April 17, 2009
Hell Hath No Fury like Potiphar's Wife
And Joseph was brought down to Egypt; and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him....And Joseph was a goodly person, and well-favored. And it came to pass after these things, that his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, Lie with me. But he refused....
And it came to pass, when she saw that he had left his garment in her hand, and was fled forth, that she called unto the men of her house, and spake unto them, saying, See, he hath brought in a Hebrew unto us to mock us; he came in unto me to lie with me, and I cried with a loud voice....
When his master heard the words of his wife, which she spake unto him, saying, After this manner did thy servant to me; that his wrath was kindled. And Joseph's master took him, and put him into the prison.
Potiphar's wife goes nameless in the Bible, but a medieval commentary on the Torah calls her Zuleika:
Against the Biblical narrator's terse and suggestive account, Sefer Hayyashar [1625 AD] paints a vivid portrait of an woman pathologically obsessed with Joseph's physical beauty. She continually urges Joseph on, whether by enticement, threats or trickery, and her passion ultimately brings upon her a suicidal state of physical depression....The name 'Zuleika' also seems to emanate from an Islamic source. Epic poems on this theme circulated widely in medieval times, of which the most popular was Yusuf and Zulaikha, composed in 7000 Persian couplets by the fifteenth-century poet Jami. The author was a Sufi who regarded the story of Joseph's temptations as an allegory for the mystical striving after divinity.
Dante stumbles across this character in the frozen fraud section of Hell (eighth floor, aisle 10, Perjury - if you hit Counterfeiting you've gone too far):
"Who are the two poor wretches
That smoke like unto a wet hand in winter...?""One the false woman is who accused Joseph,
The other the false Sinon, Greek of Troy;
From acute fever they send forth such reek."[The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto XXX (c. 1300 AD)]
Coincidentally, the earliest known mention of Phedre is in Homer's account of Odysseus's visit to the underworld:
When I had prayed sufficiently to the dead, I cut the throats of the two sheep and let the blood run into the trench, whereon the ghosts came trooping up from Erebus - brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil, maids who had been crossed in love, and brave men who had been killed in battle, with their armour still smirched with blood; they came from every quarter and flitted round the trench with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear....Anon Proserpine sent up the ghosts of the wives and daughters of all the most famous men. They gathered in crowds about the blood, and I considered how I might question them severally.... Then I saw Phaedra, and Procris, and fair Ariadne daughter of the magician Minos, whom Theseus was carrying off from Crete to Athens, but he did not enjoy her, for before he could do so Diana killed her in the island of Dia on account of what Bacchus had said against her.
[The Odyssey, Book XI (c. 800 BC)]
Not to be outdone, Virgil gives Aeneas a similar encounter in Hades:
Not far from thence, the Mournful Fields appear,
So call'd from lovers that inhabit there.
The souls whom that unhappy flame invades,
In secret solitude and myrtle shades
Make endless moans, and, pining with desire,
Lament too late their unextinguish'd fire.Here Procris, Eriphyle here he found,
Baring her breast, yet bleeding with the wound
Made by her son. He saw Pasiphae there,
With Phaedra's ghost, a foul incestuous pair.[The Aeneid Book VI (c. 20 BC)]
So as it turns out, Hell hath a fury like not one but two scorned women after all.
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Posted by Alison Humphrey at April 17, 2009 05:10 PM