In a bohemian mountain village in southern California, Karen grows up surrounded by free spirits and dissidents. The child of artists, her natural path is to become one, but her dreams call her out into the unfamiliar and dangerous world. One day, while playing in a river, Karen suffers severe trauma. Panther, a dark figure, enters her dream life. Unseen, it stalks her cross country as young love carries her away to an old mansion in Key West, home of the colorful Elias family. Pregnancy, marriage, and an uncomfortable confinement follow, and the archetypal image of Panther continues to haunt her life. Will this mountain girl survive the larger world? Left alone in the old Victorian while her husband and his family pursue their various enterprises, she discovers a secret room in the attic—a ship’s galley full of old books and maps. Here, a new dream figure—a native woman—emerges, revealing the story and secrets of the mansion and guiding Karen through the perils of Hurricane Betsy, an island murder, and her husband’s disappearance. Weaving together startling events and vivid dreams, Forever Tourmaline tells the story of Karen’s unimaginable odyssey and its surprising conclusion.
In a bohemian mountain village in southern California, Karen grows up surrounded by free spirits and dissidents. The child of artists, her natural path is to become one, but her dreams call her out into the unfamiliar and dangerous world. One day, while playing in a river, Karen suffers severe trauma. Panther, a dark figure, enters her dream life. Unseen, it stalks her cross country as young love carries her away to an old mansion in Key West, home of the colorful Elias family. Pregnancy, marriage, and an uncomfortable confinement follow, and the archetypal image of Panther continues to haunt her life. Will this mountain girl survive the larger world? Left alone in the old Victorian while her husband and his family pursue their various enterprises, she discovers a secret room in the attic—a ship’s galley full of old books and maps. Here, a new dream figure—a native woman—emerges, revealing the story and secrets of the mansion and guiding Karen through the perils of Hurricane Betsy, an island murder, and her husband’s disappearance. Weaving together startling events and vivid dreams, Forever Tourmaline tells the story of Karen’s unimaginable odyssey and its surprising conclusion.
This book explores figurative images of the womb and the simile of a woman in labor from the Hebrew Bible, problematizing previous interpretations that present these as disparate images and showing how their interconnectivity embodies relationship with YHWH. In the Hebrew Bible, images of the womb and the pregnant body in labor do not co-occur despite being grounded in an image of a whole pregnant female body; the pregnant body is instead fragmented into these two constituent parts, and scholars have continued to interpret these images separately with no discussion of their interconnectivity. In this book, Langton explores the relationship between these images, inviting readers into a wider conversation on how the pregnant body functions as a means to an end, a place to access and seek a relationship with YHWH. Readers are challenged and asked to rethink how these images have been interpreted within feminist scholarship, with womb imagery depicting YHWH’s care for creation or performing the acts of a midwife, and the pregnant body in labor as a depiction of crisis. Langton explores select texts depicting these images, focusing on the corporeal experience and discussing direct references and allusions to the physicality of a pregnant body within these texts. This approach uncovers ancient and current androcentric ideology which dictates that conception, gestation, and birth must be controlled not by the female body, but by YHWH. The Womb and the Simile of the Woman in Labor in the Hebrew Bible is of interest to students and scholars working on the Hebrew Bible, gender in the Bible and the Near East more broadly, and feminist biblical criticism.
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