Desire After Disaster: Lot and His Daughters

Abstract

Examining images of Lot and his daughters against the setting of the utter destruction of Sodom, this essay highlights the role of visual rhetoric in mediating as well as constructing responses to disaster. Horror is represented rather than recorded, as much invented and assuaged as heightened. The visual imagery of disaster is manipulated and redeployed, put to various, even dissonant purposes, depending on function, context and occasion. Numerous distinctions and paradoxes lie at the heart of Lot’s tale: punishment is the forerunner to selective salvation, destruction co-exists with visibility, doom is overcome by safety, incest couples with sodomy, control battles with indulgence, patriarchal continuity operates against abandonment, stoicism contrasts with disaster.