| Summary: | Though Woman Wisdom has often been viewed as a positive
figure for feminism, I will show that the picture is much grimmer. The article
has two parts. First, I will demonstrate that the personification of wisdom
reinscribes the typical ideology of the time along gender, social class, and
racial lines. The eroticization of wisdom as female actually excludes the woman
from the search for truth and knowledge because it assumes its adherents are
male. Woman Wisdom is shown to be upper class, while Folly is poor. And Woman
Wisdom is shown to be xenophobic in her preference for Jewish boys. Second,
wisdom/folly, the dominant dichotomy of these chapters, will be shown to
deconstruct, showing how both Woman Wisdom and Folly are inextricably connected
and partake of each other’s identity. The boundary between the two begins to
blur.
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