Abortion and the single woman as literary tropes in the works of Amos Oz — Page 8:
36 No longer able to contain her rage, she schemes to accuse him of a rape he did not commit as revenge for his rejection. Tellingly, at a meeting held to discuss an appropriate response to the nomads’ incursion, one of the male members maliciously suggests that Geula desires to be raped by the Bedouins, symbolising her status as a sexual pariah in the Kibbutz: "Hereupon Rami broke in excitedly and asked what I was waiting for. Was I perhaps waiting for some small incident of rape that Geula could write poems about?” (Oz, "Nomad" 37).
37 Here, Oz employs the device of ‘mirror inversing' to impress upon the reader that the young goat herder, who is a national outsider, is Geula's doppelgänger. Wilfe maintains that her mastery of brewing coffee equates her with the Bedouins who are experts at this, as well as her walking the fields barefoot (147). Aschkenasy, in an excellent article concerning the concept of Woman as the Double, elaborates: "[. . .] Geula comes to realise that, in a strange way, the Bedouin is her double. Both are outcasts, unattractive and unattached, and both seethe with unfulfilled erotic desires. The recognition that the physically revolting nomad, in his primitive existence, is a reflection of her own raging, uncontrollable self, fills Geula with nausea” (125).
38 Unable to demarcate fiction and reality, the circumstances of the event become so real to her that on the way back to her room, unable to forget her 'ordeal', she vomits and cries in the bushes, exhausted from her 'trauma'-reactions usually associated with real rape victims. Lying in the flowering shrubs, she begins to whisper poems to comfort herself, and is so entranced with her daydream that she is oblivious to the fact that she has blocked a snake's hole, preventing it from returning to its lair. After being bitten, she simply removes the fangs from her skin and remains on the ground, choosing to absorb the venom.
39 In "Nomad and Viper" Oz ups the odds by transmuting the simple tale of an unmarried woman to that of a dangerous woman, who, propelled by her sexual frustration and undesirability is driven to acts of extreme irrationality. The encounter with the nomad, the seduction and the subsequent false 'cry of rape' signify the social construct of single female characters peddled by male fiction. Sadly, Oz refrains from probing the dilemma a woman such as Geula faces being unmarried in a community like a Kibbutz, where the institution of the family is paramount. Instead, he outfits her with the archetypal qualities associated in fiction with the spinster: sour disposition, spite and lasciviousness (Rogers 203). A related concern is that, as Geula's story is refracted and filtered through a subjective male view, what we are left with is a clichéd take on the life of a single woman- a portrayal that certainly has the ring of the literary stereotype.
40 Oz conjures up a similar image in the short story "Kol Haneharot" ("All The Rivers" [1]All translations from the Hebrew are mine.) in the shape of its heroine Tova, the sickly poetess, who of all the author's female protagonists is the most grotesque. Here, the narrative lays bare the masculine/feminine bipolar dichotomy, once again, surrendering the narratorial medium to a subjective male voice which ruthlessly disavows female beauty and sexuality, and further reinforces the stereotype of the single woman. On the other hand, the male character is consistently favoured and his masculine virility is showcased, in this instance to exemplify the supposed differences between the male bachelor and the female spinster.