The Red Tent
Anita Diamant

In the novel, The Red Tent, Anita Diamant tells a tale of many women and their journey through life. She describes their experiences and how they try to accomplish their goals. Diamant mainly focuses on her narrator of the story, Dinah. Dinah is a main character in the novel who has all brothers and figures out womanhood a lot on her own and her observations of her four mothers as a child. Diamant really focuses on the idea of womanhood and what is expected of women in this time period and she uses Dinah and her insight as what an average girl would experience while growing up. Dinah was adored and spoiled as a child and she had a lot of goals and visions of what she wanted her life to be like. Being the narrator of the story, Dinah expresses what she is thinking and her point of view on her family and their lives. In The Red Tent, Dinah has a very specific dream of her future as she aspires to be a woman in love with her husband, a mother with many children and someone people look up to. Finding a husband during this time period was a big part of becoming a woman. Dinah wanted these things of course, however she also wanted to find love and a partner to experience life with. She would express how important love was to her and what it meant to fall in love with a successful man and start a family together. For example, Dinah stated, “The story it told was unremarkable: a table of love found and lost – the oldest story in the world. The only story” (Diamant). This quote shows how Dinah looked at love and what she wanted out of it. She expressed how she wanted a relationship where she would feel loved and taken care of. Dinah would spend a lot of time in the red tent and observe her mothers and their relationships. “I like the way he danced. And I like the way we danced together” (Diamant). Dinah stated this about the man in her life and how she appreciates the little things. Dinah wanted to be loved and cared for by a man that she could call her husband. She did not think her life would turn on the way it did with her husband and did not ever want to enter in a marriage from an attack. She dealt with it for a very long time, however always saw her life going in a different direction. Dinah was part of a big family and for the most part enjoyed it. She would spend a lot of time in the red tent with her mothers and grandmother. She would always be in the background observing her family’s behaviors and traditions they had. She wanted to become a mother and have many children. Dinah wanted to take care of someone and love a child. Dinah was always adored and give a lot of attention from her four mothers and was always very grateful for that. When she was little and growing up