LOT'S DAUGHTERS: Sex, Redemption, and Women's Quest for Authority

Before Humbert had his Lolita, Lot had his daughters. In this provocative volume, Polhemus, chair of Stanford's English department, uses the "disreputable Bible story of father-daughter incest" as a lens to understand family and gender relations through the centuries. He casts a wide net over literature (Joyce and Shakespeare), art (Dürer and Rubens), psychology (Freud and his famous study of Dora), show business (Shirley Temple and Woody Allen) and politics (Bill and Monica) to argue that the power dynamic between younger women and older men—"in which daughters fall in love with their father's lives and older men are tempted by the intoxicating power and promise of youth"—is integral to our society. Traipsing through so many fields of inquiry allows Polhemus (Erotic Faith ) to find Lot's daughters "at the core of modern life and consciousness": a "Lottish spectre of incest" haunts Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre , for example, while Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives puts it all out in the open (it concerns a man having a secret affair with a 20-year-old and was made while Allen was himself having a secret affair with his then wife's adopted daughter). Though dense and rigorous, Polhemus's book is also quite lively: general readers with an interest in any of the figures discussed will be intrigued, and if the book beats its singular note a bit too long, it does so cleanly and fervently. (Jan.)