![]() ![]() ![]() In this essay collection, newly published by Beacon Press, she reexamines the monsters of antiquity through a feminist lens. Medusa struck fear into ancient hearts because she was both deceptively beautiful and hideously ugly Charybdis terrified Odysseus and his men because she represented a churning pit of bottomless hunger.įemale monsters represent “the bedtime stories patriarchy tells itself,” reinforcing expectations about women’s bodies and behavior, argues journalist and critic Jess Zimmerman in Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. What’s more, the tales’ female monsters reveal more about the patriarchal constraints placed on womanhood than they do about women themselves. These stories may sound fantastical today, but for ancient people, they reflected a “quasi-historical” reality, a lost past in which humans lived alongside heroes, gods and the supernatural, as curator Madeleine Glennon wrote for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017. Both are described as unambiguously female. ![]() Earlier, in Homer’s Odyssey, composed around the seventh or eighth century B.C., the Greek hero Odysseus must choose between fighting Scylla, a six-headed, twelve-legged barking creature, and Charybdis, a sea monster of doom. epic Metamorphoses, for example, the Roman poet Ovid wrote about Medusa, a terrifying Gorgon whose serpentine tresses turned anyone who met her gaze into stone. The myths then, to a certain extent, fulfill a male fantasy of conquering and controlling the female.”Īncient male authors inscribed their fear of-and desire for-women into tales about monstrous females: In his first-century A.D. These villains, wrote classicist Debbie Felton in a 2013 essay, “all spoke to men’s fear of women’s destructive potential. In the classical Greek and Roman myths that pervade Western lore today, a perhaps surprising number of these creatures are coded as women. As figments of the imagination, the alien, creepy-crawly, fanged, winged and otherwise-terrifying creatures that populate myths have long helped societies define cultural boundaries and answer an age-old question: What counts as human, and what counts as monstrous? ![]() Monsters reveal more about humans than one might think. ![]()
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