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Reading Lamentations

Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT

The book of Lamentations is full of imagery of the abandoned and abandoning mother. In this article, following on the work of Tod Linafelt, this is linked to Freud’s analysis of melancholia. The surviving voice in Lamentations turns the anguish of survival into an attack on the mother, reinforced by wider biblical tropes that juxtapose women, food and death. Ultimately, hope is projected on to the continued violence of the father, which is justified at the expense of the mother. The effect of the text on the reader cannot in a simple sense be laid at the writer’s door, however, as an intertextual comparison with Alistair Grey’s novella Five Letters from an Eastern Empire reveals. Later readings have served to enshrine this strategy of survival. The article concludes by arguing that the role of such texts in the Canon may best be understood through their capacity to scandalize the reader into recognition of his or her own complicity in the psychology of destruction.

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