49 pages • 1 hour read
Sue Monk KiddThe Book of Longings
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Ana
The character of Ana struggles with the woman she yearns to be, and the woman her society and her culture say she is to be. As the only daughter of a prominent court scribe, Ana receives encouragement early on from her father to explore the world of language and the intricate play of words as a powerful vehicle for self-expression. “The act itself of writing evoked powers, often divine, but sometimes unstable, that entered the letters and sent a mysterious animating force rippling through the ink” (9). Ana grows up without knowledge of her limits. She is pure potential, defined by her longing to have her voice heard. She is ambitious, passionate, independent, and willful.
It is only when she matures into adolescence that fully understands the reality of her role in her culture. She is to marry well and bear children. In her writings to that point, she invested giving voice to the critical female characters in the Old Testament whose pivotal role in Jewish history and culture had been entirely neglected because of that perception. When betrothed in a loveless marriage, she feels the first stirrings of her rebellion. Her profound and abiding love for Jesus, exactly the wrong kind of man, an itinerant unkempt stonemason with a radical perception of a world compelled by love rather than power, frees her to become a strong, independent woman with a voice that demands and deserves others to hear her. Jesus never relegates her to secondary status. For 10 years, she is part of his every decision until he departs for his ministry.
Witnessing the crucifixion is Ana’s tipping point. Given the grim evidence of the subordination of women—her own mother, her aunt, Herod’s wife, and her only friend Tabitha—Ana’s movement toward the creation of her magnum opus in Alexandria testifies to her triumph. That she buries that courageous work, that her husband’s followers have decided to delete her entirely from the story they tell of his life, however, testifies to the tragic dimension of that triumph and how strong women of her era were routinely silenced and how women would need to wait until a later time before others would hear their voice.
Jesus ben Joseph
Since Ana, the first-person narrator, lives in Alexandria during the three years of Jesus’ public ministry, the novel skirts any accounts of the familiar miracles of Jesus. Rather, the novel defines Jesus in human rather than divine terms. He is a troubled man who grew up on the fringes of social acceptance. The problematic circumstances of his birth labeled both him and his mother pariahs. He grows up learning the value of work and the reward of expressing and creating with his hands. He understands poverty. Growing up in a tumultuous home without a father, a modest dwelling crowded with his siblings, Jesus learns to function as a kind of peacemaker. What attracts Ana, however, is his sincerity, his open heart, and his gentle compassion and unironic empathy for her and for others.
The novel presents Jesus as a devoted husband, a passionate and respectful lover, and a happy and fulfilled father. His ongoing conversation with God, whom he embraces after the death of Joseph as his father, direct him into an increasingly more radical vision of a world defined by love and acceptance. Although gentle and open-hearted, Jesus flashes with anger, his intolerance of bigotry and greed, and his rejection of hypocrisy. Although the Christian Church that will spring from his teachings will deny women a place of dignity and respect for nearly two millennia, the Jesus here listens to Ana, encourages the development of her voice, and takes her counsel at every turn as he moves toward his reluctant acceptance of the dangerous life of an itinerant preacher. Unlike Judas, Jesus preaches a new world brought about not by military action but rather by humanity reforming. He sees a God that is not here or there but rather everywhere, in everyone. In that vision lies his tragic flaw and leads directly to the agony and triumph at Golgotha.
Judas Iscariot
Few figures in Christian writings have been as demonized and as vilified as Judas Iscariot. In the popular culture of Christianity, Judas is the confidant of Christ, one of the apostles, whose greed and hypocrisy drove him to become a turncoat, the base betrayer of Jesus who for 30 pieces of silver, what today would equal just under $200, handed Christ over to the Romans for torture and execution. Driven by guilt, he hangs himself in ignominy.
In making Judas the much beloved and much respected cousin of Ana, her de facto older brother who is her counselor as she grows up, the novel offers a far different perception than a caricature villain. Judas receives a back story, specifically the story of his deep loathing of the Romans. His father, active in the Jewish underground movement to rid Israel of the hated Romans, was arrested and crucified by the Roman occupational government, and his mother bound into slavery, leaving Judas an orphan raised by his uncle, Ana’s father, who is himself a high-ranking Jew in the Roman government. Judas is uncompromising in his belief that the Roman occupation must immediately end. His risky actions endorse paramilitary operations, often guerilla terrorist acts, designed to rattle Rome. Consequently, he lives on the run, targeted by the Romans for arrest on sight, thus forsaking any chance at an ordinary life or a family.
His dedication is heroic, but his flaw is his impatience. His decision to cooperate with the Romans and help in the arrest of Jesus stems not from greed or hypocrisy but from that same impatient political idealism. He hopes the execution of the radical preacher the Jews had begun to see as the long-promised Messiah would incite widespread unrest and revolution, the only way Judas sees will ensure the end of Roman occupation. His miscalculation grieves him. When he meets Ana the morning of Jesus’s crucifixion, he confesses to her the depth of his miscalculation when, even as he handed Jesus over in the Garden of Gethsemane, he sees in Jesus’s gentle eyes all too clearly the futility of his idealism, his misplaced faith in the mob. “I wanted to help bring God’s kingdom. I thought it was what he wanted, too” (370). He begs Ana for understanding and forgiveness. His suicide marks the fullness of his tragedy, a fragile and tortured man misled and ultimately destroyed by his own idealism.
Yaltha
Ana’s heroic and fearless aunt, Yaltha, is both the victim of and product of the malignant patriarchal culture that Ana resists and ultimately rejects.
That culture, however, does not destroy Yaltha. Yaltha has never accepted silence, her mouth a “wellspring of thrilling and unpredictable utterances” (12). She speaks her mind. “Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders. She trespassed everywhere” (4). If Ana’s own mother sides with the conservative belief of a woman’s secondary status and condemns Ana’s evolution as a writer, and if her father, doting and encouraging until Ana reaches marriageable age and then willing to use his daughter in a powerplay arranged marriage designed to gain him land, only Yaltha mentors Ana’s growing need to express herself, to be her passionate and independent self through writing. Yaltha supplies young Ana with writing supplies and listens with encouragement and sensitivity to her niece’s accounts of her development as a writer. She gifts Ana with the incantation bowl with its promise of making prayers come true. She helps Ana hide her best writings when Ana’s mother comes to destroy Ana’s scrolls.
The tragedy of Yaltha, shared in bits of confession to her niece, reveals her toughness. She was raised within the comparative freedom of Egypt. Her arranged marriage to an abusive tyrant and then the agonies of enduring public accusations of poisoning him marks a difficult triumph for her. Though freed of his enslavement, she suffers exile to the community of women outside Alexandria and must leave behind her only daughter. For 20 years, Yaltha never forgets the pain and the injustice of that separation. Ana becomes her surrogate daughter. She understands Ana’s yearning for the odd stonemason she meets in the marketplace. She accompanies Ana when Ana departs for the difficult life of poverty in Nazareth with Ana’s new husband and his family. When Ana loses her child, it is Yaltha who restores Ana’s faith in her writing by giving her the shattered shards of clay pots to write upon. The reunion of Yaltha and her daughter during Ana’s exile in Alexandria reveals how, although Yaltha is modern in her unyielding belief in the right of women to find and express their voice, Yaltha never forsakes the profound bond of motherhood and family.
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By Sue Monk Kidd
