“... He leaves out the Talmudic alternative that ‘Gabriel came and fixed a tail on her’ (Megillah 12b), a detail elaborated on in later representations of Vashti. The Duke of Alba’s Castilian Bible renders Vashti with an animal’s tail stemming from her head, a detail picked up in Shmarya Levin’s description of a purimshpil held in his home town of Swislowitz... Ginzberg praises Vashti’s making ‘a virtue of necessity,’ her refusal, as such is the quick-witted reply of a woman with no way out of her situation. The contradictions in her portrayal seem to result from the rabbis’ disdain for the king to whom Vashti acts as a negative foil. However, what tellingly remains consistent throughout the rabbis’ rewritings is the inscription of moral and religious integrity. She is condemned as the Persian Vashti, underlining Jewish supremacy, and for her immodesty, a characteristic, as Leila Leah Bronner has explained, that ‘became an overriding obsession in the rabbinic portrayal of women.’ Vashti is such a fascinating figure because she personifies the many fearful aspects of womanhood that are legislated against in cultural configurations of femininity: she is desirable and deplorable, invisible and figured, diseased and, ultimately, disobedient. Despite apparent contradictions, Vashti is ultimately vilified. ...”