The English Department
Subject: Beautiful Death: The 'Belle Juive' Martyr.
Abstract: Martyrdom — the sacrifice of one’s life for religious or other beliefs — is a fundamental concept in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Historical Jewish martyrology has few, although not many, woman martyr figures e.g. the woman — named, in some accounts, Miriam, and in later accounts, Chana — who loses her seven sons and then dies. These women are written about in scripture and lamented in traditional piyyutim (poems of lamentation). The martyred Jewess is something else. It is a construction of Jewish female martyrdom that serves and reflects a specific ideological purpose and position. This research is concerned with the figure of the martyred Jewess in early 19th century fiction. The earliest literary martyred Jewess appears with Rachel, in Eugène Scribe and Fromental Halévy’s 1835 La Juive. Around the same time, Grace Aguilar, in England, begins to pen her novel, The Vale of Cedars, or the Martyr that is posthumously published in 1850. The martyred Jewess also makes it across the Atlantic, featuring in popular periodicals and poetry between 1838-1853. I argue that Hyneman and Aguilar’s engagement with the figure of the martyred Jewess both transcends and is circumscribed by broader Protestant discourse. Whereas Hyneman resists more than she absorbs, Aguilar’s understanding of martyrdom is more Protestant than Jewish, leading to a conflict between Jewishness and Protestantism within her work. The hybridity of Hyneman and Aguilar’s texts reflect their liminal positions as both Jews and women.
MA Honors 2023/24