Laughing with MEDUSA : Classical Myth and Feminist Thought

186 k a t i e fl e m i n g

Similarly, for feminism, Antigone’s totemic value—her eternal
exemplarity—seems always already to recoup previous appropri-
ations, negative or positive, even if (as Simon Goldhill has suggested
in his study of feminism’s relationship to Ismene), this is won with a
modicum of historical and textual amnesia. As with any politicized
appropriation of classical mythology, feminism invests in a selective
recovery of its heroine. But to assert truly Antigone’s continual
value, it might do well to acknowledge her past.

part iii

Myth and History

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7

A Woman’s History of Warfare

E ll e n O’Gorman

outoi gunaikos estin himeirein mache¯s
It is not womanly to desire combat

(Aeschylus, Agamemnon 940)
Carlo Guercio, the giant Italian soldier in Louis de Bernie`res’ best-
selling novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, gives an account of his
friend’s death to his friend’s mother and wife. It is a brief and highly
sanitized account, interspersed with a parenthetical narrative, the
truth about Francesco’s death.
‘What were his last words, Signor?’

‘He recommended himself to you, Signora, and he died with the name of
the Virgin on his lips.’
(He opened his eyes once and said, ‘Don’t forget our pact to kill that bastard
Rivolta.’ Later on, in a great spasm of pain, he grasped my collar with his
hands. He said, ‘Mario.’ I took the little mouse from my pocket and placed
it in his hands. In the ecstasy of his own death he clenched his fist so tightly
that the little creature died with him. To be precise, its eyes came out.)1

Many thanks to the editors of this volume for their incisive comments, as
well as to Charles Martindale for his Homeric expertise and to Robert
Fowler for reading and responding to this paper.

1 Louis de Bernie`res, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (London, 1994), 126.

190 e l l e n o ’ g o rm an

This narrative in parenthesis, as becomes clear near its conclusion,
is addressed to Francesco’s mother, but under the title ‘the things I do
not tell Francesco’s mother’. In many ways this scene plays out the
final page of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where, in Mar-
low’s encounter with Kurtz’s Intended, the romantic lie about
Kurtz’s dying words is uttered in a room which appears to resonate
with the horrible truth. Marlow’s motivations differ considerably
from those of Carlo Guercio, but in both scenes the bereaved
woman has a narrative withheld from her; in place of brutal detail
and moral compromise she is given a story that tells her—what?
That it was all for her sake after all, that it was all in her name. This
is the key moment from Heart of Darkness:

‘The last word he pronounced was—your name.’
I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an
exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of
unspeakable pain. ‘I knew it—I was sure!’2

Female complicity is here sought through the assurance that men
fight wars for the sake of women. What both these scenes in different
ways suggest is that this is a convenient lie in which both male
narrator and female listener collude. And there is more than a hint
of patronage in withholding the truth from these women. Marlow
says, ‘I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark
altogether’. Thus he effectively marginalizes the woman, keeping her
away from the heart of darkness at the centre of his story. Carlo
Guercio, from perhaps less protective instincts, keeps the women
away from the true story of death in the trenches in order to preserve
for himself a space of male comradeship and male love. While these
men propound the tale that it was all for the women, they also
implicitly maintain that women have nothing to do with it at all.

The exclusion of these novelistic women from knowledge about
the true story of warfare is mirrored at the level of ‘professional’
military historiography, where authority is so often equated with
experience. ‘It is not possible for a man with no experience of action
in war to write well about what happens in a war.’3 When the

2 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth, 1995), 147.
3 Polybius, Histories 12. 25g. 1.

a woman’s history of warfare 191

historian Polybius makes this pronouncement he doubly de-author-
izes women, first by claiming only for warriors the right properly to
represent warfare, and secondly by considering only men for quali-
fication or disqualification. For women, the question is simply not
relevant. Contemporary military history, too, remains sufficiently
entrenched in soldierly practice for the writer John Keegan to begin
his history with an apologetic confession of his lack of combat
experience: ‘I was not fated to be a warrior.’4 In this award-winning
history of warfare, Keegan inserts an ‘interlude’ at the end of his
first chapter (‘War in Human History’). The interlude, entitled
‘Limitations on Warmaking,’ concludes with this paragraph:

Half of human nature—the female half—is in any case highly ambivalent
about warmaking. Women may be both the cause or pretext of warmak-
ing—wife-stealing is a principal source of conflict in primitive societies—
and can be instigators of violence in an extreme form: Lady Macbeth is a
type who strikes a universal chord of recognition; they can also be remark-
ably hard-hearted mothers of warriors, some apparently preferring the pain
of bereavement to the shame of accepting the homeward return of a
coward. Women can, moreover, make positively messianic war leaders,
evoking through the interaction of the complex chemistry of femininity
with masculine responses a degree of loyalty and self-sacrifice from their
male followers which a man might well fail to call forth. Warfare is,
nevertheless, the one human activity from which women, with the most
insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart. Women
look to men to protect them from danger, and bitterly reproach them when
they fail as defenders. Women have followed the drum, nursed the
wounded, tended the fields and herded the flocks when the man of the
family has followed his leader, have even dug the trenches for men to defend
and laboured in the workshops to send them their weapons. Women,
however, do not fight. They rarely fight among themselves and they never,
in any military sense, fight men. If warfare is as old as history and as
universal as mankind, we must now enter the supremely important limita-
tion that it is an entirely masculine activity.5

4 John Keegan A History of Warfare (London, 1993), xiii. Compare
Keegan’s opening gambit in his earlier work, The Face of Battle: A Study
of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (Harmondsworth, 1976) p. 13—‘I
have not been in a battle.’—and his ensuing analysis of the usefulness of
military history for (exclusively male) teachers and students.

5 Keegan, History of Warfare, 75–6.

192 e l l e n o ’ g o rm an

The first point to note about Keegan’s last word on women in
warfare (his text continues for nearly 400 pages) is how his exclu-
sion of women from warmaking (and thereby from the category of
‘mankind’) depends upon a highly specialized definition of war,
excluding preparation for war, material or rhetorical support of
the war effort, and even such activities as nursing, which have for
centuries placed women in dangerous proximity to combat zones.6
For Keegan, ‘war’ can only be used to denote fighting ‘in a military
sense’. The second point to note is how the women in Keegan’s
account are complicit with their marginalization: they ‘stood apart’
from war as if of their own volition. But what might perhaps strike
the reader more forcibly than either of these aspects is Keegan’s
reference to ‘the most insignificant exceptions’ to his sweeping
generalization. Having alluded to Helen of Troy, the Spartan
women, and Boadicea, Keegan returns to his history of warfare,
but even the most casual dipper into history books might be left
asking ‘what about Artemisia of Halicarnassus? or the Dahomean
army of eighteenth-century West Africa? or Jennie Hodgers and the
other women who fought in the American Civil War? or Flora
Sandes of the First World War’s Serbian Army?’7 The problem
emerges that there are far too many ‘insignificant exceptions’ to
the exclusion of women from warfare. And yet, curiously, they have
never been emplotted into a continuous history; each individual
struggle to admit women into the military is represented as an
aberration without antecedent or successor.

Why have these discrete examples of women in warfare remained in
the margins of history? One could say that this avoidance of a histor-
ical tradition which might create a continuity to which each individual
woman might appeal reflects an ambivalence towards both warfare
and history. In the latter case feminists frequently draw attention to
the dangers of a historical tradition which can submerge a revolution-

6 Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge, 2001), 102–6, con-
siders how the presence of women in combat zones can be made invisible in
statistical representations of women in the military.

7 Artemisia: Herodotus, Histories 7. 99; the Dahomey: Goldstein, War
and Gender, 60–4; women in the Civil War: Goldstein, War and Gender,
108; Flora Sandes: Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-
Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London, 1999), 306–9.

a woman’s history of warfare 193

ary movement rather than enabling it. For some women in warfare,
perhaps, empowerment can be found in a representation of their
actions as innovative, without antecedent.8 So too plotting a continu-
ous history of women in warfare might enable a more conservative
integration of women into the military, but here many feminists alert
us to the dangers of thus validating militaristic culture. ‘[W]e face a
dilemma: putting our effort into gaining equal opportunity for those
women who are used most directly by the military only perpetuates
the notion that the military is so central to the entire social order that it
is only when women gain access to its core that they can hope to fulfil
their hopes and aspirations.’9

The feminist project with history has often been glossed as ‘writ-
ing women back into history’, in which case women’s role in warfare
would seem to be long overdue for revisionist treatment. But the
problem, as outlined above, is that military history appears to stand
forth as the quintessentially patriarchal discourse ‘against which
‘woman’ and its multiple synonyms may be said to come up at
least five to eight inches short’.10 Feminist historiography attempts
to counteract the effects of this discourse by configuring the project
of writing women back into history as a transformation not only of
women but also of history.

The challenges posed by feminist and other forms of critical
theory have already transformed the discipline and practice of
history, in particular through the challenge to rethink those received
wisdoms which constitute the basis from which we understand the
past. At the same time attempts to reconceptualize the place of war

8 So, for example, Miriam Cooke is anxious to distinguish post-modern
warfare from modern and pre-modern forms, precisely in order to highlight
particular irruptions of female representation as new and revolutionary.
Miriam Cooke, Women and the War Story (Berkeley, 1996), 103–7.

9 Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of
Women’s Lives (London, 1983), 16–17. See also Cynthia Enloe, Maneu-
vers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley,
2000), 33; and Jane Marcus, ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at
War’, in Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich and Susan Merrill
Squier (eds.), Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Represen-
tation (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), 124–67.

10 Katherine Kearns, Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and Feminist
Theory: The Search for Critical Method (Cambridge, 1997), 147.

194 e l l e n o ’ g o rm an

in society, to redefine it as more than ‘just fighting’ and less than ‘the
core of the social order’ have moved the sphere of military history
beyond the traditional combat narrative. Thus the field of battle
remains clear as a refuge for those historians who wish to avoid the
challenges of rethinking history.

The central line of resistance here can be located along the issue of
representation. The Osprey Companion to Military History, pub-
lished in 1996, contains a number of entries on representations of
war (in drama, film, music) listing and summarizing the most prom-
inent Western works, including the Iliad, and stating whether these
works are pro- or anti-war.11 What these entries reflect is a sense that
representation is an unproblematic affair, requiring no further ana-
lytic probing. The certainty assumed by military historians of a clear
relationship from action to representation validates the assumptions
that in this area authority continues to be grounded in experience,
and that representation translates back into military action.

For a historian like Polybius, as we have already seen, the author-
ity of experience is a necessary prerequisite to writing well about
warfare; earlier in his analysis, he has outlined what ‘writing well’
must entail. ‘While a bare statement of events can interest us, it is of
no use whatsoever; with the addition of causes to the narrative, the
usefulness of the history bears fruit.’12 Thus history leads back to
praxis; the authority of experience produces the proper history
which ‘bears fruit’ in its application to further action. Warrior
speaks to warrior across the centuries, and the translation from
writing to practice and back again is clear and unproblematic. Yet
the emphasis on causes reminds us of the narratives told to the
women at the start of this essay; these women are denied the bare
statement of events, but they are told the cause: that the war has
been fought for them. The question of causes and their proper
representation lies off the field of battle, and is something in
which women could be concerned, about which they could claim
some experience and authority.

11 Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker (eds.), The Osprey Companion
to Military History (London, 1996); The Osprey Companion to Military
History has no entry under ‘feminism’.

12 Polybius, Histories, 12. 25b. 2.

a woman’s history of warfare 195

The positioning of women as (authorities for) the cause of war
enables the representation of Woman simultaneously as fragile, in
need of protection, and as scapegoat, bearer of blame for all evil.
This is a familiar and somewhat depressing positioning of women; it
is, moreover, a far from innocent position from which to write a
history of warfare, traditionally a narrative which assumes its own
transparency. The historian takes his own disinterested stance as
read, but a woman who chooses to represent war must take up a
different stance: the position of a woman already implicated in the
reasons for war. This is not a simple position to adopt, since it
always risks becoming complicit with the validation of warfare,
but therein also lies its potential. Instead of saying that this position
disqualifies the woman in advance from the traditional role of the
disinterested historian, we could see this shift of position as the first
move in transforming the history of warfare.

The myth of Helen is an obvious choice when considering a
possible role for women in interrogating histories of warfare, since
women’s position as the implicit reason for war—‘this is all for
you’—is made explicit in Helen’s role as the cause of the Trojan
War and as the beginning of Greek history.13 She is, as many
scholars have remarked, simultaneously the most beautiful and
the most reviled woman. The position from which she speaks
about war, therefore, is far from innocent; it risks complicity, yet
this risk could also be what offers to her a more self-aware perspec-
tive as a historian of warfare.

The first context in which we can look at Helen’s history is in the
immediate aftermath of the Trojan War, as the women of Troy await
allocation to different victorious Greek generals. This is the scene of
Euripides’ Trojan Women. Here women’s voices dominate the
‘action’, taking up about four-fifths of the lines of the play: as well
as the female chorus, we hear the words of Hecuba, Cassandra,
Andromache, and Helen herself. Nevertheless, this play, at first
reading, seems to reinforce much of the marginalizing of women
which I have already noted: these women do not narrate the war,
instead they lament. The lamentation, situated invariably in the

13 Matthew Gumpert, Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical
Past (Madison, 2001), 10.

196 e l l e n o ’ g o rm an

aftermath of warfare, echoes the ‘cry. . . of unspeakable pain’
uttered by Kurtz’s Intended in response to Marlowe’s false account
of her beloved’s death.

Within this scene of lamentation, however, the Trojan women
repeatedly return to the question of the causes of their predicament,
the cause of the war. Helen surfaces time and again in their speeches,
as ‘hateful’ (Tro. 132), ‘detested by the gods’ (Tro. 1213), a source
of ‘dishonour’ (Tro. 132), ‘infamy’ (Tro. 133), and ‘destruction’
(Tro. 771). Andromache’s extended curse of Helen, indeed, seems
to be prompted by her own use of the word aition, cause (Tro. 765).
In one respect Euripides’ play offers a splitting of the dual role of
women in narratives of war, as he shows us on the one hand the
pathos of the women deprived of their men’s protection and on
the other the vituperation of the woman positioned as the cause
of the war. By demonstrating what happens to defeated women he
reminds us that the Trojans were not just fighting ‘for’ Helen, that
they were also fighting ‘for’ Cassandra, Hecuba, and Andromache.
From this perspective the Trojan women’s insistence on Helen as the
‘sole cause’ of war looks a little like anxious abjection onto one
women of all the blame implicitly attached to all women for being
the women that men fight for.14

Yet the causality put forward by the women of this play is not
quite so univocal as at first appears. Cassandra first articulates the
horrible paradox of so many men dying for one woman:

‘The Greeks, because of one woman, of one love,
hunting Helen, destroyed countless men.’ (Tro. 368–9)

‘One’ is opposed to ‘countless’ in an analysis of gain and loss.15 The
chorus, later, echoes Cassandra’s words:

‘Wretched Troy, you have destroyed countless men,
for the sake of one woman and a hated marriage.’ (Tro. 780–1)

14 Ra’anana Meridor, ‘Creative Rhetoric in Euripides’ Troades’ CQ, ns
50 (2000), 16–29, 28, comments on ‘The omission of the Trojans’ own
responsibility for their fate.’

15 The juxtaposition of ‘one’ and ‘many’ is a recurring feature of Helen’s
representation (cf. e.g. Aeschylus, Ag. 1455) but also a frequent contrast
within rhetoric more generally.

a woman’s history of warfare 197

While all the women (except Helen herself) agree in positioning
Helen as the one woman, the sole cause of war, there is some
ambiguity about the blame to be attached to the agents of warfare
here. Cassandra’s statement initially seems clear enough; because of
Helen, the Greeks destroyed countless Trojan men, and for this they
deserve blame. But when echoed by the Chorus, the repetition of the
verb apo¯ lesan/apo¯ lesas, ‘to destroy’ or ‘to lose’, becomes more
problematical. Does the Chorus blame Troy for losing its own
men (or for destroying its own men? or for destroying Greeks?)
because of one woman?

Euripides’ play, as I have remarked, could be read as separating
out the two aspects of women implicit in the phrase ‘fighting for
women’. While the Trojan women agree in positioning Helen as the
sole cause of war, they do not agree about how men should respond
to this cause. Their statements about Helen, furthermore, set up a
dissonance of causalities which counterpoints the universal state-
ments of hatred and disapprobation. In English we could say the
men fight ‘for’ Helen, or ‘on account of’ or ‘because of’ or ‘for the
sake of’; the women in Euripides’ play say dia (Tro. 368), or huper
(Tro. 370), or houneka (Tro. 372), or apo (Tro. 772), or charin (Tro.
781). Never is a preposition of cause repeated in relation to Helen,
and some prepositions have more causal force than others. The
effect of this is to challenge the notion that naming Helen as cause
was ever going to be a simple matter. If we respond by translating
each preposition into the other, by saying, for example, that dia is
the same as huper, we risk missing the point that the use of a variety
of prepositions could be seen to represent contestation over the
proper representation of cause (a representational issue taken for
granted by most historians). Yet can we really see in these colourless
functional words the outlines of an important debate about the
extent of Helen’s responsibility for the suffering of everyone in-
volved in the Trojan War?

Curiously enough, generations of philologists have done just
that.16 Eduard Fraenkel, in his commentary on Aeschylus’s

16 Lillian Doherty, in her essay also in this volume, comments on the
ironies and possible compromises facing the feminist as ‘well-trained clas-
sicist’. It seems to me that there is a feminist as well as a philological

198 e l l e n o ’ g o rm an

Agamemnon, devotes over a page of close-written text to the ques-
tion of whether diai (‘because of/by means of’) means the same
thing as heneka (‘on account of/for the sake of’). The grammatical
discussion of whether a preposition is causal or instrumental, or
both, quickly becomes concerned with the question of Helen’s guilt,
and even the extent of her agency in the destruction of others: ‘Not
by her hand, certainly, but by all her faults of commission and
omission, for example by her having lived throughout ten years in
Troy as the wife of Paris.’17 Yet the philologist’s certainty about
separating out cause from instrument/agent is overturned in the
Trojan women’s representation of Helen. Hecuba and Andromache,
the two most prominent Trojan women of the play, bypass the
elusive nature of causal/instrumental prepositions by representing
Helen as an agent of destruction. In so doing, they offer their own
commentary on what it means to be the cause of a war; they also
introduce a narrative of warfare which casts Helen (rather than any
Greek hero) as the warrior who visits the most destruction upon
Troy. Indeed, the first mention of Helen in the play casts her in this
light, in Hecuba’s first speech:

‘Alas, into the gulf of Troy [came the Greek ships]
in pursuit of the hateful
spouse of Menelaus, dishonour for Castor,

infamy for Eurotas,
who slaughtered
the begetter of fifty children,

Priam, and drove me,
unhappy Hecuba, to this ruin.’ (Tro. 130–7)

The subject of the war narrative begins as ‘Greek ships’ (from line
122), while Helen appears here in familiar aspect as the prize of war.
The shift to Helen as the subject of a war narrative, with the violent
verb sphazei, ‘to butcher’, is a surprise; by the end of the sentence
she has replaced the Greek ships as the subject of exo¯ keile, ‘to run
aground’.18 The placement of Helen in the sphere of warfare is

response to those who would object that these are ‘just prepositions’, which
involves the politics of deciding what is and is not important in the text.

17 Eduard Fraenkel, Aeschylus, Agamemnon (Oxford, 1950) on Ag. 448.
18 Compare the famous word play on Helene¯ helenaus—‘Helen ship-
destroyer’ (Aeschylus. Ag. 683).

a woman’s history of warfare 199

emphatic, and is continued by both Hecuba and Andromache
throughout the play.

Within this context, which we might term a debate on how
properly to represent causes, Helen herself shows up to challenge
the one aspect of causality on which the other women agree. Her
speech, addressed to Menelaus as arbiter and to Hecuba as antag-
onist, has been described as ‘the cheapest court-room pleading’;19
she appears to lose and to be led off to her death. The assumption
that she will charm her way out of the situation—implied by Hecu-
ba’s warning to Menelaus (Tro. 1049) not to travel on the same ship
as his wife—predisposes the listener to judge the speech mere soph-
istry. But Helen’s defence remains unchallenged at the very point
where she enjoins responsibility on Hecuba herself; indeed, Helen
places Hecuba’s role in the war at the forefront of her arguments:

First, then, this woman brought forth the beginnings of these troubles
by giving birth to Paris; secondly, the old man destroyed [apo¯ lese]
Troy and me, by not killing the infant,
that hateful fake firebrand, that Alexander. (Tro. 919–22)

When Helen interrogates causality in this way, she picks up on some
of the threads running through the other women’s speeches in the
play. I have already noted the ambiguity of the Chorus’s lament,
‘wretched Troy, you have lost/destroyed countless men’, where it is
not clear how much responsibility for the loss should be assigned to
the agents of the war. Even Hecuba’s pathetic description of her
aged husband, the father of fifty children, is echoed in Helen’s
suggestion that in choosing to raise all his children, Priam should
take some responsibility for the grief they subsequently bring him.20
Finally, in response to the repeated accusations of the other women,
in which the disgrace of her sexual behaviour is strongly implicated

19 Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca,
NY, 1994), 139. Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 80, comments that ‘the critic’s
condemnation of Helen’s rhetorical duplicity is always a displaced acknow-
ledgement of her beauty’; his critic is explicitly aligned with the male
character in this scene.

20 In a similar vein Herodotus, in his well-known challenge to the Helen
story, suggests that Priam’s refusal to give Helen back to the Greeks (if she
had ever come to Troy, that is) would have implicated him in some of the
blame for the war (Herodotus, Hist. 2. 120).

200 e l l e n o ’ g o rm an

in her role as the cause of war, Helen proposes that the most
respectable of women’s actions can equally be appropriated for
this kind of blame. Her repetition of the verb eteken/tekousa, ‘to
give birth’ or ‘to bring forth’, reminds Hecuba that her role as
mother does not merely intensify her pathos as victim of war, that
her own position is not as innocent as she would like to represent.21
It could be said, indeed, that Helen briefly attempts to bring to-
gether the two aspects of the term ‘fighting for women’.

In both Helen’s speech and Hecuba’s earlier narrative—despite
their sharp differences on the nature and ambiguities of causality—a
further issue is exposed, namely the problems of defining the mar-
gins of war, margins inhabited by women. In Hecuba’s speech she
moves from using the woman’s body as a metaphor for war (the
ships sail into the kolpois, the ‘gulf’ or the ‘bosom’ of Troy) to using
war as a metaphor for what happens to women’s bodies (Hecuba
becomes a ship which Helen runs aground). In Helen’s speech even
the ordinary peacetime activities of domesticity and family-building
are presented under the aspect of preparations for war. Even the
form of lamentation, which supposedly marks the aftermath of
warfare, the temporal margin, reworks the antagonisms of war.
‘What used to be labeled civilian experience—being bombed,
raped, expropriated, and salvaging shreds of living in a refugee
camp—some name combat experience.’22 Helen reminds the Trojan
women that their experience of defeat confers, along with the
authority to speak of war and the causes of war, implication in
responsibility for the war.

The women of Euripides’ play present us with modes of repre-
senting warfare (lamentation and debate) which challenge the Poly-
bian model of ‘writing well (graphai kalo¯ s) what happens in a war’.
These different representational strategies, moreover, redefine the

21 On the association of conception and war-making see Helen Cooper,
Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier, ‘Arms and the
Woman: The Con[tra]ception of the War Text’, in Cooper, Munich,
and Squier (eds.), Arms and the Woman, 9–24, and Nancy Huston, ‘The
Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes’, in Susan Rubin Suleiman (ed.), The
Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge,
Mass., 1986), 119–36.

22 Cooke, Women and the War Story, 41.

a woman’s history of warfare 201

very subject of warfare, reconfiguring what can be accounted as
‘combat’. Such challenges are replicated in contemporary historical
analyses such as Cynthia Enloe’s Does Khaki Become You? or the
edited volume Arms and the Woman. We have already seen how
Hecuba and Andromache write Helen into a military history by
privileging causality over a more straight realism: ‘Murderous
woman: with those lovely eyes you have shamefully destroyed the
famous plains of Phrygia’ (Tro. 772–3). A traditional military his-
torian would object that these lines are ‘merely’ metaphorical. We
could see it as an attempt to write the feminine into military history.
But in writing women back into history, do we not require at least
the fantasy of their bodily presence in the past? If we let go of that
fantasy, if we reframe the project as writing the feminine into
history, what now does this enable or disallow us to say about
past or present?

To pursue this we can turn from the Trojan Women to the Iliad,
the canonical text of warfare and male heroism, and to the famous,
much-studied scene where Helen is first shown to the reader of the
epic:

She came on Helen in the chamber; she was weaving a great web,
a red folding robe, and working into it the numerous struggles
of Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armoured Achaians,
struggles that they endured for her sake at the hands of the war god.
Iris of the swift feet stood beside her and spoke to her:
‘Come with me, dear girl, to behold the marvellous things done
by Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armoured Achaians,
who just now carried sorrowful war against each other’.23

It is traditional by now to see in Helen’s weaving an echo of the
Homeric epic and the process of poetic composition; the repetition
between Iris’s speech and the description of the robe makes such an
echo more resonant. Unlike the women’s speeches of the Trojan
Women, we have here no challenge to the subject of warfare as
traditionally constituted: the deeds of men are central to the repre-
sentation. We also see, yet again, Helen’s position as cause and as
prize of war; the men, central figures, struggle together for her sake.
Protected and sought after, Helen is here removed from the field of

23 Homer, Iliad 3. 125–32.

202 e l l e n o ’ g o rm an

combat where Hecuba and Andromache placed her in Euripides’
play.

As readers have observed, it is technically impossible to represent
visually what the two armies are fighting for. We can say ‘for her
sake’, hethen heineka, but we cannot show it, we cannot weave it.24
Helen has chosen a mode of representation—respectably feminine
to be sure—which renders invisible her role as the cause and prize of
the war. By sitting at home and weaving she appears simply to
occupy her marginal (domestic) place, but within that weaving the
representability of her role is already placed under question, and
even begins to shift. ‘For her sake’, then, is not visible in the robe;
but it is still present, as the half-line of poetry. Are we to interpret
this simply as the poet, or the reader, or characters in the poem
imposing back onto Helen the reductive role she is subtly challen-
ging? I would argue that this is not the case. Helen does not
challenge her role by explicit repudiation, but instead creates a
representation within which it looks very different; ‘for her sake’
is still there in Helen’s representation, but not on the surface of the
weaving. Rather it has been drawn to the weaver, and to the
weaver’s motivation. She represents this because it is ‘for her sake’.

In contrast to the challenge posed to causality in Euripides’ play,
which takes the form of an explicit debate, Helen’s work here
interweaves causal complicity in the war with the complicity—and
the enjoyment—of representing the war. This effects an important
appropriation of the war narrative; instead of the scene of men
telling war stories to women for women’s sake, for the listener’s
sake, we have the woman telling war stories for her own sake, for
the narrator’s sake, and the role of the listener is, for the moment,
vacant. ‘One day perhaps, assuming the war ends and peace returns,
Helen’s tapestry may hang in a king’s halls to entertain the king and
his barons. But perhaps not. Perhaps it was never intended for men’s
perusal, or for women’s perusal either’.25 It would, however, be a
mistake to see Helen’s work as entirely solipsistic, but rather as

24 George Kennedy, ‘Helen’s Web Unraveled’, Arethusa, 19 (1986),
5–14, 9.

25 Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom, 41; cf. Kennedy,
‘Helen’s Web’, 10.

a woman’s history of warfare 203

creating a new position for the listener or viewer of the narrative.
Such a narrative cannot ‘entertain the king and his barons’ (note
how Austin automatically predicates a male audience for the work)
because it is a different mode of narrative from, say, the Homeric
epic in which it appears. Just as Helen’s position as narrator is
responsible in relation to what she narrates, so too the listener is
enjoined to take some responsibility for her enjoyment of the tale.

In spite of this engagement with her narrative, however, Helen’s
robe reads as a monochrome account, when one compares it with
Iris’s more colourful sketch. In Iris’s speech the actions are given the
qualities of their emotional effects—marvellous or godlike deeds
(theskela erga) and sorrowful war (poludakrun Are¯a)—while in
Helen’s representation they are merely quantified—numerous strug-
gles (poleas aethlous). For a moment the robe looks like a parody of
the most technical type of history, eschewing emotive adjectives and
adverbs, and ‘sticking to the facts’. But the term ‘monochrome’
which I just used reminds us that if this representation is in one
colour, that colour is red, the colour of the robe she weaves (diplaka
porphuree¯n). In a sense what we are offered here is a separation of
the form from the content; the form, the robe, is beautiful, while the
content, the numerous struggles, is depicted without elaboration.
War is beautiful, this seems to suggest, but only in the mode of its
representation. Indeed, I would take it further and see in this separ-
ation a comment on every sanitized account of war passed on to
women in place of the real thing. Can we read Helen’s robe, not as
epic or history, but as biting satire?

While Helen’s appropriations and re-alignments of war stories
and war narrators are subtle, the questions she implicitly puts to the
tradition are far from gentle. I want to return to her verbal acknow-
ledgement of responsibility in her speech to Hector in Book 6,
speaking of all the hard work they endure ‘for the sake of dishon-
oured me’ (Il. 6. 356). This one explicit reference within Helen’s
speeches to her position as cause and as prize of war acknowledges
but does not fully accede to the similar statements made more
frequently by other characters. She says that the Trojans endure
hardship ‘for the sake of dishonoured me’ in Richmond Lattimore’s
translation, but I would prefer to render heinek’ emeio kunos as ‘for
the sake of me, bitch that I am’. When Helen calls herself a ‘bitch’,

204 e l l e n o ’ g o rm an

which she does twice in this speech, far from being merely self-
deprecating, she once more transforms and interrogates the assump-
tions underlying war narrative. It is as if Helen were to say ‘is it
really for the sake of this that you are fighting?’26 By echoing the
male narrators with ‘for the sake of me’ but then by adding ‘bitch
that I am’, she first invites unthinking acceptance of what she is
saying, and then adds the critical interpretation which exposes what
is central to the scene of men who tell war stories to women: the
simultaneous and contradictory elevation of women to the status of
glittering prizes, and debasement of women as the cause of all
suffering.

When Helen first calls herself a bitch, she uses the phrase kuo¯ n
kakome¯chanos, wonderfully translated by Lattimore as ‘a nasty
bitch evil-intriguing’, what I would render ‘a nasty trouble-making
bitch’ (Il. 6. 344). The term ‘bitch’ is usually taken to denote the
shamelessness of Helen and her sexual infidelity; we have already
seen how in the Trojan Women Helen’s sexual activity is strongly
associated with blame for causing the war. By this reading Helen’s
appropriation of the ‘for the sake of me’ trope is rather brutally
reconfigured into a bare statement of fact, expanding on exactly
why Helen is a cause of the war. This reading also dictates the
translation of Helen’s earlier description of herself as kuno¯ pis, or
‘bitch-faced’ (Il. 3. 180)—Lattimore renders it as ‘slut’. Translating
kuo¯ n and kuno¯ pis in this way when they refer to Helen presents us
with an interpretation which grounds her firmly in the sphere of
sexual, domestic misdemeanour. This interpretation is supported by
the numerous occasions in the Odyssey where adulterous women
are insulted as ‘bitch-faced’ or as ‘bitches’. ‘The repetitions of the
insult ‘‘dog’’, ‘‘dog-like’’ indicated the disorder in the reciprocities
which form the civilized society of the oikos.’27 But in drawing
continuities between Helen here and the adulterous women in the
Odyssey, we create a gulf between Helen and the other bitches and

26 Similarly, in her speech to Priam on the battlements of Troy (an
exchange which implicitly negotiates debates about Helen’s responsibility
for the war), she concludes with the ambiguous phrase ei pot’ ee¯n ge,
usually rendered as ‘did this really happen?’

27 Simon Goldhill, ‘Reading Differences: The Odyssey and Juxtapos-
ition’, Ramus, 17 (1988), 1–31, 16.

a woman’s history of warfare 205

dogs which appear in the overtly military context of the Iliad. Helen
herself interrogates a purely domestic reading of kuo¯ n in referring to
herself as ‘a nasty trouble-making bitch’, a term which invites us to
consider why we place a boundary between sexual activity and
action in warfare. The predatory force of the hunting dog, as Gold-
hill observes, is most easily assimilated to the drive of the hero in
battle.28 Indeed, the only other female characters in the Iliad who
receive the epithet are Athena and Artemis, both known for repudi-
ation of sex and for active participation in warfare.29 Helen’s choice
of self-description, therefore, does not give in to the discourse which
would position her as the source of all blame, but rather marks an
appropriation and a problematizing of that discourse. In some ways
it mirrors Helen’s reinscription of the women of Troy into the
language of causality in Euripides’ play; here she challenges the
heroes of combat by describing her part in the war in the language
of the battlefield. In the phrase kuo¯ n kakome¯chanos the roles occu-
pied by woman as cause, man as warrior and animal as scavenger
can no longer be differentiated.30

This image of Helen, as the maker of bad things, stands as
another aspect of the weaver of the beautiful red robe. But, like
the robe, which both narrates the war and interrogates assumptions
about how you narrate the war, Helen’s bitchiness does not simply
create the trouble of the war, but creates trouble about the war, by
implicitly posing the question ‘is it really worth fighting for the sake
of this?’

In Troy, then, Helen makes trouble about the war, but what is
often seen as most troubling is her easy ‘domestication’ into marital
life in Sparta, as displayed in Book 4 of the Odyssey. ‘[W]ith the
Trojan War concluded, Helen is safely at home in Sparta
again . . . no longer wild; her status has been resolved. She is not
wife and mistress, but simply a wife.’31 Norman Austin and other
scholars, however, go on to note the difficulties inherent in the

28 Ibid. 14.
29 Athena: Iliad 8. 423; Artemis: Iliad 21. 481.
30 The dog as a scavenger on the corpses of battle appears prominently in
the opening lines of the Iliad, 1. 4.
31 Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom, 72.

206 e l l e n o ’ g o rm an

Spartan domestic scene, as Menelaus and Helen present competing
stories about Odysseus and the Trojan War: competing, that is, on
the subject of Helen and her loyalties.32 In Helen’s story her joy at
Odysseus’s exploits is contrasted with the lamentation of the
bereaved Trojan women; this portrayal signals Helen’s returning
Greek partisanship while situating it once more in a context of
responsibility.

Then the other Trojan women piercingly wailed; but my heart
rejoiced, since now my inclination had turned to go back
back to my home. (Od. 4. 259–61)

Menelaus responds with a story which implicitly counters this
representation of Helen. By his account she irresponsibly plays
with the lives of Greek warriors, threatening to betray them under
the eyes of her new Trojan husband, Deiphobus. (Od. 4. 274–6) No
resolution is offered by either speaker, or by their listener Telema-
chus. Simon Goldhill remarks, ‘[T]he reader is faced with a (finally)
indeterminate interchange, an insecurity in the relation between the
representations and also in the relation between the representations
and any supposed ‘‘master version’’ of the Trojan war.’33 What is
also opened up by the difficult relations of the two stories is an
ambiguity about the sharp differentiation of the Spartan palace
from the Trojan battlefield. The ‘debate’ between Helen and Mene-
laus, since it so often raises the questions ‘which side is Helen
on?’,34 suggests a continuation of the Trojan war on the home
front. Indeed, any search for or resignation of a ‘master version’
about the war only serves to remind us that domination over
women marks the end of the war for men, but that women’s experi-
ence of peacetime may yet be redescribed. Just as the Trojan women
might seek to describe their allocation as slaves to various Greek

32 Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom, 71–89; Ann Berg-
ren, ‘Helen’s Web: Time and Tableau in the Iliad’, Helios, 7.1 (1980), 19–34;
Ann Bergren ‘Helen’s ‘‘Good Drug’’: Odyssey iv 1–305’, in S. Kresic (ed.),
Contemporary Literary Hermeneutics and the Interpretation of Classical
Texts (Ottawa, 1981), 201–14, 79–80; Goldhill, ‘Reading Differences’, 19–
24; Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 37–40.

33 Goldhill, ‘Reading Differences’, 23.
34 Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 39; cf. Austin, Helen of Troy and her
Shameless Phantom, 83: ‘Where are Helen’s loyalties now?’

a woman’s history of warfare 207

generals as ‘combat experience’, so too we could look at the Spartan
palace scene and ask, ‘do they call this peace?’35

In Euripides’ play Helen confronts the separation of women into
reviled cause of war on the one hand and sanctified object of
military protection on the other. Her attempts there to draw all
women into a position of responsibility for war-making should
resonate in the Odyssey as well, where our last sight of her is in
the bedchamber, lying next to Menelaus.

And the son of Atreus lay down to sleep in the innermost chamber
of the lofty house,

And by his side Helen with long robes lay asleep, shining among
women (gunaiko¯ n). (Od. 4. 304–5)

What this final scene with Helen shows us is the potential of
expressing a subversive position on the prevailing historical opin-
ion, not by words or even representations, but by actions. Her place
by the side of Menelaus should finally answer the questions, ‘whose
side is Helen on?’, but as the earlier exchanges between the two have
shown, mere spatial proximity is not a reliable indicator. Indeed, the
final phrase ‘shining among women’ invites us to consider Helen’s
value as a wife in the context of other women: perhaps the ‘other
Trojan women’ as Helen earlier called them. Is her place at Mene-
laus’s side so different from that of Cassandra or Andromache?36 Is
this yet another form of ‘combat experience’?

35 Marcus, ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse’ (see n. 9), 154 remarks: ‘The war is
not over when it’s over in historical time. Irene Rathbone’s We That Were
Young and They Call It Peace also demonstrate that patriarchal, capitalist,
and imperialist ‘‘peacetimes’’ are still wartimes for the exploited.’

36 Ruth Scodel, ‘The Captive’s Dilemma: Sexual Acquiescence in Euripi-
des’ Hecuba and Troades’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 98
(1998), 137–54, takes the same idea in the opposite direction by looking
at how the Trojan women describe concubinage in terms of marriage.

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8

‘Beyond glorious Ocean’:
Feminism, Myth, and America

G r e g o r y Staley

The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable.
—It is still unexplored only because we’ve been made
to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And
because they want to make us believe that what
interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to
Lack. And we believed. They riveted us between two
horrifying myths: between Medusa and the abyss. That would
be enough to set half the world laughing, except that it’s still
going on . . . Let’s hurry: the continent is not impenetrably
dark. I’ve been there often.

(He´le`ne Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’)1

dark continents

Cixous’ influential essay, published in America on the bicentennial
of the American Revolution, takes as its dominant metaphor a

1 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen,
Signs, 1.4 (1976), 884–5.

210 g r e g or y s t a l e y

notion particularly relevant to America: that of woman as unknown
land waiting to be discovered and explored.2 Cixous’ ‘Dark Con-
tinent’, of course, is most immediately borrowed from Freud’s
characterization of woman as equivalent to Africa; but in her use
of Medusa and myth Cixous ultimately takes her Dark Continent
beyond Freud, back to an essentially classical topography and
mythology of woman and the world.3 Conceptually antiquity
placed woman in the same place where America later would be
found, on the margins of the known world in a particularly mytho-
logical space which the Greek poet Hesiod regularly characterized
as ‘beyond glorious Ocean’.4

2 Cixous’ essay from the very beginning adopts the trope of a new world
(ibid. 875): ‘Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the
point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time–a time
during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely, the
(feminine) new from the old [la nouvelle de l’ancien].’ Cf. ibid. 878: ‘It is
time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her–by
loving her for getting by, for getting beyond the Old without delay, by going
out ahead of what the New Woman will be.’

3 Freud’s words come from his essay ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, in
The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, xx (London, 1959), 212: ‘the sexual life of adult women is a ‘‘dark
continent’’ for psychology.’ Even in the original German, Freud quotes the
phrase ‘dark continent’ in English and sets it off with quotation marks, an
acknowledgement that he borrows the phrase from Henry Morton Stanley’s
account of his African experiences, Through the Dark Continent, published
in 1878. Cixous, born herself in Africa, perhaps in part alludes to Africa in
her words, ‘I’ve been there often.’

4 The Otherness of women in Greek ideology led to their regular asso-
ciation with the geographical margins of the world. Medea was from
Colchis at the eastern end of the Black Sea and the Amazons had homelands
both in Libya and in Asia Minor. Particularly in the 5th c. bce it was the
eastern end of the world which symbolized the feminine and barbaric, as
Edith Hall has demonstrated: Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Defin-
ition through Tragedy (Oxford, 1989). In reaction to the Persian invasions
of Greece, the Amazons began to be dressed in eastern costume since they,
too, had invaded Attica in the attempt to retrieve one of their number,
Antiope, abducted by Theseus (cf. W. Tyrrell, Amazons: A Study in Athen-
ian Mythmaking (Baltimore, 1984), 50–2). In her use of the myth of
Medusa and the metaphor of dark continents, Cixous, however, is clearly
making the West her focus. It was the realm associated with darkness, with
Medusa, and was the place where, up to the time of Plato, Greek myth and

feminism, myth, and america 211

In antiquity women had long been seen as continents, as one
Renaissance commentator noted in explaining the name ‘America’:
‘I do not see why anyone should object to its being called, from its
discoverer Americus . . . Amerige, meaning land [Greek ge¯] of Amer-
icus, or America, since Europe and Asia have acquired their names
from women.’5 The three original continents, Europe, Asia, and
Libya, had derived their names from mythical women, for reasons
which not even Herodotus could explain.6 In the ancient world,
however, it was the still undiscovered fourth continent which was
most truly ‘dark’, a land in the West, the realm of Night and the
homeland of Cixous’ Medusa. According to Hesiod, Medusa and
her sister Gorgons ‘dwell beyond glorious Ocean in the frontier land
towards Night where are the clear-voiced Hesperides’.7

In characterizing Woman as a continent to be explored, Cixous is
simply using the dominant metaphor through which Europe ever since
antiquity had conceptualized Hesperia or the West. In both Greek and
Latin Hesperia is a feminine word, a substantive formed from an
adjective with a noun meaning ‘earth’ (chthon or terra) understood.
The very idea of ‘West’ is that of ‘Land’, a metonym for a series of ideas
which in classical ideology all connote the female, a point highlighted
in Hesiod’s account of the Hesperides and their birth:

And Night gave birth to hateful Doom and black
Fate and Death, and she gave birth to Sleep and
the tribe of Dreams. And again the goddess murky

literature placed an alternative world, as James Romm has shown: The
Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, 1992), 128. It was in the
Hellenistic and Roman periods that the South became the venue for an
alternative continent.

5 Martin Waldseemu¨ ller, Introductio ad Ptolemaei Cosmographiam
(1507), cited in M. Dilke and O. A. W. Dilke, ‘The Adjustment of Ptolemaic
Atlases to Feature the New World’, in Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold
(eds.), The Classical Tradition and the Americas, i. 1 (Berlin, 1994), 122.

6 4. 45. Herodotus notes that some of these names have been connected
with actual women, but even in those cases there were likewise mythical
alternatives.

7 Theog. 274–83; all translations of Hesiod come from the Loeb edition,
translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, with some slight alterations.

212 g r e g or y s t a l e y

Night, though she lay with none, gave birth to
Blame and painful Woe, and the Hesperides who
guard the rich, golden apples and the trees bearing
fruit beyond glorious Ocean.

(Hesiod, Theogony 211–16)

These are the ‘dark’ attributes which men have long taught women
to see as their own, as Cixous points out: ‘[women are] taught that
their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your
continent is Dark. Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the
dark, you’re afraid.’8 The indoctrination had already begun with
Hesiod: Woman as Night, as Abyss, as land in the West. It was only
after the discovery of the New World that the dark continent
thought of as Woman came to be Africa.

Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci worked within this
tradition, representing America in their narratives as a mytholo-
gized and feminine place. For a variety of reasons, Europe projected
onto the New World an essentially classical geography; indeed,
explorers crossed the sea with mythology as their map, for both
the words ‘Atlantic’ and ‘Ocean’ derive from ancient myths: Okea-
nos was a river which surrounded the world and Atlantis was an
island set in its streams to the west.9 Both as land and as unknown
realm, the New World came to be pictured as Woman in explorers’
narratives and in the illustrations which accompanied them, as
Mario Klarer has shown. Columbus describes the earth he discovers
as ‘like a round ball, upon one part of which is a prominence like a
woman’s nipple’ and finds there communities of women much like
the Amazons. Vespucci’s narratives are illustrated with allegoriza-

8 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 877–8.
9 Hesiod (Theog. 791–2) describes Ocean as a circular stream which
‘coils around the earth’; Homer (Od. 11. 13–19) places the entrance to
Hades near it to the West. Atlantis, an island in Okeanos named for Atlas,
who stood nearby to hold up the sky, is described by Plato (Tim. 24e) as ‘an
island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of
Heracles’. Beyond it there were other islands and an entire continent.
10 Mario Klarer, ‘Woman and Arcadia: the Impact of Ancient Utopian
Thought on the Early Image of America’, Journal of American Studies, 27.1
(1993), 1–17. Quotations above are from pp. 4 and 13.

feminism, myth, and america 213

tions of America as ‘female figure which oscillates between a volup-
tuous temptress and an amazon-like monster’.10

When Cixous compares woman’s discovery of self with the
Renaissance’s discovery of the New World, therefore, she is simply
asking women to take control of a traditional discourse by making
themselves not the metaphor but the reality. In The Lay of the Land,
a book published in the same year as Cixous’ essay (indeed, it is
reviewed in the same issue of Signs in which ‘The Laugh of the
Medusa’ appears), Annette Kolodny has traced the history of this
discourse and its association with America. ‘America’s oldest and
most cherished fantasy’, Kolodny writes, has been a masculine
‘experience of the land as essentially feminine—that is, not simply
the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female prin-
ciple of gratification—enclosing the individual in an environment of
receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction’.11 Tho-
mas Jefferson’s description of the confluence of the Shenandoah and
Potomac rivers, as Kolodny notes, captures perfectly the erotic
charge of this fantasy:

The passage of the Patowmac through the Blue ridge is perhaps one of the
most stupendous scenes in nature. You stand on a very high point of
land . . . The first glance of this scene hurries our senses . . . For the mountain
being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small
catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country,
inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass
through the breach and participate of the calm below. . . This scene is worth
a voyage across the Atlantic.12

11 Chapel Hill, NC, (1975), 4. Kolodny’s summary of her thesis in many
respects could be taken as a summary of Cixous’, as well: ‘The dynamic of
almost every piece of writing examined here, in fact, appears to repeat a
movement back into the realm of the Mother, in order to begin again, and
then an attempted . . . movement out of that containment in order to experi-
ence the self as independent, assertive, and sexually active’ (ibid. 153). This
parallel only highlights the degree to which Cixous has appropriated the
mythological and psychological symbolism of America’s discovery as the
model for Woman’s.

12 Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Pedem (New York, 1972),
19.

214 g r e g or y s t a l e y

Cixous adopts this imagery—of exploration, of the discovery of
a female body, and of a landscape of desire—but she wants women
themselves to ‘paint’ the scene ‘worth a voyage across the Atlantic’:

I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire [her
own body] so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might
exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body
knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous
torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than
those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune.13

In writing the body, women can now discover their own new world,
can explore their own body as the landscape which traditionally
men have envisioned it to be.

utopia

This trope of discovering new worlds is central to Cixous’ account
of woman’s quest, I shall argue, because America offered a model
for how those on antiquity’s margins could critique the centre, a
model already followed by Sir Thomas More in his Utopia. From
antiquity through the Renaissance, first the West in general and then
America in particular had functioned as the quintessential ‘some-
where else’, the locus of the Other which challenges the here and the
now. Published in 1516, More’s essay recounts the adventures of
Raphael Hythloday, a sailor who travelled with Amerigo Vespucci
on his fourth expedition to the New World. There Hythloday
journeys on to the island of Utopia, which has the ‘best form of
commonwealth’. Thus More introduces the word ‘utopia’ into our
vocabulary as both neologism and pun; it means ‘no place’ as well
as ‘good place’, an ideal society in a place heretofore not known.

It is no surprise that More associated the very idea of utopia with
the new world; for, although he coined the word, the lands at the
margins of the world to the West had long been to the ancients a
concept of just that sort, a world that had no place in the classical
scheme of values and experiences, a place that was not Greek. As

13 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 876.

feminism, myth, and america 215

James Romm has noted, the Greeks conferred on those who lived on
the margins of the world ‘a unique ethical prerogative’: ‘In their
eyes ‘‘normal’’ human values, as defined by those who imagine
themselves at the privileged center, can appear arbitrary and even
laughably absurd.’14 Cixous’ Medusa is in this ancient tradition,
laughing from the margins at the perspective of men who have
placed themselves in the ‘privileged center’: ‘They riveted us be-
tween two horrifying myths: between Medusa and the abyss. That
would be enough to set half the world laughing . . . You only have to
look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s
beautiful and she’s laughing.’15

The Greek mind used space to graph or map ideas, placing Greece
itself in the middle of the world and measuring the character and
worth of other peoples by their distance from it, as William Blake
Tyrrell has articulated:16

Less a place than an idea, [the edge of the oikoumene (inhabited world)]
expresses spatially the breakdown of differences, of the categories used to
define culture and to distinguish it from bestiality below and divinity
above . . . As a place, the frontier is the coincidentia oppositorum (the falling
in together of the opposites), and is thus populated with both subhuman
and suprahuman figures: Centaurs, gorgons, the Hesperides.17

The Greeks treat the margins of the world as a sort of antiland (a
term which we shall shortly meet in Cixous’ writing), the home both
for cultures that are inferior because they do not observe Greek
ways and for paradises where few if any Greeks can aspire to go.
This latter notion applies especially to the West, where the Greeks
placed perfect lands such as Elysium or the home of the Hesperides.

Although the recent discovery of America served as a spur to
More’s placement of his ideal society there, the Greek sources on
which he drew as models would have suggested to him the same
place even if Columbus had never set sail, a point confirmed by

14 The Edges of the Earth, 47–8.
15 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 885.
16 The Greeks’ use of their word topos, ‘place’, to describe a theme or
subject (paralleled by the Roman use of locus communis and the English
equivalent, ‘commonplace’) highlights their spatial approach to reasoning.
17 Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking, 56.

216 g r e g or y s t a l e y

Guillaume Bude´, a leading French humanist, writing a year after the
publication of Utopia:

I personally, however, have made investigation and discerned for certain
that Utopia lies outside the limits of the known world. Undoubtedly, it is
one of the Fortunate Isles, perhaps close to the Elysian fields . . . content
with its own institutions and possessions, blessed in its innocence, and
leading a kind of heavenly life which is below the level of heaven but
above the rable of this known world.18

After Amerigo Vespucci, one could say, ‘Utopia, thy name is Amer-
ica.’ But Utopia was already in Hesperia even before that word was
coined and that world came to be called ‘new.’19

Cixous’ desire for a ‘new world’ for women is part of a broader
trend which regularly has characterized feminist approaches to
myth. In her book on the women of Homer’s Odyssey, Lillian
Doherty notes that one feminist strategy for reading androcentric
texts has followed ‘a utopian path, aimed at conceptualizing a
world free of [the] constraints’ such texts impose on women.20
The appeal of many of the myths which the Greeks associated
with Hesperia is that they represent values which have ‘no place’
in the patriarchal world which Greece located at the centre; thus
America was precisely in concept ‘a world free of [the] constraints’
which patriarchal and misogynistic Greek culture placed upon
women. The New World was the one place where even the Greeks
had followed a utopian path.

18 From a letter to Thomas Lupset, dated 31 July 1517, cited by Frank E.
Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World
(Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 132.

19 In a famous prophecy, the chorus in Seneca’s Medea, which dates
roughly to the middle of the 1st c. ce, predicts: ‘In future years an age
will arrive during which Oceanus will loosen the bonds of things and a huge
continent will appear and Tethys will uncover new worlds.’ This represents
perhaps the first time the ‘New World’ received that name; Christopher
Columbus, it is argued, knew of this prophecy and asserted that his voyage
had fulfilled it. Cf. James Romm, ‘New World and ‘‘novos orbes’’: Seneca in
the Renaissance Debate over Ancient Knowledge of the Americas’, in
W. Haase and M. Reinhold (eds.), The Classical Tradition and the Americas
(Berlin, 1994), 77–116.

20 Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey (Ann
Arbor, 1995), 40.

feminism, myth, and america 217

imaginary zones

As Catherine Cle´ment, Cixous’ collaborator in producing The
Newly Born Woman, has noted, ‘Somewhere every culture has an
imaginary zone for what it excludes, and it is that zone which we
must try to remember today.’21 For the Greeks, that zone was on the
periphery of the world, dark, frightening, unknown—in short, the
abyss where Columbus found America and Cixous proposes to find
Woman. Women’s adventure into the abyss (Cixous’ word in the
original French, ‘abˆıme’, ultimately derives, like its English equiva-
lent, from Greek) inevitably makes mythology central to the project
of feminism; for only in myth can women find among the traditions
of European culture a ‘somewhere else’ that includes them amidst
all which the Greeks regularly excluded.

Utopian places of this sort are by their very nature ‘never never
lands’. Guillaume Bude´ had heard, he reports in a letter to Sir
Thomas More, that an alternative title for his friend’s work had in
fact been ‘Udepotia’, or ‘Neverland’, from the Greek word for
‘never’.22 Whether More ever entertained this alternative we cannot
be sure, but ‘Neverland’ does serve as a revealing gloss on ‘No
place’, highlighting the essentially mythological character of such
a world. In its now more familiar and reduplicated form, ‘Never
never land’, describes a remote or imaginary place, a world of
fantasy.

Woman’s search for this ‘somewhere else’ leads inevitably to the
reading of mythology, for myths provide the maps to a new world,
as Cixous argues:

There has to be somewhere else, I tell myself. And everyone knows that to
go somewhere else there are routes, signs, ‘maps’—for an exploration, a
trip.— That’s what books are . . . If there is a somewhere else that can escape
the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where
it dreams, where it invents new worlds.23

21 The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester 1986), 6.
Some of the material from ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ is incorporated into
this longer work.

22 Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 1.
23 Newly Born Woman, 72.

218 g r e g or y s t a l e y

Feminism’s search for ‘somewhere else’, its utopian drive, thus
draws on the same myths which shaped the discovery of the New
World.24 Queen Isabella of Spain, for example, offered special
bonuses to the explorers whom she funded on the condition that
they find Amazons in the New World; naturally a queen would want
to validate her own reign by showing that myths about powerful
women who challenged the dominance of men were true.25

For the Greeks, the zone distant from their ‘real’ world is inher-
ently mythical, a space in which to think about societies that might
be different from their own. Because the Greek world is intensely
patriarchal, woman is regularly the signifier of Otherness in all its
forms and is central to myths about whatever is marginal—politic-
ally, geographically, culturally. To explore the limits of the known,
therefore, is to enter a mythological space that is particularly femi-
nine, as Cixous recognizes: ‘the unconscious, that other limitless
country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women,
or as Hoffmann would say, fairies.’26 If feminism is the discovery of
a new world, then mythology provides, in Cixous’ metaphor, the
‘maps’ by which the journey must be taken:

But I move toward something that only exists in an elsewhere, and I search
in the thought that writing has uncontrollable resources. That writing is
what deals with the no-deal, relates to what gives no return. That something
else (what history forbids, what reality excludes or doesn’t admit) can
manifest itself there: some other.27

24 It is surely coincidental but none the less revealing that Tzvetan
Todorov, Cixous’ colleague and friend (they co-founded the review Poe´-
tique in 1969) published in 1982 La Conqueˆte de l’Ame´rique, which takes
the conquest of America as a paradigm for ‘deal[ing] with the other’ (the
English translation of Todorov’s book appeared in 1984 under the title The
Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. E. Leacock (New
York and London). Todorov, like Cixous, uses the word abıˆme, ‘abyss’, to
characterize the journey into the unknown.

25 Cf. Batya Weinbaum, Islands of Women and Amazons (Austin, Tex.,
1999), 131.

26 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 880.
27 Newly Born Woman, 97. This quotation elaborates a point treated
more briefly in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’.

feminism, myth, and america 219

Paradoxically, it is not through prose, through a rational represen-
tation of the real, that women can find themselves and make their
case, but through poetry, through an imaginative exploration of the
mythological. It is revealing, therefore, that the books which Cixous
reads, both early in life and later, are mythological, from Homer’s
epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, to Heinrich von Kleist’s drama
Penthesilea.

antiland

Cixous catalogues her mythic readings in a section of The Newly Born
Woman titled ‘Sorties’, which can be rendered in English as ‘Attacks/
Ways Out/Forays’.28 Myth becomes a tool through which women can
escape the world which men have constructed for them through myth,
can attack it, can begin their own voyage of discovery:

For a long time I read, I lived, in a territory made of spaces taken from all
the countries to which I had access through fiction, an antiland . . . where
distinctions of races, classes, and origins would not be put to use without
someone’s rebelling. Where there are people who are ready for anything—
to live, to die for the sake of ideas that are right and just. And where it was
not impossible or pathetic to be generous.29

28 This is the translation by Betsy Wing.
29 Newly Born Woman, 72. Although it is not explicit in this excerpt, it
is clear from Cixous’ subsequent discussion that her readings here came
from ‘a world of fiction and myths’ (p. 73), especially Greek myths. It is
revealing that she most identifies with Achilles and utterly rejects Odysseus.
Achilles is angry and rebellious, uncompromising. ‘But I didn’t like to catch
myself being Ulysses, the artist of flight’ (p. 74). If woman is to be a mythic
explorer of new worlds, we might expect that she would take Odysseus as
her model. But Odysseus, as Cixous describes him, is ‘the homecoming
man . . . always returning to himself–in spite of the most fantastic detours’
(p. 74). In many ways Odysseus represents the Greek conception of the
feminine with his desire to return to the hearth and home, the realm of
‘woman’. By contrast, Cixous wants the new woman to leave home and
therefore Ariadne represents her ideal: ‘Ariadne, without calculating, with-
out hesitating, but believing, taking everything as far as it goes–the anti-
Odysseus–never looking back, knowing how to break off, how to leave,
advancing into emptiness, into the unknown’ (p. 75).

220 g r e g or y s t a l e y

Myth offers an alternative reality, or an alternative to reality, the
anti- to all that is patriarchal, repressive, authoritarian, greedy.30

Cixous’ mythic antiland has an ideology that sounds much like
America’s, a parallel underlined in a famous poem by Emma
Lazarus, a woman with the kind of resume´ a ‘newly born’ woman
should have.31 Lazarus (1849–1887) was an American of Spanish
and Jewish ancestry who answered Cixous’ call for women to write a
century before Cixous issued it. Indeed, Lazarus was much like
Cixous, one of those ‘people who are like me in their rebellion and
in their hope’.32 Lazarus is best known for her poem ‘The New
Colossus’, written for the Statue of Liberty, on whose base it is
displayed. Liberty is the ‘new Colossus’, who is very different from
the ‘brazen giant of Greek fame’; she is a ‘mighty woman’ who
embodies the values of antiland: ‘Give me your tired, your poor j
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, j The wretched refuse
of your teeming shore. j Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.’

Lazarus’s poem, which rejects the Greek Colossus (a statue of the
Greek god of the sun, Helios, on the island of Rhodes) in favour of
an alternative, American vision of fame and national identity, sum-
marizes nicely the American reaction to classical myth during the

30 Cixous’ use of the prefix anti- to label her alternative place follows an
ancient tradition. The Greeks regularly named their other worlds in this
way: Antipodes, Antichthones, Antoikoi (cf. Romm, The Edges of the
Earth, 128–9 and nn. 17 and 26).

31 Living and working a century before Cixous, Lazarus anticipated
some of the elements of Cixous’ feminist agenda. Born the daughter of a
wealthy father who was well-connected among America’s social and intel-
lectual e´lites, Emma Lazarus began to write early and in a mythological
vein; her second volume of poems was titled Admetus and Other Poems
(1871). After 1880 she turned to social reform (she was moved by the plight
of impoverished Jewish immigrants from Russia) and to social enlighten-
ment (she wrote articles and essays which attempted to defend Jews from
the false stereotypes from which they suffered). Although her focus was
religious and cultural rather than gender prejudice, Lazarus used her writ-
ings to defend an Other. Lazarus never married and little is known about
her sexuality; she did, however, write an unpublished poem, ‘Assurance’,
which reads like a lesbian fantasy, a female’s exploration of the female body
of the sort for which Cixous calls. See Bette Roth Young, Emma Lazarus in
her World (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1995), 18.

32 Newly Born Woman, 72.

feminism, myth, and america 221

first century of the American Republic: ‘Keep, ancient lands, your
storied pomp!’ Lady Liberty, a later descendant of the Athena who
embodied Athens or the Roma who represented Rome, stands at
America’s ‘sunset gates’ not just to welcome exiles from abroad but
also to keep ancient mythology out. Long before Cixous took the
New World as her analogue for Woman, America itself had adopted
an approach to mythology that could be called proto-feminist. That
is, America was aware of its utopian status within the classical
world view and occupied very consciously the perspective of the
Other as it explored the relevance of ancient mythology for its own
sense of self. The legacy of classical mythology in America is there-
fore very different from that in Europe; the feminist critique did not
in America need to stand in opposition to the dominant cultural and
political traditions but in fact was in many ways supported by them.
For America’s Founding Fathers, as for its Founding Mothers, the
new world was a classical utopia, both no place for myth and a good
place in myth.

Geographically, America lay beyond the oikoumene, the inhab-
ited world, and was therefore a place where even the wandering
Hercules had never set foot. Just as the Romans could make the
Greek Heracles into their hero, too, for his travels had taken him to
the site where Rome eventually would be built, so too the later
nations of Europe could connect themselves with heroic traditions
through the various descendants of Greek heroes who were said
to have been their founders.33 But the New World was located
beyond the gates of Hercules, as Alexander the Great was report-
edly advised:

They say that in the Ocean there lie fertile lands, while beyond it in turn are
born new shores, a new world: that nature stops nowhere—always it
appears in a fresh guise just at the point where one thinks it had come to
a halt. These are fictions easy of invention—for the Ocean cannot be
sailed.—Let Alexander be content to have conquered as far as the world

33 See Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1949), 54 ff., for
a brief discussion of this genealogical tradition. For the tradition in Britain,
see T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (New York, 1970) and Graham Parry,
The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century
(Oxford, 1995).

222 g r e g or y s t a l e y

is content to have light. It was within the limits of the known world that
Hercules won his claim to heaven.34

The new world is a mythical, ‘fictional’ place, one where you can
imagine alternative worlds, but it is also at the same time a place not
burdened by the heritage of traditional myth: Hercules never visited
there to perform a Labour.

America, in fact, wanted to be an antiland which embodied the
kind of alternative to Greece and its myths for which Cixous herself
was searching. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the
1830s and described this New World for his European peers, cor-
rectly sensed that Americans would have a ‘distaste for what is
ancient’.35 Although the Founding Fathers turned to the Greek
and Roman worlds as a laboratory in which to design a new system
of government, they did not in general accept the ideological and
political uses of myth which had supported their ancient models. As
Hesiod tells us, the Muses are the patrons not just of poets but also
of princes: ‘Calliope . . . is the chiefest of them all, for she attends on
worshipful princes: whomsoever of heaven-nourished princes the
daughters of great Zeus honour. . . they pour sweet dew upon his
tongue, and from his lips flow gracious words. All the people look
towards him while he settles causes with true judgements’

34 These words are reported by Seneca the Elder (1st c. ce), Suasoria 1. 1
(here in translation by Michael Winterbottom from the Loeb Classical
Library) and are said to have been spoken to persuade Alexander the
Great not to continue his conquests once he had reached the Indian Ocean.

35 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve
(New York and London, 1947), 290. There were many reasons why Toc-
queville took this view. He saw myth as the characteristic preoccupation of
aristocratic societies, which possessed the leisure to engage in imaginative
activity and which, because of their own hierarchical structures, were
naturally inclined ‘to put intermediate powers between God and man’.
Democracies, by contrast, are so busy pursuing success and so concerned
with equality that they have neither the time nor the inclination to ponder
the supernatural. Moreover, aristocratic societies favour stable and uniform
religions, whereas democracies encourage a sort of doubt which ‘brings the
poet’s imagination back to earth and shuts it up in the actual, visible world’.
Aristocracies are backward-looking cultures which idealize what has come
before, whereas ‘democracy engenders a sort of instinctive distaste for what
is old’.

feminism, myth, and america 223

(Theogony 79–86). Moreover, the Muses are the daughters of Zeus,
who is both the ‘king of the gods’ and the god who ‘nurtures kings’
on earth.36 Myths are therefore songs of the Muses intended to
entertain Zeus and to celebrate his accomplishments, a form of
royal entertainment and propaganda, a connection which did not
go unnoticed in America. Fisher Ames, a member of Congress
during George Washington’s two terms as president and a leading
orator and essayist between 1787 and 1807, noted that those
moments in ancient history which we admire for their ‘republican
liberty’ are not the ones during which myth and poetry flourished:
Homer and Hesiod wrote ‘while kings governed those states’ and
Rome’s greatest poetry came after the fall of the Republic.37

Myth was an instrument of politics or, more particularly, of
aristocratic and monarchical power, which, in the eyes of many
Americans, made it dangerous and unacceptable. No ancient hero
should have been more appealing to Americans than Virgil’s
Aeneas: he had sailed across the seas to find a new home, was
epitomized by his piety, and had sacrificed his personal interests in
favour of those of his nation.38 But Aeneas had become tainted
through association with the imperial politics of Augustus, as the
American poet Joel Barlow noted in the introduction to his epic
poem the Columbiad (1807): ‘Virgil wrote and felt like a subject,
not like a citizen. The real design of his poem was to increase the
veneration of the people for a master, whoever he might be, and to
encourage like Homer the great system of military depredation.’
Achilles and Odysseus did not fare much better in American eyes, as
John McWilliams has noted: ‘To a people convinced that Divine
Providence was creating a regenerative civilization founded upon
republican politics, freeholding farmers, and Christian ethics, the
conduct of Achilles and Odysseus seemed to embody everything
from which they wished to escape.’39

36 ‘Zeus, King of the gods’ (Hesiod, Theog. 886); ‘kings, nurtured by
Zeus’ (Homer, Iliad 1. 176).

37 Works of Fisher Ames, ii, ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis, 1983), 25.
38 Cf. Meyer Reinhold, ‘Vergil in the American Experience’, in Classica
Americana (Detroit, 1984), 221–49, esp. 227.
39 The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860 (Cambridge,
1989), 22.

224 g r e g or y s t a l e y

Mythic heroes became acceptable in America only when they had
been transformed into moral exemplars, as the story of Hercules
and his choice demonstrates. Perhaps Hercules’ saving grace was the
fact that no ancient epic survived which featured his tale; Americans
encountered him therefore primarily through prose works such as
Cicero’s De Officiis (‘On Duties’), which did not seem frivolous and
fictional. There (1. 118) Cicero recalls the story of Hercules’ choice
at the crossroads, earlier used by Xenophon (Memorabilia 2. 1.
21–2f) as a lesson in life. Virtue and Vice, in the form of women,
each seek to persuade Hercules to follow them at the fork in the
road of his life. As Carl Richard has shown, John Adams was much
influenced by this story. As a young man Adams recorded in his
diary that ‘the Choice of Hercules came into my mind and left
impressions which I hope will never be effaced nor long unheeded’;
as an adult he proposed this tale as the theme for the Great Seal of
America.40 In 1819 the American Whig Society, a group organized
by students at Princeton University to provide both social and
intellectual opportunities lacking in the college curriculum, selected
the Choice of Hercules as the emblem for their diploma, a choice
which constitutes ‘one of the most revealing monuments in the
history of American culture’, as James McLachlan has shown.41

What this emblem reveals, in fact, is the role which the Enlight-
enment played in shaping the American reaction to the classics in
general and to classical mythology in particular during the eight-
eenth and early nineteenth centuries. For the centennial of the Whig
Society in 1869, students wrote an ode which offers their commen-
tary on Hercules and myth: ‘Go hence, Herculean Youth, j Clad in
the might of truth j And reason calm, j To turn with high disdain j
From vice to Virtue’s train . . . ’. The Whig diploma presents Hercu-
les’ choice as one between mythology and philosophy, the instru-
ments in turn of vice and virtue. The woman who embodies Pleasure
invites Hercules to join a scene of scantily clad nymphs and satyrs,
partying in the nearby woods to the sounds of cymbals and pipes,

40 C. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the
American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 49–50.

41 ‘The Choice of Hercules: American Student Societies in the Early 19th
Century’, in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society, ii (Princeton, 1994),
449–94.

feminism, myth, and america 225

instruments associated with Dionysos and his orgia. On the other
side, the woman of Virtue points to her (and our) right, where we
see a student reading, surrounded by a group of philosophers.
Americans, like Hercules himself, chose the ‘right’ path, that of
‘truth’ and ‘reason calm’, thereby rejecting the falsehoods of myth.
As Meyer Reinhold has noted, ‘It is characteristic of eighteenth-
century Americans that in their eclectic reading in the classics they
were interested primarily in the prose authors—the moralists and
the historians—for their practical value in promoting moral and
political wisdom. There was little taste for belles lettres as such,
especially poetry‘.42

Myth was associated with falsehood and the irrational, a point
made by Thomas Paine, the British man born of Quaker stock who
emigrated to America on the eve of the Revolution and wrote its
manifesto in his pamphlet Common Sense. In a later essay, The Age
of Reason, after arguing that the story of Christ was a Christian
adaptation of pagan myths about heroes, Paine asserts: ‘it yet re-
mains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.’43
In a similar way, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of
Independence, founder of several colleges, and a physician, rejected
the ‘ancient fables’ as an ‘agreeable description of frauds—rapes—
and murders’ which ‘shock the moral faculty’.44 Americans, creat-
ing a new nation in the midst of the Enlightenment, yearned, like
Princeton’s young students, for ‘the might of Truth’ and ‘Reason
calm’, neither of which could easily be found in the canonical myths
of Greece and Rome.

Born in the Enlightenment and located on the margins of the
classical conception of the world, America was both after and
outside of myth; it therefore did not see itself—its politics, its
faith, its values—reflected in the myths of the ancient world.45

42 Classica Americana, 25.
43 The Age of Reason (Secaucus, NJ, 1974), 53.
44 Benjamin Rush, Essays: Literary, Moral, and Philosophical ed. Mi-
chael Meranze (Schenectady, NY, 1988), 20.
45 Cf. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 129: ‘I think [the Iliad] a book
of false glory, tending to inspire immoral and mischievous notions of
honor.’ As John McWilliams (in The American Epic, cited above) has
shown, Americans had great difficulty in adapting the Iliad to the American

226 g r e g or y s t a l e y

America thus constituted an outside, or the perspective of the Other
on antiquity, which in its critique of myth anticipated Feminism’s
own. Europe, of course, had had its Enlightenment, too, and indeed
Cixous is herself in some ways a descendant of the eighteenth-
century French philosophes who created the movement. They, too,
had been influenced by the age of exploration and turned to newly
discovered worlds as ‘useful devices for criticizing European society
and suggesting a better one’.46 What Persia had been for Montes-
quieu or Tahiti for Diderot, America could be for Cixous, an
enlightened place, an antiland. For America in its enlightened cri-
tique of myth had already anticipated Cixous. Even before the
American poet and feminist Adrienne Rich gave voice to the view,
America’s Founders had read classical mythology as ‘a book of
myths j in which j our names do not appear’.47

land of dreams

The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that ‘the ends of the inhabited
world have been given all the finest things’ (3. 106); from its very
beginnings America has taken this notion seriously and has tried to
realize its vision. It is thus fair to say that the American Dream was
originally a classical myth. Americans were well aware of this
tradition, which Thomas Bulfinch mentions in the first chapter of
his The Age of Fable, a book written to familiarize Americans with
the myths that they should know:

On the western margin of the earth, by the stream of Ocean, lay a happy
place named the Elysian Plain, whither mortals favoured by the gods were
transported without tasting of death, to enjoy an immortality of bliss. This

context. In many ways the most successful attempt was James Fenimore
Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans, in which Homer’s warriors are
literally ‘embodied’ in the American Indians. Morally the Greeks were
‘savages’, albeit in some ways noble ones.

46 Leonard M. Marsak (ed.), The Enlightenment (New York, 1972), 4.
47 These are the final lines of Rich’s poem ‘Diving into the Wreck’
(1972), in The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950–2001 (New
York, 2002), 103.

feminism, myth, and america 227

happy region was also called the ‘Fortunate Fields,’ and the ‘Isles of the
Blessed.’48

This myth, Bulfinch suggests, ‘possibly may have sprung from the
reports of some storm-driven mariners who had caught a glimpse of
the coast of America’.49 Edward Everett, the first Professor of Greek
at Harvard, took these myths as a prophecy which Americans were
obligated to fulfil: ‘There are no more continents or worlds to be
revealed; Atlantis hath arisen from the ocean, the farthest Thule is
reached, there are no more retreats beyond the sea, no more discov-
eries, no more hopes. Here then a mighty work is to be fulfilled, or
never, by the race of mortals.’50

Bulfinch and Everett were trying to share with an American
audience what European intellectuals had long been saying, ever
since Peter Martyr, a humanist in service of Queen Isabella of Spain,
wrote shortly after Columbus’s voyage: ‘[the inhabitants of the New
World] seeme to live in that golden worlde of the which old writers
speake so much, wherein men lived simply and innocently.’51 When
Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 1850s transformed Greek myths into
salubrious tales for American children, he had Midas come to
America to bestow on it his Golden Touch, creating in the process
those glorious New England autumns and, by implication, a new
Golden Age in America; in fact, Hawthorne wrote his tales in the
immediate wake of the California Gold Rush. Mary Zimmerman
likewise attempted to Americanize Midas in her recent and success-
ful Broadway play Metamorphoses, based on Ovid’s collection of
tales. Zimmerman’s Midas, a successful but callous businessman, is
told by Silenus that paradise is not to be found in financial success
but resides in ‘a country beyond this one . . . Over the ocean. I’ve
been there . . . King, I tell you, it’s like a dream . . . .There is no
time—just the blue sky above and the pretty moon at night and

48 Bulfinch’s Mythology (New York, 1968), 8.
49 Ibid. 219.
50 ‘Oration on the Peculiar Motives to Intellectual Exertion in America,’
in Robert E. Spiller (ed.), The American Literary Revolution 1783–1837
(Garden City, NY, 1967), 316.
51 Peter Martyr, The Decades of the New World trans. Richard Eden
(n.p., 1966), 8.

228 g r e g or y s t a l e y

they got meadows under their feet with the yellow flowers.’52
Hesiod’s ‘beyond glorious Ocean’ still has its alluring appeal, espe-
cially in America.

If the West appealed to Christians as the Elysian Fields, a paradise
for God’s chosen people, or to Walt Whitman as ‘a better, fresher,
busier sphere, a wide, untried domain’ where both poets and immi-
grants could shed the burdens of the past, or as a nouus ordo
seclorum in which Americans could rewind Roman history, back
from evil Empire to virtuous Republic, it appealed to women
because it was one of the homelands of the fabled Amazons.53
Diodorus (3. 52. 4) had told of a tradition which placed the Amazon
women ‘on an island called Hesperia from its position toward the
setting Sun.’ The Amazons had been created by the Greeks as a
topsy-turvy society which represented a world that was in every
sense not Greek. That is why the homeland of the Amazons was
regularly on the margins of the world, whether in the West or South
or North. For the Greeks the Amazons were a fascinating intellec-
tual construct which asserted the powers of women only to deny
them through heroic conquest at the hands of Achilles, Heracles, or
Theseus. For women, however, this ‘law of reversal’ works in a very
different way. The Amazons represent female desire as well, as
Cixous has shown, but a desire in which the women prevail so as
to preserve their independence: ‘[The hero] dominates to destroy.
She dominates to not be dominated; she dominates the dominator to
destroy the space of domination.’54

The Amazons have long been popular figures among the women
who challenge patriarchy, from Christine de Pisan to He´le`ne Cixous
and beyond. When seventy-five years after the American Revolution
America’s Founding Mothers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia
Mott, and Lucy Stone, sought to apply to women the rights which
earlier the Revolution had claimed for ‘all men’, they became, in

52 Metamorphoses: A Play (Evanston, Ill., 2002), 12–13.
53 Whitman’s line comes from his poem ‘Song of the Exposition’ (1871).
For America’s use of Rome in the cinema, see Maria Wyke, Projecting the
Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (New York, 1997).
54 Newly Born Woman, 116. Cixous uses the phrase ‘the law of reversal’
there to characterize the Amazon’s need to ‘repeat the act that proves or
symbolizes that she is not captive or submissive to a man’.

feminism, myth, and america 229

Inez Haynes Gillmore’s characterization, modern Amazons: ‘The
spectacle of a woman trying to do something that a man has always
done–it is a primitive, fundamental joke. When the prehistoric
Greeks fought against the prehistoric Amazons, possibly many of
them died laughing.’55 Stanton herself used the myth of the
Amazons in her speeches to characterize the feminist movement.56

Just as Bulfinch and Everett were aware that America occupied
the place where the Isles of the Blessed had been situated, so too
America’s feminists understood the long tradition which had placed
Amazons in the New World. When Columbus reported finding an
island of women, Peter Martyr readily translated this discovery into
the myth of the Amazons; thereafter, the Amazon became ‘a figure
ubiquitous from the inception of the mythology of the New World’,
as Kathleen March and Kristina Passman have shown.57 As Ameri-
can women gained increasing access in the nineteenth century to the
kind of classical education men had long enjoyed, they too used the
language of myth to characterize their place in the world.58 Char-
lotte Perkins Gilman, one of America’s leading intellectuals of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, developed ‘an Ama-
zonian self-image’ of the type she put into the mouth of one of her
fictional characters: ‘I want to be big–Big–BIG! j I want to know
everything–as far as I can. j I want to be strong, skillful, an armory
of concealed weapons.’59 In her utopian novel Herland (1915)

55 Angels and Amazons: A Hundred Years of American Women (Garden
City, NY, 1933), 88.

56 Cf. Weinbaum, Island of Women and Amazons, 17 and references
cited there.

57 ‘The Amazon Myth and Latin America’ in Haase and Reinhold (eds.),
The Classical Tradition and the Americas, 285–338.

58 Cf. Caroline Winterer, ‘Victorian Antigone: Classicism and Women’s
Education in America, 1840–1900,’ American Quarterly 53.1 (2001),
70–93. Elizabeth Cady Stanton studied Greek with a tutor in order to
prove herself equal to men and later continued her classical studies at a
coeducational academy where she won a prize for her proficiency in Greek;
see Lois W. Banner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Woman’s Rights
(Boston, Mass., 1980), 11–13.

59 See Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical
Feminist 1860–1896 (Philadelphia, 1980), 49. Gilman’s early novel was
titled Benigna Machiavelli.

230 g r e g or y s t a l e y

Gilman creates a community of women of this sort, ‘an undiscov-
ered country of a strictly Amazonian nature’ located an ocean
voyage from America.

new worlds

Neither America nor Woman had a place in classical myth, except
as the locus of absence, of abyss. Yet, paradoxically, this absence
made myth a perfect vehicle through which both could map their
ideals, could create new worlds distant and different from antiquity.
The Greeks, who had placed their ideal civilization at the centre of
the world as they knew it, provided through their myths about
alternative civilizations at the margins a map to guide those like
Columbus and Cixous who were seeking to expand their horizons.
Only in myth could the Greeks entertain as logical but fantastic
possibilities the social ideals which ultimately America and Femi-
nism would seek to make real. The remapping of Greek geography
which began with the discovery of the New World was thus the
necessary prerequisite for the rethinking of Greek ideology which
movements such as Feminism have since fostered. That is why, for
Cixous, the New Woman embodies a New World.

part iv

Myth and Science

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9

Atoms, Individuals, and Myths

D u n c a n Kennedy

Let us begin by listening to a story told about his own discipline by
the biologist Steven Rose:
Every society that anthropologists have studied has developed its own
theories and legends to account for life and our place within it, to interpret
the great transitions that characterize our existence; the creation of new life
at birth and its termination at death. In most societies’ creation myths, a
deity imposes order upon the confused mass of struggling life. Although our
own society is no exception, we now phrase things differently, claiming to
have transcended myth and replaced it with secure knowledge. For the last
three hundred years, Western societies have built on and transcended their
own creation myths by means of scientia, the organized investigation of the
universe, made possible within the rules and by the experimental methods
of natural science, and with the aid of powerful instruments designed to
extend the human senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and sound.1
Some powerful notions structure this story. One is the idea of a
unified ‘science’, with its rules and methods. Another is the idea of
an epistemological break or leap (‘transcended’), the so-called
‘Scientific Revolution’ which separates the last three hundred years

1 Steven Rose, Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism (London,
1997), 3.

234 d u n c a n ke n n e d y

from what went before, rendering us ‘modern’ in contrast to the
exploded paradigms of what becomes the ‘ancient’ world, at one
bound associating ‘secure knowledge’ with the modern, and consign-
ing ‘myth’ to the ancient. Mythos gives way to logos, story-telling to
the exercise of pure reason. In this story, myth becomes the antonym
of science. Rose tells his story tongue-in-cheek, for he would not
distance himself so categorically from the category of ‘myth’ (my
emphasis): ‘But to study, to interpret, to understand, to explain and
to predict? These are the tasks of myth-makers, magicians and, above
all today, of scientists, of biologists. I am of this last category.’2 Rose
would be viewed by some as going over to the other side in what have
come to be known as the ‘science wars’, deserting the ranks of those
who hold to the realist view that science alone is capable of delivering
up universal truths about the world to join those who argue that
science is a cultural construct.3 Rose thus sees not the rupture between
myth and science that characterizes the realist view, but a continuum.
This essay will explore the relationship of myth and science from the
direction of gender studies, which holds to such a continuum, in an
attempt to hear the echoes of the past in the present.

Feminism’s engagement with science has been played out on a
number of stages. Historians and sociologists have studied the lives
of women scientists and have traced the processes by which the
institutions in which science is practised have either excluded
women or narrowly restricted the roles they are permitted to play.
Another focus has been the role of gender in what we might call the
culture of science. The practice of science is often mediated in
images that are tendentiously gendered, for example, the image of
science as ‘conquest’, a trope that has often taken on connotations
of fierce sexual aggression directed at a personified Nature gendered
as female. Mary Midgley writes:

2 Steven Rose, Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism (London,
1997), 3.

3 The bibliography is immense. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher
Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore and
London, 1994) are contested by the contributors to Andrew Ross (ed.),
Science Wars (Durham, NC and London, 1996); Jay A. Labinger and Harry
Collins (eds.), The One Culture? A Conversation about Science (Chicago and
London, 2001) seek to bring the sides together and lower the temperature.

atoms, individuals, and myths 235

The literature of early modern science is a mine of highly-coloured passages
that describe Nature, by no means as a neutral object, but as a seductive but
troublesome female, to be unrelentingly pursued, sought out, fought
against, chased into her inmost sanctuaries, prevented from escaping, per-
sistently courted, wooed, harried, vexed, tormented, unveiled, unrobed,
and ‘put to the question’ (i.e. interrogated under torture), forced to confess
‘all that lay in her most intimate recesses’, her ‘beautiful bosom’ must be
laid bare, she must be held down and finally ‘penetrated’, ‘pierced’ and
‘vanquished’ (words which constantly recur).4

However, whilst many, scientists and non-scientists alike, have wel-
comed the growing openness of the institutions of science to
women, and the concomitant awareness of the masculine emphasis
in the ways in which the culture of scientific practice is framed, they
balk at the notion that the content of science might (have) be(en)
affected by gendered assumptions, for to concede this would be to
undermine the cherished belief that science offers objective know-
ledge that transcends the contingencies of history and culture, gen-
der, or race, with the promise, as Evelyn Fox Keller has it, ‘of
touching the world at its innermost being, a touching made possible

4 Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning
(London, 1992), 77. Many of the terms Midgley cites come from Francis
Bacon and Robert Boyle, but a masculinist colouring may be felt in the
classical imagery of the pursuit of knowledge. Lucretius speaks of holding
his reader’s attention ‘while you come to see the whole nature of things,
with what shape it—or she?—stands arranged’ (dum perspicis omnem j
naturam rerum qua constet compta figura, DRN 1. 949–50). There seems
to be here at least the seeds of the image of a personified Nature unveiled,
laid open to the voyeuristic gaze of the investigator, for which see Ludmilla
Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine
between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Hemel Hempstead,
1989), 87–110. A masculine colouring, even though itself now unveiled,
persists. Donna Haraway, one of the most prominent contemporary femi-
nist critics of science, has recently castigated Bruno Latour’s influential
constructivist study Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass., and London,
1987) for privileging the language of war in depicting scientific practice:
‘ ‘‘nature’’ ’, she says, ‘is multiply the feat of the hero, more than it ever was
in Boyle’ (‘Modest Witness: Feminist Diffractions in Science Studies’, in
Peter Galison and David J. Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science: Bound-
aries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford, Calif., and London, 1996), 437). See
further Duncan F. Kennedy, Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textua-
lization of Nature (Ann Arbor, 2002), 112–13.