Lot's Daughters: Sex, Redemption, and Womenas Quest for Authority

By Robert Polhemus

Book Overview

Lot's Daughters explores the relationship of fathers and daughters and of older men and younger females in history, life, art, and culture. This ambitious, daringly original book shows how humanity has remembered and been formed by Lot's daughters--how the shocking biblical text describing the crucial relationship between that patriarch and his daughters has haunted the human imagination and shaped history and behavior right down to the present.

Robert Polhemus terms this ongoing human drama--the mutual attraction between young females and older males--the "Lot complex," and illustrates his theory with a wide-ranging series of portraits that analyze and dramatize the lives and work of famous men and women who, in very diverse ways, have made the world care more deeply about the destiny of daughters.

In witty, probing chapters on an entertaining selection of daughters that includes women as varied as Lewis Carroll's Alice, Shirley Temple, Mia Farrow, and Monica Lewinsky, Polhemus tells the story of men's ambivalent desire for young women and of women's quest for authority. It is an indispensable work on male-female relations.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804750513
• ISBN13: 9780804750516
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 456 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Incredibly thought-provoking and eye-opening

In Lot's Daughters Robert Polhemus has struck and richly mined the mother lode of social-psychological constructs running through human history - the Lot complex. Forget the Oedipus complex that so obsessed ancient Greeks and modern Freudians. As this book so thoroughly documents and artfully explains, there are powerful reasons why the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot's family, figure prominently throughout Western history. The Genesis 19 account of father and daughters ensuring the survival of the human species through an incestual act is an archetypal story woven into the very fabric of changing social norms and psychological dynamics unfolding over several millennia. Lot's Daughters is a riveting read about how this only Biblical story of incest manifests itself repeatedly in myriad guises and interpretations throughout religious, artistic, literary and public dramas. Books brimming with such fertile insights as in Lot's Daughters are rare treasures to be savoured over repeated readings. Polhemus has tapped into a deep, subterranean flow of timeless human consciousness that wells up into particular times and places in new forms. Shortly after reading Lot's Daughters I saw the movie Sin City. At a superficial level the movie is grotesque in its hyped, visually repugnant violence. But analyzed through the lens of Lot's Daughters it is an extraordinary, modern-day morality play. I also have been going back to many books I read over the past 35 years, seeing with more informed eyes a fresh look at how radically diverse authors intentionally or unwittingly embedded the Lot Complex in their stories. Many thanks to Robert Polhemus for a most remarkable map of largely uncharted territory well worth the exploration.

Excellent and important work; Polhemus is terrific

a smart and groundbreaking book--you'll never look at the usual suspects the same way again.