Against the grain

The etching is based on the famous Biblical story in Genesis, which also occurs, quite differently, in the Quran. It is the story of a failed attempt at seduction by a woman of high social status, who falls in love with the handsome servant of her husband. He has beauty, she has status. But she remains female, which severely qualifies her status.

It is in both classical-religious versions as well in the many depictions and dramatical enactments and novelistic retelling, such as Thomas Mann’s novel Joseph and his Brothers from 1948, seen through the mind of the enamored woman as, in turn, embedded in the view of the social group for which the versions are told. The woman, who is nameless in the canonical versions, only indicated as “the wife of Potiphar”, tried to get Joseph/Yusuf to make love to her. Thomas Mann gives her a name, though. When he refused, she grabbed his coat. She did this at first to withhold him from leaving her, but she subsequently used it as evidence to accuse him to her husband of having attempted to rape her –– her desire transformed into his crime. The husband responds by imprisoning him.

As a widespread, folkloric tale, this is a nasty story of misogyny; the story of a deceptive and sexually over-charged woman, who abuses her high position in the house to get her husband’s favorite servant to become her lover. The story is well known; it belongs to the genre of the “bad step-mother”, like Snow-White, Cinderella, and many others. All over the world, such stories serve to project bad sexual adventures on figures of wicked women, so as to blame the female sex for everything that goes wrong between men and women. They feed the suspicion, fear, and hatred of women in men.

But Rembrandt, whose art is frequently going against the grain of such generalized ideological unfairness, in this case, too, plays with and against that ideological bias. Playing with: evoking, in superficially realistic depictions, the well-known bias; playing against: using original, deviating details and subtleties to counter such interpretations.