The father would set aside a room within the house for the couple or build a marital house . . . on the roof.” For more on this point, see S. Safrai, “Chapter Fourteen: Home and Family,” in The Jewish People In The First Century: Historical Geography, Political History, Social, Cultural And Religious Life And Institutions, ed. S. Safrai and M. Stern in co-operation with D. Flusser and W. C. van Unnik, Vol. 2 (Assen, Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1976), 731. 21. See Perdue, “The Israelite and Early Jewish Family,” 190 and Malina, The New Testament World, 139 on the details of living in a multigenerational family complex. 22. Carolyn Osiek and David Balch, Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 43.



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If she were divorced, the honorable woman would need either to return to her family of origin if she were welcome there, to be under the protection of her father or eldest brother or some other male relative, including an adult son.23 However, John J. Collins observes, The custom whereby a divorced woman returned to her father’s house must have produced tensions in the paternal household and may go some way toward explaining the paranoia of Ben Sira on the subject of daughters. Ready divorce may have worked satisfactorily in the case of a woman such as Mibtahiah [a wealthy divorced woman of Elephantine] who had her own independent means, but must have involved considerable hardship in many cases.24

If she were a widow, a woman could remain in the household of her father-in-law or she could return to her family of origin as detailed above. At certain periods in the Roman Empire, a widow who was well-to-do could maintain her own household and dispose her own property, but such women would have been rare.25 The obvious alternative to these respectable options was for a woman to sell herself into debt slavery, into concubinage, or to resort to prostitution.26 4.1.2.3 Silencing of Female Characters: The Issue of Voice Finally, women very rarely speak in this Gospel but are silenced. When women do speak in Mark it is never approved because in some way it provides an opening for disorder to disrupt a well-ordered male world. On the one, crucial occasion when they are commanded to speak, women fail to do so (16:1-8). It might be said that from the perspective of the Gospel of Mark, speech is wasted on women. Combined with the way their presence in Mark’s narrative is plotted in isolation from one another, 23. Safrai, “Chapter Fourteen: Home and Family,” 731 and Perdue, “The Israelite and Early Jewish Family: Summary and Conclusions,” 194 for information on this point. Perdue, 192, lists the responsible family males other than father or husband in Jewish families of this period in descending order as “the brother, then the uncle, then the cousin, and finally, any close relative.” 24. John J. Collins, “Marriage, Divorce, and Family in Second Temple Judaism,” in Leo G. Perdue, Joseph Blenkinsopp, John J. Collins and Carol Meyers eds., Families In Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 149. 25. Bella Vivante, Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Westport, CN: Praeger Publishers, 2006), 65–66; Eva Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughter: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 139; and Osiek, Families In The New Testament World, 57–59 discuss the varying circumstances of widows across time, geography and socioeconomic class in the ancient world. Osiek and Balch, Families, 58, sums up the consensus that “A general principle . . . is that . . . high-status women had more social power . . . than poorer and lower-status women.” 26. See Perdue, “The Israelite and Early Jewish Family,” 194–95.

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these ways of representing women in Mark conspire to present a very negative image of women and significantly to silence their voice. Against these Markan strategies, I assert the capacity of the women’s stories to constitute a coherent subject in counterpoint to the uncontested, major subject of the apocalyptic triumph of God over evil in the career, death, and resurrection of Jesus from Nazareth. I argue that the relentless tendency of the Markan narrative to present women in negative light is a recognizable practice of narratives coming out of an imperial-colonial context. As a result, this characterization of female characters as given to disorder and warranting containment in male-controlled systems of order must be recognized as a sexist slander against women that contradicts other implications of the Gospel of Mark, such as the inclusion of all in the reign of God, the welcome of the least, and the necessity of turning aside from customary practices of domination of the powerful over the weak, to a practice of mutual service.

4.2  Mark: A Narrative of the First-Century CE Roman Imperial Context 4.2.1  Provenance of the Gospel According to Mark The Gospel of Mark was written early in the last third of the first century CE, somewhere in the Roman Empire. In the past two centuries, since the “rediscovery” of this Gospel by critical scholarship, every aspect of its provenance has been debated.27 The debate has canvassed the identity of the author of the Gospel, its sources, its place of final composition, its originally intended audience, its genre— and whether it is possible for historical scholarship to discover these things with any degree of certainty or precision.28 27. For a thorough discussion of the history of the reception of the Gospel of Mark across two millennia, see Brenda D. Schildgen, Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999). 28. Recent treatments representing the range of views on Markan provenance issues can be found in Richard Bauckham, “For Whom Were Gospels Written?” in Richard Bauckham ed., The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 9–48; Edwin Keith Broadhead, Mark (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001); John R. Donahue, The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 38–46; John R. Donahue, “The Quest for the Community of Mark’s Gospel,” in Frans van Segbroeck et al., The Four Gospels 1992: Festschrift Frans Neirynck, Vol. 3 (Leuven: Leuven University Press 1992), 2:817–38; Philip F. Esler, “Community and Gospel in Early Christianity: A Response to Richard Bauckham’s Gospels for All Christians,” Scottish Journal of Theology 51 (1998): 235–48; Craig A. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20. Word Biblical Commentary. Vol. 34B (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2001), lxii–lxiii; R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI: Carlisle: W. B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press, 2002), 7–9, 35–41; Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1-8:26. Word Biblical Commentary. Vol. 34A (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1989), xxv–xxxii; John S. Kloppenborg, “Evocatio



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Throughout the 1990s, there has been a clear insistence from a range of scholars that any claims to knowledge about the origins of the Gospel of Mark are based on very little and slight evidence. Provenance debates about Mark have focused on the originally intended audience, the author, and the place of composition of the Gospel. For example, attempts have been made to identify the Christian community in Rome as supplying both the author and the audience of this gospel, based on certain features of the writing, such as Mark’s perceptible sympathy for the Roman leaders over the Jewish, some nine Latin “loan-words,” and some inaccuracies in detailing Jewish customs and Palestinian geography that have been used to argue for a Roman origin and/or destination for the gospel.29 Mary Ann Tolbert concluded that “in truth, on the basis of the story alone almost any city in the Mediterranean area might be its author’s home.”30 In 1991, having dismissed the possibility that the incidental evidence of Roman culture in the Gospel points exclusively to Rome, Morna Hooker wrote in the same vein as Tolbert, that “all we can say with certainty . . . is that the gospel was composed somewhere in the Roman Empire—a conclusion that scarcely narrows the field at all!”31 Thus, we can say that the Gospel of Mark was composed in the Roman Empire. With regard to the author, Joel Marcus argues that the identity of the author is “not proven” despite the ancient claim by Papias cited by Eusebius in his history that a “John Mark” wrote down his recollections of the teachings of the apostle Peter.32 Deorum and the Date of Mark,” Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (3, 2005): 419–50; Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 17–39; Francis J. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002), 11–15; David C. Sim, “The Gospels for All Christians? A Response to Richard Bauckham,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 84 (2001): 3–27; Mary Ann Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel: Mark’s World in Literary-Historical Perspective (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1989): 303–06; and Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2001): 20–36. 29. For example, Mk 12:42 explains Greek-named coins, lepta. du,o in terms of the Roman quadrans, kodra,nthjÅ Mk 15:16 clarifies a space (“courtyard”) using the Roman military term praitw,rion. The term Surofoini,kissa at 7:26 is considered by most scholars to be a distinction between kinds of Phoenicians necessary only for Romans. However, Romans lived all over the empire, not only in Rome. Mk 7:3-4 incorrectly ascribes certain handwashing practices of the Pharisees to all Jews while his geographical references in 5:1; 6:45, 53; 7:31; 10:1, and 11:1 do not make physical sense. However, these can all be explained in terms of Mark’s theological and rhetorical concerns, writing to a wide audience of the Roman Empire in general. See Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, xxviii–xxxi and Marcus, Mark 1-8, 19-21 for detailed discussion along these lines. 30. Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel, 304. 31. Hooker, The Gospel According to Saint Mark, 8. 32. With regard to the identification of Papias’s Mark with the John Mark who was a companion of Paul (see Acts 12:12; 13:13; 15:36-41; 2 Tim. 4:11) or perhaps Peter (1 Pet. 5:13) Marcus, Mark 1-8, 24 sums up his review of the arguments by writing that

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Francis J. Moloney explains that the tradition of a “Mark” associated with Peter arising from Papias attracted the other “Mark” or “John Mark” names of the NT to it, but that we do not as a result know who this “Mark” was.33 Moloney would agree with Robert Guelich that “ultimately, . . . the question of authorship is moot for our reading of the Gospel. The writer makes no pretense of giving either his own or another’s eyewitness account of the Gospel events for which his identity would either assist our understanding or guarantee the accuracy of the details.”34 For the purposes of this book, it is only necessary that Mark be a narrative composition of the late first century CE in the Roman Empire. Given the degree of speculation that characterizes provenance arguments about Mark, I am prepared to allow that we can know only a few things about the circumstances of the composition of Mark. That is, we can know with reasonable certainty that the Gospel was written in the latter part of the first century CE by a believing Christian for an audience that could understand koiné Greek and was prepared to listen to or read such a tale. 4.2.2  Genre of the Gospel According to Mark Another major point that must be settled about the Gospel of Mark is its literary genre. This is one of the major issues that has to be decided in any critical interpretation of a piece of writing. In even the most casual interpretation the reader makes sense of the writing by deciding what kind of writing it is and therefore what kind of conventions were used in composing it and are to be used in reading it. Current debate among scholars on the genre of Mark focuses on whether the basic Greco-Roman genre pattern it follows is that of the Hellenistic Life, the bi,oj, or historiography of some kind.35 Some scholars argue for one genre over the other; some maintain that the Gospel of Mark does not completely satisfy the requirements of either genre; others argue that Mark selects elements from more than one genre, from not only the bi,oj or historiography but also from the ancient novel of this period, as suits his communication purpose. In order to arrive at this decision, scholars have first to deal with the question of whether it is the form or the content of writing that determines its genre. With reference to the Gospel of Mark, most commentators give the weight to content, recognizing that while the author of Mark had to choose some form in which to write, he was writing primarily not for the aesthetic purpose of composing in a “speculation, however intriguing, is not demonstration, and the fairest judgment on John Markan authorship is the nonprejudicial Scottish legal verdict of ‘not proven.’” 33. See Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 11–12. 34. Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, xxix. Similarly, Moloney (12) writes, “Perhaps we should respect the author’s concern to keep his name and association with either Jesus or Peter out of the account.” 35. See A. Y. Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 15–43 on the history of scholarship on the genre of Mark.



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particular genre, but for the sake of communicating something he valued deeply about Jesus of Nazareth. On the one hand, the author of Mark had a story to tell about historical persons and events in which some of the content was nonnegotiable, even though it was difficult to write about because of its controversial nature, such as the shameful death and proclaimed resurrection of Jesus. On the other hand, Mark had to write in a form that his readers would not only understand but also find attractive and persuasive, something that was recognizably like an existing, familiar literary form or combination of them. Christopher Bryan is one scholar who argues that Mark is indeed a Hellenistic Life, a form of bi,oj.36 Bryan argues that the Hellenistic Life studied not the rugged individual in the manner of the modern biography but the historical figure as typical of what was generally expected of such a person. That is, “there was some tendency among Hellenistic biographers to characterize subjects by type.”37 Against the background of character types like the distinguished man, the military general, royalty, and men of letters portrayed in such Lives, Bryan describes the Jesus of Mark as typifying traits that would be expected of someone defined as Messiah and Son of God. Thus he argues, “Jesus is entirely the sort of person one would expect, which is in turn precisely what we should expect in a Hellenistic ‘life.’”38 A more nuanced position is adopted by Ben Witherington III who recognizes that the Hellenistic Life genre does not completely account for the Gospel of Mark. He notes that as well as being about distinguished men, the ancient bi,oj was usually also written only by established writers.39 In fact, neither the central character nor the composer of the Gospel of Mark was famous. However, the story the Gospel had to tell was not a conventional story, either of success or tragedy; as those facts did not prevent the writing of the Gospel, neither does the lack of fame of chief protagonist or of the composer argue against the bi,oj genre being used in some form, precisely to present Jesus of Nazareth as worthy of fame and following. Witherington in fact lists seven features of the Gospel of Mark that show its similarity to the ancient bi,oj. Mark was comparable in length, a continuous narrative in prose focusing primarily on Jesus, using the literary strategies of episodic stories in sequence and the construction of the characters by the use of direct speech and character interaction. Finally, Mark can be seen as presenting Jesus as a “sage,” a kind of public figure, as the bioi do, and as aiming for popular appeal.40 36. See Christopher Bryan, A Preface to Mark: Notes on the Gospel in its Literary and Cultural Settings (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993), 32–64. 37. Ibid., 44–45. 38. Ibid., 46. The traits Bryan here describes Jesus as typifying are “authority, passion and compassion.” 39. See Witherington III, The Gospel of Mark, 8–9. 40. Ibid., 6–7. Witherington here summarizes features of Mark that may be found also, for example, in Marcus, Mark 1-8, 65–68.

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Adela Y. Collins, however, rejects the idea that Mark is a bi,oj. Following David Aune, she argues that Mark is not interested in using the stories about Jesus to reveal Jesus’s character. As others point out, Mark does not fulfill the usual feature of bi,oj which traces the life of the character from birth onward.41 Instead, Collins maintains, the purpose of the Gospel is much more that of historical narrative, to “reveal Jesus’s mission as an agent of God in history.”42 Collins sees Mark’s sense of history as strongly marked by apocalypticism, the religious view of history that sees God as ultimately in charge, intervening to punish evil and vindicate virtue in definitive fashion. Her final assessment of the genre of Mark is that it is a form of narrative, namely history, but one that resembled biography in the sense that it does focus on an individual, namely Jesus. Thus she defines the Gospel of Mark as “a narration of the course of the eschatological events,” arguing that this apocalyptic perspective, the belief that there are greater divine acts yet to come, makes sense of the lack of closure at the end of the Gospel.43 Both Mary Ann Tolbert and Joel Marcus, however, refuse to acknowledge that either the Hellenistic Life or a range of other ancient forms, such as dramas, aretalogies, or histories finally account for Mark. Tolbert rejects all of these because none “fit” adequately the full reality of Mark, including the fact that all these ancient genres were usually much more elevated in their diction and literary arrangement than is the Gospel of Mark.44 Joel Marcus sees Mark as selecting “generic features” from these forms but as ultimately creating a new genre because of the way he envisages the gospel being used in the Christian liturgy as the announcement of good news.45 Both Tolbert and Marcus write of the literary power of the Gospel and of its rhetorical purpose. For Marcus, Mark, like early (and powerful) Christian liturgies is “full of disruptive, mysterious, allusive elements that hint at spiritual depths.”46 He sees Mark’s purpose as expressing and thereby heightening the audience’s awareness of the continuing presence of their Risen Lord with them in their daily lives.47 For Tolbert, Mark is a religious writing addressing the deep issues of life in a way that attracts the reader to its “dramatic portrayal of [the] fateful struggle between the forces of evil and the forces of good.”48 41. See Marcus, Mark 1-8, 66 and Mary A. Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel: Mark’s World in Literary-Historical Perspective (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1989), 58. Interestingly, Marcus points out that Mark reads as the birth of a movement as much as of Jesus; Tolbert points out that categorizing Mark as a bi,oj obscures its interest in many figures other than Jesus, such as the Jewish and Roman leaders, the disciples, and those healed by Jesus. 42. A. Y. Collins, The Beginning of the Gospel: Probings of Mark in Context (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 20. 43. Ibid., 27. 44. Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel, 55–59, especially 57–59. 45. See Marcus, Mark 1-8, 68. 46. Ibid., 69. 47. Ibid., 66–67. 48. Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel, 14.



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However, Tolbert rejects the notion of Mark as creating a new genre, a notion that she outlines as stemming from a post-First World War interpretation of Mark in the European Protestant tradition. Rather, taking seriously the idea of genre as a conventional literary form that makes communication between writer and audience possible, Tolbert insists that Mark must have been comprehensible to the authorial audience against the background of a genre already known to them, a genre of ancient Greek-writing that flourished in the Roman period.49 Tolbert finds this genre in the ancient Greek prose romance. This form of writing was already in place before the Gospel of Mark was written but continued throughout the early Christian period. From the Hellenistic period of the ancient Mediterranean, from the times of the Roman Republic well into the era of the Roman Empire, there survives a distinct body of prose narratives in Greek that is generally referred to as prose romance. Only five complete texts are extant today, spanning the period from the middle of the first century CE to perhaps as late as the fourth century.50 While acknowledging that it is not possible to date these novels with certainty, Reardon assigns Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe to the middle of the first century CE and Xenophon’s Ephesian Story to the mid-second century. He places Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Daphnis and Chloe by Longus in the late second century with Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story appearing in the third or even as late as the fourth century.51 In particular, the two novels that most closely resemble Mark, Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe and Xenophon’s An Ephesian Tale fit in this category, the first being dated between 100 BCE and 50 CE and the latter between 50 CE and 263 CE, the earlier date being the most likely.52 Apart from these complete texts, some novel fragments from this period have also been found. These tend to be more biographical than romantic in focus, suggesting that the “erotic” type is only one form of the novel genre being written at this time.53

49. See Ibid., 56–58 for discussion of these ideas. 50. See B. P. Reardon ed., Collected Ancient Greek Novels (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 5 for a list of putative dates of these novels. 51. See T. Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 5–6, 19–20, 35, 42, and 59 for his dating of these novels, which largely concurs with Reardon, although he argues that on linguistic and stylistic grounds it may be placed as early as the first century BCE. 52. See Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel, 62. Apart from these complete works, there are two novels in summary or epitome form, Antonius Diogenes’ The Incredible Things Beyond Thule and Iamblichus’ Babyloniaka, dating from the mid- to late second century, respectively. Fragments of perhaps as many as seven novels thought to have come from the first to the fourth centuries fill out our knowledge of this genre. See Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 5 and Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity, 32, 118 for similar dates for these novels. 53. A discussion of these novel fragments is provided in Susan A. Stephens and John J. Winkler eds., Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

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As pointed out by Tolbert and more recently by Marcus, the literary power and rhetorical impact of this particular form of writing derives from a combination of its elements—its level of diction, its collection of plot elements in episodic sequence, its use of travel and adventure to structure the plot and provide excitement, a sense of movement and purpose. What is particularly useful for me in using this genre type to investigate Mark is that men and women are portrayed strongly in both. It is possible to find in the novels the functioning “poetics” on which they operate. The ancient erotic novel portrayed its female characters with stronger image and voice than the Gospel of Mark does with his female characters. The ancient novel’s females are able to be described at fuller length partly because the novels are much longer documents than the Gospel of Mark. The character’s circumstances in life: situation in the household in which they live, relationships to other people, their beauty or otherwise and particularly their feelings about their situation are all treated in depth. The women speak in the ancient novel with much clearer voice than they do in the Gospel of Mark. For example, E. L. Bowie describes the character of Callirhoe in Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, as well educated and possessed of a determined will in preserving her chastity for her husband, that was so powerful as to be “unintelligible to the barbarian eunuch trying to lure her to the king’s bed.”54 Callirhoe managed to negotiate her way through being buried alive, stolen from the tomb, and sold into an enforced marriage, and being taken by force to Babylon to defend herself against the great king of Persia before she is eventually reunited with her beloved husband, Chaereas. As Bowie sums it up, beside Callirhoe, her husband Chaereas is “a feeble figure . . . [whose] . . . initial and fatal jealousy is no more attractive than his recurrent despair in adversity.”55 Similarly, Anthia, the principal female character in Xenophon’s “Ephesian Tale,” is described by Bowie as possessed of great determination to survive a series of lively accidents. As Bowie relates it, Anthia’s “fidelity survives a marriage to a noble goatherd, . . . a wedding to the magistrate Perilaus, . . . and many threats to her chastity culminating in enlistment in a brothel in Tarentum.”56 Through it all, Anthia proclaims loudly her chastity and is powerful and clever enough to protect it. The Greek prose romance was not the only form of narrative of the ancient Hellenistic period that can shed light on the Gospel of Mark. At the same time as the Greek novels were being written, c. 200 BCE to 100 CE, the ancient Jewish community also produced narratives that can be classed as novels, usually written in Greek, in which female characters are portrayed as vigorous and energetic. Five such novels are Greek Esther, Greek Daniel, Tobit, Judith, and The Marriage and 54. E. L. Bowie, “The Greek Novel,” in Simon Swain ed., Oxford Readings in the Greek Novel (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 39–59, 47. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 49.



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Conversion of Aseneth.57 Lawrence Wills compares these novels with the Greek novel on the point of the portrayal of female characters, noting that “while the Jewish novels place a female protagonist at the very center of the action, unlike the Greek novels, which make the woman a partner in a romantic union, the Jewish novels more often present her all alone.”58 This Jewish woman all alone was not quite in the same isolated circumstances as the women in the Gospel of Mark, however. The female characters who suddenly appeared in abundance in the Jewish novels were able to be “the focus of the emotional issues of the drama.”59 Unlike the silent female figures alone, talking to themselves or to no one, of the Gospel of Mark, the female characters of the Jewish novels “do not so much move onto the stage of the human drama as take total possession of it. Even where there are other male characters, the dramatic tension is focused on the heroine, and the evolution of the novels moves consistently in this direction.”60

4.3 Conclusion From this very brief survey of comparable novelistic material of the same period, we can see that Mark need not have constructed female characters as limited as his are. Why he did this—beyond the obvious answer of self-interested male dominance of the new religious movement—is not my focus. Rather, given the evidence of where existing conventional expectations would have prompted— even required him—to go, I want to focus on what Mark has in fact produced and to critique it for the impact that his writing has on the Christian construction of the female person. I will show that Mark operates out of a restrictive sexism with regard to his female characters, and that this sexism is in conflict with the principles of mutuality, non-dominance, and service that are presented as strongly valued in the Gospel. Further, I will demonstrate that Australian feminists can find that their own history alerts them to this kind of double standard. The examples of Australian writing from two phases of Australia’s foundational history that we have studied in Chapters 2 and 3 show that prejudice against women led to them being constructed in writing in ways that were deeply untrue, that denied both women and men their full humanity and dignity and marshaled all the energies of large, communityfounding events or struggle to glorify the male at the expense of the female. Both the Gospel of Mark and the Australian writings studied were produced out 57. See Lawrence M. Wills, Ancient Jewish Novels: An Anthology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4ff. for a fuller description of the provenance of these novels. 58. Ibid., 4–5. 59. Lawrence M. Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 4. 60. Ibid., 13.

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of the experience of small, fledgling communities coming into existence at the (relatively) remote provincial or colonial edges of the great imperial power of their times. These imperial-colonial relationships proceeded from forcible occupation and use by imperial agents of someone else’s land and means of life. This practice tends to exacerbate situations of inequality, exploitation, and the valorization of overweening force and power, making them appear “normal.” It is the point of a feminist reading of the Gospel of Mark to refuse to accept the aggrandizement of one category of person by accident of their birth, namely gender, over others, as normal. Part of such a portrayal is very likely to present the other half of humanity, in this case, the female person, to their disadvantage. Aware of this sexist tendency, and of the literary strategies that operate in the Gospel of Mark to serve it, we turn in the final two chapters of this book, to reading the Gospel of Mark from an Australian postcolonial feminist perspective.

Chapter 5 JESUS AND FAMILIAL WOMEN IN MK 1–12

Early in the Australian autumn of 1965, two women chained themselves to the public bar of a hotel in Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland.1 Ro Bognor and Merle Thornton asserted their right to order a drink in a public place where they could meet for business or relaxation with colleagues or friends. Queensland law at the time—and conventional practice throughout Australia—forbade women access to the public bar of hotels, where men met after work. Hotels in Australia provided a “ladies’ lounge,” a separate room in which women could be served drinks, usually brought to them by their male companions and at a higher price than the drinks sold in the public bar, across the hallway. Hotel public bars are still referred to as “the office” by many men who conduct their business there, from hiring bricklayers to briefing barristers. Women are now much more in evidence in such places. In 1965, however, Bognor and Thornton’s outrageous female invasion of an exclusively male sanctum made national news. Not only the print media, but also a national current affairs program, ABC television’s Four Corners, reported on it. Questions were raised in the Queensland Parliament. Doubts were raised about the women’s competence as mothers; whether their children should be taken into state care; whether the women’s actions heralded a new moral anarchy in Australia. In chaining themselves to the public bar, Bognor and Thornton resorted to a multivalent symbol of female protest. Female convicts in Australia had been chained into their subjection to the imperial law that transported them to Australia. Female suffragettes in England chained themselves to railings in their struggle for the vote in the early 1900s.2 Women in Australia had been invisibly 1. See Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (St. Leonards NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999), 214–17 for a fuller account of the action by these women, whom she aptly titles “The Bar Room Suffragettes.” The early 1990s Australian movie, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, provides a dramatic realization of the ambience of the all-male public bar in its depiction of the public bar of a hotel in Broken Hill, an outback mining town. 2. For a description and a drawing of a famous incident of two suffragettes chaining themselves to a metal grille in the House of Commons in London, see Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49–51.

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chained out of male places of privilege; Bognor and Thornton chained themselves visibly into one of those places. To do so, they had to endure intense sexist hostility at their extraordinary, shameless bravado. Such is also the case for any woman reading the Gospel of Mark. No Australian woman today needs to stake her independence on walking into the public bar of a hotel and ordering a beer. However, any woman walking innocently into the opening chapter of the gospel according to Mark needs to recognize that environment as being as profoundly male-marked as was the Queensland public hotel bar of the 1960s, invaded by Bognor and Thornton. As I will show, Mark is a literary environment that speaks overwhelmingly in the male voice, of male experience. Female readers are meant to read this gospel from the literary equivalent of the “ladies’ lounge,” dependent on their male companions and protectors to bring them drinks, for a higher price. Any woman who wants to know for herself what is really going on in Mark will have to brave the sexism that sees her as an invader of a space sacred to males.

5.1  Markan Stories Featuring Women As I showed in Chapter 4, a crucial characteristic of Mark’s gospel, a space sacred to males, is that Jesus’s life is understood to be in fact the locus of a world-shifting action of God in history, referred to as apocalyptic eschatology. Mark portrays the masculine figure, Jesus, performing the service of bringing God’s order to a world wracked by the disorder of evil. In contrast, the rhetoric of Mark’s literary construction of female characters in this narrative casts them as always associated with disorder.3 They are not the principle of disorder itself, but they have a remarkably high incidence of susceptibility to disorder. At the same time and in various ways most female characters redeem themselves by performing acts of female-appropriate service. Some (Mk 1:29-31; 14:3-9; 15:40-41) are said very explicitly to “serve,” in language that the narrative’s hero, Jesus, uses about himself in his most explicit self-definition, as the Son of Man who has come not to be served, but to serve (Mk 10:42-45). As we shall see, however, even those who “serve” in this way are associated with or give rise to disorder. In some other women in the narrative, disorder is much more evident. 3. Some of the classic studies of the whole collection in female characters in Mark of the past twenty-five years are those by Mary Ann Beavis, “Women as Models of Faith in Mark,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 18 (1, 1988): 3–9; Joanna Dewey, “Women in the Synoptic Gospels: Seen but Not Heard?” Biblical Theology Bulletin 27 (2, 1997): 53–60; E. S. Malbon, “Fallible Followers: Women and Men in the Gospel of Mark,” Semeia 28 (1988): 29–48; Winsome Munro, “Women Disciples in Mark?” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 44 (2, 1982): 225–41; Willard M. Swartley, “The Role of Women in Mark’s Gospel: A Narrative Analysis,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 27 (1, Spring 1997): 16–22. Winsome Munro’s 1982 article is still powerfully suggestive today.



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A revelatory tension in Mark’s narrative is that the closer Jesus comes to his consummatory participation in the apocalyptic clash between good and evil, namely his death and resurrection, the more his demeanor appears as female, according to the way females are cast in this narrative. Female characters in this gospel can be classified in terms of their placement in the plot, affecting their relationship with one another; by the “voice” they are allowed in the narrative; and by their performance of the service expected of them in their relationship with men in the narrative. In these terms, then, female characters in Mark are portrayed as isolated in the plot, largely muted in voice, and either approved when their service benefits men gathered together or reproved when they fail to assist in strengthening the bond between men. I will show that in the plot of this narrative females are very marginalized, their stories being separated from one another. Each woman has only one appearance in the gospel, without any narrated continuous presence. Thus, females have no capacity to influence the larger plot in which they make their single, cameo appearance. As a result, women are isolated from all support from others like themselves. Second, females are largely mute in Mark, female speech being heavily censored in this narrative. Only once in the eleven stories featuring women does Mark grant to a female character direct speech with the major protagonist, Jesus (Mk 7:24-30). In the only story when two women speak, they do so with one another and the conversation is portrayed as diabolical in intent and effect (Mk 6:14-29). One woman speaks only to herself (5:25-34); another speaks in such a way as to provoke tragedy, namely Peter’s public betrayal of Jesus (14:66-72) at the conclusion, women speak only to one another (16:1-8). Women in Mark are like Jesus in that they do serve, but there is considerable instability in this category of service. Women’s service is approved by the narrator when it is on behalf of others, either their daughters or Jesus; when it is for themselves or against Jesus, it is reproved. In Mark, when Jesus begins his public career, he immediately begins to build a group of males around him, whom he calls to follow him, to catch human beings. Markan scholar, Benny Liew, explains that in homosocial societies, one of the tasks expected of women is that they facilitate male bonding. When women obstruct male bonding they are vilified. Liew cites the work of Gayle Rubin about women as being often “the building blocks on which homosocial communities of men are established,” as well as Jonathan Goldberg’s insight that male groups idealize women in their maternal role since “‘mother’ is understood as a ‘trope of ideal femininity, a fantasmatic female that secures malemale arrangements and an all male history.’”4 On this basis, Liew himself writes that since women in Mark “are trafficked as building blocks of male bonding, they are often also blamed for the breakup of male relationships.”5 In almost all of the stories featuring women in Mark, women’s impact on the relationship between the 4. Tat-siong Benny Liew, Politics of Parousia: Reading Mark Inter(con)textually (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 144. 5. Ibid., 146.

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men in their story is a significant means of narratorial evaluation of the women, either positively or negatively. As Jesus approaches and finally dies on the cross, he is portrayed more and more like a Markan female character. He is marked by the narrator as cut off from all support, both human and divine. In contrast to his displays of brilliant rhetoric in Mark 12, Jesus under trial becomes silent, refusing to speak even when Pilate presses him to do so (Mk 15:5). Jesus’s only articulate speech on the cross is a loud lament to God for having abandoned him (Mk 15:34). As Jesus himself predicts (Mk 14:27-31), his arrest and execution serves to shatter the bond he had built with his disciples; as he dies, Jesus is surrounded by men, but they bond with him only in cruel and ironic ways (Mk 15:21-39). The power of chaos is measured in this scene by its capacity to reduce a powerful man to the point where he is depicted in the same ways by which females are characterized in this narrative. In Chapter 4 I also outlined a structure to be found in the sequence of the women’s stories in the Gospel of Mark that enables these stories to be read as constituting a countersubject against the main subject or theme of the career of Jesus. Following that structure, I will now read each of the stories about women in sequence, pointing out the ways in which a feminist reading informed by categories drawn from Australian postcolonial analysis throws light on the construction of female characters in this gospel. I will use the categories of order and disorder, voice and service to examine the image which is constructed about each woman. I will compare the image of each of these female characters with Jesus, in preparation for reading Mark’s presentation of the death of Jesus at the end of the gospel. 5.1.1  The Mother-in-law of Simon (Mk 1:29-31) I will discuss Mk 1:29-31 under three categories focused on gender. First I will examine the ways in which gender helps to structure the narrative. Second, I will show how the theme of disorder emerges on a gender basis and then how the theme of service is linked to the theme of disorder by gender. Finally, I will assess the image and voice of the woman as she is portrayed in this story. First, the primary subject of the gospel according to Mark is Jesus of Nazareth, portrayed as the one coming to establish a new order, the reign of God, which necessarily pits him against the existing misrule of Satan.6 In a contrapuntal reading 6. In the close study I make of Markan stories in this and the following chapter, I rely in particular on the following major recent commentaries on the Gospel of Mark. Where relevant, I will cite specific places in these commentaries as well as from other studies of Mark. See Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007); John R. Donahue, The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002); and Craig A. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20. Word Biblical Commentary. Vol. 34B (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2001); R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI: Carlisle: W. B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press, 2002); Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1-8:26. Word Biblical Commentary. Vol. 34A (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1989);



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of Mark, I delineate against this primary subject a countersubject constituted of the stories about women in Mark. This countersubject is anchored by the brief story of the healing of the mother-in-law of Simon (Mk 1:29-31). The first woman we encounter in Mark’s gospel is the mother-in-law of Simon at Mk 1:29-31. For the postcolonial feminist reader of Mark’s narrative, this woman evokes the situation of Ro Bognor and Merle Thornton, alone in what has been established as an exclusively male space. By the time we meet Simon’s mother-in-law, we have already traveled through twenty-eight programmatic verses of Mark, densely packed with activity, theological significance, and exclusively male characters. By the end of Mark 1, the ratio of male to female appearances is at least 50 to 1. That is, while males have been specifically mentioned at least fifty times in a great variety of ways, the word “mother-in-law” is the only word indicating female presence in the entire first chapter.7 If the count is continued until the end of Chapter 4, a quarter of the way through the gospel, the ratio improves only slightly, to 140 to 7. It is not difficult to see that long before a woman makes a brief, anonymous, mute appearance in Mark, the story-world has been overwhelmingly marked as a male-dominated space. In this space, there is an entire cosmos of influential males. Indeed, the whole cast of males who will drive the plot of the gospel appear and strike their characteristic poses. The spiritual domain is seen in the appearances of God and Satan, the angels and the spirit, all interested in Jesus, making conflicting claims on him. For God, Jesus is the beloved son whose way God has prepared Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000); and Francis J. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002). For a mildly feminist reflection see also Susan Miller, “The Healing of Simon’s Mother-in-Law,” Expository Times 117 (4, 2006): 152–55. 7. This 50:1 ratio for Mark 1 is arrived at by counting all the ways in which male or female characters are mentioned specifically. This includes, first, males or females who are mentioned by name and, second, males or females who are mentioned by their role. It does not include the continued reference to particular individuals or roles in personal pronouns referring back to the noun antecedent, nor verbs in which named individuals or roles are clearly the subject. Thus, this is a minimal count of the number of times gender-specific names or roles are heard in this chapter. In the first category, Jesus is mentioned by name six times, and Simon five times, while God and John the Baptizer are each named four times. The fishermen Andrew, James, and John are named twice each, while their father Zebedee, the prophet Isaiah, Satan, and Moses are named once only. This makes for a total of twentynine times that individual male names have been heard. In the second category, the word “son” appears three times, “brother,” “messenger or angel,” “fishermen,” and “man” twice each, while there is only one mention each of the masculine terms “the Lord,” “the prophet,” “the man stronger than I,” “a voice from heaven,” “father,” “hired servants,” “scribes,” “leper,” “priest,” and “holy one.” These twenty-one references, combined with the twenty-nine citations of individual names, make fifty times that Mark’s audience has heard a specific male individual or role named. Such specific reference is made to a female only once, and not by individual name but by the familial role of mother-in-law, penqera (v. 30).

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by an announcing voice (1:1-3, 9-11); for Satan, Jesus can be tempted to abandon his mission (1:12-13). The spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness (1:12); the angels care for him there (1:13). The earth in its relationship with the spiritual domain throughout history is evoked.8 The prophetic figures of Isaiah and Moses speak from the past, John baptizes Jesus for his mission in the story’s present, and Jesus calls male followers to become future fishers of people for the reign of God. The conflict that will provide the dramatic energy of the plot appears more than once. Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness (1:12-13); the unclean spirits engage in power struggles with Jesus (1:21-28, 32-34); people set Jesus in conflict with established religious authority when they acclaim his superior spiritual power (vv. 21-22, 27-28). Against this array of powerful males in front of a cosmic backdrop, Mk 1:29-31 introduces us to a generic female in a bland domestic setting. A feminist postcolonial reading notes not only that the woman portrayed here is not named, in contrast to each of the five men already introduced in this brief narrative, but also that she is identified in the conventional patriarchal manner in terms of her relationship to an authorizing male person: she is the mother-in-law of Simon.9 If the plain reading of the passage can be taken, then it would seem that she lives in an extended family situation in the house of Simon and Andrew.10 If so, then it is highly likely that she is a widow who has no adult sons, and no other family male closer in relationship than the husband of her daughter to take care of her. In this familial role, she thus sums up all the other familial roles in which women will be portrayed in the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem. That is, she must be the wife of someone to be the mother of the daughter whom Peter has married; of course she is the daughter of her own father; and now she inhabits the role of mother-inlaw, the only woman to be so designated as an individual character, in the entire New Testament.11 8. See France, The Gospel of Mark, 199–200 for the comment that “the conceptual world presupposed [here] . . . is . . . of certain apocalyptic texts: on one side are Satan, the demons, and certain human beings; on the other are God and Jesus, the angels, and other human beings.” 9. The only other uses of penqera< in the New Testament occur at Mt. 8:14 and Lk. 4:38, parallel passages to Mk 1:30 and at Mt. 10:35 and Lk. 12:53, parallels of each other in which Jesus names the “mother-in-law” as one of those family members who will be set against one another by the allegiance of some family members to Jesus. 10. Donahue, The Gospel of Mark, 81; France, The Gospel of Mark, 107; Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 62 and Marcus, Mark 1-8, 196 all presume that the mother-in-law lives in the kind of extended family common to this culture. 11. It is a distinct feature of Greek narrative to portray “characters” who are types, expressing virtues or stereotypical scenes from life. It may well be that “the mother-in-law” would be read as such a “type,” as indeed she still is today. Examples of Greek “type” portraits may be found in Theophrastus’s work Caraktrej, Characters, where the “Ungenerous Type,” “`Aneleuqeri,aj” portrays the opposite of the behavior of the healed mother-in-law. See Theophrastus, Characters. 22.1-13, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Rusten, I. C. Cunningham, and A. D. Knox (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).



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If she is indeed a widow, then the entire section, Mk 1:29-31 to Mk 12:41-44, is balanced between two widows. This may be only an unintentional accident of Markan structure, but it adds an extra sense of coherence to the countersubject I choose to construct out of the stories about women in Mark. Alongside the dominant theme of the progress of the male leader Jesus and his all-male disciples, and in contrapuntal tension with it, is the theme of the women in Mark. The mother-in-law of Simon, if she can be considered to be a widow, encompasses all the familial roles of women that occur in this gospel. Second, the narrative transition from the exciting event of an exorcism in the synagogue to the healing of a woman in her son-in-law’s home is effected in a way that reinforces awareness of male gender. The narrator relates the passage of the group of five men, Jesus and his four newfound followers, from one place to the other. Many commentators notice the contrast between these two locales: there is a shift from a public to a private space; from a dramatic event with much contending speech to the domestic environment in which healing is effected without a word.12 An intentionally feminist reading sees that in this narrative, the story moves as men move; male characters remain in focus, providing the means of physical transfer from one location to another. This will prove to be true of the narrative in general, as it is narrated; female characters by contrast are much more static. If they ever do move independently, it does not augur well for males. Peter’s mother-in-law is said twice to be suffering from “fever.” She lies in bed pure,ssousa (1:30); she is healed when o` pureto,j leaves her (1:31). Given that there is no detailed description of it, this fever might be interpreted in a variety of ways. Information from medical science, both ancient and modern, and from the social history of ancient disease can shed some light on what this term might have meant to Mark’s audience. The fever itself and its social implications in the family of Simon threatened to bring disorder into the new master-disciple band of Jesus and his disciples. First, then, fever was a recognized condition discussed seriously by the ancient medical writers. John Granger Cook surveys the way fever was interpreted in the ancient Hellenistic world and in the early Christian fathers.13 Having discovered four systems of interpreting fever in the ancient world, Cook finds that “there was no monolithic understanding of illness in the Christian community of late antiquity,” and that “there was also no uniform approach to illnesses such as fever in the surrounding Greco-Roman culture of Mark’s time.”14 The Markan 12. See, for example, France, The Gospel of Mark, 106–07 and Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 62. 13. John Granger Cook, “In Defence of Ambiguity: Is There a Hidden Demon in Mark 1:29-31?” New Testament Studies 43 (1997): 184–208. An argument about the historical probabilities of this story is made in W. Barnes Tatum, “Did Jesus Heal Simon’s Mother-inlaw of a Fever?” Dialogue 27 (3–4, 1994): 148–58. 14. Ibid., 206. The four systems of interpreting fever Cook finds are the medical, astrological, that by divine causation, or by demonic or angelic causation. Fuller treatments of the ancient medical interpretations of fever propounded by the Hippocrates school and by Galen can be found in Mark John Schiefsky, Hippocrates on Ancient Medicine (Leiden:

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commentators dispute as to whether the cause would have been understood in the context as demonic or not. R. T. France considers that despite o` pureto,j being the subject of the verb, it is not necessary to see the fever as a personal agent such as an unclean spirit would be.15 Others, however, see the fever as acting like “an entity, like an unclean spirit” or see a similarity in wording with the immediately preceding exorcism, such that both afflictions are “distortions of the divine will that flee at the advent of Jesus.”16 By contrast to these wide-ranging possibilities in diagnosis, a twentieth-century doctor of medicine, John Wilkinson, M.D., uses modern scientific knowledge and a reading of the meaning of healing in the New Testament to speculate that Peter’s mother-in-law “had contracted a febrile disease which was probably malaria carried by mosquitoes breeding in the fresh water of the Sea of Galilee near Capernaum.”17 If we turn from diagnoses of causes to study of the impact of disease in the ancient world, we find that the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark writes about the devastating loss of life and thus the great fear that epidemics, such as the fevermarked diseases smallpox and measles, often caused in ancient populations.18 Stark cites the dramatic summary statement of the microbiologist Hans Zinsser about the impact of epidemics in the ancient world: Again and again, the forward march of Roman power and world organization was interrupted by the only force against which political genius and military valor were utterly helpless—epidemic disease . . . and when it came, as though carried by storm clouds, all other things gave way, and men crouched in terror, abandoning all their quarrels, undertakings and ambitions, until the tempest had blown over.19

Whether Peter and his family interpreted the mother-in-law’s fever as to be explained by bad air or by unclean spirits, the ancient understanding and Brill 2005), 126–27, 272–76 and Annette Weissenrieder, Images of Illness in the Gospel of Luke: Insights of Ancient Medical Texts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 114, respectively. 15. France, The Gospel of Mark, 108. 16. See Collins, Mark, 174 for the first view and Marcus, Mark 1-8, 199 for the second. 17. John Wilkinson, M.D., The Bible And Healing: A Medical And Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 112. 18. See Rodney Stark, “Antioch as the Social Situation for Matthew’s Gospel,” in David L. Balch ed., Social History of the Matthean Community: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to an Open Question, 189–210 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1991) for a concise treatment of this point. 19. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice And History: Being A Study In Biography, Which, After Twelve Preliminary Chapters Indispensable For The Preparation Of The Lay Reader, Deals With The Life History Of Typhus Fever (Boston: Printed and published for the Atlantic Monthly Press by Little, Brown, and Company, 1963), 99; cited in Rodney Stark, “Epidemics, Networks, and the Rise of Christianity,” Semeia, 56 (1991): 159–75.



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experience of fever would have made the woman’s illness a truly frightening thing to have in the household. Mark’s audience would have caught the sense of danger or heightened concern carried by the Greek words, pure,ssousa and o` pureto,j, of which the semantic base is the word for “fire.”20 Thus, the fevered mother-in-law is a likely site from which the disorder of serious illness could spread. In a literary sense, she sets the tone for disorder inhering in females to infest the project of Jesus in this narrative. A further dimension of the disorder that the mother-in-law represents is that she highlights the social responsibility of Simon as head of a household, to care for the members of his household. Yet Simon and his brother Andrew have already “left their nets and followed [Jesus]” (Mk 1:18). As the next few verses make clear with reference to James and John, the sons of Zebedee, following Jesus means leaving regular familial commitments behind, shocking as that would be in that culture (Mk 1:19-20). Indeed, in his later apocalyptic homily Jesus advises this same original quartet of disciples that following him sets up deathly strife at the heart of the family, between children and parents (Mk 13:12-13). The fever that Simon’s mother-in-law brings into his household must intensify the sense that in following Jesus, Simon will abandon his family responsibility. Thus, the fevered woman threatens the bond that is just being formed between Jesus and the first male disciple that he has called.21 She is a point of disruption of the order that males have set up. Her fever tests Jesus’s capacity to free his followers from the trammels of family, to enable the solidarity in male bonding that will mark Jesus’s career in this narrative. Jesus dispels the mother-in-law’s fevered disruption of his plan, by easily banishing the illness. The mother-in-law’s threat, to disorder the grand schema of “fishing for human beings,” (Mk 1:17) is quietly dispelled. When this tension, between men “going fishing” and the obstruction caused by a mother-in-law, is highlighted, one cannot but wonder if there is not some comedic content here, given the famous diatribe of Juvenal against women. “Give up all hope of peace so long as your mother-in-law is alive,” he cautions, at the beginning of a paragraph blaming such women for destroying their sons-inlaws’ marriages.22

20. See Schiefsky, Hippocrates On Ancient Medicine, 274, for the note that “the account of fever given in [Hippocrates’] Morb. IV, 42–49 is ‘a whole sustained metaphor’ that builds on the semantic associations of the word pu/r.” 21. Operating without a feminist perspective, most regular commentators would agree with John Donahue that this is a classic healing story, “the first of four Markan narratives that deal with ‘acts of power in favor of women.’” See Donahue, The Gospel of Mark, 85; France, The Gospel of Mark, 106–07; Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 61; Marcus, Mark 1-8, 199; and Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 55. 22. See Mark Harding, Early Christian Life and Thought in Social Context: A Reader (London UK: T&T Clark International: A Continuum Imprint, 2003), 217–18 for Juvenal, Satires 6.231–41. Although Juvenal wrote in the Rome of c. the early second CE, his remarks

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When she is healed, Simon’s mother-in-law “serves them” (kai. dihko,nei auvtoi/j). The inceptive imperfect tense used for “she served them” in contrast to the aorist tenses of the other verbs in the sentence (h;geiren( krath/saj( avfh/ken) implies that her service becomes a frequent, repeated action.23 She serves not only Jesus but “them”—auvtoi/j. Since the only possible antecedent for this personal pronoun is Jesus and his companions, it is reasonable to see that Simon’s motherin-law returns to the appropriate, orderly behavior for a woman serving the head of the household and his male guests. As Benny Liew comments, “The picture that Mark paints, then, has one woman . . . doing all the work . . . so that five grown men . . . can rest, interact, and socialize together.”24 The verb diakone,w is used four times and always with weight, in Mark. Already the reader has heard, at Mk 1:13, that when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, the angels served him (dihko,noun auvtw/|). At Mk 10:45 at a climactic point of selfdefinition after the third prediction of his passion (Mk 10:32-34), Jesus declares that as Son of Man he has come “not to be served, but to serve.” At the crucifixion, women witnessing Jesus’s rapid death and his respectable burial are described as having served Jesus (dihko,noun auvtw/|) consistently all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem (Mk 15:40-41). Thus, this word seems to give great dignity to Simon’s restored mother-in-law. Yet, a feminist hermeneutic makes us aware that despite being compared with angels and with Jesus himself in possessing this propensity toward service, there are strong qualifications on female service nevertheless. First, a reading of the plain meaning of both Mk 1:29-31 and 15:40-41 suggests that the service that women do in this gospel is domestic, truly servile. Women are kept in their conventional places despite having the language of angels and of Jesus used about them. Second, as cumulative reading of the stories about women will show, the overwhelming image of women as associated with disorder of various kinds radically debases any currency they might draw from these two notices of their service to Jesus and to his male companions. Summing up the story of Simon’s mother-in-law, our first encounter with a woman in the Gospel of Mark, we can see that she bears the image of a person in complex familial circumstances, and was probably regarded in her illness not only as a threat to the family but also as a disordering hindrance to the new allmale scheme of going hunting for human beings. She is an occasion for Jesus to demonstrate his mastery over the evil of illness and in response to being healed she resumes her regular place in the well-ordered household. She places no obstacle in the path of Simon’s following Jesus; indeed she facilitates this male-male bond by serving them. She indicates that in Jesus’s presence, the order of the reign of God operates. surely express a conventional attitude toward the figure of the mother-in-law that would have been alive in the c. first CE. 23. See Marcus, Mark 1-8, 196 for further grammatical commentary on the verb tenses. 24. Liew, Politics of Parousia, 145.



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In a fashion that sets the pattern for female characters in this narrative, Simon’s mother-in-law has no voice, speaking not a word. She is spoken about, by men to a man (Mk 1:30) and thus becomes, in the way they solve the disorder she brings among them, a further means for males to bond with one another in pursuit of their project. 5.1.2  The Mother of Jesus (Mk 3:21-22, 31-35) Instructed by this telling story about a seemingly insignificant woman, we move to the next, brief narrative in which a female character appears (Mk 3:20-21, 31-35). Curiously, it features another mother, this time, the mother of Jesus. Here, in her only narrated appearance in the gospel, the mother of Jesus obstructs Jesus in his mission by coming at the head of Jesus’s family to subject him to their control.25 As he released Simon from what by comparison is the relatively minor threat of an ill mother-in-law, Jesus now must defend himself against a radically disordering attack on his mission, headed by his own mother. France declares that vv. 20-21 “bristle with difficulties .  .  . such that any understanding of these verses must be advanced with some diffidence.”26 Exegetical interpretation requires judgment on what is a reasonable reading, given all the cues the verses present to a listener or reader. To deal with these difficulties, I will examine first the structure of vv. 20-35 and then the meaning of particular words and phrases within that structure. First, most scholars recognize that in v 20-35, two stories are combined, one interrupting and interpreting the other.27 Whatever the original sources of these stories, the best way to make sense of them as they stand is to see that vv. 20-21 and 31-35 are connected, surrounding vv. 22-30. These two “sandwiched” stories contrast with one another, each illuminating the other. If the outer story is about Jesus’s family coming to seize him, then as Frank Moloney writes, “[Jesus’s] family regards him as insane, but the scribes go one step further, claiming that the prince of all evil spirits, Beelzebul, has taken possession of Jesus.”28 25. The mother of Jesus does appear in another narrative in Mark, at 6:1-6, but she is not portrayed as a character acting in the narrative itself. Rather, she is spoken about in the third person, by the collective character, “the crowd.” 26. France, The Gospel of Mark, 164. France names five distinct interpretive problems: “the antecedent of auvtou,j, the identification of oi` parV auvtou/, the antecedent of auvto,n, the subject of e;legon,, and the meaning and subject of evxe,sthÅ” 27. Donahue, The Gospel of Mark, 129; Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 169; Marcus, Mark 1-8, 270, 278; and Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 80 all agree with France, The Gospel of Mark, 156 that this is a classic example of Markan “sandwich” technique. Collins, Mark, 226 argues that this is not a classic case of “sandwich” technique since vv. 31-35 make sense as a standalone story and are not therefore the original conclusion of a story that began in vv. 20-21 but was interrupted. 28. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 82.

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Second, the phrase oi` parV auvtou/ in v. 21 ranges in meaning from the formal role of “envoys” or “agents” to the more intimate “relatives” or “family.”29 The simple reading of the phrase to mean “disciples” cannot work here because the preceding list of disciples in 3:16-19 and the textual emendation of the verb e;rcetai in many manuscripts to the plural in accommodation to auvtou.j support the reading that the disciples are inside the house with Jesus. They cannot therefore go “out” (evxh/lqon) to seize him.30 If  oi` parV auvtou/ cannot be the disciples of Jesus, then the family of Jesus becomes, as France argues, “the least unsatisfactory solution to an exegetical conundrum in the context of the whole structure of 3:13-35.”31 However, combined with the issue of the structure of the whole passage from 20 to 35, some scholars differentiate between either two levels of family groups or two phases of the family setting out to seize Jesus. For those seeing two phases of the journey, vv. 20-21 present the moment of departure of the family (evxh/lqon) while vv. 31-35 announce the point of their arrival (Kai. e;rcetai h` mh,thr auvtou/ kai. oi` avdelfoi. auvtou/).32 For those reading two references to the family, the first oi` parV auvtou/ is very general, perhaps referring to a looser family group that Moloney calls Jesus’s “blood family” while the second is more specific, naming the prominent individuals of the family nucleus, Jesus’s mother and brothers.33 To add weight to this latter reading, John R. Donahue points out that the “Western” text tradition seen in the Mss D and W rewrites v. 21 specifically to name the scribes, rather than Jesus’s family, as accusing Jesus of being “out of his mind.”34 This attempt at redirecting the agency of the accusers indicates that on the face of it, the phrase oi` parV auvtou/ was taken by some early readers to refer to Jesus’s family in a way that was felt to be embarrassing. Taking this latter reading makes it possible to read that Jesus’s mother, who is named ahead of Jesus’s brothers in v. 31, is also one of those who at the outset see Jesus as “out of his mind.” Indeed, in the absence of a named father, Jesus’s mother, named at the head of the list in v. 31, seems to lead the family attempt to contain Jesus. Thus, in the light of Jesus’s mission to bring the order of God into the world, 29. See, for example, Collins, Mark, 226 and Marcus, Mark 1-8, 270. 30. France, The Gospel of Mark, 166; Marcus, Mark 1-8, 270; and Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 172 argue in this vein. Pace Mary Ann Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel: Mark’s World in LiteraryHistorical Perspective (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1989), 199, foot note 19, who argues for at least the wider understanding to be considered here. 31. France, The Gospel of Mark, 166–67. 32. Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, especially on pp. 172, 180–81 takes this approach and does France, The Gospel of Mark, 156. 33. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 83 reads it this way, writing, “New characters enter the narrative in 3:31: his mother and his brothers.” So does Collins, Mark, 227, commenting that Jesus’s “family (oi` parV auvtou) is further defined in v. 31 as his mother and his brothers.” 34. Donahue, The Gospel of Mark, 129. See Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 167–68 for a concise yet complete treatment of the text’s critical problems.



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the determined attempt of his mother, backed by Jesus’s brothers, to “seize him” (krath/sai) because they perceive him to be out of his mind (evxe,sth), proposes radically to disorder his mission. She intends to bring it to a halt. While it is going too far to say that the mother of Jesus is portrayed as being satanic, she nevertheless attempts to obstruct the path of Jesus in a way that is in sympathy with the aims of evil and radical disorder.35 Joel Marcus sums up the source of the opposition made to Jesus both by his family and by the leaders of his own religious tradition as “the ineradicable division and fierce enmity between him and the demonic forces that hold the human race in thrall and blind it to its true good.”36 This understanding is supported by the intense spatial imagery of inside and outside that plays through these stories, Jesus’s blood family being associated with being “outside” his circle through the use of the preposition “evx” three times, in evxh/lqon (v. 21), e;xw sth,kontej (v. 31), and  e;xw zhtou/si,n se (v. 32). The intense power struggle between Jesus and his mother as head of the family is marked by the fact that they use this same language of exclusion about him, accusing him of being literally, “outside himself,” “evxe,sth” (v. 21). By contrast, those who adhere to Jesus sit around him in a circle (kai. evka,qhto peri. auvto.n o;cloj, v. 32), so that there is a buffer zone between Jesus and his mother. In response to the challenge by his mother, Jesus radically empties the categories of family relationships of their regular meaning and redefines them in terms of the order to which he is committed, that of the reign of God (vv. 33-35). Summing up, we can say that the image constructed of the mother of Jesus in her only narrated appearance in this gospel, without a male escort and nameless, is that she fails massively in her attempt to disorder Jesus’s mission. Her son, Jesus, virtually defines out of existence the claim she makes on him in terms of the very strong family-based culture of the day, replacing it with a new order. Her disordered attempt to divert him from his mission becomes a means of establishing Jesus as a truly powerful, independent male who has asserted a new order, that of God. As God’s uniquely favored son, Jesus is able to bestow family membership in the new order on a new basis, that of doing the will of God, something that Jesus is uniquely placed to discern. The weakness of his mother’s attempt to impede Jesus is reflected in the fact that standing outside the “world” of order that he teaches to those gathered around him, she and her other sons “call” Jesus, but fail to get his attention. By contrast, Jesus has already succeeded in calling twelve disciples to leave their livelihoods to follow him (Mk 3:13-19). Jesus voices his call in direct speech, but his mother’s call to her son is narrated for her. The fact that Jesus’s mother speaks no individual word in Mk 3:20-21, 31-35 means that the Markan narrator will not allow disordering speech of this caliber from a woman to contest Jesus’s discourse. 35. Collins, Mark, 226, foot note 93 cautions that to interpret the actions of Jesus’s family as satanic is excessive. 36. Marcus, Mark 1-8, 279.

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France softens the image I have just outlined, arguing that “Mark’s singleminded desire to stress the priority of the ‘spiritual family’ leaves him no scope in this pericope to offer a more balanced overall account of Jesus’ relationship with his mother and brothers.”37 However, I argue that whatever may have been the historical reality of this familial relationship, literary analysis of the story of Jesus’s mother in Mk 3:20-21 and 31-35 shows her to be portrayed as a woman who threatens grave disorder in her son’s life but is resisted successfully by her son’s loyal devotion to the order of God. This contributes to the accumulating image in Mark of women as a source of disorder that threatens the mission of God’s order in Jesus. A final remark as we see this narrative moving to its denouement on the cross: Jesus’s mother strangely resembles him in the bold, utter commitment she has to her mission, as he has to his. This implacable commitment causes the “all or nothing” confrontation between them. They contrast in the fact that while Jesus is “inside” the world of order of God, his Father, the mother of Jesus is “outside” Jesus’s world. These two absolutist features, the “all or nothing” approach and the world of “insiders and outsiders” so typical of apocalyptic literature will illuminate our reading of the death of Jesus at the narrative’s climax. Having seen Jesus dispel the disorder brought against him by two mothers, we move to two stories featuring women with illnesses, who are united literarily by Mark by a number of means, one of them being that both are named in their stories as “daughter.” This is another case of intercalated stories, one (5:21-24, 35-43) shedding light on the other (5:25-34).38 I will comment on them in the order in which they first appear, starting with the story that opens at 5:22, and completing this whole story before proceeding to read the one that disrupts it. 5.1.3  The Daughter of Jairus and her Mother (Mk 5:21-24, 35-43) This story presents Jesus healing a female character known as “the little daughter of Jairus.” In the gap since we last saw Jesus encounter a woman at 3:21-22, 31-35, the image of Jesus has been further developed. Jesus has taught many parables about the order of God that he has come to announce and inaugurate, explaining 37. France, The Gospel of Mark, 178–79. 38. Most commentators, such as Marcus, Mark 1-8, 364 and Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 107 consider these two stories to be an example of the Markan “sandwich” technique, by which as Moloney describes it they “have been put together by Mark, or the tradition before Mark, precisely because each episode throws light upon the other.” France, The Gospel of Mark, 235, notes that the only obvious thematic connection between these two pericopes is that they are both women. Collins, Mark, 276–77 sees them as intertwined, but on account of different grammatical styles especially in the use of verbs in each story, as having been originally separate in the source Mark used, probably a collection of five miracle stories. Collins reads the intertwined stories reflecting on each other to intensify the sense of difficulty that each situation presents to Jesus.



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how differently it operates in comparison to the regular view of the world that his listeners hold (Mk 4:1-34). Jesus has then demonstrated how authoritative his voice is by both calming a terrifying storm on the lake (Mk 4:35-41) and then banishing an entire legion of unclean spirits infesting a deranged man, solely by means of voice commands (Mk 5:1-20).39 Having traveled across the lake to pagan territory, Jesus now returns to the Jewish side of the lake. At his arrival Jesus is greeted by a leading man of the local area who beseeches Jesus to come to heal his little daughter, who is at the point of death (Mk 5:21-23). Thus, the story is set under way by an encounter between two authoritative men. The father of the dying girl is established as authoritative because he is identified both by role as “ei-j tw/n avrcisunagw,gwn,” one of the local leaders, and by personal name.40 Jesus’s authority as we have just seen seems still to rise further with each new event. It is enhanced all the more here when a prominent local leader falls at his feet and begs Jesus to snatch his dying child from imminent death. Furthermore, Jairus has been allowed to say this in direct speech. Giving him voice both increases Jairus’s prominence and, together with 1:29-31, creates the impression that it is the role of males to discuss among themselves, the serious illness from which a dependent female is suffering. So far at least, females have not been afforded this kind of voice, about themselves. Jesus responds immediately to Jairus’s request, relayed to us by the Markan narrator with the matter-of-fact comment, “And he went with him” (Mk 5:24a). This comment is not so simple, however. In a second way, this new story resembles Mk 1:29-31, namely that the plot moves forward by focusing on men moving purposefully together. As Jesus makes his way toward the dying girl, he is pressed (sune,qlibon) by a great crowd attracted no doubt by his fame. This crowd sets up the conditions of possibility for a number of elements of the intervening story (vv. 25-34), to which I will return. For the present, Jesus’s progress to save the little girl is interrupted not only by the intervening story of the bleeding woman but also by the arrival of some people from the synagogue ruler’s house to announce, again with all the attention that direct speech affords, that the little girl has died and that Jesus’s further mission to her is therefore pointless. Jesus instructs the little girl’s father not to fear but to believe; arriving at the house Jesus declares, “The child is not dead but sleeping (Mk 5:39).” Further, in a strategy reminiscent of the “inside/ outside” dynamic of Mk 3:21-22, 31-35, Jesus asserts his order over the household, putting outside the ritualized confusion and disorder of the mourners and taking

39. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 109, notes this absence of women from the narrative, counting the gap as occurring between 1:31 and 5:21. 40. See France, The Gospel of Mark, 235 for a discussion of the term avrcisunagw,goj, as indicating that Jairus was one of the elders of the synagogue and a person of some importance. I find the explanation of Marcus, Mark 1-8, 356, that the reason that Jairus’s name is included is that it is significant whereas like other Mark minor characters, the females are anonymous, to be inadequate.

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in with him, those ready to perceive reliably what Jesus will do, when he raises the dead girl to life.41 It is notable that this will be another occasion for bonding between Jesus and his chosen male disciples. It is true that the children’s parents are also taken into the healing scene, but it would seem very strange to exclude them from the scene. In contrast to the non-identification of the female child to be healed and her mother, three male disciples are named, an inner circle of three of the first four called by Jesus, the three who are distinguished by epithets at their first commissioning (3:16-17). Not only are their stories of being called personally by Jesus and as having been called first made explicit in the narrative, but these three disciples, Peter, James, and John, will be named specifically as having been chosen deliberately to be with Jesus at the transfiguration (9:2-9), as receiving (with Andrew) a private prediction of the endtimes (13:3-37) and as again being chosen to be with Jesus in Gethsemane (14:33). France argues that this means that “the supreme miracle of raising the dead is also for their eyes only.”42 Mark’s narrative conveys the inescapable impression that the perception of the heavenly order of reality is something for which males only, together, are competent. There has been considerable narrative delay getting to this dying girl-child. She is a pawn in a theological narrative that will demonstrate the overweening power of Jesus.43 In this sense she serves Jesus’s greater mission and the spread of his fame. The little girl is in fact like Jesus in that at a deeper theological level, her death and resuscitation symbolically rehearse Jesus’s own looming fate, his death and resurrection. In these climactic events of the larger narrative, apocalyptic evil—the ultimate expression of disorder—will manifest itself in utter conflict with the source of life, God. God will win, but working this out in the earthly realm will cost Jesus his life. Already, the story of the little girl, which Jesus forbids anybody to tell, foretells as though in mime, his fate at the mercy of apocalyptic disorder.44 41. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 108 notes the literary motif of Jesus’s increasing aggression (Moloney’s term) in 5:21-43, moving from acquiescence to Jairus’s request to “a series of aggressive actions (vv. 35-43).” 42. France, The Gospel of Mark, 239. Collins, Mark, 285 reads the same way. 43. Collins, Mark, 285 remarks that Jesus’s comment that the girl is not dead but sleeping introduces an element of ambiguity, a rhetorical exaggeration to demonstrate the ease with which he will raise the child. Marcus, Mark 1-8, 372 links the story to the Johannine Lazarus story in which Jesus’s delay in going to heal Lazarus results in Lazarus’s death, but ultimately the glory of God, when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. 44. Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 304 insists that this event does not prefigure the resurrection because the little girl is resuscitated, that is, “returned to life as usual with her family.” That is, raised to mortal life, she will die again. However, the language which is used both to and about the little girl, “e;geire,” and “avne,sth” is used also of Jesus’s resurrection. Marcus, Mark 1-8, 373 argues that “Mark’s readers would immediately grasp the implication that the power by which Jesus raised the dead girl was the same eschatological power through which God later raised him from the dead.”



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Yet, while her father seeks help for her, Jesus the beloved Son of God will find no such response when he cries for help to God as he dies. In proleptic anticipation, the disorder that oppresses Jairus’s daughter’s life intensifies all the more the sense of disorder that the power of evil will wield over Jesus at the point of his suffering and death. However, this story is ostensibly about a female character, an anonymous child identified only by her relationship with her authorizing male, this time her father. In contrast to his stature, she is, by his declaration, only a “little daughter” (to. quga,trio,n mou). With this term we have moved from mothers into the domain of mothers and/or daughters, which will be the focus of the following three stories (5:25-34, 6:14-29; 7:24-30). Both females in this situation are silent. The girl-child lies in dead silence; even when she is raised we do not hear her speak at all. Her mother, for whatever reason, utters no sound in the entire narrative. It is as though the only people with vocal cords in this story are masculine. Mark has constructed for us a world ordered by male discourse. Nevertheless, it is a world in which male order is challenged by female disorder. First, the daughter’s prematurely near-dead state diverts Jesus from his mission of preaching to the crowds beside the lake, which has already been established as a typical scenario in which Jesus will teach (see Mk 2:13; 4:1; 3:7). Second, at a more serious level, the daughter threatens to provoke disorder in Jesus’s career as a preacher of God’s order, since his mode of healing her by touch as well as by word, symbolically awakens her sexually. The coherence of Jesus’s image as the completely altruistic, disinterested agent of God is strained by this depiction of him taking a sleeping pubescent female by the hand, to waken her to the onset of her adult life.45 Associated with this theme is the motif of the ritual uncleanness of her corpse that sits uneasily in contemporary critical awareness.46 Finally, that someone should have the reputation of being able to restore a dead person to life 45. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 110, acknowledges that taking the girl by the hand “is an ambiguous gesture . . . [since] her being ‘twelve years old’ makes her a woman.” As he elaborates further (p. 111), having been touched by Jesus, “The girl of twelve years of age—now marriageable—. . . rises to womanhood. The young woman, who now begins to pour forth her life in menstruation . . . [is] . . . restored.” The sense of Jesus as bridegroom who awakens a marriageable young woman to sexual consciousness seems very close to the surface here. 46. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, offers Old Testament and Jewish references to substantiate declaring both the menstruating woman and the corpse of the young girl to be unclean. However, Collins, Mark, 283 refers to a range of current scholarship that argues that “neither the menstruant nor the zābâ was socially isolated among Jews of the Second Temple period.” France, The Gospel of Mark, 235 agrees, noting that if there is an issue of uncleanness around either of these women, it is implicit in the narrative, not noted in any particular way. Thus, it is not clear that the ritual cleanliness of these women would have been perceived by Mark’s original audience as a prominent site of disorder with which the women polluted Jesus.

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is a serious threat to those who formally hold power, such that they would want to do away with Jesus. All of these elements threaten disorder to the orderly progress of Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God. Mark has ensured that the voice of Jesus will override this disorder. Jesus has spoken three times in vv. 35-43, always declaring hope and order within disorder. Against the fear that news of the girl’s death brings, Jesus encourages, “only believe” (v. 36). Against the disorder of the mourners’ tumult, he insists, “The child is not dead.” Finally, when he speaks the words of raising, Jesus is portrayed as speaking in his native tongue, Aramaic, which the narrator translates, so that the words are heard twice. This double speech has two effects. First, it creates for an ancient audience listening in Greek, a sense of the exotic language, used to impress, that they were accustomed to hearing healers use.47 By contrast to some pagan healers, Jesus does not, however, “babble” at length or perform exotic rituals. He heals with one, brief command. Second, the use of Aramaic offers those who believe in Jesus a momentary “glimpse” of his voice speaking in his native tongue, uttering the command every Christian wanted to hear from him, “I say to you, arise!” 5.1.4  The Daughter Saved by God’s Order (Mk 5:25-34) In the story that is intertwined with this one, Jesus’s voice has the last word, closing the story with a declaration of salvation, peace, and well-being to a new member of God’s order (Mk 5:34). However, this definitive closure comes only after a story in which voices have contested for power amid some conflict. The crowd that surrounded Jesus beside the sea and through which Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, seems to have moved without difficulty, is the context in which the subject of this story approaches Jesus.48 In brief, in this story an extremely ill woman, bereft of all resources, gains healing by touching Jesus’s clothes, from behind. Jesus insists on finding who has touched him in this particular way, over the protest of his disciples at the pointlessness of the task.49 The woman falls at 47. See Collins, Mark, 284–85 and Marcus, Mark 1-8, 363. Marvin W. Meyer, ed., The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook: Sacred Texts of the Mystery Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean World (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1987), 213–21, presents the long prayers in nonsense syllables that ancient pagan healers used and for which they were parodied by satirists such as Lucian of Samosata. Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 302 insists that Mark’s translation and use of Aramaic elsewhere in the gospel for stories other than healings means that Mk 5:41 is not, however, meant to be understood as a magical incantation. 48. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 107, France, The Gospel of Mark, 236 and Marcus, Mark 1-8, 366 all comment on the contrast in social status between Jairus and the woman. Marcus notes “social, economic and religious” differences. 49. Recent studies on the particular circumstances of either the bleeding woman or Jesus in this story have been written by Hisako Kinukawa, “The Story of the Hemorrhaging Woman (Mark 5:25-34) Read from a Japanese Feminist Context,” Biblical Interpretation 2 (3, 1994): 283–93; Charles, E. Powell, “The ‘Passivity’ of Jesus in Mark 5:25-34.” Bibliotheca



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Jesus’s feet, “tells the whole truth” and Jesus pronounces her to be “daughter,” “faithful,” “saved,” and “healed.” The surrounding crowd sets up the conditions of possibility for the story about this woman. First, it is under the cover of the pressure the crowd generates that the woman approaches Jesus by subterfuge, from behind, to access some of his power.50 Second, the crowd pressure highlights Jesus’s sensitivity to the difference between ordinary jostling and the special touch that accesses his power, thus emphasizing all the more his capacity to detect a higher order of reality in the midst of the tumult of ordinary life. Third, this gives rise to a significant interchange between Jesus and his male disciples. We will see that this woman introduces a number of elements of disorder into the story of Jesus’s career. These include the external impact that her intervention has on Jesus’s relationships both with Jairus and with his band of male disciples; the manifestation in her own person of manifold disorder; and the disorder to Jesus’s reputation that her interference with him threatens. First then, the woman provokes external disorder in that she obstructs Jesus on his way to heal the daughter of Jairus, whereby he would perform a favor for an important man who has made public obeisance to Jesus, in the manner of a client to a patron. Thus, the bleeding woman temporarily breaks into a newly forming male bond which promises to enhance Jesus’s status, constituting him in public as a patron figure. At the same time, the different perceptions that Jesus and his male disciples have about what happened in the crowd focuses for the first time in these women’s stories on a gap opening up between these men. It is the occasion for a brief but vigorous verbal interchange between them, expressing this discord, this disorder lurking within the disciple band (see Mk 5:30-32). Notably, in this interchange, Jesus ignores his disciples’ commonsense retort, focusing intently on his own awareness of a spiritual transaction that has occurred, of which they are oblivious.51 Sacra 162 (January to March 2005): 66–75; Marla J. Selvidge, “Mark 5:25-34 and Leviticus 15:19-20: A Reaction to Restrictive Purity Regulations,” Journal of Biblical Literature 103 (1984): 619–23. 50. The verb “sune,qlibon” expresses the pressure of the crowd on Jesus. It has already been used once before in Mark, at 3:9, in the context of Jesus needing a boat at the lakeside lest the crowd crush him. The nominal form qliyij appears three times, at 4:17, about the pressure of life that crushes faith in the word of God and twice in the apocalyptic sermon, at 13:19, 24, about the suffering of the end times. Marcus, Mark 1-8, 357 reads the woman’s approach as surreptitious, on the grounds that she is probably ritually unclean. I agree with Marcus about the woman’s stealthy approach, whatever the reason. Pace Collins, Mark, 281, who does not see the woman as under purity restrictions, and writes that “the narrator sees nothing wrong in the woman’s actions.” Collins, Mark, 282 notes that the woman’s faith resonates with an ancient belief that touch could make it possible to access a charismatic person’s gift. 51. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 108, comments on “two levels of discourse going on in the narrative,” that of Jesus and that of his disciples.

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Second, the woman’s personal state of physical, financial, and social dereliction is a vision of the disorder that can beset human beings, especially women, when they have only their own resources to rely on. This woman is in extremis even more urgently than is the little girl, because she seems to be completely alone, with no one to beseech a kindly faith healer on her behalf. The narrator tells us plainly that the woman has a chronic medical condition, a flow of blood for twelve years (Mk 5:25).52 In a sequence of aorist participles suggesting finality, we are told that as a result of her condition she has suffered much under many doctors, exhausted herself financially, not experienced any relief, and actually got worse but has heard about Jesus and has come up behind him in the crowd. All the grammatical anticipation that seven participles in a row can muster falls on the one finite, indicative mood verb, “she touched” (h[yato) with great force, seeking definitive resolution. The woman’s extreme isolation and thus disorder is highlighted not only by her being portrayed as alone, but by the voice that the narrator now allows her to exercise (v. 28). As the first direct speech heard from a woman in this gospel, it has the impact of an opening line in a play, declaring the character of a person. It is the speech of a desperately needy woman, but as the foundational speech of women in this gospel it emphasizes intense personal dependence on a male savior as the entire horizon of hope available for women. By comparison, in his opening speech, Jesus announces a program of apocalyptic fulfilment (1:15) that relates to the whole cosmos that witnessed his baptism. The only line that the bleeding woman speaks in this gospel delineates the bare minimum requirements for her healing. Her speech consists of only the words that are necessary: “touch, hem, garment, be saved,” with two conditional particles—“if,” “if ” (“Vea.n” and “ka'n,” that is., kai. and eva,n elided together). This minimalist speech reveals the exhaustion both of the woman and of her resources. She speaks to herself, perhaps in subterfuge but equally because she is utterly alone, all the supposedly competent people having failed her. She promises herself that the one remaining strategy that is available to her, touching this man’s clothes, must be the action that halts the hemorrhage of her life away from her. Like the reformed convict, Margaret Catchpole, this woman is approved because she voices only what is the barest necessity, expressing dependence on being saved by the power that inheres in a male person. Yet, despite this orderly expression of the disorder that besets her, the woman brings disorder to Jesus in a third way. As was the case with the daughter of Jairus, the transaction that occurs between the bleeding woman and Jesus when she touches him threatens disorder to Jesus’s reputation as a religious leader (Mk 5:28-30). There is an inescapable, powerful intimacy between this woman and Jesus. She knows in her body that something has happened to her as a result 52. Collins, Mark, 280 says that this is without doubt, vaginal or menstrual bleeding. France, The Gospel of Mark, 236 and Marcus, Mark 1-8, 357 agree, with Marcus arguing that Mark’s reticence in naming the source of the bleeding indicates what kind it must be.



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of touching Jesus. At the same time Jesus knows in himself that something has gone out from him. Given the gynecological nature of this woman’s illness, it is almost impossible to avoid some sense of sexual intimacy or encounter here— that Jesus’s potency has touched this woman deeply, causing her gynecological dysfunction to be corrected and making possible for her a future adult sexual life. Like Jairus’s daughter, this woman confronts Jesus with the trammels of sexuality.53 In contrast to the twelve-year-old girl moreover, this adult woman took the initiative, accessing Jesus’s power independently and setting in train the disruption of relationship with his male companions.54 In the final verse of the story, we will see the narrator’s attempt to reconstrue this relationship in an acceptable fashion. With regard to the theme of service that pervades Mark’s portrayal of female characters, it is clear that this woman is beyond serving anyone except herself for her own survival. However, like any character in a narrative, she can serve the interests of the narrator in portraying other characters. In this story the bleeding woman serves to demonstrate the marvel of Jesus’s power as physician (see Mk 2:17), of his awareness of another world of power transactions and of his magnanimity in bestowing on her as “daughter,” membership of the order of God. Perhaps, restored to health and with the new identity of “daughter,” she could become eventually a servant, who participates in Jesus’s community of mutually first and last, servant and master members (Mk 9:35, 10:31, 43-44). Unlike men in this gospel who are healed by Jesus, this woman has no projected future beyond the story itself. She is not called to follow Jesus (Levi, Mk 2:14, 17); is not instructed to go and show herself to the priests for proof or right to reenter community (the leper, Mk 1:40-45); is not instructed to go and tell people what the Lord has done (the Gadarene demoniac, Mk 5:1-20); and is not portrayed as following Jesus joyfully on the way (blind Bartimaeus, Mk 10: 46-52). Like the daughter of Jairus, the woman performs a service for Jesus in that she suffers the ma,stix that he later predicts he also will suffer. In the case of the bleeding woman, the noun is used twice at 5:29, 34 as it is also used of diseased people in general whom Jesus heals (3:10). Speaking of himself, Jesus uses the verb form mastigw,sousin (Mk 10:34). Like the little girl, the bleeding woman also proleptically foreshadows a time when Jesus will both suffer ma,stix extremely at the hands of others and will eventually be saved, through his faith. In this way, she could be said to symbolize or to foreshadow Jesus crucified and raised. She 53. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 111 says that “the older woman, who experiences menstruation as a pathological condition, [is] . . . restored [and] . . . ‘given’ new life.” France, The Gospel of Mark, 237 writes of the story progressing in a “‘primitive’ vein, in that the effect of the cure is immediately felt both by the patient and by the healer.” 54. Collins, Mark 284 declares that this woman saves herself by the power of her faith. Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel, 169–70, concludes an exposition of Markan faith as portrayed in this story with the finding that “Jesus is the catalyst of the healing process, but the woman’s faith is the essential prerequisite, because seed yields fruit solely in the good earth.”

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is depleted of her lifeblood and so will he be; she suffers much under experts of the body and so will he, in a gruesome fashion; she invests all she has into a system of care that fails her utterly; so also does the Markan Jesus spend his whole life (o[lon to.n bi,on auvtou/; Mk 12:44) irretrievably; she has great faith in God that she will be saved and so does Jesus, although he actually dies. Perhaps it is more possible to portray some difficult aspects of the death experience of Jesus vicariously in this description of this woman who, trembling and in fear, tells the whole truth.55 Perhaps the whole truth about Jesus approaching his death on the cross is that he also trembled in fear. The opening image of this woman projects a frightening air of quiet, grim desperation. She seems on the verge of extinction by exhaustion. The final image is of a woman healed by her own efforts, both physically and spiritually. The closing interchange between this woman and Jesus vindicates a feminist reading of the story. Here, if anywhere, is an opportunity for a woman restored to life to speak some words that counteract the reductive speech of v. 28. The Markan narrator betrays a deep ambiguity about female speech when he reserves it to his own voice to report, “She told the whole truth” (v. 33). This woman’s second speech, this time to the community to which she is restored, is produced through a male-favoring narratorial voice. A feminist must ask, in this Markan world, how much of a male-favoring narrator’s version of a woman’s “whole truth” is indeed “the whole truth”? Or how much of “the whole truth” about an intrinsically female experience is told, when a male-favoring narrator’s version of a woman’s “whole truth” is all that is offered? How much of that woman’s truth remains yet to be told? Jesus has the last word, interpreting whatever “the whole truth” is, as an act of faith and calling the woman “daughter” as he sends her away in peace, healed. In this final statement, Jesus’s voice prevails. Jesus asserts her identity for her, acting as the authorizing male who bestows respectability on her. It seems reasonable to assume that Jesus would mean that she is a “daughter” of the new order of God that he proclaims, in which doing the will of God brings people into kinship with Jesus. By this means, the Markan narrator has Jesus’s final line shift the memory of this woman in Jesus’s career away from the difficult area of potentially sexual relationships and onto focus on the order of God. Jesus’s authority, somewhat 55. Various theories are offered for the reason that the woman is so fearful about having been healed. Collins, Mark, 284 and France, The Gospel of Mark, 238, both of whom note that Mark gives no hint of the cause for the woman’s fear, mention fear that she will be punished for ritually polluting Jesus or for stealing his power, or embarrassment at having to speak such intimate matters in public. See Marcus, Mark 1-8, 360 and Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 107, foot note 187 for the idea that being required to perform what might be considered the legal act of testifying in public, which women did not do, caused her fear. Another possible cause could be the intense shock of going from almost psychotic reduction to communication with herself alone, to being required to account for herself in public before many powerful males.



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dented by a woman’s capacity to wrest power from him unawares and by a slight contretemps with his disciples, is restored. Order has overcome disorder presenting in female guise. In the flow of Mark’s narrative, order restored enables Jesus to progress credibly to heal the daughter of Jairus. Having already considered that story, we will move to the next story about women, about another mother and daughter, Herodias the wife of Herod and her daughter. 5.1.5  Herodias and Her Daughter (Mk 6:14-29) In Markan perspective, this next story has strong potential for disorder. On the one hand, in this story there are two named and prominent women who speak together in collusion, rather than the isolated, unnamed, muted women that we have seen in the previous four stories. On the other hand, Jesus is absent from this story. From the Markan perspective, this is a world from which the ordering power of the reign of God is completely absent. In the absence of Jesus and the reign of God, however, there is the reign of a vacillating and corrupt secular king. In this human king’s reign, a remote manifestation of the Roman Empire, the order of violence prevails. The story opens with a state of existing disorder on two levels. First, in the larger domain of the kingdom, there is talk of a faith healer with disciples doing marvelous works. Riven with guilt about a man, John the Baptizer, whom he has had executed, King Herod interprets the faith healer, Jesus, as the executed man redivivus. Thus, already merely among the male characters introduced in Mk 6:1416, there is marked violence and disturbance. Second, however, within the realm of the disordered royal court, the deep cause of this outer turmoil is to be found. Here, in the story that proceeds from v. 17 onward, the source of the turmoil in the kingdom is found to be the conflict between men that women generate.56 This is a watershed story about women in the Gospel of Mark. First, it presents for the first time, two women together in the same story, speaking to one another. Second, the way they speak together very dramatically affects the plot within that story in a way that women rarely do in this gospel. That is, the women’s speech together leads to the death of a character 56. Recent journal articles that explore very fruitfully the themes of male and female activity and identity in this story include Alice Bach, “Calling the Shots: Directing Salome’s Dance of Death,” Semeia 74 (1996): 103–26; Jean Delorme, “John The Baptist’s Head—The Word Perverted: A Reading of a Narrative (Mark 6:14-29),” Semeia 81 (1998): 115–29; Jennifer A. Glancy, “Unveiling Masculinity. The Construction of Gender in Mark 6:17-29,” Biblical Interpretation 2 (1, 1994): 34–50; Regina Janes, “Why The Daughter Of Herodias Must Dance (Mark 6:14-29),” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 28 (4 2006): 443–67, Ross S. Kraemer, “Implicating Herodias and Her Daughter in the Death of John The Baptizer: A (Christian) Theological Strategy,” Journal of Biblical Literature 125 (2 Sum 2006): 321–49.

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(John the Baptizer) in this story, which functions as an explanatory flashback to an earlier, bare report of John being arrested (1:14). In having such a strong relationship to plot, these talking women stand in marked contrast to the women we have already seen in this gospel. It can be argued that their influence also both shapes the plot of the larger story of the gospel and hints where the plot will go from this point on. The arrest of John the Baptist on account of his preaching against one of these women functions as the catalyst to Jesus beginning his public career (Mk 1:14). Jesus fills, but in a new way, the place left vacant by the sudden removal of John, the prophet who baptized Jesus for his mission. As a flashback to this earlier moment, Mk 6:14-29 fills in the development of John’s story after his arrest up to his death by execution, but does so in such a way as also to foreshadow ominously, the path ahead for Jesus as he continues preaching in succession to John.57 Third, this is a watershed story because these two women come from a different social class than those already seen in the gospel. In a sense, their world represents the Roman Empire in Palestine: it is one profile of the ancient imperial-colonial experience as it is represented in Mark’s narrative. The women may be officially ethnic Jews as have been the other women in Mark, but these two women live in the royal court of a Herod, as part of the sprawling, troubled Herodian royal family and they are to some degree at least, colored with the taint of pagan decadence, because of the Herodian association with Rome.58 As France comments, “Herodian culture was more influenced by that of Rome than by traditional Judaism” and Joel Marcus agrees, citing Josephus, “The Herodian household in general and Antipas in particular were scarcely paragons of Jewish virtue.”59 Herodias and her daughter thus represent unusual, upper-class women who operate by different rules than those of Jewish peasant and artisan society from which most of the characters so far have come.

57. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 127 lists the comparisons between the careers of John and Jesus, noting the difference between John’s disciples who bury their master’s body and those of Jesus who do not. 58. The salient features of this family for Mark 6:14-29 is that the Herod portrayed is Herod Antipas, one of the sons of Herod the Great. Herodias is a granddaughter of Herod the Great. She married first one of Herod’s sons, who was thus her uncle, called Herod by some and Philip, perhaps mistakenly, by others. Having divorced this first husband under the provisions of Roman law, she then married another son of Herod the Great and thus another uncle, Herod Antipas. The daughter’s relationship within the family will be discussed later, where relevant. For succinct reviews of the history of the Herodian family, see Collins, Mark, 303, 305–07; France, The Gospel of Mark, 256; Marcus, Mark 1-8, 394; and Florence Morgan Gillman, Herodias: At Home In That Fox’s Den (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003) 131 offer family trees of the Herodian family, Gillman focusing particularly on the genealogy of Herodias. 59. See France, The Gospel of Mark, 258 and Marcus, Mark 1-8, 396.



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From a literary point of view, this narrative is more complex than others in the gospel.60 One of the complex elements is the number of different, conflict-ridden relationships that operate in the gospel. As Appendix 2 illustrates, I identify at least six separate triangulated relationships that succeed one another in the course of the story. Most of these relationships can be seen in transactions that are narrated plainly in the story. One of them is implicit, but must be understood as operating, for the plot to function. In each of these relationships, the theme of the disorder that women bring into male domains is made evident, but each time in new ways. Tracing the story through the succession of these relationships, we will see how the themes of disorderly women, best managed by keeping them isolated, denigrated, mute, and in menial service roles, are treated in Mk 6:14-29. In the first triangulated relationship which is presented in the opening two verses (17-18), two men, brothers, are notionally at least in conflict because one has taken the other’s wife. The wife is Herodias, the third and only female person of the set. The disorder here is the flouting of Jewish marital codes by a woman following the cultural mores of the Roman imperial masters of Palestine.61 The details of this relationship are related to us by the narrator’s voice, the only character’s voice that is used being that of John the Baptizer, condemning the relationship between Herod and Herodias. No female voice is heard, but disorder caused by an unruly female is the source of a problem between two brothers. In the second relationship (vv. 19-20), two men are in conflict over their different views of this same woman, while at the same time, one man likes to listen to the other man and perhaps protects him from the murderous intentions of the woman.62 Thus, there is an ambiguity in this male-to-male relationship that will not augur well for either man. We are told about this set of relationships entirely in the voice of the narrator. It is interesting here that Herod is rounded out as a character, being presented sympathetically as a man torn between conflicting feelings. Herod suffers “fear,” “consternation,” and yet “happiness based on pleasure” on account of John the Baptizer’s preaching, a man he knows to be good and just, but imprisons nevertheless in order to keep him safe (v. 20). This sympathetic treatment of the inner turmoil of a male character is not matched by the Markan treatment of the two women portrayed in this story. An otherwise promising relationship between

60. The narrative contains a number of well-known literary themes or motifs. For discussion of these themes see Collins, Mark, 309, for the motifs of sexual entertainment at all-male banquets and of a wealthy man offering a woman or a subject a lavish, unlimited gift. See Gillman, Herodias: At Home In That Fox’s Den. for a monograph length study of Herodias, where the story’s complexity is explored against its historical background and through all three Synoptic redactions of the story. 61. France, The Gospel of Mark, 256 explains that “Herodias apparently took advantage of her Roman citizenship to divorce her first husband under Roman law. ” 62. France, The Gospel of Mark, 395, details the texts from Leviticus and Deuteronomy that underpin John the Baptizer’s opposition to Herod’s marriage with his brother’s wife.

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two powerful males, a king and a prophet, is thrown into disorder here by the influence of a woman. The third relationship introduces two new characters, namely the daughter of Herodias and a group character, Herod’s elite male companions, assembled to celebrate Herod’s birthday (vv. 21-22a).63 In this triangulated relationship, Herodias’s daughter pleased both Herod and his guests so well that there was a moment of concord between all three members of this set. This concord later modulates to discord when it becomes the means by which the daughter, in collaboration with her mother, holds the king to his word against his will, in the closing phases of the story. Again, it is the narrator who conveys this information. No female voice is heard, although female communication in the form of a pleasing dance has been evoked for us. We do see female service, but it is sexual service that draws further narratorial reproof down on this world, so contrary to the order Jesus preaches. There is no apparent disorder here—but further explication of the story will suggest that there is disordered familial, social, and sexual behavior in this set of connections between people in Herod’s court. Up until this point, the first three sets of relationships in sequence have involved one female character pitted against (or, in the third set, united with) two male characters. In the fourth and fifth sets (v. 24), two females collaborate together first explicitly against one man and then, as a result, implicitly against another. This introduces a change of balance in the gender makeup of the three-part relationship. Now, briefly, two females outnumber a single male. This marks the point where existing disorder intensifies and breaks through a system of containment based on male bonding to lead to females bringing about judicial murder. Thus, female bonding in which women collaborate to seek their goals, disrupting the controls that male bonding holds in place, deeply threatens an all-male world.64 63. A textual problem in v. 22 points to the confusion of names and relationships within the Herodian family. The best (earliest) attested readings of v. 22a have th/j qugatro.j auvtou/ ~Hrw|dia,doj, which make the girl the daughter of Herod and named Herodias. This, however, clashes with the clear sense of the story, that the woman Herodias named in v. 19 and the woman who is the mother of the girl in v. 24 are one and the same, namely Herodias the wife of Philip and then of Antipas. This Herodias had a daughter with Philip, named Salome, who is most likely the daughter referred to here. An attempt to smooth over the difficult reading of the masculine pronoun by changing it to the feminine authj, reinforced by adding a thj is a predictable scribal adjustment made in later, major Mss, such as A, C, and K. Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 332 and Collins, Mark, 308, explain this succinctly, with Collins summing it up thus: “It is likely . . . that Mark or his source mistakenly made the girl a daughter of Antipas, and that she was actually the daughter of Herodias and her husband, Herod.” 64. Curiously, the male commentator Marcus (Mark 1-8, 401) describes Herodias’s behavior here as both “devilish” and “diabolical.” I think it is possible that since the constructs of male and female that prevail still in the Western world, built on these New Testament texts and the Greco-Roman culture that supports them, do not allow women to act with that very Roman quality, gravitas, it is almost impossible to imagine a woman committing simple murder without overtones of very sinister threat to society.



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Only at this point of the narrative, the fourth set of triangulation (v. 24), do we hear the voices of daughter and mother. The king having made a foolishly extravagant public promise to the daughter (vv. 22b-23), Herodias and her daughter conspire together against John the Baptizer to get him killed. They are coolly calculating. The daughter does not explain to her mother the promise she has received—the girl’s brief question to her mother implies that the mother knows all that has transpired.65 The girl asks baldly, “What shall I ask?” She recognizes that this is a political situation, requiring political consultation in order to exploit it to the fullest. She asks nothing for herself, merely for her mother’s advice for what she should ask. Whether by training or by like-mindedness, the girl is completely subservient to her mother’s will. The mother’s voice in response is immediate, curt, and fatal for John. She names John’s head as the one thing to ask for. John’s head was the source of his ideas and the talk that so fascinated Herod. If Herodias possesses it, John can no longer be a threat to her.66 John can no longer talk to Herod, making a bond between two men in which Herodias’s husband is pleased to listen to condemnation of the relationship between himself and his wife. The lines of logic here are primal. We are at the level of life or death conflict of egos, one against the other. This is rampant political disorder, a man’s life coolly set aside, to appease female wrath. Here, we have the first instance of women’s speech together that the gospel offers. It shows women serving their own needs in a political struggle that has abandoned any due process, being directed by opportunistic revenge. This is political structure in chaos and disorder. When males conduct politics in this way, it becomes the stuff of history and philosophical reflection. When females are portrayed acting in this way, it is described as diabolical. The fifth set of relationships is implicit in the fourth: by turning so definitively against John, Herodias and her daughter also turn against Herod, Herodias’s husband, Herodias’s daughter’s male protector, and John’s protector, a definitive about-turn in the foundational relationships of this narrative. In this transaction, although no word is spoken by narrator or any character, order of every kind has broken down—marital, familial, and probably sexual, as well as political. From the Markan perspective, in the absence of the order Jesus proclaims, based on the readiness of one child of God to serve the other in mutual benefit, unlimited evil prevails. The Herodian court is a site ripe for apocalyptic evil but as Mark narrates this story, it is the machinations of two female characters together who allow evil its opportunity. This reality is laid bare in the sixth set of relationships (vv. 25-26), a complex one where all the same characters from the third set are united again, but in a different combination of dispositions. Whereas in the third set there was a 65. Was the mother waiting outside the banquet room for just such an opportunity? The narrative does not tell us. However, the women’s voices reveal their calculating nature. 66. Curiously, for all the Herodian pretension at being Roman, Collins, Mark 311 explains that “from the perspective of Greeks and Romans, cutting off and manipulating the heads of human beings was something that outsiders did.”

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moment of harmonious pleasure among all three members, on account of the girl’s dance, when the girl returns to name her request to the king, three-sided countertension immediately emerges. Returning from the female-to-female consultation, to the presence of the king with his guests, the daughter repeats her mother’s instruction, with additions. She does not merely repeat what her mother said, but makes it her own, insisting, “I want you to give me at once.” She adds her own grotesque recognition of the birthday scene, asking that her request be presented “on a platter,” as though it is to be yet another course of the banquet. In the Greek sentence, only when the platter image is in place do we hear that its contents will be the head of John the Baptist, words the dancing girl has learned from her mother. It is at this point that the third form of triangulated relationships is rearranged from a transporting union between Herod, his guests, and his wife’s daughter, to a conflicted combination of pressured relationships, that is, to the sixth set of relationships. Now, Herod is suddenly pressured by the presence of his guests who witnessed his promise to the dancing daughter. Having made his promise in their presence, before whom for political survival he must maintain his image of the all-powerful monarch, Herod has no choice but to honor his own word. The king’s all-male audience is forced by the girl’s exploitation of the situation, to oblige the king to keep his promise. The girl’s request, which goes against the will of the king, thus pits the king’s guests also against the king, since their very presence at his extravagant boast to the girl makes them witnesses who oblige the king to do what he does not want to do. The girl and her mother, conspiring together, have fatally exploited male braggadocio. Single-handedly in this scene, by exploiting male speech, the daughter asserts her will and her mother’s against the king, bonded with his friends. Again, lying within the girl’s speech to the king is a Markan horror vision: all the forces that sustain society are brought down by lust and political intrigue exacerbated by the intervention of females into the allmale management of this world. Running across this sequence of relationships and holding it together are two other literary elements that shed light on the portrayal of female gender in the narrative. First, the banquet scene is brought alive by the movement of the girl, who comes in to dance (v. 22). The allure of the dance is evoked for the reader not by a description of it but by a portrayal of its effect on the audience, namely that it caused all its members to be happy or pleased.67 The power of an individual female dancer to please an entire gathering of elite men gathered in a Greco-Roman symposium context has strong overtones of sexual entrancement.68 It is in this mood of unanimous pleasure that the girl’s dance has created, that the king makes 67.  See Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, eds., Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based On Semantic Domains. vol 1, Introduction and Domains, Rondal B. Smith, p/t. ed.; Karen A. Munson, assoc. ed., 2nd ed. (New York, NY: United Bible Societies, 1989), 300, n. 25.90 for a definition of the verb h;resen in Mark 6:22, as the aorist tense of avre,skw, meaning “to cause someone to be pleased with someone or something—to please.” 68. Marcus, Mark 1-8, 401 and Collins, Mark, 309 see this dance as inescapably sexual in nature.



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his extravagant promise to her, heard by the readers in the king’s own speech, in two statements separated by the clause “kai. w;mosen auvth/| [polla,],” “and he vowed to her,” which stresses the divine retribution he calls down on himself, should he break his oath.69 However, the dance does not end at v. 22 but continues. Mark sustains the sense of dance, which began when the girl first made her entrance, “eivselqou,shj” (vv. 22) by reversing it with the verb of her (temporary) exit at v. 24, “evxelqou/sa” and then repeating “eivselqou,shj” at v. 25 when she returns to name her request. The daughter’s first dance is really only part of a larger and more captivating movement that encompasses both those within the banquet hall and her mother outside it. The girl’s hold on the attention of Herod and his guests is so powerful that it can endure the rupture she makes by departing physically from the scene, to consult her mother.70 She abandons an incomplete transaction with Herod, even at the stakes of half his kingdom without saying a word in reply, to talk with her mother. Indeed, she leads them a merry dance. Yet at the same time, she has the presence of mind to recognize a golden opportunity when it presents itself and to make the most of it, taking time for consultation and not being rushed into a shallow, girl-child response. Herodias’s behavior when the girl exits to consult her is portrayed to us by a second literary device that highlights the sense of chains of power in operation. For Herodias, the channels of authority are suddenly all aligned to allow her unobstructed access through to John in prison. Herod’s allegiance with John over against Herodias had protected John from Herodias’s desire to kill him. When Herod momentarily made an allegiance with Herodias’s daughter, with foolishly unlimited parameters, and in a sociopolitical situation that bound him to his word, John was suddenly left unprotected. The ambivalent daughter made her final commitment to her same-sex parent, her mother, in a classic instance of female bonding. When this happens it is very interesting to note the flow of command. Marcus notes that across the girl’s movements (vv. 22, 24, 25), there is a “constant change of subject (king ® girl ® mother ® girl ® king ® executioner).”71 I would add to this that when the executioner returns from beheading John, he does not return first to the king who gave the command, but goes directly to the girl, giving her the head of John, which the girl then gives to the mother. In a sense, Herod is bypassed 69. See Louw and Nida, eds., Greek-English Lexicon, 441, n. 33.463 for a definition of the verb ovmnu,w used at Mark 6:23, as meaning “to affirm the truth of a statement by calling on a divine being to execute sanctions against a person if the statement in question is not true.” 70. The fact that the mother is not at the symposium but outside it raises questions. If the mother was observing decorum by not being at the symposium, why did she allow her daughter to be present and to dance, at this sort of gathering? No respectable paterfamilias would let his daughter dance in his presence at such an event. See Collins, Mark, 309 for helpful discussion on the sinister implications of either parent’s motives, if they knew beforehand that the girl would dance. 71. Marcus, Mark 1-8, 401.

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in the chain of command and the women have taken over.72 It is as though by cutting off John’s head Herod has decapitated his own authority.73 In this very male-focused narrative, Mark’s strong reproof of this female-female collusion against the innocent man, John, is very strongly felt. In this situation, Herodias found it to her advantage to use her alliance with her daughter, against her husband, even though she was ostensibly trying to defend her marriage to him. This is not strictly logical but neither was Herod’s excessively boasting promise to the dancing daughter. It is psychologically comprehensible that a person who found it suddenly possible to achieve a previously blocked and intensely desired goal would take a rare opportunity to achieve it, when it presented itself unpredictably. The misogynist message of this rich narrative is never to let women collaborate together on what is otherwise an entirely civilized relationship of agreement to differ, between two powerful men. Women, when they get power, are frighteningly violent and vindictive in a way that men cannot imagine. Female bonding, when women consult together, is particularly prone to grave disorder. Male bonding does not protect men but will be turned against them, to destroy them. The obvious solution is not to allow women to collect together. 5.1.6  The Syrophoenician Woman and Her Daughter (Mk 7:24-30) In this story, we meet a third mother-daughter pair, this time physically separated from each other in a way more pronounced than has been the case in either of the previous two stories featuring a mother and a daughter (Mk 5:21-24, 35-43; 6:17-29). Here, a woman revealed halfway through the event to be non-Jewish, asks Jesus to heal her demon-possessed daughter. After some reluctance, revealed in a controversial interchange with the mother, Jesus exorcises the demon. From a literary point of view, Mk 7:24-30 is a watershed story in the Gospel of Mark.74 The Markan narrator generates drama by opposing against one 72. Liew. Politics of Parousia, 146 writes that Herodias “disrupts the female ‘conduit’ that is supposed to solidify male relations and benefit male participants.” 73. Collins, Mark, 305–07 gives an historical overview of Herod’s whole life, who ran afoul of the Emperor Caligula shortly after 37 CE and was exiled to Lyons, where he lived the rest of his life, with Herodias who joined him there. 74. A small sample of the range of commentary on this story, which is relevant for my study, can be found in Gerald F. Downing, “Words as Deeds and Deeds as Words,” Biblical Interpretation III (2, 1995): 129–43; Hisako Kinukawa, “De-Colonizing Ourselves as Readers: The Story of the Syro-Phoenician Woman As A Text,” in Holly E. Hearon ed., Distant Voices Drawing Near: Essays in Honor Of Antoinette Clark Wire, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004), 131–44; Surekha Nelavala, “Smart Syrophoenician Woman: A Dalit Feminist Reading Of Mark 7:24-31,” Expository Times 118 (2, 2006): 64–69; Jim Perkinson, “A Canaanitic Word in the Logos of Christ; or the Difference the Syro-Phoenician Woman Makes to Jesus,” Semeia 75 (1996): 61–85.



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another, two characters whose personal reputations, in an honor-based culture, are seriously at risk. Here, a woman who has disturbed Jesus against his wishes speaks directly to him as though she is equal to him. Refusing to be intimidated by him, she takes up the challenge to legitimate her invasion of his peace and quiet with a witty, well-developed theology of the abundance of God. After this story, the relationship between Jesus and female characters is treated differently, as the following chapter will argue. No woman afterward speaks directly to Jesus the way the Syrophoenician woman does. One such woman appears to be enough for Mark. As in the other stories featuring women in the Gospel of Mark, the Syrophoenician woman and her demonically possessed daughter bring disorder into Jesus’s life. The difference between this story and the previous ones is that here Jesus’s own life is portrayed as already somewhat disordered, politically in disarray. Disorder certainly continues to be associated with female characters, but it begins here to show independently of women in Jesus’s own life. With his career beginning to fray from the stresses of preaching an unwelcome message, Jesus is further harried by female disorder at an intense level. Here then, two forms of disorder meet, producing predictable levels of friction and thus drama. Each of the two characters who meet in this story does so with a preceding “history” that conditions their approach to one another. The circumstances of the Syrophoenician woman are sketched briefly for us, in the process of her appearance in the story and will be commented on as we read it. Given that this story occurs well into the gospel narrative, Jesus’s character has a much more fully developed profile. This profile is particularly influenced by events portrayed in the preceding pericope, Mk 7:1-23. In these preceding twenty-three verses, Mark has depicted Jesus in very direct controversy with the religious authorities of his own tradition. Jesus accused the Pharisees and scribes of hypocrisy, of preferring their own law to God’s and of abusing God’s law to neglect their parents. Jesus would thus be very vulnerable to retaliatory counterattack by the Pharisees, who had already (3:6) determined to destroy him. As a result of Jesus’s arguments in 7:1-23, the Pharisees could well have labeled him a betrayer of the traditions of Israel, too easily setting aside valuable practices and boundaries that safeguarded the identity and holiness of God’s people. They could have accused him of opening the way for all sorts of pollutions to enter Israel, through neglect of its necessary, distinctive practices. When the new story opens at Mk 7:24, the narrator depicts Jesus in a house somewhere in the region of Tyre and Sidon, a considerable distance from Galilee, hiding from controversy. In the opening verse, the Markan narrator says plainly that Jesus did not want it known that he was in the house.75 In v. 25, the narrator 75. France, The Gospel of Mark, 297 notes that in Mark, Jesus frequently “wishes to get away from public attention (cf. 1:35; 3:13; 4:10; 6:31-32), uses a ‘house’ for the purpose (cf. 1:29; 2:1; 3:20; 7:17), but is unable to escape those in need (cf. 1:32-33, 36-37,45; 2:2; 3:7-12, 20; 6:33-34).”

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tells his audience outside the gospel about a woman who comes seeking Jesus’s healing for a sick child. This new character has responded, as have so many, by hearing about Jesus. Like Jairus before her, the woman has a “little daughter” who needs healing and she falls at Jesus’s feet as Jairus did; the healing the child needs is exorcism and Jesus has performed these already. Like all those who have already sought healing from Jesus, this woman urgently wants her seriously ill child to be healed. Thus, all the cues would seem to be in place for a straightforward healing story with which we are now familiar.76 However, in v. 26, having already strongly marked Jesus’s unusual circumstances and wishes (v. 24), the Markan narrator makes it clear to his audience that this new scenario is not simple. In v. 26, the narrator tells us pointedly, with some weight, that the next thing that Jesus knows is that the woman was Greek, Syrophoenician by birth, and, perhaps therefore, upper class.77 This woman was thus pagan and ritually unclean, and she has fallen at Jesus’s feet, touching him.78 As the narrator has unfolded it, the woman brings layer upon layer of disorder into Jesus’s retreat. The first layer of disorder is physical. Wishing to be private, Jesus is disturbed by a woman who comes and throws herself at his feet. This action contravenes the express wishes of Jesus. What is more, since Jesus has gone into a house, it must be interpreted that the woman somehow managed to get access to Jesus inside the house. Thus the woman has very deliberately and with some skill or force brought the disorder of her unwished for and indeed surprising presence into the strategic retreat that Jesus had chosen for himself. A second layer of disorder has to do with social propriety and religious purity. The woman, unnamed as usual, has clearly come without a male chaperone. Coming unprotected in this manner, inside a house to speak with a completely strange man is very much against the norms of propriety for a respectable woman in this culture and threatens to compromise both her and Jesus. As Carolyn 76. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 145 writes that except for one notable detail, this story conforms to the regular pattern of a miracle story. The citation by Collins, Mark, 365, of the various assessments of this story by Bultmann (an apophthegm but focusing on Jesus’s changed behavior), Theissen (an exorcism), and Tannehill (a hybrid objection quest story) demonstrates the complex nature of this story. 77. All commentators point out that the noun “~Ellhni,j” indicates that the woman was ethnically Greek and thus a Gentile, not a Jew. Guelich, Mark 1-8:26, 385 and Marcus, Mark 1-8, 462 think the term could indicate that the woman was Greek-speaking, educated and thus from the upper class. The second phrase, Surofoini,kissa tw/| ge,nei, describes the woman more specifically most probably on a geographic basis, as being Phoenician but from Syria, not North Africa or that she came from coastal Syria rather than the hinterland. See Collins, Mark, 364–65 for the way in which these terms are used in debating the place of writing of the Gospel of Mark. 78. I concur with France, The Gospel of Mark, 297, that this action should be interpreted as indicating that the woman had “a remarkable insight into the wider significance of Jesus’ ministry.”



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Osiek and David L. Balch write, “Females incur shame in the public male world primarily by compromised sexual purity, or by other public conduct unbecoming the male ideal of female modesty.”79 These two matters might have gone unnoticed, but they suddenly become significant when the narrator takes a whole verse, after introducing the woman and the circumstances of the healing sought, to detail the Gentile aspect of the woman’s identity. Third, the woman brings the disorder of unclean spirits into Jesus’s house, when she asks Jesus to cast an unclean spirit out of her daughter. The Markan narrator had told his audience in v. 25 that the little girl was possessed, but the plain meaning of v. 26b is that Jesus first knows about the existence of the little girl and her condition only after he has been interrupted against his will, inside a house in foreign territory, by an unknown, unidentified, and unchaperoned Greek woman who now asks Jesus to perform an exorcism on a child who is not even present.80 The Syrophoenician woman confronts Jesus all at once with a complex problem. Jesus is accosted by a person who in herself at least doubly offends any normal Jewish male’s sense of propriety: she is pagan and she is female. On either count, in the private home where she confronts him, she is problematic for Jesus. When these two features are combined, they become all the more powerful. Discussing the combined forces operating in this pericope, Benny Liew identifies “an alliance between racism, or ethnocentrism and sexism, [and suggests that] . . . if the issue here involves more than ethnicity, it also involves more than gender; instead, it involves a combination of the two. Or, in Crenshaw’s terms, injury does occur at intersections.”81 Further, by seeking out Jesus without a chaperone, the woman no doubt threatened her own good name in the region but also put Jesus at risk of being accused of taking advantage of her. If the event were to become known in Jesus’s own Jewish territory, it would offer Jesus’s opponents, stinging from his castigation of their hypocrisy, powerful material with which to blacken his name as a womanizer, one who so disregarded the traditions of Israel that he dallied with 79. Carolyn Osiek and David L. Balch, Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 40. See also the comment in Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology, 3rd ed., Revised and Expanded (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 49 that “women not under the tutelage of a man—notably childless widows and divorced women without family ties—are viewed as stripped of female honor, hence more like males than females, therefore sexually predatory, aggressive, ‘hot to trot,’ hence dangerous.” 80. France, The Gospel of Mark, 297 lists these disadvantages in the woman’s circumstances and writes that “few of those who approached Jesus had so much against them, from an orthodox Jewish point of view.” 81. Liew, Politics of Parousia, 136. The scholar Liew cites here is Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–67.

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women, indeed, pagan women. How would a man with Jesus’s profile respond to such a challenge? One very likely response, of which the famously troublesome verbal interchange between Jesus and the woman gives a hint, is that Jesus would interpret her as what he calls her—“a little Cynic,” a kunari,on.82 Cynics practiced a particular kind of ancient philosophy that had begun in the fourth century BCE around the famous Diogenes of Sinope and which lasted until the fifth century CE. Cynic philosophy focused largely on ethics and, in a very tradition-bound culture, severely critiqued shallow social conventionalism that enslaved people, preventing them from pursuing true happiness. At least one of the ancient etymologies of the name Cynic is that it came from the Greek word for “dog,” ku,wn, from which is derived the diminutive, kunari,on. Cynics were known for their convention-defying, shameless behavior in public, living close to nature just like dogs. They spoke their philosophy publicly in the market place, becoming famous for their witty one-line rejoinders. It is historically credible that Jesus would be able to recognize a Cynic, since not far from where he grew up in the town of Nazareth was a beautiful Greek-style city named Sepphoris which was rebuilt by Herod Antipas. It is highly likely that Jesus, known as an artisan, would have found work at Sepphoris, where he may well have heard Greek philosophy, including Cynicism, debated. “A little Cynic” could well be a ready image with which to challenge an importunate woman breaking all social convention. The clue that Jesus was reading the woman as a Cynic does not come until the end of his opening speech to her, where Jesus says it is not good to throw the children’s bread to the dogs, “toi/j kunari,oij balei/nÅ” (v. 27b). Dramatic irony operates when Jesus, who is in exile in Tyre, bearing the cost for behaving as something of a social boundary-breaker in his own tradition, decides to challenge this woman for her Cynic style. Jesus responds as much to the emotionally confronting manner of her request as to its content. His response is both an emotional and an intellectual challenge to her. That is, Jesus reacts emotionally to what he perceives as an offense against his wishes for privacy and the sudden danger to which her lack of social propriety subjects him. He flings back at the woman, whose Greek effrontery he reads as typical of Cynic behavior, a retort that challenges her to live up to the image she projects about herself to him. Jesus accosts her verbally with an intellectual challenge that forces her to declare herself, showing whether she properly understands and values what she asks for.

82. For the following paragraphs on the Cynics, I depend on information taken from M. O. Goulet-Cazé, “Cynicism (Kunismo,j; Kynismós),” in Hubert Cancik and H Schneider eds., Brill’s The New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World, Vol. 3 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2003), 1052–59.



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The designation “toi/j kunari,oij,” so problematic for interpreters, is delayed until the second-last word of the statement.83 Jesus’s strategic placement of this term does three things. It tells the woman what he makes of her, and thereby challenges her to act the Cynic role, arguing her case back at him with a clever rejoinder.84 If she is not indeed a Cynic and cannot match his challenge, then “dogs” delivers her an insulting rebuke that is in some way a recompense for the cultural dishonor she has brought into Jesus’s life. Jesus has been discomforted by the disorder this woman brought into his already pressed circumstances. In his reply, Jesus vents some of his ill-feeling in a sharp response. However, as I will show, it also offers a very ordered way of negotiating an understanding about what the woman believes Jesus can do— since for Jesus, as we have already seen, the faith of the requester is really what effects healing.85 When Jesus’s statement is examined closely it can be seen that it begins a threephase rhetorical device called an enthymeme. Jesus will be depicted later in Mark using this device with great success to rout successive waves of attacks on him from the Jewish religious authorities.86 For the present, the two-part structure of Jesus’s statement suggests that Jesus challenges the woman to a game of wit, the completion of an enthymeme. The enthymeme is a syllogism used in ancient Greek rhetoric, in which not all the logical steps are spelled out. The listener is teased into supplying the missing step to complete the syllogism and as a result, finds it convincing. The enthymeme usually consists of a major premise, one or more minor premises, which is usually where the omission occurs, and then a conclusion. In this case, Jesus declares first, the principle or conclusion to which the woman must agree if Jesus is to grant her request. She must agree or “allow” (a;fej) that “first the children must be fed (v. 27a).” Then Jesus states the major premise: “because it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the 83. Note that it was found difficult in New Testament times. Mt. 15:21-28 redacts the whole pericope strongly, calling the woman a “Canaanite,” exaggerating her irritating behavior and having Jesus’s disciples express the desire for her to be sent away. Luke omits the story altogether. As Joel Marcus writes, ancient Jews saw dogs as wild scavengers, eating unclean foods. As a result, it was an insult to be called a dog. Cf. Marcus, Mark 1-8, 463–64. 84. France, The Gospel of Mark, 299, foot note 45 cites Hoggatt, Irony, 150–51, who argues that Jesus is using a particular form of irony, “peirastic irony . . . a form of verbal challenge intended to test the other’s response. It may in fact declare the opposite of the speaker’s actual intention.” 85. Collins, Mark, 368 comments that both the Syrophoenician woman and the bleeding woman virtually effected by themselves, the healing that they sought, one for her daughter, the other for herself. 86. See Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel, 250–56 for a clear, succinct treatment of Mark’s use of the Greek rhetorical devices, the syllogism and the enthymeme, to portray Jesus in Mark 12. See also R. Dean. Anderson, Glossary of Greek Rhetorical Terms Connected to Methods of Argumentation, Figures and Tropes From Anaximenes to Quintilian (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 44–48 for treatment of the enthymeme.

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dogs (v. 27b).” Finally, it is the woman who supplies the missing minor premise, responding that “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs (v. 28).” Marcus points out that the woman’s speech is introduced by two verbs of speech, “h` de. avpekri,qh kai. le,gei,” (“She replied and she said,”) which is a formula used in Mark normally to introduce the speech of Jesus.87 In this way, Mark signals that this woman’s speech is of the same stature as that of Jesus in this interchange. It is for saying her word, Jesus says, that the demon has left her daughter. By completing the enthymeme so promptly, with such courage and with such ready understanding, the woman shows Jesus that she does indeed match him in perceiving and valuing the ways of God. In fact, the Syrophoenician woman is like Jesus in a number of ways. Like him, she is swift with repartee, being able to match an argument cast in metaphor about the ways of God. Jesus himself approves her speech, saying, “It is for this word that you may go” (7:29). Second, she shows in her reply that both the dogs under the table and the children can eat from what is available and be adequately fed, that she accepts Jesus’s teaching that there is more than enough for everybody in the order of God. She already believes in the superabundance of God which Jesus has taught in his parables of the good soil bringing forth the one hundred fold (4:1-20) and of the flourishing mustard seed plant (4:30-33) and demonstrated in his miracle of feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fish (6:30-44). Finally, she demonstrates, but in the negative, the truth of Jesus’s most recent and controversial teaching, that “what comes out of a person is what defiles a person.” (7:20). What comes out of this woman, so outwardly brash and offensive to ingrained male Jewish perspective, is nothing but love for her child. For her child, she braves a famous man, absorbs his emotional violence and stays focused so that she can by her wit dispel his brusque suspicion of her. All of this was done quickly, alone, under the pressing anxiety of a child left at home, being thrown about by a demon (7:30) as roughly as one might throw food to dogs (7:27). To do all this requires enormous energy, the energy of a mother’s love for a child. In this way, this woman serves someone other than herself and in some sense foreshadows Jesus who also will brave famous, powerful men and endure their violence, for the sake of what he believes about the abundance of the order of God. Tragically, where this woman’s repartee in this story won her child’s safety from demonic possession, in Jesus’s appearance before the representative of the Roman Empire, Pontius Pilate, rhetoric does not save.88 In an attempt to release Jesus, Pilate turns to the crowd who had, at Jesus’s last encounter with them “heard him [Jesus] gladly” (Mk 12:37b).89 Pilate’s effort at oratory, in sharp contrast to 87. Marcus, Mark 1-8, 464; this expression is used about Jesus at Mk 3:33; 6:37; 8:29; 9:19; 10:3, 24, 51; 11:14, 22. 88. See Mk 15:6-15. 89. It is interesting that here Mark intimates the fickleness of the crowd’s pleasure in listening to Jesus, using the same words, “h;kouen auvtou/ h`de,wj,” to describe it as he did to describe Herod’s ambiguous pleasure in listening to John the Baptizer, “h`de,wj auvtou/ h;kouen” (Mark 6:20).



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Jesus’s rhetorical sway over the crowds, fails wretchedly, instead eliciting from the crowd the cry for Jesus’s death, to which Pilate accedes. This is the only story in the Gospel of Mark where a woman is portrayed speaking face to face, in direct speech, to Jesus. Combined with the way she imposed her presence on Jesus, disordering his life, this woman’s speech challenged Jesus in a way no woman had in the narrative up to this point. Two other female characters were reported as speaking to Jesus—Jesus’s mother and the bleeding woman—but direct speech in their own voice to him was reported from neither. It is highly significant that after this story, no woman directly encounters Jesus until Mk 14:3-9. That is, from Mk 7:31 to Mk 14:3, no women are specifically identified as encountering Jesus in any way. In Mk 12:41-44, Jesus is depicted as observing a widow from a distance and commenting on her to his disciples, but she is oblivious of him and there is no personal encounter between them. 5.1.7  The Great Gap (Mk 7:31-14:2) This absence of women is highly significant, because scholars recognize that in the section Mk 8:22–10:52, Jesus resumes his preaching journey, turning to Jerusalem and instructing his disciples on the way.90 I argue that since Jesus does not personally encounter any specifically identified female character between Mk 7:31 and Mk 14:3, there is in fact a lengthy period when the male disciples are depicted as traveling with Jesus and being taught by him, in the absence of disturbance by females. The marked absence of women in these six chapters supports my thesis that for Mark, women are associated with disorder. When Jesus intensely prepares his all-male disciples to assume responsibility in proclaiming the order of God, no women are explicitly included. Induction of a male band into the new order of God is not to be threatened with the disorder that always attends the presence of women in Mark. This entire middle section of the gospel is an all-male environment, where Jesus bonds closely with his chosen male disciples only.91 Here, Jesus teaches his disciples the inner secrets of the order of God, preparing them to continue his mission when he is no longer there. Jesus educates these male disciples, interprets the order of God for them, and above all models by his own behavior how they are to act as well-equipped emissaries of his apocalyptic message. I will discuss this section of the gospel only insofar as it relates to my thesis, which focuses on the portrayal of female characters as they relate to Mark’s depiction of the death of Jesus. The implications of such a lengthy gender-exclusive section in 90. For example, France, The Gospel of Mark, viii, identifies Mark 8:22-10:52 as “Act Two: On the Way to Jerusalem (Learning about the Cross (8:22–10:52)”; Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, ix, designates Mark 8:31–10:52 as “Jesus and the Disciples Journey to Jerusalem.” 91. The study of male bonding in a now classic, though provocative monograph in the discipline of Anthropology offers valuable insights on this dimension of Mk 7:31–14:2. See Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005).

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the center of the narrative, privileging male disciples with the information and skills that will equip them alone to lead and manage the reign of God on earth, warrant a separate study of the construction of male characters and of masculinity in the Gospel of Mark.92 As we saw in studies on language in both the Roman and British Empires, all talk on matters of gravitas in imperial-colonial contexts is imagined to be masculine. Such talk in fact constitutes the male person.93 In Mk 7:31–14:3, in all-male company, discussing with Jesus the disposal of significant proportions of the most precious resources of a human community, such as its money, power, sexuality, and religion, male disciples of the order of God are instructed how to conduct themselves.94 They learn the realities of these resources and how they are to be interpreted in this new order of God.95 They learn language, phraseology, strategies for when and how to speak, or not to speak.96 Fundamentally, they learn how to be male in a new way. 92. That the study of masculinity itself is a growing area of New Testament studies within the new field of masculinity studies can be seen from the following titles published in the last decade. Of particular interest is Stephen D. Moore and Janice Capel Anderson eds., New Testament Masculinities (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). Other titles, in which it is interesting to notice the prevalence of the word “bad,” are Barbara J. Essex, Bad Boys of the Bible: Exploring Men of Questionable Virtue (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2002); Colleen M. Conway, Men And Women in the Fourth Gospel: Gender And Johannine Characterization (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999); John Goldingay, Men Behaving Badly (Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 2000); Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, In the Company of Jesus: Characters in Mark’s Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000); and John F. O’Grady, Men in the Bible: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2005). 93. For a thorough discussion of the Roman concept of “making the man” by training in rhetoric, see Maud Gleason, Making Men. See also her brief essay on the masculinity of Jesus, “By Whose Gender Standards (If Anybody’s) Was Jesus A Real Man?” in Moore and Anderson eds., New Testament Masculinities, 325–28. 94. For example, Jesus teaches the disciples about money in the order of God at Mk 10:2327; about power at 10:42-45, about sexuality at 10:2-9, and about religion, the relationship with God, at 12:28-34. It is significant for the unfolding development of the master-disciples bond that Jesus’s teaching on these matters presents a very rigorous position that challenges the disciples’ established views on them. 95. The chief reality in which Jesus’s disciples are instructed is his necessary suffering, death, and resurrection which provide an important element of the literary structure of these chapters, in three predictions that Jesus makes at 8:31; 9:31, and 10:32-34. 96. Jesus’s disciples learn the language of taking up a cross to follow him; of the first being last and the last first and they witness Jesus using great rhetorical skill in the debates of Mk 12:13-44. In the apocalyptic sermon at 13:9-11 Jesus instructs his disciples that when they are taken before governors and kings for his sake, they are not to be worry ahead of time about what to say, because it will be given to them at the time, what to say.



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Recognizable strategies of male bonding can be seen being used in these chapters to establish powerful links of loyalty between Jesus and his disciples. Jesus elicits from Peter a statement that publicizes Jesus’s alpha male status: he is the Messiah (8:27-29). Jesus maintains this status by admitting three of his inner core disciples to an awe-inspiring revelation of his heavenly identity, at the Transfiguration (Mk 9:2-8). When Jesus’s first prediction of his passion weakens the master-disciples bond, he challenges his all-male cohort individually to prove their loyalty to him, each taking up his own cross and follow Jesus (Mk 8:24-9:1). When two disciples make a power putsch, seeking to negotiate privately for positions of privilege, Jesus puts down the attempt briskly and deals with the consequent internal group dissensions, using the occasion for a teaching session on power and on his identity as Son of Man (Mk 10:35-45). Until a certain point in the narrative is reached, Jesus is very successful at putting down challenges coming from his enemies, time and again outclassing them in feats of power and authority and defeating them in verbal jousting.97 However, as the early impression of Jesus the magnanimous wonder-worker who feeds thousands and heals all manner of illness begins to give way to an increasingly clear articulation of the costs involved for both master and disciple of proclaiming the reign of God, the bond weakens. While Jesus as master continues to enact with his disciples, the style of the alpha male leader and the content he teaches becomes more and more disconcerting. He teaches the ways of an ordered society to an all-male group of disciples, but the society that Jesus teaches is markedly at odds with prevailing expectations of power, privilege, and opportunities for self-aggrandizement that Jesus’s disciples frequently betray they hold. The gap between Jesus’s worldview and that of his disciples widens, holding together tenuously until the nighttime arrest of Jesus (14:43-50) when the sudden intrusion of real violence dispels the disciples’ protestations of loyalty to death (14:27-31) so that “they all forsook him and fled” (14:50). The literary tension created by this betrayal at a climactic point in the narrative is bearable because in the proclamations of its chief protagonist, especially in his three passion predictions (Mk 8:31; 9:31, and 10:32-34), the narrative has always proclaimed both a death and a resurrection for Jesus and thus for his worldview. This worldview of the imminent arrival of the reign of God sits within apocalyptic eschatology, which provides the historical interpretive backdrop for the Gospel of Mark. Apocalyptic eschatology sees an inevitable cosmic clash between the forces of evil and good that may well cost the virtuous their lives, but which will see God, the personification of what is good, ultimately triumph. In that triumph, those faithful to God will be vindicated. For the writer of Mark, faithfulness to God is expressed by being a faithful disciple of Jesus. For the 97. For example, at Mk 8:11-13, Jesus has the authority simply to refuse to supply the Pharisees with a sign justifying his actions; Mk 11:27–12:44 supplies a long stream of examples of Jesus besting the custodians of his own religious tradition, with his ready wit and clever turn of phrase.

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audience of Mark, faithfulness is expressed at a literary level by not abandoning the story at this point of collapse between the master and disciples but rather by assuming the mantle of the disciple and following Jesus all the way to his cross and resurrection. It is possible that this collapse in the male bond between disciples and master makes sense sociologically. At Jesus’s arrest, while an unidentified person makes a token violent gesture in cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus himself protests at the cowardly violence of arresting him at night with swords and clubs, when he has been available daily in broad daylight, teaching in the Temple (Mk 14:48-49). In the very next verse, Mark writes that “they all forsook him and fled.” When Jesus exposes the aggression of an armed male group as cowardly, Jesus’s own disciples abandon any commitment they may have clung to, to defend him with physical aggression. Thus, they forsake Jesus. The anthropologist Lionel Tiger offers an explanation of this dissipation of the violence in the bonded male group. He postulates that aggressive behavior in men, which may be biologically determined, has both an identifiable stimulus process and a process by which it is limited. He links “the control of human aggression . . . to the control of the dynamics of [bonded] male groups and the maintenance of male self-respect and confidence.”98 The specific way that aggression is stopped is by the overwhelming sense that nothing more can be achieved in that way. Tiger writes, The focusing of a group on a specific goal—which is functionally equivalent to a prey animal in the dynamics of a [hunting] group—suggests that perhaps male bonding requires a consummatory stimulus. Such a stimulus “cuts off ” the aggressive impetus, as does the killing or escape of a prey animal. Outright victory is one consummation, loss is another.99

In a sociological study of early Palestinian Christianity, Gerd Theissen writes that the best description of the functional outline of the Jesus movement for overcoming social tensions is an interpretation of it as a contribution towards containing and overcoming aggression. In this connection, four forms of containing aggression emerge: aggression was (1) compensated for by counterimpulses; (2) transferred to other objects and ascribed to other subjects; (3) internalized and reversed so as to fall on the subject of the aggression; (4) depicted in Christological symbols and transformed.100

98. Tiger, Men in Groups, 184. 99. Ibid. 100. Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), 99. The aggression to which Theissen refers here is the result of social tensions in the uncertain world of first-century CE Palestine riven by intraJewish divisions under the pressure of Hellenism and the Roman occupation of Palestine.



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When Jesus is arrested, tried, condemned to death, and executed, there is an immediate and then an accumulating sense of consummatory loss on the part of Jesus’s disciples, who abruptly abandon him. When the gospel is written much later, Jesus’s death at the hands of power is depicted, as Theissen says, “in Christological symbols and transformed.” This will be a useful insight for considering the death of Jesus from the perspective of the disorderly female characters of this narrative. Before we can turn to that culminating scene, we must consider the disorder made evident by the final female character who features in a scene with Jesus, close to the end of his public career. 5.1.8  The Widow of the Temple System (Mk 12:41-44) Mk 12: 41-44 introduces a widow who is projected to us through Jesus’s eyes.101 Like all the other female characters in the Gospel of Mark, she brings disorder into view. In a unique way in this pericope, Mark evokes this widow for us through the ordering eyes of Jesus. Mark establishes Jesus as seated, watching activity in the Temple in Jerusalem. We see what Jesus sees: a widow, on whom he then comments.102 It is the simplest of scenes, but Mark uses it to conclude Jesus’s public career. After this event, Jesus delivers a major apocalyptic judgment on the entire world (Mark 13), before the Passion Narrative concludes the gospel (Mk 14–16). As the final word of Jesus’s public career, the story of the widow is designed to convey a powerful sense of conclusion. The story also make a judgment on the status of the Jerusalem Temple system, exposing it as terminally incompetent, by telling the story of a stereotypically exploited figure, the widow.103 While acknowledging 101. The following journal articles reflect the range of treatments of this story over twenty-five years, from literary to more ideological readings: E. S. Malbon, “The Poor Widow in Mark and Her Poor Rich Readers,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 53 (4, 1991): 589– 604; Smith, Geoffrey, “A Closer Look at the Widow’s Offering: Mk 12:41-44,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40 (1, 1997): 27–36; R. S. Sugirtharajah, “The Widow’s Mites Revalued,” The Expository Times 103 (1990–91): 42–43; Wright, Addison G., “The Widow’s Mites: Praise or Lament?” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 44 (2, 1982): 256–65. 102. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 283 explains that Jesus was probably able to identify the widow as such by her clothing. France, The Gospel of Mark, 491 and Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 246 both comment on the vulnerability of the widow, a woman without the protection of a husband, noting the number of occasions in the Old Testament where the obligation to respect widows is stressed. 103. See Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 282–83 for his agreement with the interpretation of this story by A. G. Wright, “The Widow’s Mites,” that sees the story as a lament about the exploitation of this widow by a cynical religious system. Stephen D. Moore, “Mark and Empire: ‘Zealot’ and ‘Postcolonial’ Readings,” in R. S. Sugirtharajah ed., The Postcolonial Biblical Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006), 193–205, traces interpretation of this story through three phases. I concur with Moore’s second reading,

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the narrator’s intent, I will read the story from a feminist perspective to scrutinize what is communicated by the image and voice of the female character in this story. This story punctures the long period between the story of the Syrophoenician woman and the story of the anointing woman in Mk 14:3-9, in both of which women encounter Jesus face to face in a very direct way, the first sparring verbally with Jesus and the other, provoking uproar by anointing him. The widow of Mk 12:41-44 does not encounter Jesus in person at all; she is not aware of his presence, yet she represents a very troubling form of disorder to Jesus. She is used by Jesus as an object lesson in his education of his disciples, as he delivers his final appeal to them to hear his message about the reign, the order of God. She is thus the one woman to be mentioned in the long section from Mk 7:31–14:2, but she is oblivious of Jesus and Jesus does not meet her personally in any way. Her disorder is close enough to be seen, but far enough away to allow male ordering to dispose it unopposed, in favor of the reign of God. From a feminist perspective, I note that the widow of Mk 12:41-44 forms an inclusio with the (widowed) mother-in-law of Mk 1:29-31. After this pericope, the language of mothers, daughters, and widows ceases, and women become identified much more by the function they perform for Jesus and his bonds with his male disciples.104 Since I will treat the story of the woman who anoints Jesus as beginning another motif or phase of the countersubject of women who appear in the Passion Narrative, it means that this story of the widow in the Temple concludes the first long motif of women in Mark. Mk 12:41-44 takes place in the Temple in Jerusalem. This pericope lies within the larger trajectory of Mark’s treatment of Jesus and the Temple. Since Mk 11:11 Jesus has been entering the temple, acting as though he has the legitimate authority to halt all activity within it (11:15-19) and winning arguments comprehensively against the chief officers of the Temple system until they are silenced and “no one dared to ask him any question” (Mk 11:27–12:34). Immediately after the story of the widow, Mark begins Jesus’s apocalyptic judgment of Jerusalem, where he declares that the Temple will be destroyed, with not one stone left upon another. Structurally, then, the story of the widow is a hinge between Jesus’s debates with the custodians of his own religious tradition and then his judgment upon it. Immediately before this pericope Jesus has moved from responding to attacks, to launching a charge of his own against the scribes, accusing them of seeking in a shallow way after honor. He specifically condemns them for “devouring widows’ houses” and says that they “will receive the greater condemnation,” presumably because their superior knowledge of the law makes their failure to fulfill it all the more culpable (Mk 12:38-40).105 but I resist Moore’s invitation to pursue too literally the illogic of this story’s drive toward apocalyptic extinction of everything in Jerusalem, including poor widows. 104. See this schematized in Appendix 1. 105. France, The Gospel of Mark, 491–92 lists a range of ways, discussed in historical scholarship, by which scribes would have been able to defraud widows of their property.



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Immediately after Jesus makes this judgment against the devourers of widows’ houses, Mark provides a widow for the audience to see through Jesus’s eyes. The story has three scenes. The first scene establishes Jesus in the position of observer and judge. Jesus’s seated posture opposite the treasury establishes for attentive readers of Mark that he is in a position to see clearly and to teach.106 In the second scene, through Jesus’s eyes we see people putting money in the treasury: a crowd, many rich people, and a widow. The point of the sequence of people donating to the Temple is that the donations drop markedly from very much money, to calko.n( copper coins that might be called “loose change” to finally the widow’s gift, which is named specifically as lepta. du,o( two small copper coins, each worth less than one hundredth of a denarius, a day’s wage for a laborer.107 The widow’s contribution to the Temple treasury is two small coins of almost meaninglessly tiny value. This is the point in the story where the widow embodies disorder, but this is only evident when we know the commercial value of the amount that the widow contributes and what it represents in her life. The kodra,nthj that the widow contributed could buy enough corn to make a small cake, enough to sustain one person for a day.108 The significance of this is not grasped until Jesus deliberately gathers his disciples to him and declares that the widow has put in more than all the others, because she put in “everything she had, her whole living (o[lon to.n bi,on auvth/j)” (12:44).109 In giving everything she had, into a system that Jesus has just exposed in detail as inept and corrupt and is about to judge as moribund, that specializes in exploiting widows by devouring their houses, the widow has colluded with religious disorder in a vicious cycle of illogic. This is all the more intense if we were to imagine that the literally penniless widow must then draw on the generosity 106. See Mk 13:3 where Mark repeats the word kate,nanti and 15:39 where he uses the phrase evx evnanti,aj auvtou/. In each case the physical position of the observer, “opposite” or “over against,” established the very clear view with which they make an important judgment. In Mk 4:1 and 9:35, Jesus sits to teach the crowds and to call his disciples. 107. See Collins, Mark, 589 for a detailed account of the value of the coins referred to here. 108. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 282–83 cites Jewish midrash (Lev. Rab.3.5 [on Lev 1:17]) to explain that the widow’s donation would enable her to buy a “handful of fine flour,” enough to provide “one meagre meal.” France, The Gospel of Mark, 493 concurs with this view. 109. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 247 and France, The Gospel of Mark, 493 both comment that the formality of the introduction to Jesus’s speech, “kai. proskalesa,menoj tou.j maqhta.j auvtou/ ei=pen auvtoi/j( VAmh.n le,gw u`mi/n o[ti,” (“And calling together his disciples he said to them “Amen I say to you.”) indicates that this is a teaching to be noted in particular. Collins, Mark, 590 notes that the phrase “o[lon to.n bi,on auvth/j”” invites comparison both positively with Jesus’s definition of the greatest commandment in which he uses “o[lhj” four times to describe the devotion of the entire person to God and negatively with the scribes who take “all” that widows have.

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of the Temple’s widow fund, in order to sustain her life for another day.110 The ever-tightening circle of exploitative madness is symbolic of the impossibility of the Temple system continuing, as Mark portrays it. Here, the disordered system conducted from the Jerusalem Temple that has plagued Jesus throughout the gospel is portrayed for us in the person of the widow, but through Jesus’s eyes and interpreted by him. Thus, Jesus makes order from the disorder associated with the widow. The point that Mark wants to make as Jesus concludes his public ministry is that Israel is full of people like the widow. She is already like Jesus in that she gives “her whole life” into a religious system. As he moves forward to serve the reign of God by the sacrifice of his life so also she serves, but misguidedly, a form of the presence of God among people. Unlike the reign of God preached by Jesus, the religious system the widow supports in this deathly game of symbiotic, circular dependency has no future. The argument of the pericope is that this woman is an ideal disciple, one who projects in miniature, one of the features of the authentic disciple.111 She is potentially an ideal disciple of the reign of God. She is the motivation for the disciples of Jesus to proclaim the reign of God with all the energy and fearlessness that Jesus did. However, for Mark to make this argument, he has constructed a woman remote from all others in the narrative, exploited and mute. Like all the women in this narrative, this widow is completely isolated from other women, insofar as the narrative presents it. Like so many women in this narrative, this widow is utterly silent, not voicing in any way her reasons for behaving as she does, whether in some way she experiences some joy in this act or whether she is some form of religious automaton. There is a sense in which Mark exploits her literarily, creating her to provide an egregious example of the disorder within the Jewish religious tradition against which Mark portrays Jesus proclaiming the need for another approach to God, the way that he teaches. The woman is “given” to Jesus whose eyes perceive the woman and whose voice interprets her action. Jesus’s voice has the last word of this sequence of vignettes in the Temple and the last word of his own public career before he goes out of the Temple to sit on the Mount of Olives to the east, to pronounce the end of the Temple and the end of the world.112 110. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 284–85 discusses the OT legislation that stipulates care of widows and orphans but also points to Qumran literature, Josephus, and rabbinic stories that indicate strife over the failure of the priesthood system to perform their duties for widows. 111. Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, in “The Poor Widow in Mark,” 89–604 and “Fallible Followers,” 29–48 discusses the literary construction of ideal disciples in Mark. 112. See Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, ix–x, in which he proposes a literary structure for Mk 11:1–13:37, where Jesus brings to end at least symbolically or predicts the end of the Temple and its cult (11:1-25); of religious leadership in Israel (11:27–12:44); of Jerusalem itself (13:1-23), and of the world as we know it (13:24-37).



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After Jesus pronounces this major apocalyptic worldview, in Mark 13, the story moves to the Passion Narrative, where Jesus’s suffering under both Jewish and Roman authorities, his death and burial and the proclamation of his resurrection, is narrated. That narrative begins with the story of a woman anointing Jesus for this task. We will take up the story of this woman and the other women who surround Jesus in the tale of his suffering, death, and resurrection in the next chapter.

Chapter 6 JESUS IN THE MIDST OF FUNCTIONAL WOMEN, MK 14–16

6.1  The Woman Who Anoints Jesus (Mk 14:3-9) As Chapter 14 opens after the apocalyptic homily that predicts the end of the Temple, of the city of Jerusalem, and of the entire world, we see Jesus returned to the ordinary world, located in space and time (14:1-2). First, he is located in time: two days before Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Second, he is located in the social context that now determines Jesus’s fate: the Temple authorities have become actively hostile to Jesus but intend to act surreptitiously, lest they provoke a social uproar. Thus, these verses begin the Passion Narrative of Mark’s Gospel.1 The specific scene in which we see Jesus encounter another woman is established for us in terms of Jesus’s position. It is while Jesus reclines at table in the house of a man, characterized only as “a leper,” that a woman comes into the scene. Jesus is static, reclining, while the woman is upright, moving with intent. In this situation of vulnerability for Jesus, the woman is armed only with an alabaster jar of very expensive, fragrant ointment.2 Elaine Wainwright discusses this setting as that of the deipnon, or male dinner party, in which any women present were considered to be at least promiscuous, sexually, so that this space was “a borderland space where gender was being negotiated.”3 Breaking the jar, the woman pours its contents over Jesus’s head. Anticipating for a moment the whole story, it is possible to say that this woman introduces disorder of a new kind into the Markan narrative of Jesus. This woman 1. Collins, Mark, 620–27 discusses the composition and history of the tradition that lies behind the Passion Narrative. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 354 notes that the opening has an ominous tone. 2. France, The Gospel of Mark, 551 notes with reference to this jar and its contents that “the four genitives which Mark uses to describe its contents form a deliberately weighty phrase, emphasizing that this was no ordinary perfume. mu,ron is a general term for perfume or fragrant ointment. na,rdoj specifies that this is the highly prized perfume made of spikenard, whose oil was imported from India and therefore expensive. 3. Elaine Wainwright, Women Healing/Healing Women: The Genderization of Healing in Early Christianity (London: Equinox Pub. Ltd., 2006), 132.

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is not constrained by one of the major boundaries that limits women in this gospel. Like all those who have preceded her, she is not introduced by a personal name. As with the bleeding woman, Syrophoenician woman and the widow, whose stories we have just read in that sequence, this female character is introduced to us simply as “a woman” who comes into the scene.4 However, whereas the preceding women are designated somewhere in their story by the familial titles of “mother,” “daughter,” or “widow,” this woman remains only ever “a woman.” Jesus makes a general descriptive and evaluative remark about this woman at the end of the story, but this does not constrain her in any way. The women in the other three stories that follow this one in the Passion Narrative are qualified in some way by a relationship with a male figure.5 Thus, this woman remains outside the social system whereby women are located in relation to a tutelary male family figure. Within Mark’s own established system for portraying women, therefore, this woman functions completely outside male control, in a way that threatens disorder to the world of order that Jesus proclaims. The experienced Markan reader will know that a woman coming into Jesus’s presence may do something to disturb him. Yet, this woman’s action is still surprising because without any preparation, she approaches Jesus physically in a very direct way and drenches him in expensive perfume. There is physical vigor, even violence, in the fact that she breaks the alabaster flask to release its costly liquid over Jesus’s head (14:3).6

4. It is worth noting that in all four of these stories, the woman is referred to as “coming” to Jesus in some way. Thus, we have: kai. gunh. ou=sa evn r`u,sei ai[matoj .  .  . evlqou/sa evn tw/| o;clw| o;pisqen h[yato tou/ i`mati,ou auvtou/\(5:25); avllV euvqu.j avkou,sasa gunh. peri. auvtou/ . . . evlqou/sa prose,pesen pro.j tou.j po,daj auvtou/ (7:25); kai. evlqou/sa mi,a ch,ra ptwch. e;balen lepta. du,o( o[ evstin kodra,nthj (12:42); h=lqen gunh. e;cousa avla,bastron mu,rou na,rdou pistikh/j polutelou/j (14:3) This practice reinforces the sense of Jesus as the center of gravity of Mark’s perspective, into which an occasional individual woman makes her way. Collins, Mark, 641 explains that in 14:3 this description of the woman probably means that she comes from the outside and is uninvited. 5. As I have indicated in Appendix 1, and explained in Chapter 4, the four stories featuring women in the Markan Passion Narrative present women not primarily in their familial roles but in terms of their function in relation to Jesus and his disciples. However, apart from the woman in Mk 14:3-9, in each of the other stories, some of the other females are identified in relation to males. The woman in 14:66-72 is the maidservant of the Jewish high priest; in 15:40-41, 47 and 16:1-8, at least one woman of those suddenly individually named, in each of the three places, is identified as the mother of a male who is clearly known at least to the Markan composer. 6. See Collins, Mark, 641 for a good survey of the general tenor of scholarship, which agrees that it was not physically necessary to break the jar open. However, the gesture is dramatic; as Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 360 notes, the breaking of the jar means that all the perfume had to be used at once, an act of great extravagance.



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This action is only the introduction, however, to the bulk of the story, which begins in murmuring among “some people” against the woman and ends with the complainants being rebuked at length by Jesus because of their misreading of her.7 We are not told the identity of those who complain about the woman, but since Jesus has been depicted for several chapters as traveling with his male disciples and  since they are specifically named in the next two pericopes (Mk 14:10-11, Judas; Mk 14:12-16, the disciples), it is reasonable from the context to envisage that it is the disciples of Jesus who complain about the woman’s actions.8 Other details reinforce this reading. First, those who complain are said to be “indignant among one another,” “avganaktou/ntej pro.j e`autou,j,” (14:4) just as the ten disciples were indignant with James and John at Mk 10:41.9 Since the indignation of the ten over the actions of James and John was provoked by their attempt to procure preferential favor with Jesus, the term used here may well indicate that, again, the disciples feel somebody has attempted to supplant them in the relationship with Jesus, the leader, the alpha male. Since this person is a woman, behaving in ways that are probably beyond the repertoire of males in a group, the indignation may be all the more intense because there is no way for the all-male disciple group to compete with this sudden irruption into their table gathering.10 For whatever reason, the disciples’ response to this woman bears out Benny Liew’s observation that in this gospel, any woman “without a man . . . [is a] target[s] of (male) harassment.”11 Second, the disciples appeal to a principle Jesus had presented to them earlier, namely that wealthy goods should be sold and the proceeds given to the poor, since wealth constitutes a major obstacle to entering the reign of God (Mk 10:17-31). It is not possible for me to follow the theme Mark is developing ironically around the disciples here, but their protests against the woman ring hollow, given their amazement (always a negative term in Mark) when Jesus articulated his teaching to them on wealth and the poor.12 Curiously, the language with which they describe 7. France, The Gospel of Mark, 549 reads vv. 6-8 as a sequence of rebuke and counterrebuke that is very similar to other confronting teaching situations between Jesus and his disciples at 8:22–10:52. 8. Ibid., 553 agrees with my argument here. Wainwright, Women Healing, 131 argues that “male naming and male voice characterize the story.” 9. See oi` de,ka h;rxanto avganaktei/n peri. VIakw,bou kai. VIwa,nnou (10:41). Both Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 281 and Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 360 read the disciples as indicated here. 10. In support of my reading here, Wainwright, Women Healing, 132 writes, “Not only has this unknown and unnamed woman transgressed the predominantly male space but she has countervened the honour code by acting decisively in this public space in relation to the male body of Jesus.” 11. Liew, Politics of Parousia, 138. 12. In the course of Mk 10:24-28, first the disciples in general and then Peter, twice, protest at the impossibility of Jesus’s teaching on this matter. The disciples consistently register their values in monetary terms. To feed the first great crowd of five thousand men,

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her use of the perfume, namely avpw,leia (“wasted”) has many levels of meaning here. The word derives from the verb avpo,llumi, which means primarily “I destroy, I ruin.” It names plainly the woman’s irrevocable destruction of the alabaster jar, carved from stone and possibly beautiful in itself. It speaks prophetically of the irrevocable destruction of Jesus’s body, out of which his precious lifeblood will pour, not much further along in the narrative. Finally, it hints ominously at the damage that has occurred to the master-disciple bond, despite all the intense nurture it has received through Jesus’s teaching of this all-male group on the journey to Jerusalem. Third, Mark is also ironic when he portrays the disciples as imitating Jesus, but doing so in a misguided way, when they “reproach” the woman (kai. evnebrimw/nto auvth/|), just as Jesus spoke sternly to the leper (kai. evmbrimhsa,menoj auvtw/| euvqu.j evxe,balen auvto,n) early in the gospel (1:43). Jesus had a reason for speaking severely to the leper; however, the disciples merely “mimic” Jesus’s gravitas but without the serious grounding in the need to safeguard the proclamation of the reign of God. The woman’s actions introduce disorder into the master-disciple bond because her extraordinary action provokes the disciples and Jesus into an intense, confrontative interchange about her. On the one hand, the disciples of Jesus respond to the woman in an outburst of protest, in which they betray how far they are from true discipleship of Jesus. On the other hand, Jesus’s lengthy reply reveals that at this point of the narrative, despite all the teaching the disciples have received, hearing Jesus predict his suffering, death, and resurrection three times, only this unidentified woman understands that Jesus is approaching his death.13 In Jesus’s own spoken interpretation, only this woman acts like a true disciple with regard to the death of the master, to revere the body of the soon-to-die master by preparing it for burial (14:8).14 As the male disciples feared, this woman has indeed supplanted them, and has already performed for their master, an act of extraordinary magnanimity and reverence which their master appreciates. Here, a female to male bond momentarily threatens the all-male bonding of the master-disciple group. The woman has, in fact, performed the definitive act of service for Jesus, although the word diakoni,a is not used here in any form. By her performance of this act, she is revealed as being in many ways intensely like Jesus. First, Jesus defines himself, as we have seen, by his readiness to “give his life as a ransom for many.”(Mk 10:45) This woman is the only person in this gospel who has, in Jesus’s own interpretation, recognized that his impending execution as a criminal is in

the disciples protest that it could cost 200 denarii (Mk 6:37). In Mk 14:5, the jar of ointment is estimated as being worth 300 denarii, nearly a year’s wages for a laborer. 13. See Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 281. 14. See Mk 6:29 for reference to the disciples of John the Baptist removing his beheaded body for burial, thus providing one of the measures of the true disciple.



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truth a gift that warrants extraordinary reverence being paid to his body.15 Second, the woman is misjudged and reviled by a group of males in a power position who presume the right to do so, because of their bond with and supposed understanding of their master, Jesus. In his impending Passion, Jesus will be misjudged and reviled by two similarly powerful groups of males who will presume the right to do so because of their bond either with their father, God, or with their imperial master, Tiberius Caesar. Third, as we have seen, the disciples’ response to the woman betrays in fact the weakness of their bond with Jesus and their lack of understanding of him. The disciples are indignant about the woman’s position of favor with Jesus; thus they can be said to respond out of jealousy. When Jesus is sent to him, the Roman procurator, Pilate recognized that “it was out of envy that the chief priest had delivered him [Jesus] up (15:10).” Thus, both Jesus and the woman experience the destructive envy of people—in this case, men—invested with more power than their actual authority can sustain. In the woman’s case, as Liew points out, “Since women are trafficked as building blocks of male bonding, they are often also blamed for the breakup of male relationships.”16 In the woman’s case, of course, Jesus was there to defend her. In Jesus’s case, no one, not even Jesus himself, speaks in his defense. Thus, while there is a sense in the story of the anointing woman that Jesus vindicates her within the situation, Jesus becomes in his trial and death, more and more like this woman, who says no word of defense of her own action. That is, the Markan narrator does not allow this woman to speak in her own defense or, more importantly, to interpret her own action.17 As a result, the interpretation of her action that stands is that of Jesus. Thus, the first woman whom Jesus encounters directly since the Syrophoenician woman of 7:24-30 is not permitted literarily to speak to Jesus. She reverses most of the previous meetings Jesus had with women, where he brought healing to them by some form of bodily 15. France, The Gospel of Mark, 554 sees the slightly awkward use of the verb e;cw rather than du,namai as signifying that the woman used what was available to her, to express her sense of Jesus’s value. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 281 sees the similarity of this woman’s action with that of the widow, who gave “her whole living.” Since, however, the anointing woman gives “what she has” to Jesus, Jesus declares that her action will be told whenever the gospel, the good news about Jesus, is told. 16. Liew, Politics of Parousia, 146. 17. There is scholarly debate about whether this anointing is meant to be messianic or not. Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 281 sees it as a royal anointing while Evans, Mark 8:2716:20, 359 agrees with a number of scholars that it is a messianic anointing, even though it has an element of the anointing that was common at feasts. France, The Gospel of Mark, 552, disagrees, since the verb cri,w is not used and the text “goes on to interpret the festal gesture in terms of death and burial rather than of messianic commissioning. See Wainwright, Women Healing, 133–34 for an informed discussion of the use of the words for anointing, muri,zw and evlai,fw and for oil, mu,ron, that are used in Mk 14:3-9, especially with regard to the female-gendered character of mu,ron.

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touch. Here, she takes the initiative, salving Jesus by the ointment she pours over his head. However, she is not allowed the initiative of speech, to express her meaning. Jesus’s voice sounds with the last word, directing the significance of her action away from the clear potential of a sexual interpretation, where a precious receptacle belonging to a female is broken irrevocably to pour precious fluids over a reclining male. Instead, the master instructs his male disciples that wherever the gospel is announced throughout the world, what this woman had done would be told in her memory. This is so because despite the Jewish sense of crucifixion as a curse from God, the woman was able nevertheless to treat Jesus’s body with reverence and beauty.18 In some sense, then, this woman knew and believed Jesus’s predictions, not only of his suffering and death but also of his resurrection. Nowhere in the gospel is any mention made of memorializing Jesus’s male disciples. Thus, this woman has brought out into the open a rift between master and disciple that is never really bridged from this point on. Even the central Eucharistic union between Jesus and the disciples at the Passover Feast that follows almost immediately (14:22-26) is situated between two scenes riven with talk of betrayal (14:18-21) and ironic, outright contradiction of Jesus’s words to them (14:27-31). This woman whose story is told at the beginning of the Passion Narrative sets the tone for what is to follow. Hostile emotions prevail, instigated by the indignation the woman stirs in Jesus’s male disciples. Yet again, a woman is used to produce this dramatic effect and has her actions interpreted by a man. A female character is used to enable a literary effect desired by the Markan composer, namely that the bond between Jesus and his disciples be seen to weaken further, as the composer moves inexorably toward the death of Jesus. Before we come to that culminating scene of the Gospel of Mark, there is one other story featuring a woman, to be read.

6.2  The Maidservant Who Exposes Peter’s Betrayal (Mk 14:66-72) After Mk 14:3-9, a long sequence of very important events occurs, before the reader encounters another woman in this gospel, at Mk 14:66-72. In order to situate this new story in its context, it is necessary briefly to summarize these intervening events before discussing the story at 14:66-72. After the dinner at Bethany at which Jesus is anointed by an unnamed woman, provoking unease in the master-disciples relationship, events follow one another rapidly, leading to Jesus’s arrest and trial before the high priest, where we meet the next female character of Mark’s narrative, the maidservant of the high priest. In sharp contrast to the dramatic demonstration of loyalty made by the anointing woman, in the verses immediately following her story, Mark tells of the betrayal of Jesus by one of his chosen male disciples, Judas, who, for a price, promises to find an opportunity to hand Jesus over to the chief priests (14:10-11). 18. See Lev. 18:5 for crucifixion as a curse.



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In the flow of this story, after being anointed for his burial, Jesus has eaten the Passover meal with his disciples (14:12-26), which will turn out to be the last he eats with them before he is arrested, tried, and condemned to death. At this meal, Jesus predicts the complete dissolution of the master-disciples bond, on which point all his disciples contradict him, ironically already proving him true (14:27-31). After celebrating the Passover ritual in a new way, speaking of the bread as his body and the cup as his blood which he gives to his disciples to drink, Jesus moves from the supper setting to a garden where, after a protracted period of agonizing prayer alone, Jesus is arrested by armed agents of the temple authorities, through the treacherous connivance of Judas (14:32-46). Jesus protests the cowardice of the nighttime arrest, but amid other small acts of protest from his followers, he is taken by force to the high priest while his disciples all flee (14:47-52). In the presence of the high priest Jesus is subjected to many charges, none of which actually hold against him. In frustration at the difficulty of the proceedings, the high priest challenges Jesus to make a response to the charges. Here, a change relevant to my overall argument begins to appear in Jesus’s behavior. No motive is offered, but Jesus refuses to speak. Perhaps we are meant to read that Jesus allows the incoherence of his accusers’ attack to defeat itself (14:55-61a). However, the high priest then challenges Jesus to identify himself in response to the question, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus replies to this with an extended affirmation that will see him condemned for blasphemy. Jesus uses the divine selfaffirmation in responding to the high priest, saying “I am” and adding that as Son of Man Jesus would be “seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (14:61b-62). Thus we see on the one hand that precisely at the point when Jesus would be expected to use the rhetorical skills he demonstrated in Mk 12:13-44, he becomes silent, even when specifically asked by the high priest to respond (14:60-61a). On the other hand, when the high priest questions Jesus with regard to his identity as Messiah and Son of God, Jesus responds unequivocally, in language that gave his enemies every opportunity to condemn him to death for blasphemy (14:61b-64). In this latter interchange, we see a major climactic literary dynamism of narrative as Aristotle identified it, namely the recognition scene. This scene is prepared for by one of the well-known literary devices used in the Gospel of Mark, the Messianic Secret, where Jesus refuses to allow people to announce prematurely the mighty works he has done. The effect of this unsuccessful attempt of the Messianic Secret to contain the true identity of Jesus is that it becomes part of the goal of the narrative to proclaim clearly, in a significant place, who Jesus really is. Aristotle described the successful narrative plot as combining two dynamic elements, “reversal” and “recognition.” Reversal is defined by Aristotle as “a change to the opposite direction of events . . . and one in accord . . . with probability or necessity.”19 For Aristotle, the best kind of reversal occurs simultaneously with what he terms “recognition,” which he defines 19. Aristotle, Poetics, 1452a, 21–23.

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as “a change from ignorance to knowledge, leading to friendship or to enmity, and involving matters which bear on prosperity or adversity.”20 The combination of plot reversal and recognition together has the effect that it “will yield either pity or fear, just the type of actions of which tragedy is taken to be a mimesis; besides, both adversity and prosperity will hinge upon such circumstances.”21 Here, in Mk 14:53-65, but particularly in vv. 60-64, we see the full recognition of Jesus’s status as Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power. At the same time, we see his fortunes reverse from being the favorite hailed by the crowds, listened to as the one whom no one dared to question (12:34), to one become strangely silent before questioning, whose own definitive answer of self-declaration sees him instantly condemned to death. Amid a sudden loss of speech from the one who was the Sower, sowing the word of God, the image of the conquering male master of disciples becomes strangely like the female characters of this narrative: isolated from the support of friends of his own gender; denigrated by being spat upon and blinded, silent but then mocked in his speech, being challenged to “speak forth,” that is to “prophesy,” while being beaten (14:65). Within one verse, the consequence of Jesus proclaiming his identity unambiguously is summed up, showing how spectacularly his power plummets and yielding pity for the sudden reduction in his human dignity. This is the context in which we read Mk 14:66-72, a piece which Mark sandwiches in between two trials of Jesus, the first as we have just seen, before the Jewish authorities and the second, before the Roman procurator, Pilate (15:1-15). In this interim narrative, Peter, the leader of the disciples of Jesus, having followed Jesus “at a distance,” after his arrest, into the premises of the high priest, is himself put on trial.22 However, while Jesus is on trial for his life before leading men of his religious tradition, who have wanted to destroy him since early in his career, Peter is grilled “below stairs” by a maid who knows only that Peter is associated with Jesus. While Jesus opts first for silence and then declares fully his identity, Peter not only denies his association with Jesus and with the other disciples, but also even being a Galilean (see 14:68, 70, 71). In fact, as Tolbert, explains, this trial of Peter is “almost an exact antitype of the recognition scene.”23 While the contrast between the two male characters in terms of their experience of trial and their contrasting behaviors is clearly the prime interest of the narrator, there are patterns to be observed about the female character in this story. Like all female characters in this gospel to date, she has no individual name, but she is identified by her relationship with a male figure. That is, she is 20. Ibid., 1452a, 28–31. 21. Ibid., 1452a, 38–1452b, 2. 22. See Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel, 217–18 for an explanation of the way Mark’s detailed location of Peter in the same place as Jesus is being tried, established the sense of simultaneous trials being held. 23. Ibid., 75.



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the maidservant, perhaps a slave, of the high priest (14:66).24 For a scene that will function as a mock trial of Peter, who has in fact followed Jesus to the high priest’s premises but makro,qen, “from a distance” (14:54) and is now “below in the courtyard,” ka,tw evn th/| auvlh, (14:66), this maid of the high priest who is simultaneously examining Jesus “above,” is ideally placed. By her lowly status, including her female status, she reduces the trial of Peter in comparison with that of Jesus to that of a farce. Yet, the farce has tragic consequences for Peter and his relationship with Jesus (14:72). What is unusual about the portrayal of this female character is the impact that her two speeches have on the plot of the narrative, despite the banal nature of what she is given to say. The maidservant causes major disorder in the order of God that this gospel has portrayed Jesus setting out to establish, by calling male disciples to follow him. She instigates the public disavowal of that master-disciples relationship, out of the mouth of the functioning spokesperson for the disciple group, who had declared not much earlier that even if he had to die with Jesus, he would not deny him (14:30). The power of the maidservant’s role in the scene is indicated grammatically in the opening verse, when Peter’s presence is indicated by a clause built on genitive absolutes (Kai. o;ntoj tou/ Pe,trou), whereas her arrival is announced by the finite, indicative mood verb, e;rcetai, “she comes” and the principal clause of the sentence is built around the verb le,gei, “she says (14:67).” The scene is constructed out of shifting bodily locations and speeches between Peter and others, with the maidservant taking the lead. The maidservant makes two statements about Peter, first to Peter himself and then to the bystanders. Her second statement is then taken up by the bystanders, repeated and extended. While they are in themselves quite mundane, her statements nevertheless go to the nub of the matter for the master-disciples relationship, which is the reason that Peter is in the courtyard at all.25 That is, in her 24. France, The Gospel of Mark, 620 comments that the high priest probably kept quite a number of slaves to maintain his household and that the diminutive form used to name this maidservant, “paidi,skh” registers if nothing else, her complete social insignificance and powerlessness. Bernadette Kiley, “The Servant Girl In The Markan Passion Narrative: An Alternative Feminist Reading,” Lutheran Theological Journal 41 (May 1, 2007): 52–53 argues that “since forms of the noun paidiskē are used in classical Greek to denote both prostitute and brothel, the servant girl’s role could have been that of sexual object for the males of the high priest’s household if not for the high priest himself.” If this were the case, the girl’s remarks to Peter might be seen as degrading as well as threatening. 25. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 464 argues on the strict logic of the scenario in the courtyard that there is nothing intrinsically threatening in the maid servant’s remarks to Peter. However, I agree with the more emotionally attuned reading by France, The Gospel of Mark, 619 that the interchange between the maid servant and Peter consists of challenges and denials that “follow an incremental scale,” to Peter’s final recognition that he has betrayed Jesus.

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first observation to Peter, the maidservant remarks that he was “with the Nazarene, Jesus.” The primary relationship in the order of God that Jesus proclaims is between Jesus and the male disciple that he calls literally “to be with him” (3:14), of whom the very first was Simon, later named Peter (1:16-18; 3:16).26 Here, in response to the plain statement of an obviously observable fact, Peter categorically denies that relationship, declaring that he neither knew nor understood what the woman was talking about (14:68). Having said this, Peter moves physically further away from the woman and from Jesus, going “out into the gateway” (e;xw eivj to. proau,lion) into what was perhaps an ambivalent space. No motivation is given for the maid’s persistence, but she is a stock character, who could well be modeled after more than one of Theophrastus’s “Characters.”27 Thus, she remarks again, but this time to a new audience, spreading the problem more widely for Peter, that Peter was “one of them” (14:69). By calling disciples to follow him, Jesus established a disciple band, the focus of this second challenge of the maid. Again, Peter denies it, thus turning his back not only on Jesus, but also on the new order of brothers and sisters of one another, constituted by doing the will of God, that Jesus had announced (3:34-35). The maid having caused the trouble, her refrain is taken up by mere bystanders, who substantiate their charge with what was obviously felt to be simply observable, namely that Peter came from the same place as Jesus and his followers, Galilee.28 This Peter again denies, with curses and imprecations, specifically denying Jesus who has just declared himself plainly above.29 The remaining verse of the story returns to the theme of Jesus’s prediction of Peter’s betrayal before the rooster crowed to end the night. My interest lies in the fact that a female character here facilitates a form of recognition scene focused on Peter in Mk 14:66-72. What is recognized about Peter is his cowardice and the degree to which fear has overcome his faith, his 26. Note that Jesus’s call to the disciples in Mk 3:14, to “be with him,” (i[na w=sin metV auvtou/) provides the basic vocabulary for the maid’s comment, “You were with the Nazarene” (su. meta. tou/ Nazarhnou/ h=sqa). 27. For example, aspects of such Theophrastian characters as “Idle Chatter,” “Garrulity,” or “Rumor-Mongering” are in evidence in the maidservant who moves around, chatters whether her opinion is sought or not, talks to all and sundry, and destroys a man’s reputation and entire life by apparently trite remarks. See Jeffrey Rusten, I. C. Cunningham and A. D. Knox eds. Theophrastus: Characters; Herodas: Mimes; Cercidas and the Choliambic Poets (Cambridge, MA; London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1993) 48–49 for the lists of Theophrastus’s Characters. 28. Collins, Mark, 708 notes that other gospels construct reasons for Peter’s clear identity as a Galilean, either on account of his speech (Mt 26:73) or his being recognized from the garden (Jn 18:26). 29. See Ibid., where Collins calls this moment “the lowest point in the development of the theme of the failure of the disciples in Mark,” since Peter has used an oath, after the manner of Herod, to call God, the Father of Jesus, to witness Peter’s own untruthfulness under the warrant of divine punishment.



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relationship with Jesus. It is possible to see that Mark has created a lively female character here, who is powerful enough to have this effect. Indeed, she brings about a reversal in Peter’s fate, the complete destruction of Peter’s relationship with Jesus, indicated by Peter’s abject weeping (14:72).30 Thus we see in this story, as we witnessed in the story of Herodias and her daughter, that when a woman intervenes in the context of male relationships, especially by speech, she actively catalyzes the collapse of male relationships.31 Finally, at a level of critique outside the story, I observe again as a feminist reader, alerted by postcolonial critique of the way gender is portrayed in imperialcolonial literature, that the Markan narrator is prepared to exploit stereotypical concepts of females, such as the political naivety of a low-status female servant, to serve his own literary and theological ends. Indeed, being subject to attention by a female character is used to denigrate a male disciple of Jesus. Had Peter been tried, as was Jesus, by male leaders of the Jewish religious tradition, there would have been a tone of gravitas in the event.32 However, Peter’s circumstance is belittled in comparison with Jesus by the fact that a low-status female instigates proceedings against him. Even though it only takes her public statement of the very obvious to provoke Peter to abandon Jesus altogether, her low status keeps the whole event at the level of farce. This is another way in which the Markan narrator, in using female status to achieve his own literary and theological ends, in fact denigrates women. The feminist critic must be ready to detect and denounce such a tendency. As Bernadette Kiley observes in connection with the Markan portrayal of female characters, “Neither silence nor speech delivers female characters that are ultimately satisfying for the feminist reader.”33

6.3  The Path to the Death of Jesus (Mk 15:1-32)34 After the crowing of the rooster announced Peter’s betrayal, the scene shifts immediately back to Jesus, who, as soon as morning had come, was led away 30. France, The Gospel of Mark, 619 notes that after this event, Peter and Judas both disappear from the narrative. Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel, 75 argues that the literary conventions of first-century CE narrative mean that Peter’s denial of his self-identity means that there is no happy resolution for him, and that “the Gospel gives us no grounds for supposing that Peters’ lament signifies a change of heart” (p. 218). 31. See Liew, Politics of Parousia, 146 on this point. 32. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 467 writes that “Peter’s failing only makes Jesus look more impressive.” However, the interpretation of Jesus’s silent passivity here as noble ignores the degree to which Jesus thereby resembles the female characters of this narrative, who I argue are regarded in an untroubled way as secondary in status to males. 33. Kiley, “The Servant Girl,” 48–49. 34. A highly detailed comparative study on historical-critical principles of the death of Jesus in all four canonical gospels can be found in Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the

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bound and handed over to the Roman authority, Pontius Pilate. We return for the next thirty-nine verses to an all-male environment, Mk 15:1-39, in which the matter of judicial execution will be conducted as public male business. A second trial scene opens this new phase. This time the trial is held on political grounds, conducted by a man who has the power to condemn Jesus to death. As with the Jewish trial, Jesus refuses to engage with the process. He implicitly acknowledges to Pilate that he is “the King of the Jews,” but insists that these are Pilate’s words. After this, Jesus refuses to speak (15:2-5). Jesus’s trial before the Roman authority, his condemnation, preparation for death, and his death itself will be filled with the clamor of voices but his will be heard only once, at the penultimate moment of death. The reader does not hear another word from Jesus until his last cry just before he dies. In this cry, in the words of Ps. 22:2, Jesus cries out asking God why God has abandoned him. The last word of the man who has brought the abundance of God in healing, feeding, and liberating understanding of God to crowds of people is to leave hanging in the air the question to God, “Why have you abandoned me?” In the period before Jesus’s final word in this gospel, we hear many other voices. Finding no response from Jesus, Pilate, a man working his way (without distinction, it seems) through the Roman cursus honorum and, presumably, therefore with some form of the regular Roman rhetorical education behind him, tries his hand at persuading the crowd. Pilate gambles with Jesus’s life, in the silent presence of Jesus, a man to whom the crowd had listened gladly (12:37) and whose sway over them was such that the authorities did not dare to arrest Jesus in public, for fear of the multitude (12:12; 14:1-2). Pilate, says the Markan narrator, perceived that it was an inner-Jewish jealousy that drove the chief priests to submit Jesus to him. Therefore, Pilate attempts to release Jesus by offering him as a prisoner to be set free as a Roman gesture of goodwill on the Jewish Passover feast (15:6-15).35 Pilate commits the unforgivable error of asking an open-ended question of a crowd, without doing anything to ensure that the answer would go as he wished. In the rhetorical situation, as Mark portrays it, this action by Pilate hands all power over to the crowd. The narrator’s voice informs us that the crowd, now under the control of the chief priests, asked instead for a convicted murderer, Barabbas. In the second phase of his abdication of his Roman imperial authority, Pilate then asks the crowd what he is to do with “the King of the Jews.” This strategy leaves Jesus entirely subject to mob justice, driven by envy. Responding to the cries of “Crucify him!” Pilate’s weak and inept rejoinder, “Why, what evil has he done?” Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1994). 35. Collins, Mark, 713–17 discusses the historicity of this alleged custom, showing that Greek, Roman, and Jewish Second Temple literature used the literary device of inventing such customs if necessary, to further the plot. She decides that this Passover release of a token prisoner in Jerusalem is an example of this practice.



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cannot prevail over the crowd’s shouting for Jesus to be crucified. In utterly banal fashion, the imperial-colonial relationship between Rome and Palestine issued here in the complete betrayal of a provincial subject (15:6-14). In what follows immediately (15:15), Jesus is treated literarily in a manner very like the portrayal of women in the Gospel of Mark. The sense of Jesus’s passivity is heightened by the fact that the narrative notes, without any sense of protest, that Jesus is scourged as a matter of course and handed over to the Roman soldiery to be executed (15:15). It is true that scourging was a regular part of the execution process, helping to induce a state of shock that hastened death.36 It is also true that Mark absolutely avoids any indulgence in violence for its own sake in his portrayal of the actual process of crucifixion of Jesus, noting in 15:24 the barest fact, “and they crucified him there.” It is true that Mark in a sense transposes much of the violence that is done to Jesus into his portrayal of the scene (15:16-20) where the soldiers mock Jesus as “King of the Jews.” Nevertheless, the almost passive form of Mark’s very bare style in 15:15 leaves Jesus unprotected by any sense of narratorial protest against the abuse to which he becomes suddenly subject. Despite having cast out an entire legion of invading unclean spirits from the possessed demoniac of Gadara (Mk 5:1-20), Jesus behaves here and in the following verses as completely powerless, until he dies. It is as though Jesus is suddenly completely at the disposal of the men of violence, entirely plastic and malleable, as though he is an unresisting register on which any and every mark can be made. In the hands of the Roman soldiers (15:16-20), Jesus is maltreated, the title “King of the Jews” sounding a third time since 15:9, this time in mockery. Jesus is denigrated, beaten, and spat on, made the sport of men using violence to bond with one another. A reverse male bonding occurs in this scene. These men bond not with Jesus as leader, eschewing self-indulgent violence, but with one another, over against Jesus. Eventually, Jesus is lead away to be crucified (15:20). In a matter-of-fact tone, the narrator describes the details of the act of crucifixion of Jesus (15:21-32). Jesus is assisted to carry the cross, by somebody known to the composer of the gospel or to its audience. The place of execution is named, the offer of wine mixed with myrrh is made, and Jesus is crucified, at the third hour. Jesus is depicted in context, crucified between two thieves. At this point, fixed to the cross, Jesus is in an utterly passive state, unable to move. His voice is still not heard, but the voices of others interpret the scene in mockery of various kinds. The charges raised against Jesus in both trials are heard again, in new forms. The political title “King of the Jews” appears yet again, this time in written form, as the charge on which Jesus was executed (15:26). Those who pass by reiterate the accusation of the Jewish leaders, that Jesus had proposed a ludicrous violence 36. Martin Hengel, The Cross of the Son of God, trans. John Bowden (London, UK: X Press Reprints, 1997) is a book-length study of the processes of Roman crucifixion and of how it was viewed in the ancient world.

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against the temple (15:29-30). Jesus’s act of saving others returns as a cruel insult, challenging him to reverse the passivity to which the cross reduces him. Charged as a pretender to power in both Roman and Jewish systems of governance, Jesus is challenged to descend from the cross, to produce belief in him (15:31-32). Finally, even those enduring execution with him revile him (15:32). Jesus is fixed inescapably in a situation in which he is isolated from the support of his friends, rejected by the custodians of his own religious tradition, failed by Roman justice, misrepresented for what he has said and done, and loathed by all around him. Before we approach the scene of Jesus’s actual death, it will be helpful to sum up the findings to this point. What it is most important to say is that when Jesus is at his weakest point, in the penultimate moment before he dies, there is none he resembles more in the cast of the Gospel of Mark than the female characters Mark has portrayed. In this gospel, female characters have been shown, in a variety of ways, to be associated with disorder in a way that opens opportunity for the ultimate form of disorder that threatens the world, apocalyptic evil. In this gospel, Jesus’s entire career is really a contest with this evil which he appears at the beginning to be conquering, like the person entering the strong man’s house to bind him and plunder his house of Jesus’s imagery, early in the gospel (3:27). However, at his death, Jesus is depicted as being completely overwhelmed by evil, in the absence of any power on earth or in heaven to assist him, despite his absolute innocence of any wrongdoing. When the Gospel of Mark depicts Jesus subject to this onslaught of disordered evil, the recognizable characteristics of his demeanor are those the Gospel of Mark has constructed as female. To say this in another way, when the Gospel of Mark wants to depict Jesus as a site of complete occupation by the forces of evil, Jesus is portrayed with the characteristic features of women in the narrative.

6.4  A Reprise of Female Characters in Mark 1-14 Jesus is like all the other women whom we have seen to this point, in some general points and then like specific individuals in particular ways. 37 In general terms, Jesus on the cross is like the female characters in Mark in that he is isolated from all support, he is silent, and he is severely denigrated. While each of these three categories has been produced for Jesus in the narrative on a different basis than they were for the women, nevertheless, when Jesus is being executed in silent passivity, the characters in the narrative in whom we have already encountered this manifestation of a human being are female. A most significant difference, of course, is that whereas there is a strong sense in Mark that Jesus’s isolation, silence, and denigration are a scandal against his identity that Jesus bears with heroic dignitas, the endurance by female characters 37. I except from this comparison, the two murderous women who are portrayed as being really part of the Roman imperial power system, Herodias and her daughter.



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of isolation, muting, and denigration is not portrayed as anything out of the ordinary, such that it should draw attention. It is precisely the task of a feminist reading to disallow this normalization of the marginalization of female characters in a narrative that carries the canonical authority that the Gospel of Mark has in the Christian community. Yet, at the same time it is the task of a feminist Christian reading to claim the hope that Mark’s gospel of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection offers. Hope is built into the stories of these women whose existence as literary constructs the Markan author has constricted, in ways that he did not do with the portrayal of male characters. This hope is the Markan hope, of the hundredfold yield of fruit (4:20) and the hundredfold of houses, families, and lands (10:29-31) that Jesus promises in both parabolic and in plain speech. This hope must be available to all, unstintingly and without discrimination by the accidents of birth, if Mark’s portrayal of Jesus is to have any coherence. When Jesus suffers death in female guise, the narrative sustains hope in the resurrection that Jesus always foretold whenever he predicted his death. This hope of resurrection that the narrative holds open for Jesus as he dies marked by the features of female characterization is thereby held open for all female characters as well. It is of the utmost importance to my argument to insist that the dynamic of salvation I have just named does not legitimate deliberately subjecting women to isolation, silence, and denigration, so that they might be more like the suffering Christ, while males reserve to themselves all the powers of the risen Christ. Women have suffered two millennia in Christianity of being subjected to shallow, indeed puerile, reasoning of this kind. It is time in the evolution of Christian thinking to repudiate such immaturity and to learn to see with gladness, the full glory of the risen human being, female and male alike. In order to enable this, I propose to bring to the reading of the death of Jesus, a feminist recollection of the female characters Mark has presented to us. I recall these female characters not so that they or other women might be inspired to imitate Christ in this abjection. I gather them so that they might witness the abjection that they have already endured in a highly male-dominant narrative, and so that this abjection can be set out in a language that a strongly male audience understands. I also gather them to counteract the isolation to which the Markan plot construction subjected them, so that we might have a sense of their collective strength and might hear their collective voices protest loudly and long, the punishment in an all-male political system, of one who exposed that system’s needless ineptness and exploitation of its people, but at cost of his life. When I treated the individual stories about women I indicated ways in which the portrayal of female characters related to Jesus as he would be portrayed in the Passion Narrative. I will not repeat all that material here, but will merely point to some very salient points of comparison or contrast between these women and Jesus as he dies. For example, the mother-in-law of Simon, having been healed, “serves” Jesus and his disciples. On the cross, Jesus’s own description of himself as having come to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many (10:45) is

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realized in an ultimate way. Jesus’s own mother opposed him utterly and Jesus rejected completely her attempt to seize control of him. Both mother and son exhibited a determination to pursue radically that which they believed in. It is precisely by that single-minded faith that Jesus pursues his life with integrity, even to the cross. The women whose stories are linked by the “twelve years” catchphrase both endure death of a kind and are restored to life by faith in Jesus (5:22-43). The older woman suffers ma,stix as Jesus does in his death, is depleted of her blood, yet expends all she has, even virtually her last breath, to seek healing and life. This is effectively what Jesus does, dying on the cross on account of what he has proclaimed and enacted about the creative, abundant power of God to bring about a new order in creation. The Syrophoenician woman, by her daring for her child, models the power that love can have (7:24-30). Again, this speaks of the meaning of Jesus’s death on the cross, even though in the trials that lead to his execution the gift of repartee that served the woman well no longer works for Jesus. The widow Jesus assesses so acutely in the Temple is in a sense a forerunner of Jesus, who is destroyed in his turn by the machinations of the system operating in the Temple, as the widow was (12:41-44). Yet, like this widow, Jesus also gives “his whole life.” The argument of the larger story of the gospel is that unlike the widow, giving her life into an exploitative system that has no future, Jesus gives his whole life to the order of God which will ultimately triumph over the power of evil. The anointing woman of Mk 14:3-9 supports Jesus in his dying because, as we have seen, she anticipates the reality of his death and affirms it as something meaningful, to be treated with reverence and beauty. Strangely, she also makes a marked contrast with Jesus on a significant point. The anointing woman is the only woman who is not identified in any way as being under the control of an authorizing male figure. By contrast, when Jesus dies, he is utterly under the control of male figures. The good that the woman does, she does completely free of male tutelary power. The evil that is done to Jesus is carried out by the principal agents of male power in Jesus’s world, both Jewish and Gentile, both religious and political. The woman’s capacity to envisage both the destructive power of evil yet the vindication of Jesus’s faithfulness to the order of God makes her gesture extremely powerful, a means of hope. Last, the maidservant’s matter-of-fact speech promises to a feminist reader, that male bonding that is based on delusions of power and grandeur can be undone by a plain word spoken at the right time and the right place (14:66-72). Finally, as I assemble these Markan women, I suggest to the imagination of the reader one final layer. Imagine the convict women of the First Fleet, banished from imperializing England, assembling to witness the bodies of their great-greatgreat colonial grandchildren, female and male, slaughtered on the battlefields of Gallipoli, France, and Palestine, to serve the interests of imperial Great Britain in the First World War. In a vernacular hermeneutics, what might these women of colorful language have to say about this scenario of Jesus, the colonial subject, dying at the hands of imperial power?



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6.5  The Death of Jesus (Mk 15:33-39) The death of Jesus begins with the abiding presence of apocalyptic evil: in the middle of the day, at the sixth hour, darkness sits over the whole land, for three hours. Jesus had predicted in his homily of the last days that “the sun will be darkened” (13:24).38 No other reference is made to the dying of Jesus, except the passing of time in darkness, from the sixth to the ninth hour. Against the clamor of competing voices in the preceding account of the act of fixing Jesus to the cross, the opening verse of this section offers no sound, only darkness. This is the moment of apocalyptic evil, when disorder reigns. Mark’s female characters know what it is to be in soundless isolation, regarded as a site of disorder. At the end of this period, Jesus speaks his last words of the entire narrative, crying out in a loud voice, in Aramaic, the opening line of Psalm 22, which is then translated into Greek, so that the hearer hears it twice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34) Like the few speeches of women in this gospel, it is only a single line that has to carry all Jesus’s meaning, that has to tell “the whole truth” of his suffering, on all levels. Regardless of the unverifiable speculations that have been made about the intentions of Jesus in this cry, what Mark offers is a line in which Jesus does two things. First, his address to God claims God still as “my God.” Second, by these words, Jesus names starkly, his experience of the relationship with God, under the power of apocalyptic evil. The experience is that God is not merely absent, but that God has forsaken God’s own beloved son. A measure of how far removed from any sense of the presence of God the whole situation is, is the ghastly fumbling of the bystanders with the meaning of what Jesus has just cried out. They mishear his words, thinking that Jesus is calling on Elijah. They do not know that Jesus had already explained halfway through the narrative, that Elijah had already come, in the form of John the Baptizer, to whom people did what they pleased (9:11-13). Those who have read the whole gospel attentively will hear ironically, even in this misinterpretation, the hint that Jesus is indeed following the path of John, suffering people enacting upon him, whatever they please. However, for the bystanders, the poignancy of Jesus’s cry, that of every person of faith pushed to their limit because of that faith, completely evades them. They pursue their own misunderstanding, in two different ways. First, they announce wrongly what Jesus means. Second, they rush to give Jesus a drink, to enable him to last a little longer, in the event that Elijah does come, to take him down. The bystanders have completely failed to understand what has transpired in the three hours of darkness. The Son of God has in fact been killed and has come to the point of his death. Against the vacuous chatter of the bystanders, Jesus cries a loud, incoherent sound, and breathes his last breath. 38. See France, The Gospel of Mark, 651 and Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20, 506 for discussions of uses of darkness in Old Testament, and both ancient Jewish and Roman literatures to indicate God’s displeasure with the actions of human beings.

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At that moment, the world registered an event of major proportions.39 First, in the Jewish world, the curtain of the Temple was completely ripped apart, to reveal that nothing stood behind it. For Mark, the whole presence of God has relocated to the dead Jesus on the cross. Second, the world of Roman imperial power, represented by the supervising centurion, positioned so that he could observe proceedings accurately, remarked with unconscious irony, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” Interpreting the scene with Roman eyes, the professional soldier believed that to be allowed to die after only three hours on the cross was a reprieve from excruciating suffering of such an order, that it meant Jesus must have been a son of a god in some form. Thus, from both the Jewish and the Gentile perspectives, that is, the whole world as it was known to the Markan composer, at the moment of Jesus’s death, God had declared God’s presence among human beings in a new and definitive way.

6.6  Women, the Last to Appear on the Markan Stage (Mk 15:40-41, 47; 16:1-8) After the death of Jesus, the all-male environment gives way to a notice that all along, women have been watching the entire scene, but from a distance. These women witnessing Jesus’s rapid death and his respectable burial are described as having served Jesus (dihko,noun auvtw/|) consistently all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem (Mk 15:40-41). The women are not mere bystanders, as will shortly emerge. For only the second time in this gospel, the individuals in this group of women are named, as though they are already known in some way. One is identified by a place name, another as the mother of two males clearly known to the writer and his audience, and a third has only her personal name. Since there are no male disciples remaining engaged with Jesus in the scene, a state of affairs that Mark established so that Jesus died starkly alone, witnesses are needed to verify that Jesus died and that he was buried. The necessity of insisting that Jesus died is theological—very early in the Christian community, rumors abounded that Jesus only appeared to die. As a result, the resurrection as a theological category was vitiated because if Jesus did not die, he was merely resuscitated, not raised from the dead. Second, it was necessary to insist that Jesus was properly buried because this meant not only that his body was treated with dignity but that it was not left to hang on the cross to be preyed on by birds of prey and then allowed to fall at the base of the execution ground, to be scavenged by dogs. To verify the death of Jesus and his rapid burial, Mark uses these suddenly appearing, named women as witnesses. These women might look like resurrection hope. Someone has remained faithful to Jesus and has not abandoned him. They can witness to his death as 39. See the discussions of the various possible meanings of these events by Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 328–30; France, The Gospel of Mark, 656–60 and Collins, Mark, 759–71.



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though saved by God from the protracted torture of death by crucifixion, to the apocalyptic signs that marked his death, and to his decent burial that saved him from the final disgrace that usually attended the execution of a criminal by the Roman Empire. There seems to be no sign of disorder among them. However, the portrayal of these women is problematic. Even though they are named, they still have no voice. Although the attendants at the cross and the supervising centurion give interpretive comments on the death of Jesus, these women do not speak at all. Many feminist commentators point to the fact that Mark uses about these women the highly valued term that defines Jesus. That is, Mark tells us that from the time when Jesus was in Galilee, all the way to Jerusalem they and many other women “followed him and served him” (15:41). Yet, how can this be? As we have seen, in the entire journey of Jesus to Jerusalem, from 7:31–14:2, there has been no specific mention of women. The journey was told as though it were an entirely male journey. Jesus does not speak to or heal any women in all that time. Any individual character who encounters Jesus personally in that time, whether to be taught by him, to be awed or healed by him, or to debate with him, has been male. How can it be that in all that time, there were also women who were following Jesus and ministering to his needs? This is an act of disorder on the part of the Markan composer. It is not a mere slip of the editorial pen but an omission of a much more serious kind. This omission presumes to use women and never to account for their services. The concern raised here is not, as it would be legitimate for feminist inquiry to do, a matter of historical accuracy: did women actually accompany Jesus to Jerusalem or not?40 Winsome Munro, who made such an inquiry a quarter of a century ago, wrote that “there is little preparation for the women who appear at the death and burial of Jesus and at the empty tomb.”41 Munro’s solution is a historical one, finding that women were used to witness the death, burial, and empty tomb of Jesus because there was a strong tradition in the early Christian community that they did so. However, Munro argues, Mark chose to override that tradition, but that his gospel reveals to historical inquiry, “though with reluctance and ambiguity, that certain women exercised a key role in the primitive church as witnesses to kerygmatic events.”42 The disorder that a feminist reading identifies here is that by the terms of Mark 15:41, the services of women have been used to support a male leader throughout the course of a major campaign, and there has been no literary recognition of the cost that these women have borne. Nor have women been acknowledged as being present when Jesus taught his disciples about the inner working of the order 40. Other questions that might be asked in this vein of thought would be: How would that have been possible sociologically? What does it imply about such women if they did so? Were they wealthy? Did they also leave spouses and children in order to follow Jesus? Was the socially outrageous behavior of such women really part of the intense animosity against Jesus held by the custodians of Jewish religion? 41. Munro, “Women Disciples in Mark?” p. 230. 42. Ibid., 240.

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of God, gave them language and strategies for leading people in this new way of living, teaching them about his own destiny of dying and rising. This knowledge that seemed to be specific to males only is now exposed as having been given to women as well. Not until necessity obliged it was the Gospel of Mark prepared to reveal that, in fact, women were present, serving Jesus, through the entire learning journey to Jerusalem. Women have been through the same preparation to lead in the reign of God announced by Jesus, as have the male disciples. Thus, Mark’s narrative is revealed as disordered in two ways. First, the narrative lacks inner coherence on the matter of the presence of women in the journey to Jerusalem with Jesus. On the one hand, in the narrative portrayal of this journey, across six chapters at the center of the narrative, no woman is specifically mentioned in any way, while individual male characters fill every verse. On the other, long after the journey is complete, to fill a rhetorical need of verification of events for the author, women are suddenly, but as though an afterthought, noted as having been present through the entire process. Second, the narrative lacks the conviction of one of its own major principles because it acknowledges, but far too late and insignificantly, that these women had been in fact acting in Jesus’s own chosen mode of “serving.” This is no mere trifle. As I have argued, women living in the context of an imperial-colonial relationship are very readily exploited by the work they do, being under-recognized in every register of value in society for both their competence and hard work. In Chapter 2 I wrote about convict women who, when they were admitted to the “Female Factory,” had any money they owned taken from them, some being given to the poor but the rest not being accounted for.43 In Chapter 3 I wrote about Australian women’s contribution to the national effort in the First World War being relegated to the very edges of the telling of the national saga, the Anzac Myth. I also produced evidence to show that the Australian nurses who organized themselves to participate in medical care of the soldiers from the war were exploited by having to pay for all their own costs and that they were paid less than males for the same work.44 In Australia today, these same problems persist still for women, as registered in regular newspaper commentary on women’s access to positions of power and influence, to financial independence and to the right to speak. For example, in the current Australian federal government cabinet of twenty-two ministers, appointed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on January 24, 2017, only five are female.45 These numbers represent a fivefold increase from the single female cabinet member under the previous prime minister, Tony Abbott, but still make up less than twenty-five percent of cabinet. One important sign of progress is that the seniority of cabinet positions held by women is increasing, with Julie Bishop as minister for foreign affairs, Kelly O’Dwyer as minister for revenue and financial 43. See Ibid., 76. 44. Goodman, Our War Nurses, 30. 45. See http://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/parliamentary_handbook/current_ministry_list; accessed February 11, 2017.



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services, and Marise Payne as minister for defence. There is some other small good news, reported from the recently established Australian federal government Workplace Gender Equality Agency.46 This agency oversees the compulsory reporting to federal government on gender equality issues by private sector employers with more than 100 staff members. Summing up its third annual report, Nassim Khadem writes that policies are being put in place to increase the number of women in management roles.47 Nevertheless, the current situation of women in Australia is that women are still significantly financially penalized in the workplace, since Khadem goes on to write that “working women earn almost $27,000 less than a man and women in the c-suite—from CEOs to CFOs—earn almost $100,000 less than their male counterparts.”48 Not only while they work but also when they retire, women are disadvantaged by the prevailing financial management systems in Australia. It is Nassim Khader again who reports that actuarial modeling for a superannuation industry report to a recent federal government tax review found that the “superannuation tax concessions flow overwhelmingly to men .  .  . because the existing tax concessions favour high income earners, who are mostly male.” As a result, “over two-thirds of single women aged 55–69 would retire on incomes below a ‘comfortable’ standard.” 49 In this way, female dependence on male favor for a decent life is enshrined by sexist policies in place from a bygone era. Finally, in this rapid overview of conditions for women in contemporary Australia, while women may be slowly increasing their presence in policy-making positions, they still have to battle to be heard. The right to respected speech in public is still a matter for which Australian women have to fight. There is no doubt about the importance for women of having their own kind speak up for them in the public place, whether it be the commercial or government domain. The Australian sex discrimination commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, argued that women suffer as a result of the small number of women represented in public life, but especially in Parliament. As she stated at an International Women’s Day speech, “Because we don’t see women at senior leadership levels and in public life a lot, then we can minimise their contribution.”50 46. This agency was established by the Workplace Gender Equality Act, compiled and in force on March 25, 2105. See https://www.wgea.gov.au; accessed February 11, 2017. 47. See Nassim Khadem, “Men out-earn women by $27,000: WGEA 2016 gender pay gap report,” http://www.smh.chttp://www.smh.com.au/business/men-outearn-women-by-27000wgea-2016-gender-pay-gap-report-20161114-gsoz0q.html; accessed November 14, 2016. 48. Ibid. 49. See Nassim Khadem, “Rich old men get the best deal out of super tax concessions: ISA tells tax review,” http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/rich-old-men-getthe-best-deal-out-of-super-tax-concessions-isa-tells-tax-review-20150603-ghfxnz.html; accessed June 6, 2015. 50. See http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-08/sex-discrimination-commissionersays-men-must-empower-women/5307796; accessed March 8, 2014.

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But even when women do speak in Parliament they are hindered by entrenched sexism. In a recent thesis titled “Let Her Finish” for the BPhil(Hons) degree at the University of Canberra, Joanna Richards demonstrated that in the politically charged environment of Senate Estimates hearings for the federal Parliament of Australia, “while women interrupt nearly as much as the men they, crucially, don’t speak as much without interruption as men.”51 As Daisy Dumas reports, Richardson’s study showed that “when women interrupt, they are punished more than their male counterparts, with the Chair more likely to call women to account when they behaved this way than men ‘who got off more lightly with it.’”52 How far has contemporary Australia come from the imperial-colonial government’s readiness to contain women’s speech and to punish those who do speak. Thus we can see that in contemporary Australia, women’s access to the major agencies that dispose all the significant resources of the community; their just remuneration on the basis of equal pay for equal work; and ultimately, their right to speak, to be heard, and to be accorded full adult respect for competent and discerning speech still has a long way to go in Australia. It is impossible in this context not to remember Jesus’s ironic commendation of the widow in the exploitative Temple system in Jerusalem, “She has given her whole living” (12:44). There is of course no direct cause-and-effect correlation between the treatment of women in the Gospel of Mark and the treatment of women in contemporary Australia—but there certainly is a case to be made for a postcolonial feminist reading of Mark, informed by awareness from Australia’s history of a tendency to refuse to recognize the work that women do in society and to exploit them outrageously. In turn, some sense of outrage at the discovery in the Gospel of Mark of a blatant use of unacknowledged female labor to achieve the literary and theological ends of the composer might inspire Australian women to fight against such practices in their nation today. Immediately after 15:47, the notice that the women saw where Jesus had been buried, Mark begins a new story, the final story of this gospel at 16:1-8.53 The scene is set on the second day after the burial of Jesus, when the same three named women who saw Jesus buried, go to his tomb to anoint his body, having waited righteously until the Sabbath had passed, before they set out to perform this task. Already, the opening verse bristles with indications even to the regular reader that this effort is disordered and bound to fail. Mark returns to his portrayal of 51. See Daisy Dumas, “Women are interrupted more than men, and are ‘pushed back harder’ finds research,” http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/news-features/ women-are-interrupted-more-than-men-and-are-pushed-back-harder-finds-research20161123-gsvkmc.html; accessed November 23, 2016. See also http://www.joannarichards. com/academic-work for the full title of the thesis, “Let Her Finish: Gender and Deliberative Participation In Australian Senate Estimates Hearings.” 52. Ibid. 53. I hold that the ending of the gospel is intended to be at 16:8. Scholars who agree with that position include Collins, Mark, 797–801 and Moloney, The Gospel of Mark, 348–52.



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females as the sites of disorder that cannot welcome the order of God, brought by Jesus. First, the opening words, “Kai. diagenome,nou tou/ sabba,tou,” alert the reader to remember that Jesus healed on the Sabbath whenever the need presented itself: Jesus’s first healing of his public ministry, the exorcism in the synagogue at Capernaum (1:21-28), and his healing of the man with the withered hand (3:1-6) were both performed on the Sabbath. The second of these Sabbath healings is the occasion for a bitter debate between Jesus and the Pharisees about Jesus’s right to work in this way on the Sabbath. While Jesus is depicted as winning the debate in 6:4-5, 6:6 notes that afterward, a religious and a political party, the Pharisees and the Herodians, immediately began to plan to destroy Jesus. Jesus’s compassionate care of people’s bodies and spirits on the Sabbath led directly to his death. Jesus argued that the law of the Sabbath was not meant to stand in the way of satisfying genuine human need. Arguing on this point early in his career, Jesus had declared indeed that as Son of Man, he was “Lord of the Sabbath” (2:28). Thus, in waiting until the Sabbath was over to go to reverence his body in the customary way, these women already failed to follow and serve Jesus according to his own principles, those that led to his death. The second register of disorder in the opening verse is that the reader knows that, as Jesus himself verified in his own words, Jesus has already been anointed for his burial (14:3-9). There is no need for this action to be repeated. Far more significant, however, is that in 16:2, a second time reference is given, in which the language alerts the attentive reader to the fact that the women are moving with mundane mentality into a scenario of apocalyptic eschatology. Verse two opens, “kai. li,an prwi> th/| mia/| tw/n sabba,twn . . .” In his extended apocalyptic homily at 13:3-37, Jesus’s final word to his disciples before the Passion Narrative begins at 14:1 is that they should “watch,” lest the master of the household come, “in the evening, or at midnight, or at cock crow, or in the morning” (13:35). This verse introduces a new system for counting time, that of the eschaton, which is the time scheme that is used to structure the telling of Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection, beginning with the notice at 14:17 that Jesus and his disciples gathered for the Passover supper at “evening,” “ovyi,aj genome,nhj.”54 The word used for “morning” at both 13:35 and 16:2 is prwi>. Clearly then, the women bring into the narrative, a pronounced disjunction between time schemes. The narrative is measuring time by the new apocalyptic schema, which is opening onto the dawn of “the first day of the week,” symbolically the inauguration of a new world. The

54. This time scheme can be traced throughout the Passion Narrative, beginning at Mk 14:17. At 14:30, Jesus predicts that Peter will deny him three times before the cock crows twice; at 14:72, this language of the cock crowing is repeated twice. At 15:42 we are told that “when evening had come” (ovyi,aj genome,nhj) Joseph of Arimathea sought permission for the body of Jesus. “Midnight” is not specifically mentioned, but it is clear that the middle of the night occurs between Jesus’s trial before the Jewish leaders at 14:53-65 and the Roman trial the next morning, prwi>, at 15:1.

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women, however, are oblivious to this teaching of Jesus, counting time instead by the everyday reckoning of the Sabbath of which Jesus has always been the Lord. Third, the narrator indicates that the women have not understood Jesus’s teaching about his resurrection from the dead. If they had traveled with Jesus from the time he was in Galilee, and up to Jerusalem, they must have heard Jesus’s triple insistence on the impending reality of his suffering, death, and resurrection (8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34). However, like the male disciples who abandoned Jesus at the beginning of his suffering, these women have not understood or believed in Jesus’s promise of resurrection. Instead, they are focused on the things of death, planning to anoint an already-anointed but truly risen body, provided they can have the stone door of the tomb rolled away (16:3). The stone of the tomb is in the women’s minds. They are imprisoned in the tomb of a dead way of thinking, where the service they perform remains menial, in complete unawareness of the new world Jesus has inaugurated. As Benny Liew remarks about these women, they are “not there out of faith in Jesus’ promised resurrection but out of duty; they are there to clear the remain-ing business.”55 However, Mark maintains the tension for his reader by offering one final time, the opportunity for the women to respond to the gospel that Jesus proclaimed. When the women “look up” out of their mindset of death, they see the tomb in fact opened by some extraordinary force, since the stone was very large (16:4). Entering the tomb they encounter an enigmatic “young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe.” In response, the women are amazed (16:5), never a sign of capacity for appropriate reception of the message of the reign of God in Mark. The young man proclaims to these women the gospel in miniature form. He tells them that they have come looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who has been the subject of this entire narrative. Throughout the narrative, people have sought Jesus; the literary structure of the gospel has been built around the quest for the recognition of the true identity of this Jesus, as Son of God, Messiah, Son of Man. In declaring the women’s quest as seeking this Jesus, the young man evokes the entire narrative of the gospel. He specifically recalls the culmination of that narrative in Jesus’s death by crucifixion. The young man then proclaims to the women that Jesus has been raised, that he is not held by the tomb (16:6). Finally, the young man commands the women to convey to Jesus’s male disciples and Peter the news that this risen Jesus is returning to Galilee, where they would see him as Jesus had told them (16:7). Despite having been told by the young man not to be amazed, the women run from the tomb and say nothing to anyone, for fear had brought upon them trembling and astonishment (16:8). The gospel ends here, in a moment of immense shock, meant to propel the engaged listener into proclaiming the message of Jesus crucified and raised, from which these women, the last hope of the Markan narrative, flee, categorically speaking to no one, because they remain in a state of fear. As Benny Liew observes, 55. Liew. Politics of Parousia, 142.



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in the hands of the Markan narrator, these women are “inadequate male surrogates, who prove to be incapable of serving as “back-ups” in the affairs of men.”56 Such a reading indicates the degree to which Mark sees women as disordered: at the very last point of hope that the resurrection of Jesus might be proclaimed from within the narrative, the last category of person who could do so, women, refuse and fail the hope of the narrative, for fear. Yet, Benny Liew makes a further suggestion, rich with potential, about these women. Following his line of argument that women in Mark are in a “lose-lose” situation, where they are “either passive channels of male bonding, or active culprits of male discord,” Liew makes the point that “the women’s inability to say what the young man told them to tell (16:7-8) threatens the restoration of the (male) disciples, and their reunion with Jesus.”57 For a feminist reading of the narrative, staying firmly within the narrative’s created world, this is precisely the point of the women’s fear. What the women are commanded to do by the young man dressed in white is to re-instigate the entire sexist process that is the whole gospel we have just read. The women are commanded to refacilitate male bonding with the male Messiah, from which bond in its inner core, with all its benefits, the narrative of Mark had always excluded women. The women in the tomb are commanded to instruct the disciples and Peter, reinstated to Jesus’s company in some way, to go back to Galilee where the entire journey began and to repeat that process. The women are effectively commanded to subject themselves in the apocalyptic time scheme of an ever-opening new day, to membership of a male-dominated society in which they would have every expectation of being permanently isolated from each other, muted and denigrated, as they had been since Mark 1:1. Functioning still within the narrative’s world, the women ran from this vision in fear and trembling, because good sense had come upon them. These women, I propose, stand for every woman who has been caught by the vision of Jesus, the one who proclaims the extraordinary abundance of God to all persons female and male alike, who brings healing and joy to those he encounters and who insists that among those who follow his vision of God, there is to be none of the “lording it over one another” that so prevails among “the nations.” These women stand however, also, for those women who have learned that this vision of a great male figure, the Son of God present in human reality, is very easily taken over in the exigencies of human history as uniquely the property of members of the same gender as Jesus, who make Jesus into their alpha male, one who can only be known in full intimacy and proclaimed by somebody who is male, like Jesus. These women know what it costs women to be caught up in the trammels of such a possession of God incarnate, that it can cost them “their whole living,” in a system of crazily exhausting exploitation, while males who oversee the system devour “widows’ houses.” With great good sense, they run far from such a scenario. 56. Ibid., 143. 57. Ibid., 146, 147.

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I believe that like these women, a feminist Christian must reject such a system because it is a structure for the idolatry of male gender. I believe that a feminist Christian can legitimately claim the vision of the abundance of God that Jesus proclaims while she rejects the sexism of the fascinating Gospel of Mark, a document bearing the signs of its production in an imperial-colonial context. I suggest that an Australian postcolonial feminist, reflecting on what living in the aftermath of an imperial-colonial relationship is like, is well suited to note the possibilities and challenges involved in such a complex process. As the transplanted English convicts learned how to see in the intense light of Australia, and grew to love the contradictions of its being “a sunburnt country, . . . a land . . . of droughts and flooding rains,” so an Australian feminist knows that it is possible to read the Gospel of Mark aware of its fierce contradictions yet choosing it for its hope in life. In her famous poem of 1911, “My Country,” the Australian poet Dorothea MacKellar opted for Australia. She knew full well the trials of living in the Australian landscape and was in a position to compare it to life in England. Nevertheless, she decided, “The wide brown land for me.”58 An Australian Christian feminist reading Mark knows the tensions of reading this enigmatic text, but for the hope of resurrection that underwrites all else in its religious vision, it is a text that she judges to be worth all the work.

58. Dorothea MacKellar wrote her poem while on a visit to England, to defend her Australian home against English concepts of the beauty of a landscape. Generations of Australians have learned this poem as school children. The full text of the poem can be accessed on the official Dorothea Mackellar website, http://www.dorotheamackellar.com. au/index.html

Chapter 7 CONCLUSION

At the end of this book, it is appropriate to ask what hope my argument holds open for Christian believers. A persistent feminist exegesis of an ancient text that has every likelihood of being sexist might seem in the end to find so much to deplore in the text that there is little of value left in it, little hope for those who read it. For me as a committed Christian feminist, the fundamental hope that the Gospel of Mark upholds is the hope in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, as an earnest of resurrection for all people, indeed for the cosmos in some way. I do not conduct here an apologetics for the resurrection of Jesus, on which Christianity is based. With Mark, I take it as read. This hope survives my feminist interpretation of Mark. In some sense, having survived a close reading of this kind, the resurrection hope of Mark is all the stronger. However, reading Mark’s encouragement to follow Jesus, taking up my own cross as a disciple of Jesus, I believe that we must be alert to flaws in Mark’s powerful text. Mark’s presentation of the career, death, and proclaimed resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is marked by attitudes of his time toward women that feminists today find unacceptable. On the one hand it may seem harsh to judge an ancient text by ethical standards not envisaged in its own day. On the other hand, Christians choose to carry this text with them in their history, calling it “canonized,” belonging to a list of texts considered to be inspired by God and revelatory of God. This text is granted enormous power over people; it must therefore be held accountable for the power it wields—or that is wielded in its name. For this reason, I have subjected the Gospel of Mark to rigorous scrutiny on the issue of its portrayal of women. I find that the Gospel falls into practices of portraying women that can be found operating in other texts that come from imperial-colonial contexts, where masculinity tends to be valorized and female persons and narrative characters tend to be portrayed as sources of chaos or disorder. Yet I find that this same Gospel has its most authoritative figure, Jesus, spell out plainly at a most climactic moment in the narrative, the principle that there will be no lording it over, of one person by another, in the manner of the would-be great ones of “the nations.” I find that in his characterization of women, the composer of the Gospel of Mark falls prey to the perceptions about women and the evaluation of them that is typical of societies operating on the political and cultural dynamic

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of the imperial-colonial subservience model, in which the female all too readily is devalued against a male constructed as the symbol of the power that makes empire great and to be feared. My hope lies in Mark’s presentation of Jesus and the reign of God that he preached as consonant with the principle Jesus spells out in Mk 10:42-45. I recognize that according to the relentless logic of what I consider to be the best of Mark’s values, namely following the principle of not lording it over, while yet vigorously living and acting for justice, will take adherents to some form or other of the cross. I believe that today, Christian women need not, indeed must not, accept uncritically the tendency to characterize them negatively that operates quietly in Mark’s Gospel. I believe they need to call the Gospel to account by its own clear principles and to live their lives of faith authentically by those principles. Christian feminists who do so will meet the cross as they always have done, but they will do so not as half-acknowledged Christians, not accepting without protest, being subtly cast as sites of disorder in an otherwise beautifully ordered male-dominated followership of Jesus. The image of female Christians will not be denigrated simply because they are female; indeed it will eventually become horrific to think that this could be so. Their voice will be accepted in Christian discourse, not out of exaggerated courtesy or out of compliance with politically imposed quotas, but because the female voice will have become a voice that is accustomed to speaking its full truth out loud in language free from sexism, in an assembly that has learned to hear the full range of the human voice and not just the male as wise, authentic, and authoritative, indeed, like that of Jesus himself. I believe this vision has still a long way to go before it is realized. Nevertheless, in support of this vision I hope that my study of Mark has done the following things. I hope it has alerted Australian feminists in particular but also others who have lived under some form of imperial-colonial foundation in their history, to the dynamisms of misrepresentation of the female that can occur in such a context. I have aimed to bring to the attention of readers of Mark the tendency of this lively gospel to leach the life out of his female characters, by refusing to let them speak out loud, to one another, or to influence the plot of the narrative. Yet I also hope I have written something that might make feminists enjoy reading Mark! I do not want to deprive him of his pace and verve but I want to contest with him, the unfavorable image he creates of women. I hope this book alerts scholars in biblical scholarship in general that there are very many different experiences of the imperial-colonial relationship in our postcolonial world that need to be articulated so that we can enlarge our awareness of the ways in which these multiple experiences affect our reading of the powerful book, the Bible. I hope that the methodology I have used in this dissertation, accessing my own country’s engagement in the imperial-colonial relationship through a feminist reading of narratives constructed about very resonant events of the still quite brief Anglo-Celtic settlement of Australia, might prove to be useful to others. Writing this book makes me aware that there is further research to be conducted on the Gospel of Mark under the category of gender. What yet needs to be done



7. Conclusion

185

is to examine the construction of the masculinities of Mark as the counterpart to Mark’s portrayal of female characters. A very interesting section of Mark on which this study could be carried out is the long section, Mk 7:31–14:2 in which, I have argued, only male characters are portrayed in interaction. Such a study could be carried out by using the vernacular hermeneutics of any country. If it were conducted from an Australian perspective, it could use a lens cast even from the same events, of the convict founding and the original construction and deliberate contemporary recasting of the Anzac hero myth, with the ambiguities that obtain between the ideal and the actual expressions of masculinity that occurred in those events. Combined with this, or as a separate task, it would be fascinating to use any existing study of masculinity as it was construed in the imperial-colonial context of the first-century CE Mediterranean to analyze Mark’s narrative construction of foundational Christian males. In this task, two possible avenues of approach would be to use Maud Gleason’s historical research on masculinities in ancient Rome in Making Men: Sophists and SelfPresentation in Ancient Rome, or to use the modern anthropological study of malebonding, Lionel Tiger’s Men in Groups.1 However, as a feminist who finds the Gospel of Mark powerfully engaging, what I would really desire is that all women and men might eventually read this text, aware of its contextually conditioned flaws, but finding it lively and inspiring nevertheless. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was castigated early in his career for eating with tax collectors and sinners (Mk 2:15-17). In the light of the revelations of Mk 15:47, one hopes that there were some female tax collectors and sinners among those whose company Jesus deliberately sought out. The vision of the Gospel of Mark is that in the order of God as Jesus practiced it, there is no need to resort to the strategy of Ro Bognor and Merle Thornton, invading the public bar of a hotel to claim access to all the rights and best resources a society boasts, that men have been able till quite recently to reserve to themselves. In the order of God when it is fully realized, Jesus’s vision of God’s desire that all human beings be welcomed and abundantly refreshed at God’s banquet will make an aggressive strategy like that of Bognor and Thornton unnecessary. Until that great day, armed with Jesus’s vision of the order of God, women may still have to claim their rights in many contexts. Reading Mark’s very apocalyptic story may well highlight for women the neurotic fear of the female that the pressures of life can release in male-dominated societies. Mark however also declares to women, as its central message, the resurrection of Jesus, the earnest of the potential resurrection of all peoples and the vanquishing of all evil. In this hope, Christian women can read Mark, alert to his dangers for them, but determined to claim for themselves the one hundredfold yield that Jesus, the Sower of the Word, promises to those who have ears to hear and eyes to see.

1. See Gleason. Making Men and Tiger, Men in Groups.

Appendix 1 CONTRAPUNTAL READING OF THE STORIES ABOUT WOMEN AGAINST THE MAIN MARKAN THEME, JESUS Jesus’s Public Ministry and Journey to Jerusalem Jesus in Mark

9–11

Passion Narrative Jesus’s Apoc’c Sermon

2–8

Jesus’s Baptism Jesus teaches, heals, exorcises, argues, feeds

Jesus’s Transfiguration 1st P.P. 8: 22-26 Jesus heals a blind man in Bethsaida

2nd P.P.

16–39 Jesus’s Death

3rd P.P.

10: 46-52 Jesus heals a blind man in Jericho

Jesus TEACHES male disciples who do not learn Mark chapter Women in Mark

1

2

3

4

5

29–31

21, 31–35

21–24a, 35–43

Peter’s motherin-law in Galilee

Jesus’s mother

Jairus’s daughter

6

7

14–29

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

24–30

41–44

3–9

Herodias, former wife of Herod Philip; 24b–34 current The illicit wife bleeding of Herod woman, Antipas; “daughter”; mother of as healed, unnamed potential daughter mother

The SyroPhoenician woman, mother offstage, unnamed daughter

The poor widow in Jerusalem

The woman who anoints Jesus

Mothers & daughters

She teaches Jesus, exploiting his example / metaphor

Jesus teaches on her as example / metaphor

Widow

1–8

The women who observed who want 66–72 40–41, 47 to anoint The maid The women Jesus’s who observes who observe corpse & names Jesus’s death … … Peter’s & burial identity

Teachers, teaching material

Widow

FAMILIAL FEMALES

16

Anoints

Want to Anoint

FUNCTIONAL FEMALES

Appendix 2 TRIANGULATED RELATIONSHIPS IN MK 6:17–29

v. reference

Character # I

vv. 17-18

Philipp

vv. 19-20

John the Baptist

Character # II

Character # III

Against

With regard to Herodias

Herod

Liked by Herod but against Herod

Opposed by Herodias

with regard to Herodias vv. 21-22b

the daughter

& Herod

& Herod’s guests

v. 24

Herodias

& the daughter

Against John the Baptist

v. 24

Herodias

& the daughter

vv. 25-26

the daughter

Against Herod

Against Herod Against Herod’s guests

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INDEX Abbott, Tony 176 Achilles Tatius 107 Anderson, Janice Capel 148 n.92 Anderson, R. Dean 145 n.86 Andrews, E. M. 64, 72 n.49 Antonius Diogenes 107 n.52 Anzac Book, The (Bean) 78–81, 83, 84 Anzac Day 59–60, 66 n.17 Anzac legend 72 definition of 73–5 postcolonial feminist critique of 76–86 significance of 72–3 ANZAC Myth 3 apocalyptic eschatology 5, 95–9, 112, 113, 149, 179 apocalyptic evil 126, 137, 170, 173 Aristotle 33, 163 Ashcroft, Bill 11 n.4 Atkinson, Alan 22, 30 n.12, 31 n.18, 33 n.26, 35, 44, 50 Aune, David 106 Australia’s involvement in First World War as dominion of Great Britain 61–3 postcolonial significance of Australia’s entry into World War and 63–6 Australian Army Nursing Corps (AANS) 68, 70–1 Australian Imperial Force (AIF) 64, 70 Austria 60, 66 Aveling, Marian 36 n.32 Bach, Alice 133 n.56 Bach, Johann Sebastian 94–5 Balch, David L. 143 Barber, Richard 51 n.92 Barker, Anthony 76 n.63 Barker, David 80 Barker, Francis 11 n.4 Barker, Marianne 69 n.29 Barrett, James 70

Barton, Edmond 61 Bassett, Jan 69 n.29, 70 Bauckham, Richard 102 n.28 Bayly, C. A. 60 n.1 Bean, C. E. W. 77–84 Beaumont, Joan 68 n.24, 71 Beavis, Mary Ann 112 n.3 Belgium 62 Bentham, Jeremy 31, 32, 45 Bhabha, Homi K. 11 n.4 biblical references 18, 24, 50, 56 n.113, 74, 88 n.2, 89 n.5, 90 n.6, 91–4, 96–9, 103 n.29, 112–17, 119–35, 140, 141, 145 n.83, 146–9, 151–3, 154 n.112, 158 n.5, 159–60, 162–75, 178–81, 185, 187–8 Birdwood, William Riddell 65, 79 Bishop, Julie 176 blasphemy 5, 75, 163 bleeding woman 56 n.113, 98, 99 n.18, 125, 128 n.49, 129–31, 145 n.85, 147, 158 Bligh, Governor 44 n.64 blood and bread metaphor 16–17 Blythe, Ronald 51 n.91, 53 Bognor, Ro 111, 112, 115, 185 Botany Bay 36–8, 59 Bowie, E. L. 108 Bridges, William 65 Broadhead, Edwin Keith 102 n.28 Broderick, Elizabeth 177 Brown, Raymond E. 167 n.34 Bryan, Christopher 105 Bullivant, Roger 94 n.14 Bury, J. P. T. 60 n.1 Caesar, Adrian 73, 74, 80, 82 Canada 9 n.3 Canny, Nicholas 28 Cantarella, Eva 101 n.25 Castlereagh, Viscount 46

200 Index Catchpole, Margaret 3, 51–6, 130 Chaereas and Callirhoe (Chariton) 107, 108 Chariton 107, 108 Chrisman, Laura 11 n.4 Churchill, Winston 66 Clark, C. M. H. 27 n.1, 30 n.12, 31, 34, 35 n.31, 38, 61 n.2, 65, 66 n.17, 72 n.49 Clendinnen, Inga 75 Cobbold, Elizabeth 52, 54 Cobbold, Richard 50–5 Collins, Adela Y. 106, 114 n.6, 121 n.27, 122 n.33, 124 n.38, 126 n.43, 127 n.46, 129 n.50, 130 n.52, 131 n.54, 132 n.55, 134 n.58, 135 n.60, 136 n.63, 137 n.66, 138 n.68, 139 n.70, 142 nn.76–7, 145 n.85, 153 nn.107, 109, 157 n.1, 158 nn.4, 6, 166 nn.28–9, 168 n.35, 178 n.53 Collins, J. J. 96 n.15, 101 colonial Australia, as imperialized reading context British government decision and 27–35 English narrative of female crime and convict transportation and 50–6 female convicts’ role, in New South Wales colony foundation and 35–50 colonial Australia myth, in imperial war 59–60 Anzac legend 72–86 Australia’s involvement in First World War as dominion of Great Britain 60–6 Gallipoli Campaign and 66–72 colonial imperatives 15 Colquhoun, P. 31 n.17 conceptual correspondences 13 n.9 conflict between imperial powers 60–1 Confoy, Maryanne 19 n.27 containment, by compulsory relationship with authorizing male 99–101 convict colony establishment reasons, in New South Wales 33–35 Conway, Colleen M. 148 n.92 Conway, Jill Ker 18–19 n.26 Cook, James 27, 30 Cook, John Granger 117 counterpoint 94

Cranfield, C. E. B. 90 n.6 crime and punishment theory 32 critical freedom 94 Cunningham, I. C. 166 n.27 cynic philosophy 144 Dahlhaus, Carl 94 n.14 Damousi, Joy 36, 40–2, 48–50, 67, 71, 72, 74, 75 Daphnis and Chloe (Longus) 107 Darling, Governor 47 daughter of Jairus and her mother, story of 124–8 daughter saved by God’s order, story of 128–33 Delorme, Jean 133 n.56 denigration of women, by association with disorder 95–9 Dennis, C. J. 77, 81 Denoon, Donald 61 n.2, 63, 72 n.49 Desbordes, Francoise 22–3 De Vries, Susanna 68 n.24 Dewey, Joanna 89 n.4, 90 n.6, 112 n.3 Donahue, John R. 102 n.28, 114 n.6, 116 n.10, 119 n.21, 121 n.27, 122 Downing, Gerald F. 140 n.74 Dumas, Daisy 178 Egypt 66, 69 Emile (Rousseau) 45 English narrative of female crime and convict transportation and 50–2 proto-convict and 52–3 reformed female and 53–6 enthymeme 145, 146 Ephesian Story (Xenophon) 107, 108 Esler, Philip F. 102 n.28 Essex, Barbara J. 148 n.92 Ethiopian Story (Heliodorus) 107 European imperialism, in late eighteenth century and 28–9 Evans, Craig A. 102 n.28, 114 n.6, 151 nn.102–3, 153 n.108, 154 n.110, 157 n.1, 159 n.9, 161 n.17, 165 n.25, 167 n.32 faithfulness, to God 149–50 female as consistent locus of chaos, concept of 97–8

Index female Australian participation in First World War and 66–7 home front and 67–8 war front and 68–72 female bonding 136, 139, 140 female convicts’ role, in New South Wales colony foundation 35–6 identity, sent to Botany Bay 36–8 imprisonment conditions and transportation 38–50 “Female Factory” 32, 36, 37 n.34, 38, 46–7, 89, 176 isolated by physical restraints and 47 isolated from feminine identity and 48–50 isolated from legal rights and protection 50 isolated on basis of virtue and vice and 47–8 femininity, denial of 48 feminism 2–4, 21, 23, 38, 55–7, 66, 73, 91, 92, 94, 109, 110, 114–17, 119 n.21, 132, 152, 167, 171, 172, 175, 178, 181–5. See also feminist criticism in general 15–17 feminist criticism 3, 10. See also feminism language role in 20–3 postcolonial 17–20, 76–87 Fetherston Report (1915–16) 69 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler 19 n.27, 97 n.17 First World War, official history of 81–5 Foucault, M. 32 France 28, 29, 60, 62, 63 France, R. T. 102 n.28, 114 n.6, 116 nn.8, 10, 118, 121, 122 n.30, 124, 125 n.40, 126, 127 n.46, 128 n.48, 130 n.52, 131 n.53, 132 n.55, 134, 135 nn.61–2, 141 n.75, 142 n.78, 143 n.80, 145 n.84, 147 n.90, 151 n.102, 152 n.105, 153 nn.108–9, 157 n.2, 159 nn.7–8, 161 n.15, 165 nn.24–5, 167 n.30, 173 n.38 Gallipoli Campaign 3, 60, 61, 64–6, 81 female Australian participation in First World War and 66–72

201

male Australian participation in First World War and 66 Gammage, Bill 64 n.10 Germany 28, 60, 62, 66 Gerster, Robin 75, 78 Gillman, Florence Morgan 134 n.58, 135 n.60 Gipps, Governor 50 Glancy, Jennifer A. 133 n.56 Gleason, Maud W. 23 n.37, 148 n.93, 185 Goldberg, Jonathan 113 Goldingay, John 148 n.92 Goodman, Rupert 69 n.29, 70 Gospel. See also individual entries genre, according to Mark 104–9 provenance, according to Mark 102–4 Gospel of Mark literary features of 87–102 major phases in 90 n.6 as narrative of first century CE Roman-imperial context 102–9 Goulet-Cazé, M. O. 144 n.82 Greenwood, Gordon 60 n.1 Grey, Edward 62 Griffiths, Gareth 11 n.4 Grimshaw, Patricia 17 Guelich, Robert A. 102 n.28, 103 n.29, 104, 114 n.6, 116 n.10, 122 nn.30, 34, 126 n.44, 128 n.47, 136 n.63, 142 n.77 healing, phenomenon of 90 n.6, 92–4, 96–8, 115, 117–20, 124–32, 145 n.85, 161, 172, 179 Heliodorus 107 Hellenistic Life 104–6 Hengel, Martin 169 n.36 hermeneutic of suspicion 10 Herodias and her daughter, story of 133–40 Hickey, Michael 61 n.2 Hisako Kinukawa 128 n.49, 140 n.74 History of Margaret Catchpole, The (Cobbold) 50–1 Hodge, Bob 11 n.4 Holmes, Katie 71 Hooker, Morna 103 Howard, John 7 n.1 Hudson, Wayne 7 n.1

202 Index Hughes, Robert 30 n.12, 31 nn.13–14, 17, 42, 44 Hulme, Peter 11 n.4 Iamblichus 107 n.52 Ihde, Erin 44 imagery 2, 21, 39, 40, 123, 170 imperial and industrializing Britain, in world context British Industrial Revolution 30–1 European imperialism, in late eighteenth century and 28–9 US war of independence and British loss of US colonies and 29–30 imperial-colonial construct, of woman 57 imperial-colonial relationship 2 imprisonment conditions and transportation, of female convicts 38 Female Factories and 46–50 in gaols and hulks 38–40 landed at colony 42–6 transported in ships 40–2 India 14 Ireland 28 Irigaray, Luce 21 Iversen, Margaret 11 n.4 “Jane Bell Affair” 70 Janes, Regina 133 n.56 Japan 62 Jesus and familial women 111–12 Markan stories featuring women and 112–55 Jesus in the midst of functional women death of Jesus and 173–4 female characters reprise and 170–2 maidservant exposing Peter’s betrayal and 162–7 path to death of Jesus and 167–70 woman anointing Jesus and 157–62 John the Baptizer 88 n.2, 90 n.6, 94, 96, 115 n.7, 133–5, 137, 146 n.89, 173 Jones, Caroline V. 76, 77, 80, 82–4 Joy, Morny 19 n.27 Kaplan, Gisela 18 Kennedy, Paul 60 n.1 Kent, D. A. 79

Khader, Nassim 177 Kiley, Bernadette 165 n.24, 167 King, Governor 45 King, P. G. 35 n.31 Kloppenborg, John S. 102 n.28 Knox, A. D. 166 n.27 Kociumbas, Jan 29 n.10, 31, 33, 43, 44 n.64, 45 Kraemer, Ross S. 133 n.56 Kwok Pui-lan 16 Lake, Marilyn 71, 72, 77 n.67, 111 n.1 Laud, William 53, 55 Lawson, Henry 77, 81 Le Doeuff, Michèle 21 Lee, Bessie Harrison 17–18 Lee, Dorothy A. 19 n.27 Leucippe and Clitophon (Achilles Tatius) 107 Liew, Tat-siong Benny 96 n.15, 113, 120, 143, 143 n.81, 159, 161, 180–1 Lloyd, Genevieve 21 Locke, John 31, 32 n.18 Louw, Johannes P. 138 n.67, 139 n.69 loyalty 85, 94, 99, 124, 149, 162 Lynraven, Joan 51 n.92 McClintock, Anne 16 MacDonell, John 32 nn.19–20 Macintyre, Stuart 61 n.2, 62, 64 n.10, 66 n.17, 72 n.49 MacKellar, Dorothea 182 McKenna, Mark 7 n.1 Macquarie, Governor 46 Magee, Penelope 19 n.27 Making Men (Gleason) 185 Malbon, Elizabeth Struthers 112 n.3, 148 n.92, 151 n.101, 154 n.111 male bonding 85, 98, 113, 119, 120, 129, 136, 140, 147 n.91, 149, 150, 160, 161, 169, 172, 181, 185 Malina, Bruce J. 100 nn.19–20, 143 n.79 Malthus, Thomas 31, 33 Man from Snowy River (Paterson) 76 Marcus, Joel 103, 106, 108, 116 n.10, 120 n.23, 121 n.27, 123, 124 n.38, 126 n.43, 128 n.48, 129 n.50, 130 n.52, 132 n.55, 134, 136 nn.63–4, 138 n.68, 142 n.77, 145 n.83, 146

Index marginalization, of women 3, 5, 6, 21, 25, 57, 60, 71, 73, 79, 83, 84, 87 in Gospel of Mark 88–95 Markan “sandwich” technique 121, 124 n.38 Markan stories, featuring women 112–13 daughter of Jairus and her mother 124–8 daughter saved by God’s order 128–33 great gap 147–51 Herodias and her daughter 133–40 mother-in-law of Simon 114–21 mother of Jesus 121–4 Syrophoenician woman and her daughter 140–7 Widow of Temple system 151–4 Marlay, Ross 28 n.3 Marsden, Samuel 38, 49 Marshall, P. J. 29 masculinity 2, 5, 21–3, 35, 48, 54, 72, 80, 81, 85, 112, 115 n.7, 127, 136 n.63, 148, 183, 185 masculinization see masculinity Mayhall, Laura E. Nym 111 n.2 Mein-Smith, P. 61 n.2, 63, 72 n.49 menstruation 127 n.45–6, 130 n.52, 131 n.53 Messianic Secret 163 Meyer, Marvin W. 128 n.47 Millar, T. B. 63 Miller, Susan 115 n.6 mimicry 21 Mishra, Vijay 11 n.4 modern feminism 15 Moloney, Francis J. 103 n.28, 104, 115, 121, 122, 124 n.38, 125 n.39, 126 n.41, 127 nn.45–6, 128 n.48, 129 n.51, 131, 132 n.55, 134, 142 n.76, 147 n.90, 151 n.102, 153 n.108, 154 n.112, 159 n.9, 161 nn.15, 17, 174 n.39, 178 n.53 Montesquieu, Charles 33 Moore, Stephen D. 11 n.4, 148 n.92, 151–2 n.103 moral influence 54 moral transformation 52 mother-in-law of Simon, story of 114–21 mother of Jesus, story of 121–4 Munro, Winsome 97 n.17, 112 n.3, 175 “My Country” (MacKellar) 182 narrativel enrichment 13

203

National Council of Women 67 n.19 nationalism 8, 12, 60, 73–8, 80–5, 176 National Leader (Newspaper) 67 Nelavala, Surekha 140 n.74 the Netherlands 28 New World 11, 12 New Zealand 9 n.3, 65 Nida, Eugene A. 138 n.67, 139 n.69 non-verbal cues 18 Nowotny, Joan 19 n.27 O’Dwyer, Kelly 176 Official History Of Australia In the War Of 1914–1918 (Bean) 78, 79, 82–4 O’Grady, John F. 148 n.92 Olson, James S. 28 nn.3–4, 29 n.11 optics, of postcolonialism 15 Osiek, Carolyn 100, 101 n.25, 143 Oxley, Deborah 36 n.32, 37–40 Pacifica (journal) 19 n.27 Pacific exploration, by British 29 Panopticon 32, 41, 45, 47 n.77 Parramatta 46 n.72 Passion Narrative 91–4, 151, 152, 155, 157, 158, 162, 179 n.54 Passover ritual 90 n.6, 162, 163, 168 Paterson, A. B. 76, 77, 81 Payne, Marise 177 peirastic irony 145 n.84 Perdue, Leo G. 100 n.19, 101 n.23 performantial parallels 13 n.9 Perkinson, Jim 140 n.74 Phillip, Governor 42 Phillips, Tina Picton 52–5 Plato 33 Plummer, T. W. 44–6 Pontius Pilate 146, 168 Portugal 28 postcolonial biblical criticism 14–15 postcolonial criticism 1–2 in general 11–12 language role in 20–3 postcolonial biblical criticism and 14–15 vernacular hermeneutics and 12–14 postcolonial feminist critique of Anzac legend 76–86 Bible and 17–20 see also feminism

204 Index postcolonial religious world, in Australia 7–8 contemporary Australia as site of reading and 8–10 feminist criticism 15–23 postcolonial criticism 11–15 postcolonial significance, of Australia’s entry into First World War1 63–6 poverty and crime, in new urban class 30–1 Powell, Charles E. 128 n.49 Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Lake) 111 n.1 prose romance 107–8 Queensland 34 n.27 Quintilian 22–3 Ratliff, William G. 28 n.3 Reardon, B. P. 107 recognition, Aristotle’s definition of 163–4 Reid, Kirsty 89 n.3 reign of God 5, 10, 20, 25, 96, 102, 114, 116, 120, 123, 128, 148, 149, 154, 159 reversal, Aristotle’s definition of 163–4 Rich, Adrienne 16 Richards, Joanna 178 ritual uncleanness 127 Robertson, George 76–7, 82, 83 Rousseau, J.-J. 32 n.18, 45 Rowe, Joseph M., Jr. 28 n.3 Rubin, Gayle 113 Russia 62 Rusten, Jeffrey 166 n.27 Sachs, Kurt-Jürgen 94 n.14 Sacrificial Mother, The 67 Safrai, S. 100 n.20, 101 n.23 Said, Edward 9 n.3, 94 Salt, Annette 37, 38, 44 n.64, 46, 47 nn.77–8, 48 n.81, 50 Satan 96, 97, 114–16 Schiefsky, Mark John 117 n.14, 119 n.20 Schildgen, Brenda D. 102 n.27 Scott, Ernest 83, 84 Segovia, F. F. 14, 15 self-sacrifice 72, 85 Selvidge, Marla J. 129 n.49

service, theme of 9–10, 37, 43, 52, 57, 59, 68–71, 75, 98–9, 102, 109, 112–14, 120, 131, 135, 136, 160, 175, 177, 180 sexism 2, 5, 10, 24, 70, 75, 77, 79, 88, 109, 110, 112, 143, 182–4 biblical 20 counteraction of 95 imperialist 23 sexuality, gender, and population growth theory 33 Shadle, Robert 28 n.3 shame 41, 47, 49, 50, 52, 55–6, 105, 143 shaving, of women’s head 41, 42, 48–50 Shute, Carmel 67, 68 Sim, David C. 103 n.28 Smith, Adam 31, 33 Smith, Geoffrey 151 n.101 social organization theories, in lateeighteenth century Britain 31–2 crime and punishment theory and 32 sexuality, gender, and population growth theory and 33 Spain 28, 29 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 18 Stark, Rodney 118 Stephens, Susan A. 107 n.53 Sugirtharajah, R. S. 2, 11–15, 151 n.101 Swartley, Willard M. 112 n.3 Sydney 34 n.27, 63 Sydney Cove 42 Syrophoenician woman and her daughter, story of 140–7 Tasmania 34 n.27, 47 n.77 Tatum, W. Barnes 117 n.13 Theissen, Gerd 150 Theophrastus 116 n.11 Thompson, David 60 n.1 Thornton, Merle 111, 112, 115, 185 Tiffin, Helen 11 n.4 Tiger, Lionel 147 n.91, 150 Tolbert, Mary Ann 16, 20, 103, 106–8, 122 n.30, 131 n.54, 145 n.86, 164, 167 n.30 Townshend, Joseph 33 Treaty of Paris 29 Turkey 60, 65, 66 Turnbull, Malcolm 176 Tyquin, Michael 68

Index United States 9 n.2, 62 US war of independence and British loss of US colonies 29–30 vernacular criticism 2, 3 vernacular hermeneutics 11, 12–14 Victoria 34 n.27 Vivante, Bella 101 n.25 voice, issue of 101–2 Vyvyan, J. M. K. 60 n.1 Wainwright, Elaine 19–20, 97 n.17, 157, 159 nn.8, 10, 161 n.17 Wallace, Robert 33 Weissenrieder, Annette 118 n.14 Welsh, Frank 61, 73 Western Australia 34 n.27

205

Widow of Temple system, story of 151–4 wife-sale ritual 45 n.69 Wilkinson, John 118 Williams, Glyndwr 27 n.2, 29 Williams, Patrick 11 n.4 Wills, Lawrence 109 Winkler, John J. 107 n.53 Witherington III, Ben 103 n.28, 105 Women’s Peace Army 67 n.19 Women’s Political Association 67 n.19 Workplace Gender Equality Agency 177 Wright, Addison G. 151 nn.101, 103 Wyndham, Marivic 61 n.2, 72 n.49 Xenophon 107 Zinsser, Hans 118