Women and Women's Writings from Antiquity Through the Middle Ages: Women in Classical Art and Literature

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WOMEN AND WOMEN'S WRITINGS FROM ANTIQUITY THROUGH THE MIDDLE AGES: WOMEN IN CLASSICAL ART AND LITERATURE

JUDITH P. HALLETT (ESSAY DATE 1984)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

DENISE LARDNER CARMODY (ESSAY DATE 1988)

SOURCE: Carmody, Denise Lardner. "Genesis 2:23-24." In Biblical Woman: Contemporary Reflections on Scriptural Texts, pp. 9-14. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1988.
In the following essay, Carmody approaches the book of Genesis from an analytical perspective informed by contemporary feminism.
Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.

The scholarly consensus is that this text occurs in a stratum of the J, or Yahwist (J from the German Jahwist), tradition. J is the oldest of the traditions woven into Genesis, probably having roots as early as the tenth century b.c.e. It is earthy, shrewd, and the source of some of our most memorable Genesis passages. In contrast to the priestly (P) source that opens Genesis and the Bible, J is less interested in questions of cosmic order and more interested in concrete humanity, with its wonders and scars alike.

Our text occurs in a block of J material extending from 2:4b to 3:24. In terms of the full canonical text, this block, concerned with the creation and disobedience of the first human beings, is in part a reprise of the account of the creation of all the things of heaven and earth (see 1:26-29 for the P account of the rise of human beings) and in part a new venture, a much closer look at the creature of most interest to the Bible. Prior to our verses, the J account has narrated the creation of the earth and the heavens and the formation of the man from dust, into which God breaths the spirit of life. Placed in Eden to keep its gardens, the man is commanded not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. At this time he is alone, apparently a solitary male, and the full force of both the Lord's creative force and command rest on him. God then seems to observe the solitary state of this man and to decide it will not do. So, to make him a helper, God fashions beasts and birds of every kind. (In the J account, the man is the first creature; in the P account, human beings come at the end of the creative process.) However, none of these beasts or birds is satisfactory. Apparently, the man needs a different sort of helper.

There follows the well-known story of the formation of a woman from the rib of the man, whom God has put into a deep sleep. When God takes the woman to the awakened man, he utters the words of our text, every indication being that he is delighted, if not indeed awed. The etymology of woman clearly derives from man, and the story of the rib may be a visual way of putting this derivation. A midrash (Jewish interpretational gloss) on this text offers the opinion that humanity originally was bisexual—an undivided whole.¹ How literally we are to take this opinion is uncertain, but it underscores the mysterious affinity between male and female, which is such as to suggest a common source. The second of our two verses seems in the nature of a homily, a short sermon by way of reaction to the man's exclamation. However, it is a homily with an eye to Israelite custom, as well as the well-nigh universal custom of all peoples: when woman and man marry, they leave (emotionally if not physically) what had previously been their strongest emotional ties: those with their parents. Even when one grants that the extended family structures of the ancient Near East make it possible the author meant to include the new family arrangements set between the spouses, who become daughter and son to another set of parents, the basic reference to the implications of heterosexual encounter seems obvious. The two become one flesh, not just because that is how children get born, not just because that is what families arrange so that children get born, but because from the beginning they have been "one flesh" in the sense of allied, so made physically and emotionally that "helping" defines their relationship.

This said, we must also underscore the fairly obvious patriarchalism or male supremacism of the text. This stance seems more unthinking and assumed than deliberately taught, but it shows quite clearly that the J authors thought of male humanity as the primary instance and of female humanity as something secondary, if not derivative. (One should not push images too hard and assume that the woman's coming from the man's rib means the authors thought in terms of direct physical derivation.) In contrast, the creation account in P makes humanity male and female from the outset (1:27). The idea that women exist to be helpers of men, rather than independent agents or species of humanity equally entitled to receive help, buttresses this male-supremacist reading. J takes us into a patriarchal world in which men place themselves at the center of society (indeed, at the center of creation) and in which women (as well as beasts and birds) exist for men's support.

Nonetheless, the tone of the man's exclamation softens this legitimate reading. However much he accepts the notion that he should have a helper, someone to assuage his lonely estate as the overlord of God's work, he is delighted beyond the measure one would expect had he been shown "man's best friend" or a noble steed. Even were these animals to prove themselves exceptional helpers, servants willing and able to labor from dawn to dusk, the man would still be alone, the word that dominates Gen. 2:18, where God is musing about the situation of his first creature. The helper the man sees upon awakening from the sleep that allowed the removal of his rib bids fair to dispel his loneliness. Furthermore, we may infer that she seems a work worthy of God, something that can more than redeem the man's loss of part of his bodily substance.

The exclamation thus stresses the unity of the now two examples of humankind. To bone-depth, as something inscribed in the flesh of both, they are together. By cleaving, they make a natural unity, a primordial building block. Indeed, their sexual union will be a reminder of their unified beginnings. Even when the man is made the source of the woman (in an arrogation of birthing symbolism to males that has parallels in other patriarchal societies—woman's primacy in producing new human life is something male-dominated societies everywhere have struggled with), the more important point is the conjunction of their destinies. From the moment the man delights in his womanly helper/companion/coordinated flesh, their story is bound to unfold as one family tale.

If we now step back to take stock of how this text rings in a feminist age, we realize, perhaps fully for the first time, that the Bible is one of feminists' great problems. For centuries, people have been able to go to this text, usually thinking it virtually God's dictated word (both traditional Jews and traditional Christians tended to think this way), and find an anthropology, an understanding of human nature, that makes masculinity primary and femininity secondary, or ancillary. The tip-off to the patriarchal mentality comes in the biological shift that makes the male the producer of the female. This twist so flies in the face of how every mother's son has come into being that we should hear the alarm bells ringing. Patriarchy felt it had to say that, in the beginning, at the crucial first hour, masculinity begot femininity. After that beginning, the fathers perhaps felt, the helper could take over the ongoing reproduction. The male had given the first initiative, had provided the creative impulse (and had been accorded the first honors), so the patriarchal mythology remained intact.

One notes similar tendencies in such parallel creation accounts as the Japanese. There, in the Shinto chronicles, the male, Izanagi, has to speak first, because that is what is fitting. Because Izanami, the female, breaks this fitting pattern, their first child is defective.² On the other hand, in many places the Bible is its own debunker of patriarchalism, including in this text. For it is not the first male who really creates, but only the Lord God. Thus any tendency of patriarchal Israelite mythology to snatch the creative power from females and arrogate it to themselves runs into the textual problem of God's creative primacy. At best the first male was the matter from which God fashioned the first female. A certain male primacy remains, in that the myth first considers humanity to be solitary maleness, but this "advantage" is proven inadequate, unworkable, and so any extended claims to male supremacy easily could be debunked ("When you were on your own, you couldn't hack it"). Throughout, God's judgment and creative power are truly significant, and by the end God has made it clear that authentic humanity is a delightful coordination of male and female.

Insofar as present-day culture allows feminists to start from an assumption that men and women are radically equal in their humanity, it places feminists in a dialectical relationship with the biblical text. We shall see that this is a regular occurrence. Here feminists may judge themselves both debtors to the text for a deep insight into the coordination, the shared origin and fate, of men and women, and people called to accuse the text of patriarchal sexual biases. In other words, feminists may find themselves not only recipients of a valuable heritage but people whom honesty forces to challenge, criticize, and even, at places, reject the biblical text. Such a finding implies the heady wine of critical hermeneutics—theory of interpretation that wants both to listen and to respond. We shall see a good deal more of this need for a critical mind, but here we should mark well the maturity that critical interpretation requires. One cannot do it well as an ideologue, an absolutist. Neither unchallenging fidelity to the letter of the scriptural text nor ungracious refusal to recognize the contributions of biblical faith will do the job. If the text manifestly is inadequate to today's feminists' needs, it remains true that the text has helped millions of men and women, however unknowingly, to cherish one another as flesh of one flesh and bone of one bone.

Notes

W. Gunter Plaut, ed., The Torah: A Modern Commentary (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), p. 32.
Rysyaku Tsunoda, William Theodore DeBary, and Donald Keene, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 25-26. This story is discussed in Denise Lardner Carmody and John Tully Carmody, The Story of World Religions (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1988), pp. 441-44.

ANNETTE DEPLA (ESSAY DATE 1994)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

SUE BLUNDELL (ESSAY DATE 1995)

SOURCE: Blundell, Sue. "Myth: An Introduction." In Women in Ancient Greece, pp. 14-19. London: British Museum Press, 1995.
In the following excerpt, Blundell reviews the principal ways in which women are portrayed in Greek myth: typically as powerful goddesses, royal figures, or destructive monsters, but in many cases as liminal or victimized individuals.

Women in Myth: Goddesses, Royals and Monsters

The heading above refers to the three levels of being which women assume in Greek myth. The divine level is dominated by the figures of the six goddesses (Hera, Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, Demeter, Hestia) who together with six gods (Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Hermes, Ares, Hephaestus) form a ruling élite known as the Olympian deities. But there are also many lesser goddesses, the relatives and associates of the Olympians; and a number of divine female collectives, such as the Fates, the Muses and the Graces. On the human level of representation, myth features women from a number of social classes. But it would be true to say that the only ones with starring roles are the queens and princesses of the ruling households, such as Helen or Electra. This is indicative of the fact that the Bronze Age, when many Greeks were still ruled by monarchs, was a crucial time for the creation of myth. Royalty was one of the bits of traditional social baggage that Greek myth carried with it into later ages, but its presence did not mean that the stories were of no relevance to women and men of other classes. When, for example, the tragedian Aeschylus was writing about the queen Clytemnestra in fifth-century Athens, where no royal women existed, his play would not have been dismissed as having no implications for the more egalitarian society of his own day.

On the third level of being there is the female monster, who is part-woman and part-animal. Examples of this type are the Gorgons, three sisters who had golden wings, boars' tusks and snaky hair, and who turned men to stone; and the Sphinx, whose form embraced that of woman, lioness and bird. These creatures speak most obviously of the fear which women inspired in men. But it is worth remembering that beings which are terrifying can also be useful, because they help to keep one's enemies at bay. So, while Freud's theory that the Gorgon's head represents the castrating female genitals should certainly not be dismissed out of hand,¹ it should also be borne in mind that antefixes in the form of these heads were commonly used to decorate Greek temples. Similarly the Sphinx, which in myth destroys those hapless passers-by who cannot answer its riddles, often served as a grave-marker in Greek cemeteries of the sixth century b.c. Both these objects doubtless had the function of frightening away evil spirits. This points to the ambiguity of the male response to the female. Even the Furies, the ghastly spirits of vengeance with Gorgon-style snaky hair, who generally seem to be pretty straight-forwardly nasty, turn into kindly beings, or Eumenides, at the end of the play of that name by Aeschylus.

The amount of speculation prompted by the Greek goddesses in recent years makes it necessary to provide some additional comment on their history. It is a frequently-noted paradox that the societies which worshipped these prominent female deities were ones in which real women had a very low status. Many commentators have tried to account for this anomaly by resorting to a hypothetical reconstruction of the origins of Greek religion. According to this hypothesis, before the arrival of the Greeks on the Greek mainland, in about 2000 b.c., the native population consisted of settled agriculturalists, who worshipped deities who were primarily female and were associated with the fertility of the earth. The Greeks then brought with them a set of strong male deities more suited to their own way of life, which hitherto had revolved around warfare, pillage and the use of horses. As the native and Greek populations combined, their religions went through a process of fusion whereby the resident females and the incoming males were brought together in a single system. The tensions generated by this development found expression in mythological accounts of friction between females and males, one example being the stormy marriage of Hera and Zeus.²

Nowadays it is widely accepted that this reconstruction is a gross oversimplification. The culture of ancient Greece was a complex phenomenon made up of many strands, and its anomalies cannot be explained simply in terms of the racial differences which are the basis of this theory. Archaeological evidence from the Cycladic islands and from Crete, dating from the Early and Middle Bronze Age periods, would certainly seem to indicate that female deities were widely worshipped during that time,³ and this may go some way towards explaining the prominence of goddesses in later Greek religion. There is, however, very little evidence to support the idea, still commonly encountered, that in the prehistoric era there existed a single unified Mother or Earth Goddess, who was worshipped throughout Europe and the Middle East. It seems much more likely that there were quite a few female deities, with varying functions, in early Greece. The historical process whereby these goddesses were gradually incorporated into a male-dominated pantheon cannot now be recovered, because the evidence simply does not exist. It would undoubtedly have been a complex transformation, involving social, political and cultural changes as well as external influences.

The notion of a prehistoric Mother Goddess has been linked by some people with the idea of matriarchy, or rule by women. The matriarchal era as such is outside the scope of this work, since, if it ever existed, it would have been located in the Stone and Early Bronze Ages. However, since the idea of matriarchy has influenced the interpretation of Greek myths, a brief discussion is necessary. As a theory it relies very heavily on those myths which describe the suppression of women's power. The upholders of matriarchy argue that these contain echoes of the historical transition from matriarchal to patriarchal government. But this reliance on myth makes the theory a very dubious one, since, as we have seen, the myths which we possess were the products of the adaptations worked upon them by later patriarchal societies. For example, it was probably not until the sixth century b.c. that the story of Agamemnon's murder was altered in order to make Clytemnestra the chief perpetrator. In other words, the 'matriarchal' element, the woman's attempt to rule and her violent overthrow, was added at a later stage, at a time when patriarchal domination in Greece was firmly established.

There is no clear evidence to prove that matriarchy ever existed as a historical reality. Many feminist scholars today, while accepting that some prehistoric societies were much more egalitarian than later historical ones, reject the notion of outright female dominance.⁴ As a feature of myth, rule by women (which is not in fact all that common) can best be understood, not as a memory of historical events, but as a narrative 'providing justification for a present and perhaps permanent reality by giving an invented "historical" explanation of how this reality was created'.⁵ In other words, the myth explains why men and not women rule, and hence helps to validate and reinforce male control. It is the 'justifiable' male take-over which is the crucial factor. So, to take the example of Clytemnestra, as a ruler she is shown to be bloody and tyrannical, and the restoration of male power is seen as something to be welcomed.

A brief survey of the symbolic associations of the mythological female concludes this [essay]. Prominent among these is the identification of women with the wildness of nature—that is, with whatever exists beyond the boundaries of an ordered civilisation. It is generally assumed that it is women's capacity for child-bearing, and hence their alignment with natural forces beyond male control, that prompts these commonly envisaged relationships with trees, plants, springs, birds, and so on.⁶ This nature symbolism can often be found to be operating within a 'nature versus culture' model, where men are seen as the representatives of a civilised society which is somehow opposed to the forces of nature. One example occurs in Euripides' play The Bacchae, where the king, Pentheus, is associated with ordered life within the walls of the city, while the women worshippers of Dionysus whom he is persecuting are repeatedly linked to the savage world of the mountainside and its wild animals. That the encounter between nature and culture can be seen as leading to the destruction of men is demonstrated in this instance by the appalling fate of Pentheus, who is torn to pieces by the women when he tries to spy on them.⁷

We have already seen, in the discussion of female monsters, that women in myth can be terrifying and destructive. This is equally true of regular mortal women, among whom betrayers, avengers and murderers are legion. Not all of these women are isolated individuals: there are also whole societies of women who murder their husbands, such as the daughters of Danaus or the women of Lemnos. Men in Greek myth can, of course, do their fair share of killing, but this is usually a straightforward manly affair, in the hunt or on the battlefield. Typically, a woman employs trickery and deception in order to dispose of others; and the people disposed of are generally related to her by blood or by marriage. The ultimate negation of the woman who adheres to her proper role in life is the mother who murders her sons, and of these there are several examples. In The Bacchae, for instance, Agave is the leader of the band of women worshippers who tear her son Pentheus limb from limb.

Clearly these themes demonstrate a great anxiety about women—one which does not appear to be justified by any of the facts which are known to us. The question of this anxiety will be taken up again.…For now, it should be noted that the notion of women's destructiveness can probably be linked in part to their perceived closeness to nature, and hence their perceived remoteness from civilised values. As Gould has written, 'women are not part of, do not belong easily in, the male ordered world of the "civilised" community; they have to be accounted for in other terms, and they threaten continually to overturn its stability or subvert its continuity, to break out of the place assigned to them by their partial incorporation within it. Yet they are essential to it: they are producers and bestowers of wealth and children, the guarantors of due succession … Like the earth and once-wild animals, they must be tamed and cultivated by men, but their "wildness" will out.' (1980, p. 57).

Implicit in what Gould is saying here is a notion of women as 'liminal'. This is an anthropological term, meaning 'existing on, or crossing, boundaries'.⁸ Women in Greek myth can be seen more often than not to be boundary-crossers: they are represented as anomalous creatures who, while they live in the ordered community and are vital to its continuance, do not really belong there. They are always liable to cross over its boundaries into some disorderly state of being, and for this reason they are seen as highly dangerous.

Perhaps equally as common as the destructive women of myth, though receiving far less attention, are the women who are victims. They are united with their more outgoing sisters in a basic antithesis: mortal women who are active are very often destroyers, while mortal women who are passive are very often destroyed. This is particularly true of the scores of women who are raped or seduced by gods in Greek myth: in the sexual act or in subsequently giving birth they are liable to perish, often in very nasty ways.

Notes

See S. Freud (1922). The fact that in visual images the Gorgon has a gaping mouth, and that the Greek word stoma denotes both a mouth and either the cervix of the uterus or the lips of the vulva, lends some plausibility to Freud's theory. For Freud, the snaky hair of the Gorgon symbolises both pubic hair and, in a typically Freudian piece of acrobatic thinking, a multiplication of penises.
For one version of this theory, see Guthrie (1950), pp. 27-35.
For discussions of the evidence, and a résumé of recent references, see Ehrenberg (1989), pp. 66-76, and Goodison (1989), pp. 4-11.
For example, see Ehrenberg (1989), pp. 63-6.
Bamberger (1974), p. 267.
For a much fuller discussion of this symbolisation, see Ortner (1974).
I would not want to suggest that in this play Euripides is 'for' civilisation and 'against' nature: the work is far more complex than this. See pp. 174-7.
For a useful discussion of liminality, see Friedrich (1978), pp. 132-3.

Bibliography

J. Bamberger (1974) 'The myth of matriarchy: why men rule in primitive society', in Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974), pp 263-80.

M. Ehrenberg (1989) Women in prehistory British Museum Press.

S. Freud (1922) Medusa's head, reproduced in the Standard edition of the complete psychological works, Hogarth Press, 1955, vol. 18, pp 273-4.

P. Friedrich (1978) The meaning of Aphrodite University of Chicago Press.

L. Goodison (1989) 'Death, women and the sun: symbolism of regeneration in early Aegean religion' Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies supplement 53.

J. Gould (1980) 'Law, custom and myth: aspects of the social position of women in Classical Athens' Journal of Hellenic Studies 100, pp 38-59.

W. K. C. Guthrie (1950) The Greeks and their gods Methuen.

S. B. Ortner (1974) 'Is female to male as nature is to culture?', in Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974), pp 67-87.

M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (1974) Woman, culture and society Stanford University Press.

Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion