Abstract
“The Blank Page”, Isak Dinesen's acclaimed story and its feminist reading, led by Susan Gubar's seminal work, epitomizes the defiance and subversiveness of women's writing. However, what Dinesen refers to in her story as “the germ” of women's narratives, has been ignored. This germ or source is the biblical story of Achsah, the daughter of Caleb (Joshua 15 and Judges 1), a dramatic story of concealed subversion of a national leader who gambled with his daughter to advance his conquests, and that of a daughter who dared to defy her appropriation as the spoils of war. The biblical text and the traditional commentary accompanying it present the story as a domestic narrative of familial arrangements, therefore concealing its political significance and marginalizing it within the context of the national narrative of conquests and settlement in the land of Canaan. Re‐reading the text shifts the focus from the professed context, namely the narrative of conquest whose protagonist is Caleb, to the concealed one, namely the emotional junction of father–daughter relations, whose protagonist is Achsah. Reading the story of Achsah in this new context not only sheds light on Dinesen's view of women's subversiveness, but also outlines the politics of women's resistance and its implications.
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