The Female Body as Landscape in The Song of Songs: Constructing Wholeness and Identity
This paper seeks to examine the construction of the woman’s body as landscape lovingly mapped in the descriptive poems (Song 4:1-7; 6:4-10; 7:2-10) by the male speaker. It is this metaphorical construction of the beloved woman out of the sights, smells, shapes, and experiences of the world that is of primary interest. This is not only because this imagery has been identified as problematic, inappropriate, and bizarre by many readers of The Song, but also because this construction of woman activates a larger trope that associates the female body with particular social spaces, such as cities, nations, and houses. I will examine the poetic form of systematic description and the detailed metaphorical imagery of fertility and fortification in the first landscape poem (Song 4:1-7) to demonstrate how bodily wholeness is constructed by the male lover and to consider what is at stake for the man in this construction. I will suggest that while these lush descriptions of the landscape-body’s wholeness and health reflect real anxieties around the vulnerability and fertility of female bodies, the larger concern here is the reinforcement of a particular collective identity.
Kelli A. Gardner is a PhD candidate in Bible at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her interests include gender, metaphor, and poetry in the Hebrew Bible. Her dissertation project, The Figure and Figuration of Woman in the Hebrew Bible, is motivated by the question of why Israel, as land, city, and people, is repeatedly figured as a woman, across biblical genres and moments in Israelite history. From wayward wife of Yahweh in prophetic literature to victimized widow of Lamentations to the creative reimaginings of the female body as land and cityscape in The Song of Songs and the proliferation of female figures representing wisdom and folly in Proverbs, the female persona, body, and experiences are consistently drawn on to represent the collective identity and values of Israel. A central and unique argument of this dissertation is identifying and analyzing this phenomenon as a consistent cultural metaphor creatively reused across genres: geographical/political entity is a female body. Kelli holds a BA from Canisius College in Religious Studies and Psychology and an MA from University of Chicago Divinity School.