The Red Tent - By: Anita Diamant

The Red Tent is a novel written by Anita Diamant and is the novel that I have chosen to read and write my literary essay on. This novel is based approximately 2000 years ago. The Red Tent is a historical fiction based on a biblical story, from the book of Genesis. It is about Dinah who has no voice in the biblical story, but Anita makes Dinah have a voice and uses it. The story is written from a female perspective, from the women all around Dinah as she grows from a child to a grown woman. Personally I thought it was a good book for the fact that it was so different but real at the same time. It was Anita's first time writing a novel and she did a good job, she added a lot of historical facts into the novel without us even noticing.
This novel is more for women than for men for the fact that it is told from the females perspective and has a lot of detail in parts of the novel where males will not be able to handle. Dinah's mother (Leah) and aunt (Rachel) are both midwives who help females who are delivering babies, Dinah eventually also becomes one. This is where a lot of description comes in and some people do not want to read about this. This is where the males stop and the females keep reading. An example from the book is,

"But I had no time to be sorry for myself, because suddenly a strange red bubble emerged from between Leah's legs and then, almost immediately, a flood of bloody water washed down her thighs. Leah tried to stand, terrified, but Inna told her not to take her feet off the bricks... Leah pushed, her face red, her eyes bulging, blue and green, glittering..."

I also really enjoyed this book because it shows the many different ways that women were treated 2000 years back. The "red tent" is the first part that I would like to comment on. The red tent is a tent that the females have to go and stay during their "time of the month" and also while they are carrying their husbands child. No males are allowed to see them during this time which makes for the fact that the males generally have more than one wife and several children. Jacob for one has 4 wives and 13 children.
Females were also treated poorly when it came to how their husbands treated them. Now a days your husband should love you becuase you plan on spending the majority of you life with them but in this novel the husbands just got married so that they could have children. But the children were only desired if they were males because males are the only ones who can actually do work, according to the men of this society. Females where only put on the earth for the purpose of childbearing. It is in a way like "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood for the fact that females were looked upon as nothing but the carrier of babies. Both of these books were interesting and a good read. I feel as though they were both well written and have twists that I don't normally see in my type of novel.