A Stereotype as Immigrant: Re-reading Jephthah's Daughterby Sister M.L. McKenzie In his 1952 article, "The Revolt of Charles Heavysege," Thomas Randall Dale describes the nineteenth-century Canadian poet as a quiet rebel whose literary ancestors are the Romantic poets Blake and Byron. He argues that in two of his major works, Saul (1857) and Jephthah's Daughter (1868), the poet is subtly protesting against the image of a merciless God in the two Old Testament stories upon which the poems are based (35-6). This view of Heavysege as a questioner seems to find some support in the cautious remarks of one of his daughters, Helen Middlemiss, who remembered that in his religious views, her father "was not altogether, at one time, quite orthodox" (qtd. in Burpee 52). This paper will explore the possibility that, in Jephthah's Daughter, the poet is also questioning a social and literary convention that has been accepted in western civilization from earliest times: namely, the idea that a woman's story is entirely one of relationships with men. According to this view, woman, who has no independent life of her own, finds her meaning and glory in co-operating with male aims, even at the cost of great self-sacrifice. Such a situation can be justified, of course, only by the assumption that man's world, the sphere of action dominated by reason, is superior in importance to the domestic, emotional sphere assigned to woman. Literature frequently conceals the destructive aspects of this system by presenting the victimized woman as an angel of virtue with almost supernatural qualities. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have explained, such characterization, which reached its Victorian apogee in Honoria in Coventry Patmore's "The Angel in the House," renders the woman an object of admiration, even of veneration, for the male, thus deflecting any guilt he might experience for his complicity in the annihilation of her personality (17-59). A close reading of the text of Jephthah's Daughter, against a background of the literary evolution of the story, suggests that Heavysege, while following the traditional pattern of glorifying a willing female victim, simultaneously undermines the reader's acceptance of that convention in several ways: the development of the mother's energetic personality and logical, but unanswered, arguments; the dramatic presentation of Jephthah's deeply divided consciousness, and, finally, the portrayal of the daughter's ambivalent emotional reaction to her plight. The prominence of these elements in the poem reveals that, while he does not reject the stereotype, Heavysege displays some uneasiness with it. The biblical account of Jephthah's story offers an archetypal example of the sacrifice of woman for man's political aims while also illustrating the willingness of the victim which depends on her conviction that such aims are altruistic and patriotic when, indeed, the context suggests otherwise. As told in Judges 10:17-12:26, the story presents the death of a young girl, who is not even given a name, as a minor incident in a series of exciting events that are of great importance to her father. He has been ejected from his father's house in Gilead by his half-brothers because his mother was a harlot. Accompanied by a band of soldiers, he withdraws to the hills until the Gileadites come to beg his help in a border dispute with the Ammonites. Seeing an opportunity to regain his lost position and more, Jephthah agrees, on condition that, if he is successful, they will make him "head." This title, as John L. McKenzie points out, implies "free and more unimpeded power" than was usually accorded a military leader in that society (146). When diplomacy with the Ammonites fails, Jephthah prepares for war and, since victory is so important to him personally, he makes the vague vow for which he is famous. Upon his return home, where his daughter is the first to greet him, both he and she agree, without hesitation, that she must be sacrificed. The period of her lamentation in the mountains and her actual death rapidly ensue and Jephthah then goes on to fight the tribe of Ephraim who question his right to engage in war with the Ammonites without their consent. His daughter's death has clearly been but a stepping stone in his rise to power in pursuit of revenge. Heavysege was also familiar with Iphigenia in Aulis, Euripides' version of the Greek story that so closely parallels the story of Jephthah's daughter. Here too, a young woman gives up her life in aid of her father's career. In Burpee's account of Heavysege's life, we find that the poet's friend John Reade remembered lending him "some of the Greek dramatists in English" sometime before 1859. He commented that only "the Iphigenias of Euripides" impressed Heavysege (Burpee 22). Dale speculates that the translation in question was probably that of Robert Potter, first published in 1780 (Life and Work 168). Wilbur Owen Sypherd has pointed out that the Iphigenia story, especially as dramatized by Euripides in Iphigenia in Aulis, greatly influenced the numerous dramatic treatments of the Jephthah story all over Europe, beginning in the sixteenth century (Sypherd 16-22). In his depiction of Iphigenia's development from carefree innocence to heroic acceptance of death, Euripides is said to have changed the legendary image of the girl from "an unwilling victim into a true saint" (Walker 290). The Greek dramatist also offered a mother-figure in the character of Clytemnestra, a role not mentioned in the biblical account, but introduced into many dramatic versions of the Jephthah story as a result of Euripides' influence. The opening lines of Heavysege's poem, the forceful role given to the mother and, of course, the development of the daughter's character all suggest the Canadian poet's reliance on the Greek tragedy. Euripides' ironic probing of Agamemnon's motives for sacrificing his daughter is also reflected in Heavysege's presentation of Jephthah. Whereas the strongly moral dramatic versions of the Jephthah story have always tended to focus on the ethical problem facing Jephthah once he made his rash vow and won the victory, there exists another literary tradition connected with this story in which the pathos of the daughter's situation is central. This lyric tradition of the lament (planctus), whose persona is either the girl or her maiden's, originated as early as the first century. As Margaret Alexiou and Peter Dronke have shown, in these poems, the girl's emotions are generally so sublime as to elevate her beyond the need for human pity or vindication. At the same time, the laments often contain strong condemnations of the father's behaviour. In the nineteenth century, several poets continued this tradition by creating sentimentally sublime treatments of the daughter. Heavysege was probably acquainted with some of these poems. Dale considers it "not unlikely" that he knew at least three of them (Life and Work 168): Byron's "Jephtha's [sic] Daughter," in Hebrew Melodies (1815); "Jephthah's Daughter" (1828) by the American writer, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Tennyson's "A Dream of Fair Women" (1832). All three are similar to the laments in their treatment of the daughter's virtue, while omitting any reproach of the father. Byron's heroine, whose lament is addressed to her father, denies suffering, saying: "If the hand that I love lay me low, / There cannot be pains in the blow: ll. 7-8). While Willis's poem is a narrative rather than a lyric lament, he endows the girl with an angelic countenance and speaks of "the affection of a delicate child / For a fond father" (lines 28-9). Tennyson's dreamer confronts the girl only when she is safe in heaven. Claiming obedience to her father as the source of her glory, she chides the speaker for criticizing her parent, saying: "It comforts me in this one thought to dwell, / That I subdued me to my father's will" (lines 233-34). Heavysege may also have known that he was not the first poet in Canada to deal with the subject. In 1841, a dramatic narrative entitled "Jephthah's Daughter" and signed by J.S., appeared in the Literary Garland. The father in this poem makes a clear distinction between the gender roles and includes in his view of feminine endowments a woman's natural ability to give her life for another. The daughter also implies that she understands that, for a woman, there are only two possible roles: if she is not an angel, she will be a femme fatale. So, in a short lament, she looks on her death as the preservation of her innocence, declaring: "My eyes with their brightness no longer can snare" (447). These depictions of the daughter minimize the tone of regret that mingled with heroic acceptance in the earlier laments, while stressing filial obedience as the praiseworthy virtue. Both the classical model provided by Euripides' Clytemnestra and the "angel in the house" stereotype of Victorian literature are reflected in Heavysege's characterization of the mother. Earlier, in the first two parts of Saul, he had presented Ahinoam, Saul's wife, helplessly watching her husband's evil moods and trying to divert him with homely concerns. Jephthah's wife also puts great store in domestic routine and accepts the necessity for catering to male moods. Like Clytemnestra, whose consideration for ritual propriety leads her to concentrate on details of her daughter's wedding even after she suspects something is amiss, she, "outwardly serene, / But inly troubled" (20), tries to surround her daughter with music and spinning, the customary occupations of her household. Her explanation of Jephthah's rude manner and her advice to her daughter on how to respond are typical of acquired patterns of female behaviour through the ages. Men, warriors in particular, she explains, have strange moods to which women must accommodate themselves. They are often deeply disturbed by the carnage in which they engage,
From first to last, the mother refuses to identify what is happening with the will of heaven, although Jephthah makes that equation his main justification and the daughter learns to accept the idea. When Jephthah first tells his wife of their daughter's fate, he declares: "'Tis Heaven that now demands her sacrifice" (32). This explanation unleashes from the wife a tirade of accusation quite equal in fury to that of Clytemnestra (Iphigenia 318-20). In her view, Jephthah and no other is to blame for this situation and she associates that blame with his male role. His search for "taperglory in the field," fuelled by their daughter's life, is the cause of this unnatural behaviour; for her, it is "hideous glory" if it is to be purchased at the price of the girl's death (34). He is no different from his enemies in this male pursuit. He is a deceiver and a robber, but: "All men are robbers, like the Ammonite" (33). He is incapable of the paternal love he professes, but then: "Fathers, like beasts, seek to devour their young; / Man is divested of humanity" (35). As for this being an act of religion demanded by heaven, she mocks the idea, asking: "Think'st thou Jehovah will accept such victim?" Again she compares him with "fell Ammon, / Whose children pass to Moloch through the fire" (34).
After
maintaining a long silence while Jephthah laments his unhappy lot and
their daughter gradually leans towards his way of thinking, the mother
breaks out into another speech in which she attempts to dissuade her
husband from his course of action by logic. First, she rejects his right
to act as God, asking: "Who hath made thee Heaven's viceregent"
(47)? Then she appeals to the values she thinks will carry some weight
with her husband. These values are based on confidence in the cycle of
nature and on a family life rooted in that cycle. Already in her first
exchange with Jephthah on this grisly subject, she pointed out that all of
them, including the girl, will eventually be brought to death by
"calm Nature's stage and slow process," while at the same time suggesting that to hasten
that process would be an "enormity" (31). In this second speech
of protest, she reiterates the same argument by mentioning all the natural
means such as "thunderbolts" or "sickness" that are
available if Heaven wants to claim the girl. Her expectations that this
reasoning will influence the other two members of her family seems
justified since both Jephthah and his daughter associate themselves with nature's plan through figurative language. The
daughter appeals to her father: "Cut me not down or ere my harvest
comes; / . . . Fell me not whilst a sapling" (38) and Jephthah
deplores the ravages his act will make on the natural process, calling
himself "crueller than Cain," who "broke his brother bough,
/ I tear the total tree" (13). The family is also united by bonds of
affection formed in a happy past that all three recall; unlike
Clytemnestra, who expends considerable rhetoric accusing Agamemnon of past
wrongs, Jephthah's wife reminds her husband of their
The great irony of the mother's situation lies in the fact that, not only is she trapped by the male system she has supported, but her compliance has also taught her daughter the very patterns of reacting that now lead the girl to accept her father's proposal as a glorious opportunity. The influence of her mother is evident in the daughter's explanation that she and her maidens have come to greet her father "as is meet" (8) and in her readiness to believe that some fault of hers has caused his anger at her arrival. Her education for reliance on male initiatives and co-operation with male aims is supposed to insure her security and the continuance of her family's life; in this case, as in that of Iphigenia, however, such conditioning leads to acceptance of violent and untimely death with no hope of offspring. Her mother, gradually perceiving the ironic effect her teaching has had on the girl as the latter admits being "charmed" (44) by her father's words, finally expresses her exasperation in the question: "How shall I save thee, saving not thyself" (58)? In contrast to her forceful arguments to Jephthah, her pleas to her daughter to resist because of her mother's need of her seem weak indeed. When she calls the girl "my life, / My hope, my joy, my care," she is speaking to a person she herself has taught to subordinate her feelings to male plans (58). When she realizes that her words are having no effect, the mother ceases speaking. Although Dale implies that she acquiesces in the idea that the plan is God's will, her silence seems rather the only protest left to her ("Revolt" 41-42). She and her daughter are caught in a system she is powerless to control. Her last words in the poem, a desperate cry of maternal sorrow, "Blessed they who have no offspring. . ." (59), echo Jephthah's first message to her that "It had been better had she not conceived" her child (29). This circular verbal pattern enclosing the mother's part in the story symbolizes the inevitability of female defeat.
Into his characterization of Jephthah, Heavysege introduces a psychological complexity that not only sets the character apart from his literary models, but also undermines the credibility of his wholehearted acceptance of his daughter's sacrifice even as he insists upon it. While the biblical figure displays no emotion and Agamemnon's affection for his daughter almost entirely disappears in the face of political necessity, the Jephthah of Heavysege's poem is constantly overwhelmed by paternal feelings whose expression culminates in worship of his daughter at the poem's conclusion. In several emotional passages filled with affectionate language, he declares his fondness for her, especially when he tells her of the day of her birth when "I took thee in mine arms rejoicing," even forgetting to be angry that she was "not a male" (42). She too refers to the many "answering endearments" to her greetings when he returned on previous occasions (20). Jephthah now finds these emotional ties in conflict with his desire to rule Gilead, an aim that suddenly seems to depend on the death of his beloved child.
Both Jephthah and his daughter clearly recognize from the outset that personal ambition, having for its goal supremacy over Gilead, was the real motive for his vow. In her greeting she hails him as "lord of Gilead: / Gilead that cast you out, and deemed you born / To base dishonour" (9), indicating her understanding of the real meaning of his victory. His response connects his victory and the symbol of his political power while also subtly shifting the blame for his disappointment from himself to her:
Even later when he grieves for her approaching death, he never considers preserving her life at the expense of the vow that he clearly considers a political rather than religious matter, "For by its answer has success been won" (42). Success is dear to Jephthah. In an unguarded moment he yields to the pressure of his discovery that his daughter is the required victim and spontaneously offers "Sword, shield and judge's staff" as well as "Gilead's chair" to be quit of the obligation of his vow (17); however, he never repeats the offer in these terms when he beseeches God or later consults the priests. He offers his possessions, his life — even the life of his wife — but never again mentions the symbols of the power he has attained. The tension between Jephthah's deeply felt affection for his daughter and his ambition to rule Gilead produces a painful inner division that he is never able to transcend. His internal struggle provides the dramatic conflict in the poem. Upon first realizing his desperate situation, in his long and anguished speech before the crowd at Mizpeh, he figuratively expresses his inner torment:
Throughout
the poem the ambivalent use of images involving animals and the sea reinforces the sense of a painful contradiction within
Jephthah. Frequently recurring references to animals by both Jephthah and the narrator suggest that he is a fierce predator like the lion or bear,
while the girl is often mentioned as a hare, lamb, or other helpless victim of
the hunt. Paradoxically, at other
times, Jephthah is the potential victim, calling on vultures, wolves or lions to destroy him. Tropes involving the sea
are also
This inner tension leads Jephthah on a search for an authority to bear the responsibility for the death of his daughter. He lacks the assurance of his biblical prototype and Greek counterpart, both of whom unquestioningly follow the assumption that political aims must take precedence over personal affection at any cost. Agamemnon, after brief vacillation, quickly accepts the idea that his daughter must die to help the Greek fleet and turns his attention to deceiving Clytemnestra so that she will bring the girl to Aulis. While Jephthah does not deceive his wife, as we have seen, he does not listen to her either, but turns rather to all the available patriarchal authorities for advice: God, the priests and the laws. What he is looking for is a means of escape that will not jeopardize his position in Gilead. The conclusion of his appeal to God unfortunately coincides with the appearance of his daughter, a circumstance he interprets as a sign that she is the only acceptable victim. This passage has been the main focus of critical comment on the poem because it raises the question of the identity of the power that seems to demand such a sacrifice. Frye says it is the "moral nihilism" of nature (146); Dale, although allowing for the ambiguity of the sign (Life and Work 174-75), nevertheless blames the girl's death on God's "insistence on literal fulfilment" of the vow ("Greatest Poet" 246). Djwa agrees that Jephthah offers his daughter to "the stern Old Testament God of Judgement manifested in a Victorian poetic landscape" (intro. xxxiii). Jephthah's swift conclusions about what is intended in this sign, as well as his lack of religious sentiment throughout the poem, seem to support equally well the idea that, torn between affection and ambition and favouring the latter, he is relieved to be able to hide behind this mysterious manifestation of divine will. Consultation with the priests confirms his belief that the sacrifice is necessary if he is to retain power. Their role in the poem, was, perhaps, suggested to Heavysege by that of Calchas, the priestly political opportunist who initiates Iphigenia's difficulties. Heavysege's priests, motivated by their own political fears rather than by reverence for the sacredness of vows, urge Jephthah to get on with the sacrifice lest the land be returned "back to slavery" (68). After he has investigated "the law of vows, traditions" and "the mazy walks of casuistry," he assures his wife that they leave "only more ensnared / My weary, wandering thought's entangled foot" (37). While these authorities help Jephthah rationalize the cruelty demanded by his quest for power, they do not relieve his uneasiness.
Further evidence of the war within Jephthah lies in his attempts to win his daughter's consent to the sacrifice and in his strange reaction when she finally agrees. By his emphasis on Jephthah's insistence that his daughter agree to her own death, the poet adopts the Greek idea that the consent of the victim removes the guilt of the one performing the sacrifice. According to P. Roussel, Euripides incorporates the Greek custom of obtaining ritual gestures of approval from animal victims into his portrayal of human victims, including Iphigenia (236). Viewed from the perspective of such a tradition, the consent of both Iphigenia and Jephthah's daughter serves rather to exculpate the fathers than to demonstrate the free will of the daughters. Although he is technically guiltless, Jephthah cannot fully accept the reassurance that should come with his daughter's compliance with his demand that she die. Horror mingles with his relief when she announces her willingness to obey:
This
ironic simile, in which the narrator compares Jephthah's reaction to his
daughter's acceptance of the idea that her death is the will of heaven to
the amazement of a person who successfully communes with evil powers,
conveys once again the desperate confusion within Jephthah. By depicting
him as a man who, in spite of every rational justification that his
society affords, still feels in his heart that he is pursuing an evil
course, the poet seems to question the moral basis for the predominance of
male concerns. While
the story in Judges does not touch on the inner reactions of the daughter,
Iphigenia in Aulis offered Heavysege a pattern of psychological change
that he imitated and developed. In both works, the daughters' apparent
acceptance of a glorious death really marks their total absorption into
the stereotypical role their societies impose on them as women. In both
cases, the contrast between their initial negative reactions to their
horrible
fate and their later insistence on dying is quite remarkable. When first
confronted with their imminent deaths, both girls express strong
convictions about the superiority of life in any circumstances over death.
"For life," Iphigenia declares, "though ill, / Excels
whate'er there is of good in death" (321). Jephthah's daughter
passionately details the lengths to which she would go in enduring
"ill" life rather than experience death. She offers to allow
herself to be imprisoned, chained, separated from all nature and humanity
except her parents, saying: "I will resign all pleasure, and accept / Of pain" (38-39). Motivated by this strong desire to
live, both daughters offer the most appealing arguments they can muster to
move the paternal heart. Both point out that their dead ancestors would be
displeased at such a brutal turn of events; both urge their mothers'
rights over their lives. Both touchingly assert their desire to care for
their fathers. The idea of "virtuous young ladies angelically
ministering to their powerful father," has been called "one of
western culture's fondest fantasies" (Gilbert and Gubar 215).
Iphigenia recalls how she and her father used to talk about the future
when she would be married and he a welcome guest in her home. Jephthah's
daughter returns three times to her plans to tend her father in his old
age, concluding: "Youth was not made to die, but live to cherish /
The aged; so was I to cherish thee" (45).
In contrast to the many similarities between the two victims, the precise motive given for Jephthah's daughter's dramatic reversal of her position, while equally embedded in the demands of the patriarchy, differs greatly from that ascribed to Iphigenia. The Greek heroine, while listening to Achilles' talk of saving her, suddenly cries out: "More than a thousand women is one man / Worthy to see the light of life" (327) and then refuses to consider any further plans to save her life. Jephthah's daughter, however, after a more gradual conversion, claims she faces death willingly because: "Heaven has chosen me" (52). Then, in a speech that is highly ironic in the light of her earlier pleas, she explains that she has been taught by "nature" to yield, asking: "Take me, my father, take, accept me, Heaven / Slay me or save me, even as you will" (54). As in the poems of Byron, Willis and Tennyson cited above, the real virtue of the girl in this poem lies in her dutiful obedience to her father, whose will she equates with that of heaven. Here the idea of the absolute superiority of male over female life, evident in Euripides' drama, is modified to accommodate the Victorian view of the father as God's representative. While Heavysege's adaptation of the story to the taste of readers familiar with the domestic idyl may have made the poem more appealing to them, the underlying assumptions about woman's place in a man's world remain unchanged. Further evidence of the extent to which women have been educated for sacrifice throughout the history of western civilization lies in the parallels between marriage and death, the products of a long tradition expressed again in both Iphigenia in Aulis and Jephthah's Daughter. In Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, Helene P. Foley explores the similarities among Greek rituals for marriage, funerals and sacrifices. She explains that the audience at a performance of Euripides' tragedy would have understood that the girl had been trained to look on marriage as a kind of sacrificial death (84-92). From that perspective, Agamemnon's invention of the marriage ruse to bring his daughter to Aulis actually connects her bizarre fate with the conventional role of woman. Iphigenia applies nuptial imagery to her situation, describing her efforts on behalf of Greece as "my monuments, my children these, / My nuptials and my glory" (327). In contrast to her use of such language to lend patriotic meaning to her death, there exists widespread evidence from the ancient world of the use of bridal images to mourn the death of young girls before marriage, usually by describing them as brides of death. Such references, often accompanied by figurative language contrasting the darkness of death and the underworld with the bright illumination of the wedding festivities, recur in funerary inscriptions as well as in the plancti associated with the story of Jephthah's daughter (Alexiou and Dronke 835). Heavysege too combines these images in the daughter's lament to her maidens. For her, death is
Her prolonged lamentations undoubtedly add to the impression of Jephthah's cruelty in demanding her death; however, the latter part of the poem contains a version of the conventional device of elevating a wronged woman to so sublime a state that her goodness overshadows the guilt of the man who is wronging her. Such women become objects of male veneration as does Iphigenia after the intervention of Artemis with its implications of divine favour, or even of divinization for the girl (Foley 66). More importantly, perhaps, the substitution of the deer in her case frees Agamemnon from the role of murderer although, as Clytemnestra points out, it does not return the girl to her former life. The biblical story, of course, does not admit of any such absolution of the father's crime, although the concluding portrayal of the girl in terms reminiscent of the iconography associated with Christian virgin martyrs seems an attempt to make his role in her death more acceptable. Possibly influenced by the dreamer's vision of the girl in heaven in Tennyson's poem, the poet casts his heroine into an "ecstasy" (70) in which she dreams of herself in celestial surroundings, wearing a golden crown. The unconscious presents her with images of Hebrew history and of an afterlife in which she gloriously transcends herself and all her negative emotions. In telling her father of her dream, she comforts him with the reassurance that heaven is a place of reunion in which all the bonds he has broken will be remade. The family will be reunited and she will be one with all the heroes and heroines of biblical history. She forgives her father, urging him to abandon his grief and tend to her mother, whose unhappiness she calls a "great sickness" (71).
Her moving account of her vision is framed by two further instances of the imagery of love and marriage that increase the tension between the picture of the girl's heroism and the selfishness of her father's vow. When Jephthah embraces her and rouses her from her dream, they are compared to "lorn lovers" one of whom is going on "some world-encircling voyage" from which she will not return (69-70). While on the one hand this simile palliates Jephthah's crime by implying that his loss is as great as hers, on the other hand, the reader's sympathy for him is lessened by the recognition that the image of the voyage is possibly derived from a highly ironic passage in Euripides. In a short dialogue with her father before she knows the fate he has prepared for her, Iphigenia innocently wishes she and her father could go on a voyage together. The recollection that, at this point in the play, the girl is completely at the mercy of her father's devious arrangements lends a sinister note to Heavysege's image of the parting lovers. After hearing his daughter's dream, Jephthah, kneeling before her,
The strong religious overtones to Jephthah's mourning do not obliterate the implications of these two similes. In the context of the association of death and marriage discussed above, the figure of Jephthah as his daughter's "bridegroom" only further strengthens the idea that she, the "lost bride," is being sacrificed to him. The juxtaposition of the Pygmalion simile with that of the bridegroom once again directs the reader away from possible sympathy with Jephthah to a new awareness of his active role in controlling the girl's attitude to her death. Finally, the narrator's concluding praise of the girl, while omitting any mention of the will of heaven, recalls that she "bowed her to a parent's urgent need" (73). While granting his heroine every mark of virtue, then, Heavysege nevertheless displays dissatisfaction with the easy assumption that the subordinate and sacrificial role of a woman is inevitable and just both in his realistic treatment of the girl's human feelings and particularly in his insistence on the fact that she is dying to further her father's aims and for no other reason.
In this poem, Heavysege, as we have seen, is working with a traditional story that has undergone centuries of literary development. Presented earlier in didactic drama and lyrical lament, the story is here cast in the context of the domestic idyll so popular in Victorian literature. Whereas the depiction of such a family unit generally suggests ideals of harmony and hope for the future, in this poem, the relations among the three members of the family provide an ironic commentary on the surface action of the narrative. The mother's defence of her daughter's natural right to live and bear children is undermined by the recognition that she herself has taught the girl the superiority of male cultural aims over natural concerns. The father's self-seeking exposes the cowardice of his need to find justification in authorities outside himself, while his inner torment invalidates his claim to be morally justified in demanding the girl's death. The depiction of the daughter as victim and heroic martyr further negates the acceptability of her death, especially since the nobility of the cause is reduced to obedience to a self-serving father. Indeed, Jephthah's obvious quest for personal glory and revenge reduces the martyred woman to the status of victim, or even dupe of the situation. Her plight is made the more lamentable in that her own sex, here represented by her mother, have been compliant in supporting the faulty hierarchy of values upon which the patriarchy depends. Heavysege does seem a quiet rebel, whose somewhat ambivalent treatment of an old story offers early Canadian Literature some encouragement in questioning the stereotypical portrayal of gender roles. Notes
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