Esther 8

Esther Pleads for Her People

Commentaries by Ayla Lepine

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Guercino

Esther before Ahasuerus, 1639, Oil on canvas, 217 x 159.6 cm, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor; Museum purchase, 1963/2.45, www.umma.umich.edu

Paradoxes of Power

Commentary by Ayla Lepine

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Sensitive to the variations of the Greek Septuagint’s (LXX) longer version of this narrative, Guercino directly alludes to three encounters between Esther and the king (Perlove 1989: 36–39). A Septuagintal addition has Esther coming before the king with two maids ‘leaning daintily on one with the other carrying her train’ (Additions to Esther 15:3–4), and describes her as both beautiful and terrified. Here, two women support the body of Esther who is overcome with emotion before the throne of King Ahasuerus. One of them weeps and pleads while the other regards her queen with tender admiration.

The contrast between Esther’s anguish and the king’s composure appears to reinforce a conventional gender binary. But things are more complicated. Ahasuerus’s gesture of relinquishment is merely symbolic: the edict under his authority must be enforced. Soparadoxically powerful and powerlesshis kingship is here both lauded and compromised. Both his hands make contact with his symbols of power, but lightly, less bold than resigned.

Meanwhile, Esther’s limp body supported by two attendants recalls both Pietà and Crucifixion imagery: of Mary fainting in sorrow, and of Christ collapsed in death (Perlove 1989: 136). This iconographic strategy merges the emotional range of the queen with that of both Jesus and his mother.

The juxtaposition of the depth of risk and sacrifice evident in Esther’s physical vulnerability with the qualified nature of the king’s power makes a sharp point. Potent salvific powers may be at work in the midst of Esther’s apparent weakness. The queen’s pose renders her not simply vulnerably feminine but, read typologically, Christ-like.

Nonetheless, even if suggesting the king’s limits, Guercino also shows us his compassion. In this respect a different comparison is generated: between the king and the ruler whom Christ confrontedPontius Pilate. There was a lesson in mercy here, perhaps, for Cardinal Magalotti, the patron of this work, under whose protection were many Jews.

 

References

Perlove, Shelley. 1989. ‘Guercino’s “Esther Before Ahasuerus” and Cardinal Lorenzo Magalotti, Bishop of Ferrara’, Artibus et Historiae, 10.19: 133–47


Patricia Cronin

Shrine for Girls, as installed in La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Ludovico Pratesi, 2015, Saris and photograph, Chiesa di San Gallo, Venice; © Patricia Cronin Mark Blower

A Threefold Cord of Pain

Commentary by Ayla Lepine

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Patricia Cronin’s installation revives the histories of countless girls on holy ground. It consists of three piles of clothes within a chapel. Katrina Larkin (1996: 88–89) has argued that Esther may be understood in relation to Exodus: a fruitful path for interpreting Cronin’s work. A longed-for release from persecution and injustice infuses each thread of Cronin’s trio of tragic heaps.

Esther’s plea to the king is structured as a poetic repetition that announces her strategy and appeals to his power:

if it please the king, and if I have found favour in his sight, and if the thing seem right before the king, and I be pleasing in his eyes, let an order be written… (Esther 8:5)

She links her own self with the suggestion she offers, uniting her own identity wholly with the identity of her people and her royal role, recognizing all these elements as contingent and frail in relation to the king’s royal power. Dazzling and subversive, Esther’s plea is also fragile and submissive.

In Cronin’s installation, the fragile beauty of textiles laid sacrificially upon the altar press questions of memory and identity. The garments refer to three groups, who together fuse into an allegory of oppressed women: gang-raped and murdered girls in India, the 276 girls kidnapped in 2015 by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and girls forced to work in Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. While not generalizing women’s suffering (aware of the distinctiveness of each of the three histories it invokes), this weaving together of three narrative strands emphasizes a shared human problem. Cronin weaves a threefold cord of female pain.

Abuse and exploitation mark each item of clothing. Combined in this context, they acquire a capacity to confront and pierce our consciences. The colours of the clothes are vivid; their forms recall the folds of Esther’s luxurious garments in Old Master paintings like Guercino’s, and yet the girls that these inanimate textiles represent must plead for their people differently from her. Cronin, in laying out these objects and images, calls for justice by memorializing and honouring those whose stories are too often forgotten.

 

References

Larkin, Katrina J. A. 1996. Ruth and Esther (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press)


John Everett Millais

Esther, 1863–65, Oil on canvas, 77.4 x 106 cm, Private Collection; Painters / Alamy Stock Photo

A Turncoat

Commentary by Ayla Lepine

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John Everett Millais emphasises Esther’s boldness. To state her case, she must enter the Persian king Ahasuerus’s private chamber. The white walls, gilded columns, and rich blue curtain heighten our awareness of this threshold and of her intrepidness in crossing it. This is the turning point of the narrative, in which Esther’s risky plea to the Persian king will result in the salvation of the Jews from genocidal persecution, Esther herself having been given ‘a measure of royal power, which she exercises along with [her cousin] Mordecai in the composition of the edict’ (Barton and Muddiman 2012: 648; see Esther 8:8–9).

Esther is both regal and, momentarily, informal. Her left hand holds her crown protectively; her right pulls at the ornament in her hair, loosening it in preparation for her impassioned meeting with the king. The brightly coloured striations blazing across the bottom of the billowing yellow silk cloak were a deliberate and innovative use of an unusual piece of clothing: a ceremonial coat offered in 1864 to the British general Charles Gordon by the Chinese government. Millais, a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, borrowed the coat in order to incorporate its likeness into this visual interpretation of Esther—a biblical heroine who spoke on behalf of her oppressed people within the confines of a strict state regime.

Interestingly, Millais represented the coat inside out, transforming its appearance from an Asian symbol of court life into an abstract pattern of woven threads (Rosenfeld and Smith 2007: 154). A gift between contemporary male leaders becomes a glossy, silken ‘armour’ for Esther, whose narrative is not only one of strength but also of vulnerability. Millais’s interpretation conflates Esther 5:1 and 8:1–12 (and references the ‘splendid attire’ mentioned in chapter 15 of the Greek Septuagint’s Additions to Esther). In Millais’s hands the silk jacket is both Esther’s raiment and a metaphor for her subversion of prevailing monarchical authority, as she turns the state system inside out from within.

 

References

Barton, John, and John Muddiman. 2012. The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Rosenfeld, Jason, and Alison Smith. 2007. Millais (London: Tate)


Guercino :

Esther before Ahasuerus, 1639 , Oil on canvas

Patricia Cronin :

Shrine for Girls, as installed in La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Ludovico Pratesi, 2015 , Saris and photograph

John Everett Millais :

Esther, 1863–65 , Oil on canvas

Esther’s Performative Body

Comparative commentary by Ayla Lepine

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The book of Esther traces the crucial decision-making of a woman who finds herself at a profound social and cultural disadvantage. Esther’s capacity to strategize, to protect, and to transform her vulnerability into unique strength offers a way through the wilderness which is Israel’s oppression. Esther’s narrative is one of politically canny opposition in the face of brutal persecution. Through a combination of imagination and action, a new kind of order is brought out of a chaos which itself masquerades as order.

The issue at stake in Esther 8:1–12 is authority. The king gives the Jewish queen the wealth of her chief oppressor; her cousin Mordecai is offered the king’s signet ring and Esther is given his sceptre as a sign of reversal of power. Just as in John Everett Millais’s painting we see her standing at the threshold of the king’s domain, so Esther herself may be understood as a ‘threshold’ in this narrative. Through her self-sacrificial action and her non-violent resistance within the system of royal power, she is able to question and subvert that very system. (This is true despite the fact that her apparently positive power reversal leads to further violence, for as a result of it the Jews are given license to arm and defend themselves against the unstoppable genocidal edict of the Persians; Esther 8:11.)

This juxtaposition of artworks spanning three centuries is intended to open up diverse perspectives on Esther’s performative body and its adornments.

In Millais’s Esther (1863–65), she stands in front of a curtain, the royal blue of the textile itself standing for the impending presence of King Ahasuerus beyond. She stands both centre and back-stage, preparing to meet the king and, impassioned, to request his mercy on her people. The dramatic irony is present in part because Esther stands alone, as she does in both Esther 5 and 8. Millais’s painting contrasts with Guercino’s seventeenth-century, Septuagint-inspired interpretation of Esther’s encounter with the king, where she is shown crowned and accompanied by two women, and in which the king exerts a strong physical presence. In Millias’s rendering, the lone Esther’s facial expression demonstrates her resolve to the viewer in the critical moment just prior to pulling back the curtain.

In Patricia Cronin’s 2015 installation, collections of clothing make reference to broken and lifeless bodies. They are passive objects that weave multiple narratives of exploitation and the devaluation of female life. The artist creates a composition that speaks out of these inanimate objects to animate their stories of brutality and disregard. Similarly, Esther’s limp body in Guercino’s painting suggests passionate suffering. Her body, heavy and vulnerable, laden with jewels and silk, is displayed to the king by her attendants as a sign of her whole people’s pain and yearning for justice. Cronin’s textiles do likewise, attended to and displayed by the artist to affect social change in the particular contexts of women’s suffering.

In Guercino’s painting, Esther’s eyes are closed in suffering, recalling the passage: ‘how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred?’ (Esther 8:6). The tragedy of impending genocide is both urgent and beyond what can be managed in the senses of a single body, even a sacrificial and subversive one. Cronin’s textiles and their stories insist upon opening viewers’ eyes, as paradoxically do Esther’s closed eyes in Guercino’s painting. As she is overcome with grief, the open eyes of the viewer may respond with compassion and resolve.

In the biblical text, Esther makes her case before the king, placing herself in a sacrificial position in which she relinquishes control and breaks strong conventions in order to act as an advocate for her oppressed culture. Cronin makes her case for the girls whose lives are destroyed by violence and abuse, raising the issues of their physical absence through the presence of their clothing. In Guercino’s painting, Esther is physically present but simultaneously absent on account of her unconscious state. Eyes closed in a compassionate pleading, her ‘Passion’ before the paradoxically powerful yet limited king visually associates her resilience with the Virgin Mary’s acceptance of her role as God-bearer (as a result of which her soul too will be pierced; Luke 2:35), and with Christ himself facing death in order to gain life for humanity.

Next exhibition: Job 1

Esther 8

Revised Standard Version

8 On that day King Ahasu-eʹrus gave to Queen Esther the house of Haman, the enemy of the Jews. And Morʹdecai came before the king, for Esther had told what he was to her; 2and the king took off his signet ring, which he had taken from Haman, and gave it to Morʹdecai. And Esther set Morʹdecai over the house of Haman.

3 Then Esther spoke again to the king; she fell at his feet and besought him with tears to avert the evil design of Haman the Agʹagite and the plot which he had devised against the Jews. 4And the king held out the golden scepter to Esther, 5and Esther rose and stood before the king. And she said, “If it please the king, and if I have found favor in his sight, and if the thing seem right before the king, and I be pleasing in his eyes, let an order be written to revoke the letters devised by Haman the Agʹagite, the son of Hammedaʹtha, which he wrote to destroy the Jews who are in all the provinces of the king. 6For how can I endure to see the calamity that is coming to my people? Or how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred?” 7Then King Ahasu-eʹrus said to Queen Esther and to Morʹdecai the Jew, “Behold, I have given Esther the house of Haman, and they have hanged him on the gallows, because he would lay hands on the Jews. 8And you may write as you please with regard to the Jews, in the name of the king, and seal it with the king’s ring; for an edict written in the name of the king and sealed with the king’s ring cannot be revoked.”

9 The king’s secretaries were summoned at that time, in the third month, which is the month of Sivan, on the twenty-third day; and an edict was written according to all that Morʹdecai commanded concerning the Jews to the satraps and the governors and the princes of the provinces from India to Ethiopia, a hundred and twenty-seven provinces, to every province in its own script and to every people in its own language, and also to the Jews in their script and their language. 10The writing was in the name of King Ahasu-eʹrus and sealed with the king’s ring, and letters were sent by mounted couriers riding on swift horses that were used in the king’s service, bred from the royal stud. 11By these the king allowed the Jews who were in every city to gather and defend their lives, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods, 12upon one day throughout all the provinces of King Ahasu-eʹrus, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar. 13A copy of what was written was to be issued as a decree in every province, and by proclamation to all peoples, and the Jews were to be ready on that day to avenge themselves upon their enemies. 14So the couriers, mounted on their swift horses that were used in the king’s service, rode out in haste, urged by the king’s command; and the decree was issued in Susa the capital.

15 Then Morʹdecai went out from the presence of the king in royal robes of blue and white, with a great golden crown and a mantle of fine linen and purple, while the city of Susa shouted and rejoiced. 16The Jews had light and gladness and joy and honor. 17And in every province and in every city, wherever the king’s command and his edict came, there was gladness and joy among the Jews, a feast and a holiday. And many from the peoples of the country declared themselves Jews, for the fear of the Jews had fallen upon them.