Artemisia and Hildegard: An Exorcism in One Act

ARTEMISIA: (Crossing to the slide.) Judith was an Israelite. She was a widow. That’s her in the blue dress. And she had a companion named Abra. That’s Abra in the red. Anyway, Judith and Abra’s village was being attacked. They were under a siege, running out of food. So Judith and Abra went to pay a visit to the enemy general. Judith pretended to like him, and she and Abra got him falling-down drunk, and then they cut off his head. Which, even if the man is passed out, is pretty hard to do. I mean, he’s going to have a certain number of reflexes—and then, of course, there’s the technical problem of the cervical vertebrae, which overlap each other. You’d have to actually cut through the bone… (HILDEGARD clears her throat. ARTEMISIA smiles at her.) I was concerned with the emotional realism of the subject. Most of the painters who did Judith showed her standing at arm’s length, holding out the sword like this… (She illustrates.) …looking squeamish. Well, you can’t even slice a ham from that position, much less the neck of a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man. I wanted to get across the idea that Judith was an ordinary woman, who would encounter the same problems as any one of us, if we were to cut off a man’s head.

ARTEMISIA: But you still needed the men’s permission to move.

HILDEGARD: (Turning to ARTEMISIA.) Of course. But the point is, we got it.

ARTEMISIA: Like asking your husband for a night out with the girls.

HILDEGARD: (Icy.) We were not wives.

ARTEMISIA: What’s the difference? You couldn’t own anything, you couldn’t read or write, you couldn’t go anywhere—

HILDEGARD: (Cutting her off.) The difference is we didn’t have to sleep with them. (Crossing in front of the podium to address the audience.) Yes, we had to work around the men. Every woman has to do that. But the question is, does she work around them for her own gain at the expense of other women—or does she work around them to help liberate her sisters? And there is nothing more tragic than a woman who can’t tell the difference.