Laughing with MEDUSA : Classical Myth and Feminist Thought

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

by the power of pure thought’.5 That gendered assumptions might
affect the substance of science is a tendentious claim, so let us start
by looking at what it might mean.

In what is now a classic article that appeared in the journal Signs
in 1991, the anthropologist Emily Martin has charted the ways in
which medical textbooks have represented the moment of concep-
tion—what the egg and the sperm do—in ways that are reminiscent
of Mills & Boon romances:

It is remarkable how ‘femininely’ the egg behaves and how ‘masculinely’ the
sperm. The egg is seen as large and passive. It does not move or journey, but
passively ‘is transported’, ‘is swept’ or even ‘drifts’ along the fallopian tube.
In utter contrast, sperm are small, ‘streamlined’, and invariably active. They
‘deliver’ their genes to the egg, ‘activate the developmental program of the
egg’, and have a ‘velocity’ that is often remarked upon. Their tails are
‘strong’ and efficiently powered. Together with the forces of ejaculation,
they can ‘propel the semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina’. For this
they need ‘energy’, ‘fuel’, so that with ‘whiplashlike motion and strong
lurches’ they can ‘burrow through the egg coat’ and ‘penetrate’ it.

At its extreme, the age-old relationship of the egg and the sperm takes on
a royal or religious patina. The egg coat, its protective barrier, is sometimes
called its vestments, a term usually reserved for sacred, religious dress. The
egg is said to have a ‘corona’, a crown, and to be accompanied by attendant
cells. It is holy, set apart and above, the queen to the sperm’s king. The egg is
also passive, which means it must depend on the sperm for rescue. Gerald
Schatten and Helen Schatten liken the egg’s role to that of Sleeping Beauty:
‘a dormant bride awaiting her mate’s magic kiss, which instills the spirit
that brings her to life’. Sperm, by contrast, have a ‘mission’, which is to
‘move through the female genital tract in quest of the ovum.’ One popular
account has it that the sperm carry out a ‘perilous journey’ into the ‘warm
darkness’, where some fall away ‘exhausted’. ‘Survivors’ ‘assault’ the egg,
the successful candidates ‘surrounding the prize’.6

Such ideas can be seen as historically deeply embedded, as Evelyn
Fox Keller has pointed out: the assumption that the egg is activated

5 Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Lan-
guage, Gender, and Science (New York, 1992), 78.

6 Emily Martin, ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a
Romance Based on Stereotypical Male–Female Roles’, Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, 16 (1990/1), 489–90.

atoms, individuals, and myths 237

by fertilization, therefore by the entry of the sperm, resonates with
the view voiced by Apollo in Aeschylus’s Eumenides that the female
is not the parent, but the nurse of the seed implanted by the male
within her.7 As Martin goes on to suggest, the picture of ‘the egg as
damsel in distress, shielded only by her sacred garments; sperm as
heroic warrior to the rescue’, prevalent up to the 1970s, has given
way to other descriptions of the process of fertilization which
contradict this picture, though the imagery in which these are
communicated is no less ideologically loaded. The work of Gerald
Schatten and Helen Schatten from 1983 referred to by Martin (an
article entitled ‘The Energetic Egg’) pictures the egg, like the sperm,
as an active agent, directing the growth of projections on its surface
called microvilli to capture the sperm. Egg and sperm are repre-
sented as ‘partners’ (as Londa Schiebinger suggests ‘perhaps a dual-
career couple’8) co-operating to achieve fertilization. As Schiebinger
observes, though this might be a more sophisticated account, it is
not an example of ‘prejudice vanquished’, of gender bias trans-
cended; as the egg is energized, so it becomes masculinized (vest-
ments replaced by shoulder pads, perhaps), and Martin remarks
that, as the egg becomes active and masculinized, it is also seen as
aggressive, a sort of femme fatale out to entrap the sperm. We
should note that a very strong claim is being made here: the story
patterns drawn out by scholars such as Martin are not seen as an
ornamental extra that can simply be discarded to get at an ‘object-
ive’ account; the claim is that, at a fundamental level, the story
pattern constitutes the explanation.9 In what might be regarded as

7 Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, Mass., and
London, 2000), 84.

8 Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge,
Mass., and London, 1999), 146.

9 Over the past generation or so, quite a lot of work has emerged on
what we could call the ‘emplotment’ of scientific explanations. Perhaps the
most famous instance of this is Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary
Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Lon-
don, 1985). Along the same lines, the physicist and historian of science
Gerald Holton in his book, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler

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

a ‘pre-scientific’ text, such an assertion might not come as a sur-
prise.10 A corollary to this is that the history of knowledge becomes
re-configured: continuity is privileged over rupture, the ‘Scientific
Revolution’ starts to lose its ontological status as a historical fact,11
and the distinction between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ becomes some-
what harder to maintain, in epistemological terms at least.12 A
further corollary is that if such story patterns are still operative,
there is no reason to believe that they and their successors will not
continue to be so. Whilst ‘better’ descriptions may well be forth-
coming in the future (in the sense that they bring into view fresh
phenomena or grant existing observations a new significance), they
will no less encode the ideological assumptions of the society that
generates them; no final or objective account of the kind posited
within a realist epistemology will be forthcoming. If biology styles
itself a rationalizing, scientistic logos, the logos concerned with
explaining ‘life’, then what scholars like Martin are practising is
the description of this self-styled biology’s ‘biomyths’ and their
discipline could be termed ‘biomythography’.

In her recent book Has Feminism Changed Science? Londa
Schiebinger has examined the arguments for seeing gendered

to Einstein (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1973), proposed his notion of
themata, preconceived patterns or conceptual templates that are applied to
the phenomena of the world. Again, the claim is the strong one that the
pattern constitutes the explanation: for Holton, so fundamental an idea as
that the basis of matter is atomistic is a cultural prejudgement that physi-
cists bring to their work, not an inference they derive from it.

10 As e.g. when Lucretius uses the traditional personification of the earth
as a mother to provide an explanation for a phenomenon he cannot directly
observe, but feels obliged to explain historically, the appearance of different
species (DRN 5. 793–827); cf. Duncan F. Kennedy, ‘Making a Text of the
Universe: Perspectives on Discursive Order in the De Rerum Natura of
Lucretius’, in Alison Sharrock and Helen Morales (eds.), Intratextuality:
Greek and Roman Textual Relations (Oxford, 2000), 221–3. For an
extended treatment of myth in Lucretius see Monica R. Gale, Myth and
Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge, 1994).

11 See Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London,
1996).

12 So for Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge,
Mass., and London, 1993).

atoms, individuals, and myths 239

assumptions as affecting the substance of science, and has suggested
that in medicine, primatology, and biology, a strong case can be
made, along the lines of work such as Emily Martin’s. Thus Schie-
binger observes that ‘the egg’s cone of microvilli was documented as
early as 1895, but was not considered worthy of research until some
eighty years later.’13 It is in the context of a change in perceived
gender relations that a different story—and hence mode of explan-
ation—becomes plausible, and comes to see significance in a detail
that has hitherto been marginalized and effectively ignored. Schie-
binger similarly points to the role of ‘origin stories’ in primatology
and archaeology. She applauds the call by the anthropologist Mar-
garet Conkey for a critique of the assumptions underlying the
attribution of ‘the sexual division of labour’ to apes or early hom-
inids: ‘The debate about man the hunter versus woman the gatherer
is, [Conkey] remarks, really about the origins of two Western social
institutions: the nuclear family and a gender-based division of
labour. To seek their origins is to accept these institutions as natural
and legitimate, rather than to see them as the products of particular
histories.’14 However, Schiebinger is much more circumspect when
it comes to physics, and does not in the end bring forward any
instance she would assert as unequivocal. ‘Empirical study’, she
writes, ‘may reveal that gender does not permeate the most abstract
level of human endeavor’, and for the moment is content with the
much weaker holding position that ‘gender abounds in the cultures
of math and physics, determining to a certain extent who gets
educated, gets funded, enjoys prestige, and can build upon oppor-
tunities.’15 We might be able to see a rationale for this. Feminist

13 Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science?, 146.
14 Ibid. 138. The geneticist Richard Lewontin has similarly criticized
appeals to what are effectively aetiological fables in sociobiological ac-
counts of the development of allegedly universal ‘human traits’ such as
altruism and homosexuality as the result of selective evolutionary pressures:
‘All of the sociobiological explanations of the evolution of human behav-
iour are like Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories of how the camel got his
hump and how the elephant got his trunk’, Biology as Ideology: The
Doctrine of DNA (New York, 1991), 100. The point is elaborated in
Rose, Lifelines, 233–5.
15 Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science?, 178.

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

critiques of science are concerned to see how gender, specifically
defined as a cultural construct rather than as a given of nature,
affects science. Within the opposition of culture/nature that feminist
studies of science negotiate, ‘culture’ is given explanatory prece-
dence over ‘nature’, and the claim is made that it offers critical
purchase in discussing discourses such as biology. But physics
defines itself as, precisely, the study of ‘nature’ (physis): it concerns
itself with things. Its most extraordinary contribution to the history
of ideas might be taken to be its development, refinement and
theorization of the idea of a ‘thing’,16 with the concomitant notions
of the thing as an object and of objectivity as the ideal of physical
speculation: get to know the thing-in-itself, the nature of the thing
(physics aspires to be, as Lucretius would have it, de rerum natura).
Physics aims to seek out things as they really are (and we should not
overlook the derivation of that term from res); its preferred mode is
realism. At its purest (and in a mirror image of feminist studies of
science), physics seeks to dissolve the opposition culture/nature,
and refer all explanation ultimately to nature. Were the feminist
critique to be ‘right’, the claim of physics to be both an autonomous
discourse, and fundamental to boot, would fall.

The stakes are indeed high. Science, for all the critical scrutiny
brought to bear upon it, is still the great success story of our culture,
and ‘scientific method’ carries with it, as we have seen, an enormous
epistemological prestige. Scientific method is a very broad-ranging
term that in different accounts can cover experiment or the mathe-
matization of nature; but in respect of its capacity to explain, it is
often identified with reductionism. Reductionism’s goal could be
seen as the discovery of fundamental or ultimate causes, and herein
lies one of the most familiar ideas associated with it, that biology
can be reduced to chemistry and chemistry in turn reduced to
physics as a final explanation. The reductionist case is often pressed
further than this: thus sociobiology seeks to reduce sociology to
biology. Reductionism can be further defined as a method of under-
standing the whole by examining the parts: matter, for example, by
reducing it to primary constituent parts such as ‘atoms’, organisms

16 See Wolfgang Mann, The Discovery of Things (Princeton and Lon-
don, 2000).

atoms, individuals, and myths 241

by reduction to genes, and, as in the recent work by Richard
Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Susan Blackmore, culture by reduc-
tion to what they term ‘memes’.17 Reductionism is not simply
concerned with fundamental things; its goal could be seen as the
discovery of fundamental or ultimate causes.18 The dominant para-
digm of physical reality has been atomism, and it has served as the
model of ‘fundamental’ knowledge that scientists should aspire to in
other fields of study, and it continues to do so even as the classical
atom has lost a good deal of its intellectual currency in contempor-
ary physics. The search for something ultimate, an end point with
no internal structure, has not been abandoned; atoms gave way to
electrons a century ago, and in turn, leptons and quarks are some-
times touted as ultimate, even as some physicists speculate that they
are composed of yet smaller constituents. However, as the physicist
Steven Weinberg writes, ‘in place of particles with definite positions
and velocities [by which Weinberg means the atom of Newtonian
physics19], we have learned to speak of wave functions and prob-
abilities. Out of the fusion of relativity with quantum mechanics
there has evolved a new view of the world, one in which matter has
lost its central view.’20 John Dupre´ emphasizes how problematical
the model of the classical atom has become: ‘[E]lementary particles
have become an increasingly heterogeneous bunch since the good
old days of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and some of them fail

17 Cf. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976); Daniel Den-
nett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Lon-
don, 1995); Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford, 1999).

18 When we recall the etymological link between Latin causa and French
chose, ‘thing’, we are reminded how in reductionist thinking ‘fundamental’
things are endowed with causal power, and are seen as agents with the
capacity to bring about effects. Cf. Kennedy, Rethinking Reality, 85.

19 Cf. Newton (Optics iv. 260): ‘It seems to me that God in the beginning
formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of
such sizes and figures and with such other properties and in such proportion
to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that
these primitive particles being solids are incomparably harder than any
porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear
or break in pieces.’

20 Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fun-
damental Laws of Nature (London, 1993), 1.

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

to be elementary by being composed of simpler entities, quarks. The
sense of ‘‘composed’’, however, is obscure, as quarks are generally
said not to exist except in such ‘‘compositions’’ ’.21 These ‘composi-
tions’ are sometimes troped heart-warmingly as ‘families’, and in
particle accelerators, quarks decay within micro-seconds of being
smashed out of these compositions. They can only by a stretch be
described as ‘things’ any more, and contemporary physics notori-
ously enlists the imagery of both ‘waves’ and ‘particles’ to charac-
terize them. However, what atoms have always lacked in terms of
visibility and their modern counterparts are coming to lack in terms
of ontology, they more than make up for in a quality that is philo-
sophically far more important, their finality. They provide a defini-
tive point of explanatory closure, and as such have become the
model for explanation, seldom acknowledged, in discourses that
see themselves far removed from physics.

The proponents of reductionism often advance the progressivist
argument that what separates ‘modern’ science from the earlier
animism of ‘natural philosophy’ is a methodology that, in reducing
phenomena to their constituent ‘things’, resists the imposition or
projection of human desires, hopes or fears on to the natural world,
which is conceived of rather as, precisely, depersonalized, and
operating without purpose or design in a purely mechanical causal
fashion.22 Descriptions of the fundamental components of the phys-
ical world should therefore aspire, at least, to transcend the kind of
anthropomorphism, with its attendant gender biases, that feminist
critics of the sciences have detected in what they see as the stories
that structure explanation across a range of scientific discourses.

21 John Dupre´, ‘Metaphysical Disorder’, in Galison and Stump (eds.),
The Disunity of Science, 103.

22 Cf. Rose, Lifelines, 52, on the use of mechanical metaphors (e.g. the
heart as pump) in biology: ‘the temptation to rely on mechanical and
industrial metaphors for living processes goes back to the transformation
in scientific thinking that came with the Newtonian revolution of the
seventeenth century, itself of course intimately connected with the birth of
modern capitalism and industrialization. Before that time, the metaphor
trade tended to be in the opposite direction: the physical worlds of our own
Earth and the cosmological universe were described in language usually
reserved for living organisms, as when inanimate forces (the wind, rivers,
and so forth) were ascribed intentions and goals.’

atoms, individuals, and myths 243

Londa Schiebinger, as we have seen, is extremely cautious about
conceding gender bias in respect of the substance of physics, though
she does assert that ‘fundamental concepts in any field should not be
taken for granted but should be set within historical frameworks of
meaning.’23

Let us accept her invitation in respect of physics and frame our
question thus: does reductionism escape its historical legacy? With
Greco-Roman atomism, we have an example of a proto-reductionist
strategy that seeks to explain the world around us in terms of the
activity of primary particles operating way below the threshold of our
senses. Epicurean atomism held that these minuscule pieces of matter
had only three properties: size, shape, and weight. With weight, it was
thought, came movement, and it is through their movements that
these atoms become enmeshed in compounds to form the visible
objects of the world around us. The Greeks referred to these particles
using the adjective a-tomos, that which cannot be divided, indivisible;
in that sense, atoms are ‘individuals’. When Lucretius comes to write
on Epicurean atomism in Latin, he eschews transliteration of the
Greek in favour of a variety of terms that include corpora, ‘bodies’,
thus eagerly embracing an explicitly anthropomorphic representation
of these primary particles.24 The atom is completely solid, impene-
trable, and collides randomly with other atoms, stereotypically mas-
culine qualities, it might be concluded. But let’s not get ahead of
ourselves here, and rather look in a bit more detail at how Lucretius
represents them (DRN 2. 116–41; my emphasis):

multa minuta modis multis per inane videbis 120
corpora misceri radiorum lumine in ipso 125
et velut aeterno certamine proelia pugnas
edere turmatim certantia nec dare pausam,
conciliis et discidiis exercita crebris;
conicere ut possis ex hoc, primordia rerum
quale sit in magno iactari semper inani.
dumtaxat rerum magnarum parva potest res
exemplare dare et vestigia notitiai.

Hoc etiam magis haec animum te advertere par est

23 Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science?, 189.
24 Lucretius, it should be added, reminds his readers that they must not
think that the atoms are actually animate, 1. 1021–8.

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

corpora quae in solis radiis turbare videntur 130
quod tales turbae motus quoque materiai 135
significant clandestinos caecosque subesse. 140
multa videbis enim plagis ibi percita caecis
commutare viam retroque repulsa reverti,
nunc huc nunc illuc, in cunctas undique partis.
scilicet hic a principiis est omnibus error:
prima moventur enim per se primordia rerum;
inde ea quae parvo sunt corpora conciliatu
et quasi proxima sunt ad viris principiorum,
ictibus illorum caecis inpulsa cientur,
ipsaque proporro paulo maiora lacessunt.
sic a principiis ascendit motus et exit
paulatim nostros ad sensus, ut moveantur
illa quoque in solis quae lumine cernere quimus,
nec quibus id faciant plagis apparet aperte.

You will see many minute bodies mingling in many ways throughout the
void in the light itself of the rays, and as it were in everlasting conflict
engaging in struggles and fights, battling in troops without any pause, kept
occupied with frequent unions and partings; so that you may conjecture
from this what it is for the first-beginnings of things to be perpetually tossed
about in the great void. To this extent a small thing can offer an illustration
of great things and the traces of a concept.

And for this reason even more it is fitting that you give your attention to
these bodies which are seen to be jostling in the sun’s rays, namely that such
turmoil indicates that there are secret and unseen disturbances lurking
below in matter. For there you will see many things set in motion by unseen
blows change their course and turn back forced to give ground, this way
and that in all directions. You can be sure that all get this erratic movement
from their first-beginnings. For in the first place the first-beginnings of
things move of themselves. Then those bodies which are formed from a
small combination, and are, as it were, closest to the forces, of the first-
beginnings, are set in motion by the impact of their unseen blows, and they
themselves in turn assail those that are a little larger. Thus the disturbance
makes its way upwards from the first-beginnings and gradually emerges to
our senses so that those objects also are set in motion which we are able to
perceive in the sun’s light, whilst it is not clearly obvious by what blows they
are made to do this.

In this famous passage where the motion of atoms is compared to
that of motes of dust in a sunbeam penetrating into a darkened
room, Lucretius says (116–20) that ‘you will see many minute

atoms, individuals, and myths 245

bodies mingling in many ways throughout the void in the light itself
of the rays, and as it were in everlasting conflict (velut aeterno
certamine) engaging in struggles and fights (proelia pugnas edere),
battling in troops (turmatim certantia) without any pause, kept
occupied with frequent unions and partings (conciliis et discidiis).’
For the movement of atoms, Lucretius consistently employs the
language of warfare. Their characteristic activity is imaged through
the verb turbare in 126 and the noun turbae in 127; and involves
blows (plagis, 129; ictibus, 136) and collisions (repulsa, 130;
inpulsa, 136). As ‘individuals’, they are autonomous, and move of
themselves (133, prima moventur enim per se primordia rerum).
A similar picture emerges at 5. 436–42, where Lucretius describes
the chaotic motion of the atoms before the formation of the earth;
‘but a sort of strange storm, all kinds of particles gathered together
into a mass, and their discord (discordia, 437), exciting battles
(proelia miscens, 439), threw into confusion (turbabat, 439) their
intervals, directions, connections, weights, blows, meetings, move-
ments, because, on account of their differing shapes and various
forms, not all when joined together could remain so or make the
appropriate motions together.’ The behaviour of Lucretius’s atoms
has political overtones: he uses the term motus of their movement
(2.127; 138), ‘a common euphemism for political convulsions’.25
When the atoms come together to form compounds, their movement
within the compound is restricted by their interaction with other
atoms. The term Lucretius regularly uses for such a compound is
concilium, which is also the word for a political assembly, and Don
Fowler has remarked on how the ‘society’ formed by Lucretius’s
atoms is ‘strongly republican’ in flavour.26

In so far as a reductionist outlook is brought to bear on this, we
are dealing not with metaphor, but with homology. In this passage
in Book 2, Lucretius goes on to argue (133–40) in classic reduction-
ist fashion that a chain of causation runs from the movement of the
microscopic atoms to the movement of things in the world we are

25 R. G. M. Nisbet and M. Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace Odes
Book II (Oxford, 1978), 11 on Horace Odes 2. 1. 1 (motum ex Metello
consule).

26 D. P. Fowler, ‘Lucretius and Politics’, in M. Griffin and J. Barnes
(eds.), Philosophia Togata (Oxford, 1989), 146–7.

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

able to observe with our senses: the movement of the motes of dust in
the sunbeam is ultimately the effect of the movement of the constitu-
ent atoms. This chain of causation, which extends up to the level of
the human, positively encourages a homologous subtext to be read
off: untrammelled individualism lies at the root of civil disturbance.

When Lucretius turns to speculate on the question of human ori-
gins, his thoughts are similarly structured by the assumption that
human beings are, first and foremost, individuals out for themselves,
in contrast with ‘Golden Age’ or ‘Golden Race’ representations in
Plato and others, which suggested that the human race in early times
was just and peaceable, and required no laws (DRN 5. 958–65):

Nec commune bonum poterant spectare, neque ullis 960
moribus inter se scibant nec legibus uti. 965
quod cuique obtulerat praedae fortuna, ferebat
sponte sua sibi quisque valere et vivere doctus.

Et Venus in silvis iungebat corpora amantum;
conciliabat enim vel mutua quamque cupido
vel violenta viri vis atque inpensa libido
vel pretium, glandes atque arbita vel pira lecta.

Lucretius remarks of primitive humans that ‘they were unable to
look to the common good (nec commune bonum poterant spectare),
nor did they know how to manage their mutual relations in accord-
ance with custom and law. Whatever booty fortune gave to each,
that he bore away, each taught to be strong and live for himself at
his own will (sponte sua sibi quisque valere et vivere doctus). And
Venus coupled the bodies of lovers in the woods; for either mutual
desire brought each female into union, or the violent strength of the
man and his enormous lust, or an inducement—acorns and arbutus
berries or choice pears.’ Sexual relations are promiscuous, and are
instigated, if not by mutual desire, then by male violence (violenta
viri vis atque inpensa libido) or bribery (pretium, 962). The term
used of bringing male and female together (conciliabat, 964) is
etymologically associated with concilium, the term Lucretius
deploys for the compound formed by interlocking atoms. These
primitive collisions and couplings in due course give way to friend-
ship amongst neighbours, a process of joining, as atoms do into
compounds (tunc et amicitiem coeperunt iungere aventes j finitimi
inter se nec laedere nec violari, 5. 1019–20), and eventually to

atoms, individuals, and myths 247

contracts (foedera, 5. 1025), the same term as is used to characterize
the formation of atomic compounds. Lucretius’s imagery endows
the reductionist tradition it helped to inspire with a strongly mas-
culine character—just as when he resorts to holistic forms of
explanation, whereby a system with many components may collect-
ively exhibit emergent qualities that are absent at the level of the
individual component viewed in isolation, his preferred imagery,
that of a personified ‘Nature’, is feminine.27

Earlier we saw how Emily Martin drew attention to the way in
which anthropomorphism, and its attendant gendered assumptions,
featured in descriptions of the activities of the egg and the sperm.
Indeed, this was her key tool of critique. Reductionist claims, it
should be emphasized, are not made in respect of the egg and the
sperm, but they often are in respect of genes, and here, for all of
‘modern’ reductionism’s principled resistance to it, anthropo-
morphism seems rife as well. The infamous example from Richard
Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene bears another repetition:

The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines
created by our genes . . . Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have
survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world.
This entitles us to expect certain qualities of our genes. I shall argue that
a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless
selfishness.28

Although Dawkins seeks to forge ‘selfishness’ into a quasi-technical
term as the book goes on, it never escapes this memorable charac-
terization at the beginning. The point would be an amusing one
were it not for the rather bold metaphysical assumption we can
see at work here, that the parts are more real and significant than
the whole they make up: we are but machines created by our genes.
The extreme reductionism espoused by Dawkins results in a curious
flip-over here: people become depersonalized while the things that
make them up are endowed with the characteristics of people.

27 Cf. Kennedy, Rethinking Reality 87–93, where I also discuss a latter-
day counterpart, James Lovelock’s so-called ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, named by
William Golding for the Greek goddess of the earth.

28 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 2–3.

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

Dawkins develops the point even more forcefully in his recent book
Unweaving the Rainbow (my emphases):

The individual organism . . . is not fundamental to life, but something that
emerges when genes, which at the beginning of evolution were separate,
warring entities, gang together in co-operative groups, as ‘selfish co-oper-
ators’. The individual organism is not exactly an illusion. It is too concrete
for that. But it is a secondary, derived phenomenon, cobbled together as a
consequence of fundamental, even warring agents.29

Dawkins’s metaphysical reductionism, here felt strongly in the
repeated term ‘fundamental’ and in the (extraordinary) statement
that ‘the individual organism is not exactly an illusion’, seems to be
centred on the suggestion that the parts are more real than the
whole because they are causally active. They are self-moving
movers, while the wholes they compose are mere passive outcomes
of their activity, or, as Dawkins puts it, ‘cobbled together as a
consequence of fundamental, even warring agents’. Ancient ato-
mism’s characterization of its indivisible entity haunts these modern
discussions. As I have remarked, the imagery of which we have been
talking is deeply embedded; in Dawkins’s term ‘warring’ the residue
of Lucretius can be detected. For Fox Keller, the gene is a combin-
ation of the atom of the physicists with a Platonic soul, ‘at one and
the same time a fundamental building block and an animating
force’.30 Although the classical atom may have lost a good deal of
its currency in contemporary physics, the masculine bias it
expressed carries on in those discourses—and these are not only
‘scientific’—that continue to use it as a model.

Lucretius’s staunchly Republican Roman atoms may work to-
gether with more regard for constitutional niceties than do Daw-
kins’s ‘selfish co-operators’ who ‘gang together in co-operative
groups’, but again his reductionist assumptions mean that there is
also a homologous political subtext at work in Dawkins; ‘If you
wish . . . to build a society in which individuals co-operate gener-
ously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little
help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and

29 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (London, 1998), 308.
30 Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 2nd edn. (New
Haven and London, 1995), 9–10.

atoms, individuals, and myths 249

altruism, because we are born selfish.’31 However theoretically
fundamental Lucretius finds the atom, friendship (amicitia) and
the institutions of civil society seem of particular urgency to him,
as they do to Dawkins, to counter what they believe to be the
dictates of nature. The behaviour attributed to primary units in
reductionist analysis interacts with the political ideologies specific
to that society so as to ‘ground’ behaviour in ‘nature’. As Donna
Haraway has argued, theories of animal and human society based
on sex and reproduction, notably, of course, Darwinian evolution,
have been powerful in legitimating beliefs in the natural necessity of
aggression, competition, and hierarchy, and she concludes: ‘It is
difficult to imagine what evolutionary theory would be like in any
language other than [that of] classical capitalist political econ-
omy.’32 Of course a society’s political ideology need not be viewed
as monolithic (and does that image owe some of its force to the
solid, impenetrable atom of reductionist thought?); not all political
philosophies track back to the individual. Conversely, biological
theories that are unsympathetic to individualism are also wary of
the claims of reductionism. Steven Rose argues that the competitive,
selfish genes postulated by ultra-Darwinism ‘are not the genes of the
molecular biologists’. Rather ‘they are a bit like atoms were before
the days of nuclear physics; hard, impenetrable and indivisible
billiard balls, whose mode of interaction with one another and
with their surrounding medium is limited to a collision followed
by a bounce. The sole activity and telos of these genes is to create the
condition for their own replication.’ Such isolated, competitive
units could never bring about ‘anything like a harmoniously func-
tioning organism’, and he offers a very different picture of the gene,
one in which communicative relationship and collaboration—Rose
calls it ‘molecular democracy’—is the key.33

Reductionism’s goal, the discovery of fundamental causes, pur-
ports to be value-neutral, to seek out things as they really are, to

31 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 3; my emphasis.
32 Donna Haraway, ‘Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the
Body Politic, Part II: The Past is a Contested Zone’, Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, 4 (1978/9), 60.
33 Rose, Lifelines, 307.

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

create, therefore, a clear and final distinction between ‘nature’ and
‘culture’, with ‘nature’ granted an ultimate primacy. Feminist critics
of reductionism argue in classic constructivist fashion that ‘nature’
and ‘culture’ are never finally distinguished, but operate within a
feedback loop. Complete depersonalization is never achieved, and
in the course of their anthropomorphic representation as people, the
argument goes, primary units and their so-called ‘behaviour’ cannot
but take on an ideological colouring from those social or cultural
traits attributed to them that are deemed to be characteristic of
human beings (or at least a certain section of them, such as Daw-
kins’s ‘Chicago gangsters’), and those story patterns into which they
are inserted. Thus Fox Keller argues that ‘much of contemporary
evolutionary theory relies on a representation of the ‘‘individual’’—
be it the organism or the gene—that is cast in the particular image of
man we might call ‘‘Hobbesian man’’ . . . autonomous and a priori
competitive.’34 According to such critics, social imagery is
implanted in representations of nature in such a way as to re-import
that same imagery as natural explanations of social phenomena—
now reinforced by the epistemological prestige of science (realist,
reductionist science, that is) and thus ‘naturalizing’ the gender roles
that are encoded in these representations. For Donna Haraway,
‘sciences . . . act as legitimating metalanguages that produce hom-
ologies between social and symbolic systems. That is acutely true
for the sciences of the body and the body politic. In a strict sense’,
she concludes, ‘science is our myth.’35 This form of critique, which
sees science resolutely from the perspective of culture, results in a
flip-over of assumptions no less remarkable than that we have just
seen in Dawkins. For Mary Midgley ‘[m]yths are not lies. Nor are
they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of
powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the
world.’36 Thus in these critiques myth is not, as is sometimes sup-
posed, the opposite of science, or something that science has trans-
cended and consigned to the past in its pursuit of the truth, but

34 Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, 115–16, 144.
35 Haraway, ‘Animal Sociology’, 60; my emphasis.
36 Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (London, 2003), 1.

atoms, individuals, and myths 251

remains part of it—as Midgley puts it, the part that decides science’s
significance in our lives.

There is a need for some caution at this point. Are we simply
dealing with a reversal of Dawkins’s reductionist assumption that
biology is primary and determines social behaviour with a corres-
pondingly reductionist assumption that the social or the political is
primary and determines what we count as ‘biology’? Something like
this seems to be happening in Mary Midgley’s account of what she
alternatively calls (in deference to Lucretius) ‘social atomism’ or
‘individualism’, which she describes as (my emphasis):

the idea that only individuals are real while the groupings in which they live
are not.37 Each citizen is then a distinct, ultimately independent unit, linked
to the others around it only externally, by contract. The roots of this idea
are of course political. But individualist theorists have for some time
claimed that the view is scientific in a sense that roots it in physical
science.38

Similarly, when Schiebinger asserts, as we saw earlier, that ‘the
debate about man the hunter versus woman the gatherer is . . . really
about the origins of two Western social institutions’, we look to be
dealing with a social reductionism that is the mirror image of the
physical reductionism it is contesting: rather than culture being
reduced to nature, nature is being reduced to culture. The key
term here is ‘really’, which, in an extraordinary piece of discursive
compression, encodes the assumption that the debate is being ‘led
back’ (reducere) to a ‘thing’ that is regarded as primary, and, in
principle, irreducible—precisely, a reification—whether that ‘thing’
is ‘culture’, ‘nature’, ‘ideology’, ‘society’, ‘gender’, ‘science’, or
‘myth’. In a decisive intervention into the representation of the
atom, Lucretius imaged it as a principium, ‘the thing that occupies
the first place’, a ‘principle’. Within such modes of argumentation,
these reifications take on the qualities of the classical atom: singular,
with no internal structure, and not subject to analysis, that is, to
being broken up into constituent parts.

37 It has become traditional in this context to cite Margaret Thatcher’s
statement that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ Cf. Rose, Lifelines, 296;
Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London, 2001), 153.

38 Midgley, Science and Poetry, 2; for Midgeley on Lucretius cf. ibid. 23–6.

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

As long as we construct hierarchies in our discourses, as long as we
attempt to explain one thing in terms of another or appeal to some-
thing as a principle, our sense of ‘reality’ is going to migrate in that
direction. And if ‘principles’ collide, as they do in the science–culture
‘wars’, we may recall that conflict is embedded in their representation.
Realism has its distinctive direction of signification and employment
of grammatical number: what is discursively represented the complex
and the multiple (sciences, as it may be, or cultures) is seen as the effect
of the simple and the singular (culture, as it may be, or science). Anti-
realism seeks to resist the pull of reduction by emphasizing plurality.
Recall how Donna Haraway wrote of how ‘sciences . . . act as legit-
imating metalanguages that produce homologies between social and
symbolic systems’, only then to sink back into a realist mode: ‘That is
acutely true for the sciences of the body and the body politic. In a strict
sense, science is our myth.’ For anti-realists, language—or, as Har-
away puts it, ‘symbolic systems’—is irreducible: ‘things’ are the effect
of our descriptions, and language is intrinsically anthropocentric in
that anthropomorphism, however occluded, is always going to be a
feature of our descriptions of things whenever agency is attributed to
them. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has argued that only reduc-
tionism explains, everything else merely describes, and he has cau-
tioned against the extension of physical reductionism to other
phenomena.39 Explanation seeks finality; descriptions endlessly pro-
liferate. The two perspectives coexist in the term ‘mythology’. Myth-
ology can be a body of myths, expanding as time passes. Mythology
can also encode the assumption that there is a logos, rationalizing and
scientistic, that can explain myths, thus establishing a hierarchy of
logos over mythos, which rests upon the realist assumption that
mythos can be reduced to logos in a way that allows a thousand
stories to be explained in terms of a single thing, say, ‘ritual’ or ‘civic
identity’. Whether our preferred descriptions are couched in terms of
‘culture’ or of ‘nature’, a desire for finality (in science, in science
studies, or in discourses beyond), it seems, ‘masculinizes’ us all, men
and women alike—as a resistance to, or postponement of, finality
‘feminizes’ us.

39 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York and Oxford,
1986), 15–16; Other Minds (New York and Oxford, 1995), 98–9.

10

The Philosopher and the Mother Cow:
Towards a Gendered Reading of
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

A li son Sharrock

The new sociology of science stresses the role of stories and para-
digms in the construction of scientific truths about the world. I shall
therefore begin with a story. When I was a very young and nervous
Head of Department in the mid-1990s, one of only two other female
HoDs in my institution was a neuroscientist, who was even more
conscious than I was of functioning in a male-dominated world, but
was rather more confident in joking about it. She loved to tell the
story of how her elder son, who would have been about 8 or 9 at the
time, reacted when asked whether he was going to be a scientist
when he grew up. ‘Oh no,’ he said scathingly, ‘science is for girls!’
From the perspective of the world-weary feminist academic, the
innocent ignorance of the child is both delightful and telling.
He purports to despise this high-status intellectual activity, not
because he wants to be a yob instead, but rather because he associ-
ates it so strongly with his mother that he assumes it must be a soft,
soppy, weak-minded, and girly sort of activity. Not one for real men.
The implied readers of this story (the world-weary feminist

254 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

academic and the slightly embarrassed male colleague) view it from
the vantage-point of knowing better, knowing that ‘really’ science is
for boys.1

As we ‘all know’, science is for boys, while myth is for girls. The
story of the Boy Who Didn’t Want to Be a Scientist, in its subver-
sion-through-inversion of the dominant ideology, is paradigmatic of
the social forces which have shaped, at a quite basic level, the
philosophy and the discourse of science in many ways throughout
the Western intellectual tradition. It is a discourse which privileges
science over myth, reason over emotion, control over empathy, and
all those other oppositional constructs which are so familiar to
feminist theory. My use of this fable stands in a tradition of feminist
and other enquiry into these forces, which seeks to draw attention
to the situatedness of perceptions of science in the modern world. It
is my aim in this essay to explore what light may be thrown on
Lucretius’ own text by interrogation of it in a manner which has
some affinities with that applied by feminists to modern scientific
work. Part of what I am trying to do with Lucretius is to see how a
feminist or gender-sensitive approach might affect what we read in
the text: both how we might explore, identify, and respond to its
own (masculine) agenda, and also how we might (if we might) see
features in it which could be released as having feminine resonances.

Implicit in my essay is some degree of connection between the
reading of an ancient philosophical poem and a modern intellectual
discourse and practice which would frame itself as wholly separate
from the world of poetry and from what might be perceived by its
practitioners as the distant past. At one level, it would clearly be
naı¨ve to treat Lucretius’ poem on the world as ‘the same’ as modern
science;2 my defence would be that Lucretius’ text, for all its

1 This opening paragraph, and indeed my whole essay, must acknow-
ledge a strong general debt to the work of Duncan Kennedy, especially in his
negotiation of the interactions between scientific constructionism and clas-
sical literature in Duncan Kennedy, Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the
Textualization of Nature (Ann Arbor, 2002). Kennedy’s contribution to this
volume also does some of the work of my essay for me, such that
I respectfully recommend the reader to read his paper first.

2 Certain features of Lucretius’ poem encourage modern readers to get
excited about his modernity and to treat him as an inspired prophet of
the post-Enlightenment ‘truths’ about the world. Our conventional use

gendered reading of lucretius 255

aesthetic beauty and poetic swirliness, exhibits underlying traces of a
mental universe which have also shaped other texts in the main-
stream of the scientific tradition. Interestingly, surprisingly, there
seem to be ways in which DRN betrays a patriarchal agenda closer
to that of the long tradition of scientific discourse (to which I will
apply the shorthand of the ‘rape of Nature’) than it is to the conven-
tional patriarchal discourse of his own day.3 I would add that DRN
is being read very positively in the present day precisely because of
the contemporary high valuation of science and also the contempor-
ary interrogation and deconstruction of scientific discourse. A sec-
ond strand to my response (to the objection to treating Lucretius’
poem in such a way as to imply that modern science has affinities
with poetry) is to say, simply, ‘well, they are not so separate’.

I must now confront an issue which hits at the heart of its own
thesis, already implied in the title, and perhaps at the discourse of
this whole volume and the wider feminist project. The risk we take
in identifying a feminist reading, whether of a text or of the world,
or indeed in doing anything at all as women or men (i.e. as gender-
sensitive beings), this statement included, is that we play into patri-
archal hands. ‘The Philosopher and the Mother Cow’: this title
might seem to proffer a heavily and straightforwardly gendered
opposition, between male reason and female unreason/emotion;
male humanity, female animality; male seriousness, female trivia.
As soon as we identify one of those ‘gendered oppositions’, or notice
how certain features like force or reason tend to be gendered

of the term ‘atom’ to refer to Lucretius’ semina rerum (‘seeds of things’) or
principia (‘first principles’) is among the tricks played on us by the critical
tradition. Lucretius, I would say, is much less modern than he sounds. For
the modernizing reading, see particularly W. R. Johnson, Lucretius and the
Modern World (London, 2000). More balanced but still tending towards
the same direction are Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory
and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1994) and Gordon Campbell,
Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on De Rerum Nat-
ura, Book 5, lines 772–1104 (Oxford, 2003).

3 Cf. the argument of Pamela Gordon, ‘Some Unseen Monster: Reread-
ing Lucretius on Sex’, in David Fredrick (ed.), The Roman Gaze: Vision,
Power, and the Body (Baltimore, 2002), 86–109, that Lucretius’ treatment
of male sexuality was firmly opposed to that of his contemporary society.
I have deliberately avoided ‘Lucretius on Sex’ in this essay.

256 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

‘masculine’ while bodiliness or passivity are gendered ‘feminine’, we
potentially create precisely the segregated conditions which we
sought to oppose. That way of thinking explains how science
comes to be ‘for girls!’ or indeed ‘for boys’. But the identification
of that very risk itself may play into the patriarchal agenda, since it
implies a win–lose situation, a competitive mode of analysis. The
violent and confrontational nature of the sentence in which
I introduced the ‘issue’, at the beginning of this paragraph, will
not have been lost on the reader.4

It is a problem, also, which goes to the heart of contemporary
work on feminist science.5 What is it? Can it exist, or will be it
wholly negative and self-destructive, and so play into the hands of
those who would say ‘I told you so’? It is easy enough to do feminist
science while the goal is simply to expose the tribulations of women
studying and working in scientific environments, whether academic
or commercial, but it gets much harder when the question comes to
be about the discourse of science and even—perish the thought—the
content of science itself, which holds itself as absolute truth about

4 An alternative strategy which I considered at this point is to reject the
requirement to confront issues, to turn away from the search for answers as
being a masculinist drive to control the world. But that way lies still further
trouble, because the worst thing that could happen to feminist thought
would be to abandon intellectual rigour. Apologies for the masculinist
metaphor, there, but the stakes, it seems to me, are high. (And for that
one.) Just because all the words we have for positive intellectual activity are
‘male’ (power, force, strength, importance, etc.), we must not despair of our
capacity to speak and to think, even with these imperfect tools. The reader
will note that I have sought to soften (feminine metaphor) and partially to
undermine (hmm) the impact (masculine?) of this point by presenting it in a
footnote.

5 Some fascinating work on feminist science has also informed my read-
ing of Lucretius. In addition to those works mentioned by Kennedy, I draw
the reader’s attention to Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and
Science (New Haven, 1995); Nancy Tuana (ed.), Feminism and Science
(Bloomington, Ind., 1989), particularly the chapter by Keller; Londa Schie-
binger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). Mar-
tha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic
Ethics (Princeton, 1994) and Cynthia Freeland (ed.), Feminist Interpret-
ations of Aristotle (University Park, Pa., 1998) have also been influential on
my thinking.

gendered reading of lucretius 257

the world. We can expose the masculinist agenda of the traditional
paradigms for scientific enquiry, but can we put anything in their
place? ‘Science’ has always been figured, in the Western intellectual
tradition, as the dominance of nature by the mind, which penetrates
its secrets and, knowing it (‘in the biblical sense’), gains power and
control over it. Could things be different?6 Some feminist scientists
have taken primatology as an example of a specifically feminist
science, one based on co-operation, empathy, and living amid
nature rather than on dominance, knowledge, and control. Fair
enough, but the risk is there, too, that we essentialize and so limit
female activity, and that we undermine its importance and signifi-
cance precisely by identifying it as female. I hope that, in a small
way, my reading of the gendered complexities of Lucretius’ scien-
tific text might contribute some widow’s mite towards a way of
reading (or even doing?) science which allows communication to
be made up of multiple interacting voices.

The aim of this essay, then, is to explore some of the readerly
options in approaching Lucretius’ poem ‘on the nature of
things’ from a gendered perspective.7 One element in Lucretius’

6 It is important to remember that a project like Keller’s is not about
trying to say that ‘male science’, for the want of a better term, discovers
things which are in any sense wrong (she uses the example of Boyle’s Law,
which is of course ‘right’ and useful), but rather that the way we perceive of
science is affected by the metaphors we live by, and so affects the questions
we ask, and what satisfies us as answers. It is a matter of paradigm shift,
not denial.

7 The works which I have found most helpful in this field are Don
Fowler, ‘The Feminine Principal: Gender in the De Rerum Natura’, in
G. Giannantoni and M. Gigante (eds.), Epicureismo Greco e Romano
(Naples, 1996; also available as Appendix C in Fowler’s Lucretius on
Atomic Motion: A Commentary on De rerum natura 2. 1–332 (Oxford,
2002); Georgia Nugent, ‘Mater Matters: The Female in Lucretius’ De
Rerum Natura’, Colby Quarterly, 30 (1994), 179–205; Martha Nussbaum,
The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Prince-
ton, 1994), Barbara Clayton, ‘Lucretius’ Erotic Mother: Maternity as a
Poetic Device in De Rerum Natura’, Helios, 26.1 (1999), 69–84; Pamela
Gordon, ‘Some Unseen Monster: Rereading Lucretius on Sex’, in Fredrick
(ed.), The Roman Gaze, 86–109; Alison Keith, Engendering Rome: Women
in Latin Epic (Cambridge, 2000), esp. 36–41. Charles Segal, Lucretius
on Death and Anxiety: Poetry and Philosophy in De Rerum Natura

258 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

representation of gender (to use a shorthand) that I would like to
suggest is indeed that ‘female myth undermines male science’, that
in the interstices of this scientific ‘male’ text we can see glimpses of
alternative points of view which might reasonably be categorized as
‘feminine’.8 But this is hardly going to give us a tidy answer when—
as we must—we refigure scientific discourse such that the oppos-
ition science/myth breaks down. The opposition male/female, by
Lucretian analogy, will perhaps do so likewise. Moreover, there will
be throughout this essay an underlying tension which has pervaded
so much of Lucretian study—that is, between ‘poetry’ and ‘philoso-
phy’ (which for our purposes may be taken as standing also for
‘science’). It is an easy slippage for that opposition to be reconfig-
ured in gendered terms, between gentle, ‘female’ poetry and hard,
‘male’ philosophy/science, as Segal is inclined to do (for example) in
his powerful and sensitive reading of Lucretius on death, although
he is not quite explicit about the gendered implications of his
paradigm.9 What I am doing is partly exploring and celebrating
that opposition, partly exposing and undermining it: I hope that is
not too much of a contradiction to be useful. It seems to be hard not
to read Lucretius ‘against himself’, to see strands in his thought
which we could equally well describe as ‘opposing’ or ‘interacting’,
depending on the preferred metaphor.

(Princeton, 1990) is also extremely useful, although Segal does not expli-
citly identify the gendered implications of his work. Nugent’s article is one
of the most sustained general feminist readings of Lucretius, but is sadly
difficult to access in Britain. I am very grateful to Georgia Nugent for
sending me a copy of the paper, and recommend interested readers to
hunt it out.

8 This might look somewhat like a reading of ‘anti-Lucrece chez
Lucrece’—the argument that Lucretius just couldn’t help himself from
undermining everything he was trying to say, and that he was a religious
poet really. I do have some sympathy with this, now rather unfashionable,
view, which I see as relating quite closely to the constructionism of
Kennedy, Rethinking Reality.

9 Cf. e.g. Segal, Lucretius on Death and Anxiety, 46: ‘One result of such
resonances is a continual shifting between the objective, distancing, third-
person analysis of death in the framework of Epicurean physics, and a
warmer, more affect-laden first-person or second-person discussion rooted
in the literary tradition.’ He does not actually say anything about gender,
but his sentence says ‘male’ and ‘female’ pretty clearly.

gendered reading of lucretius 259

Whether we take the association of women with myth as some-
thing to celebrate or something to unmask and demystify (or even,
as I would, as both), it is worth noting that the association itself
derives in part from a dominant strand in Western thought which
awards men a privileged status with respect to reality.10 Men, in
public life and in discourse, somehow manage to become more real.
They are more likely to have full names and identifiable biograph-
ies, more likely to be credited with effects on the world around
them, less likely to be taken as representative of the rest of their sex,
less likely to be associated with (and turned into) countries, trees,
ships, cars, statues, etc. In this regard, I think we can see something
interestingly gendered in Lucretius’s presentation of personification,
reification, and realism. Several scholars have noted the extent to
which Lucretius plays into the common trope of masculinist
thought which associates the material, the bodily, the solid and
earthy with the ‘feminine’, and the spiritual, the cerebral, the
rational and abstract with the ‘masculine’.11 Here I would ask the
reader to make a mental distinction between the ‘material’ and the
‘real’, for it seems to me that in discourse of this nature, while it is
clearly the case that the female sits closely with the body (an
association, incidentally, perpetuated by the modern scholarly trad-
ition in Women’s Studies), it is the male which sits closely with the
person. This is what I mean by saying that ‘men are more real’. If the
abstract is associated with the male, it is in an active rather than a
passive way: ‘men do’ abstract thinking, for example, but women
‘are abstractions’.

It seems to me that Lucretius is much happier to accept person-
ifications if they are female ones; that the people accorded ‘real’
status in the poem are only himself, Memmius, and (although to a
lesser extent, since he is also deified/reified) Epicurus;12 but that the

10 I have discussed this tendency with reference to Propertius in my
‘Constructing Characters in Propertius’, Arethusa, 33 (2000), 263–84,
and to Ovid in my ‘Ovid and the Discourses of Love: The Amatory
Works’, in P. R. Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cam-
bridge, 2002), 150–62.

11 Nugent, ‘Mater matters’: is an especially powerful account of this
process in Lucretius.

12 There are other philosophers mentioned, who are real-ish, but dead.

260 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

atoms get some kind of peculiar high status with respect to reality,
and as a result, perhaps, can support some degree of personification
despite apparently being gendered male;13 and that all this shows a
poem which conforms to certain sets of patriarchal agenda, such as
are in keeping with the Western scientific tradition of the dominance
of the mind over nature, although they are by no means necessarily
the typical Roman patriarchal agenda.14 While I would be loath to
argue for any direct influence of Lucretius on later scientific writing,
I think it is worth noting that an attitude to nature and knowledge
which to some extent conforms diachronically with a masculinist
standpoint manifested in later scientific discourse can coincide with
attitudes which are in other ways quite different from the conven-
tional masculinity of their own day. But perhaps this should not
surprise us: the scientist is a peripheral figure in many cultures, and
it is only within the modern academic world that scientific prowess
is associated positively with masculinity. But, to return to Lucretius,
I would stress that there are none the less some undercurrents in the
text which might reflect an alternative view of the world and offer a
viewpoint which is not patriarchal. If so, we will have to agree with
Fowler (‘Feminine Principal’) that this undermining of the patri-
archal position is part of Lucretius’ poem also.

It is more or less a commonplace of Lucretian scholarship to note
the activity of Nature, although critics vary in the implications they
draw from her role.15 Some readers would see Nature’s creative,
nurturing role, so strongly and emotively characterized, as causing
something of a deviation from Epicurean orthodoxy, since it returns
divine agency by the back door. Perhaps, however, we might nuance
the point: it is extremely difficult to talk about the world, especially
in powerful poetic language, without using determinist vocabulary
(as critics of Darwin and his successors have shown well), but in
Lucretius’ mental universe a discursive structure of this nature is
acceptable precisely because the personification is female, and
women are hardly real anyway (this is an exaggeration, of course,

13 See also Kennedy in this volume.
14 See esp. Gordon, ‘Some Unseen Monster’, Clayton, ‘Lucretius’ Erotic
Mother’.
15 See Clayton, ‘Lucretius’ Erotic Mother’, Nugent, ‘Mater Matters’.

gendered reading of lucretius 261

but one based on truth). The female and the metaphorical sit hap-
pily together (that is, the female as the metaphor, not the female as
user of metaphor), and can slip in and out of direct personification
without too much trouble—this is an inverse of the phenomenon we
see happening so creatively (if problematically) in Roman love
poetry.16 So Venus can be a woman, a goddess, a statue, and a
generative force all together; Earth can be a mother; Flora can
scatter flowers in spring (5. 739); and Nature can be the active,
driving force of the poem and everything in the world, despite its
total absence of teleology.17 Lucretius will parade the personifica-
tion of Nature even in close proximity to some of his most explicitly
anti-theistic moments. Take, for example, 2. 1090–1104

Quae bene cognita si teneas, natura videtur
libera continuo dominis privata superbis
ipsa sua per se sponte omnia dis agere expers.
nam pro sancta deum tranquilla pectora pace
quae placidum degunt aevum vitamque serenam,
quis regere immensi summam, quis habere profundi
indu manu validas potis est moderanter habenas,
quis pariter caelos omnis convertere et omnis
ignibus aetheriis terras suffire feracis,
omnibus inve locis esse omni tempore praesto,
nubibus ut tenebras faciat caelique serena
concutiat sonitu, tum fulmina mittat et aedis
saepe suas disturbet et in deserta recedens
saeviat exercens telum quod saepe nocentes
praeterit exanimatque indignos inque merentes?

If you come to know these things and hold onto them, Nature will be seen
to be completely free and independent of arrogant masters, doing her will
herself, of her own accord, without the gods. For, by the holy hearts of the
gods in tranquil peace which lead a calm life and serene existence, who is
powerful enough to rule the heights of the universe, who to hold in his hand
the firm reins of the abyss to guide them, or who can turn all the heavens
together and blow over the fruitful earth with ethereal fire, or be present in
all places and at all times, so that he might make shadows with clouds and

16 See Maria Wyke, ‘Mistress and Metaphor in Augustan Elegy’, Helios,
16.1 (1989), 25–47; and Alison Sharrock, ‘Womanufacture’, Journal of
Roman Studies, 81 (1991), 36–49.

17 Just to take one example among many, consider 1. 56 unde omnis
natura creet res, auctet alatque.

262 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

shake the peaceful tracts of sky with his thunder, then send bolts and often
cause his own house to shudder, and retreating into the wilderness rage as
he plies his weapon, which often passes by the guilty and kills the innocent
who do not deserve it?

The first extraordinary thing about this passage is the way that the
fully personified Nature takes on anthropomorphic characteristics
in contrast with the denial of those to the unnamed quis; the second
is that the anthropomorphic characteristic that she takes on is
precisely freedom from control by the gods; the third is the threat-
ening, brooding presence of the Unspeakable. Obviously, it is Jupi-
ter Himself, who cannot be named but must be implied, in order to
be denied all the traditional attributes which are thus negatively
named. Nature is the female principal that can stand up to the
thunder god: one possible feminist reading of this could appropriate
it for celebration of liberty, but the nagging alternative is that
Nature can only do this because she isn’t real. She, as driving
force and agent of life, isn’t real in Lucretius’ philosophical (theo-
logical) epistemology, because there is no driving force or agent of
life: she isn’t real in Lucretius’ gendered epistemology because she
is female. Jupiter, by contrast, is too threatening to be allowed a
personification. Because, as a male, he comes close to the reality of
personhood, he cannot be allowed the pseudo-reality of personifi-
cation. We might compare the later scientist for whom ‘nature’ is a
woman who is ‘real’ as regards matter and bodiliness, but precisely
not real as a person.

We ought to compare that hymn to Jupiter in denial with the
procession of the Magna Mater (2. 600–43). It is one of the ‘set-
pieces’ in which Lucretius revels in visual and poetic extravagance,
depicting in detail the extremes of worship which the Earth, as
‘Great Mother’, inspires. At the end of the passage, his response to
his own display of religious/artistic fervour is quite calm: quae bene
et eximie quamvis disposta ferantur, j longe sunt tamen a vera
ratione repulsa (‘however well and excellently they are portrayed,
yet they are far removed from true reason’, 2. 644–5)—because, as
we already know, the gods live a life apart and are unaffected by our
worship. It’s all just a matter of vocabulary, Lucretius says: people
like to call the sea ‘Neptune’ and grain ‘Ceres’, and even Bacchi
nomine abuti j mavult quam laticis proprium proferre vocamen

gendered reading of lucretius 263

(‘prefer to misuse the name of Bacchus rather than to call drinks by
their proper name’, 2. 656–7). That’s fine by him, and fine for Earth
to be called mother of the gods, as long as this does not bring the
taint of religion. Nature, Earth, and even Venus, as far as Lucretius
is concerned, can get away with this, but male entities cannot. A few
hundred lines later, he himself affirms that it is quite right to call
Earth ‘mother’ (2. 998). The briefest mention of a pater who drops
his seed into her lap engenders a celebration of Earth’s generative
power.18 There are, however, no such extended celebrations of
Bacchus as wine or Vulcan as fire, although both substances feature
positively in the poem. An account of the tales of Pan created out of
the effects of the echo is resoundingly dismissed (4. 580–94).19 The
Phaethon story (5. 395–410) receives an equally scathing response.

If any male entity can be allowed to ‘be’ a god in the Lucretian
universe, then there is only one candidate: Epicurus. In the prologue
to Book 5, he is duly deified as the embodiment of wisdom, more
worthy than Ceres or Bacchus to stand for bread and wine. He is
greater than all the heroes of myth. At this point, I begin to be
unsure just how well Epicurus does hold onto his reality.

Another aspect to the presentation of Nature, Earth, and even
Venus which exempts them from threat as feminine principals is the
manner in which they are fetishized throughout the poem. (Here
again the female characters are personifications, not people.) The
prevalence of generative language in DRN sets the background
against which the most pervasive representation of the female in
the poem is as a womb. There are indeed some magnificent celebra-
tions of fertility, and also some which are quite scarily fetishizing,
the most extreme example being the creation story in Book 5. Here
primitive Earth is covered in wombs from which burst forth new
creatures (5. 805–17), which are then suckled as the Earth squeezes
out a milk-like liquid for them from her orifices. The simile which
‘proves’ the point, by Epicurean analogy, is—rather banally—of a
new mother whose milk has come in. It is almost a metaphor by

18 The passage is probably Ennian, with the reference to caeli . . . templa,
but that does not materially affect the point.

19 Nice point that he says that people believe these stories because
humanum genus est avidum auricularum: they like to hear marvellous
tales, and they like to turn what they hear (the echoes) into the marvellous.

264 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

direct association, halfway towards being a tautology. The generative
force is thus reduced to the essential gynaecological body parts.20 It
seems, then, that there are lots of mothers in DRN, but often only
wombs and breasts with bodies and souls just there to give the
reproductive organs something to hang onto. At this level, mother-
hood is completely depersonsalized, reified into its function.21

It should come as something of a surprise, then, that the illustra-
tion of the argument that no two examples of a species are identical
should take the form of a moving exposition of maternal grief at the
loss of a child, a loss which negates the normative function of
femininity in DRN (production of new life).

nam saepe ante deum vitulus delubra decora
turicremas propter mactatus concidit aras
sanguinis expirans calidum de pectore flumen;
at mater viridis saltus orbata peragrans
novit humi pedibus vestigia pressa bisulcis,
omnia convisens oculis loca, si queat usquam
conspicere amissum fetum, completque querellis
frondiferum nemus adsistens et crebra revisit
ad stabulum desiderio perfixa iuvenci,
nec tenerae salices atque herbae rore vigentes
fluminaque ulla queunt summis labentia ripis
oblectare animum subitamque avertere curam,
nec vitulorum aliae species per pabula laeta
derivare queunt animum curaque levare;
usque adeo quiddam proprium notumque requirit.

(DRN 2. 352–66)

For often before the revered shrines of the gods, by the incense-burning altars,
a calf falls slaughtered, breathing forth the warm river of his blood from his
chest; but his bereaved mother, wandering around the green groves, has
recognized on the ground the footprints of his cloven hooves, searching all
around with her eyes, if only she might ever find her lost baby, and stopping

20 The modern descendant of this passage is the creation-scene in The
Magician’s Nephew, but at least C. S. Lewis is explicit about the mythical
(and intertextual) status of what he says, and is also less fetishizing of
female body parts.

21 See also Nugent, ‘Mater Matters’, Keith, Engendering Rome, 36–41.
Clayton, ‘Lucretius’ Erotic Mother’, offers a more positive reading of
maternal roles in the poem, but only metaphorical ones.

gendered reading of lucretius 265

she fills the leafy woods with her complaints and frequently returns to the
fold, pierced by longing for the calf, nor can the tender willows and the
grass thriving in the dew nor any rivers gliding past at the tops of the banks
delight her soul and take away her sudden care, nor can the sight of calves
over the happy pastures distract her mind or alleviate her care; on and
forever she keeps seeking her own, known child.

The point at issue is the nature of the relationship between species and
individuals. The proof that individual instantiations of a species are
not identical with each other is illustrated by observation of the ability
of mothers to recognize their own children, even though to an outsider
all ‘children’ look the same. This issue, indeed, has had many ramifi-
cations through the ages: from the racist insinuation that all members
of a particular ethic group are ‘the same’ to the tender assimilation of
all babies to each other. Animals, most explicitly, are designated ‘all
the same’, and indeed it could be held to be one of the defining
differences between animals and people. The unfortunate implication
of less-than-full humanity to members of other ethnic groups from the
dominant one (or just the speaker), and indeed to babies, is all too
prevalent.22 But why does individual identity matter in Lucretius’
scheme of things? Moreover, why does he choose to illustrate it with
a scene of death? He could, after all, have offered a joyful, frolicking
sort of image. And why use a cow? The story of the mother cow and
her lost baby springs from a generalizing statement about mothers and
children: nec ratione alia proles cognoscere matrem j nec mater posset
prolem (‘nor by any other process can the young recognize its mother,
nor the mother her young’, 2. 349–50). He could have slipped into a
pretty story of babies who recognize their mothers from the earliest
days of their life.23 Instead he chooses loss. Let me look briefly at the
presentation of the scene.

22 We have a lovely children’s story, from the Ivor the Engine series, in
which the train driver and the station master (Dai) are discussing sheep,
whom Dai claims are ‘all the same’. Evans (the train driver) points out one
that isn’t, because it has no mother, and Dai grudgingly takes it in to look
after it. He becomes very attached to the lamb, caring for it like a mother.
When it is necessary for the young ram to rejoin the flock, Dai wipes away a
tear and responds to Evans’s repetition of his (Dai’s) earlier words about
sheep being all the same by saying ‘Mine wasn’t, and he was very special’.

23 That this was known even to men in antiquity may be seen from
Virgil’s famous line in Eclogue 4. 60, referring to the good omen of early

266 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

The story begins not with the mother but with the calf ritually
slaughtered at the altar. At this point, we do not know that the
‘mother þ baby’ pair will be the victims, the cows, rather than some
humans who happen to be involved in the sacrifice (perhaps prayer
or thanksgiving for the life of a child). For a moment any question of
context is forgotten, as the calf breathes out its lifeblood.24 Then,
at mater, the scene shifts to the mother cow, already orbata
(‘bereaved’) although she does not realize it yet, as she wanders
through the groves looking for her lost child. The word orbata is an
authorial comment, the only word to intrude on the strong focal-
ization with the cow. An animal of extraordinary intelligence, she
even recognizes her baby’s hoofprints,25 and searches determinedly
everywhere she can think of, like any mother whose child is
lost, crying as she goes. She even rushes back home again and
again, hoping he might be there, but he is not. Somewhere around
line 361, she comes to a realization of her loss, although it is a
painful, empty realization, without the beginnings of peace which
can come from at least the certain knowledge of what has happened.
Now nothing gives her comfort or alleviates her pain, least of all the
sight of other babies playing in the fields. Her baby was unique, and
special, and her grief is inconsolable.

I have played the story around rather heavily perhaps, but I would
argue that I have only drawn out what is in Lucretius’ text. What-
ever implications one is willing to take for the effect on Lucretius’
philosophy of death, I think the story’s pathos, in its own terms, is
undeniable. But it does seem to me possible that the story comes

recognition (and smiling) in a new baby. Babies actually don’t smile for
several weeks, whereas they do recognize their mother from the first few
days, but that’s probably a detail that we couldn’t expect many ancient men
to know.

24 Such emotive writing about sacrifice is not, however, out of keeping
with positive Roman representations of its own religion. Cf. Horace, Odes
3. 13.

25 There is a textual problem in line 356. The manuscript reading non
quit cannot be right, because it requires an infinitive, nor can the nonsens-
ical alternative readings. Linquit is offered by the corrector of Q. Conjec-
tures include noscit, novit, and quaerit, the last of which would remove the
cow’s success with the hoofprints, and leave her only searching. The point
remains the same, however.

gendered reading of lucretius 267

some way to undermining Lucretius’ Epicurean project. Its conclu-
sion might be that individuals do matter, that people (including
readers) might care; that the generative force is not impersonal
but is bound up in (or comes into conflict with) individual grief
as well as individual pleasure—that is, pleasure in an individual,
rather than pleasure of an individual, which is the proper Epicurean
pleasure.

The problem with that reading, however, is that the cow’s status
as a philosopher is undermined by the constraints of her represen-
tation. She’s just a cow, and a female one at that. The story is
obviously heavily anthropomorphizing. It is followed by a series
of other little examples of baby animals and their mothers recog-
nizing each other—although the text refuses to return to the human
mother referred to, slightly ambiguously, just before this passage.
Could it be that by making her an animal, and not only that, but a
silly, slow, foolish, domesticated animal, Lucretius is making the
grieving mother into the very antithesis of the philosopher? Perhaps
the cow grieves because she does not have the benefit of Epicurean
philosophy. She grieves because she does not understand that death
is not to be feared.

But whose death? It is one thing to weave spells of psychological
protection against fear of one’s own death, but quite another to
protect oneself against the grief of bereavement. Could it be, then,
that the cow’s grief itself undermines Epicurean philosophy? Or at
least shows that there are other ways of looking at the world, and
that Lucretius has not given all the answers in his directly didactic
passages about death. He has told us to look with ataraxia, or
appalling selfishness, at the sufferings of others (prologue to Book
2, end of Book 6). But in this story he is showing us that people care
about other people, as individuals. Understanding the ‘nature of
things’ will not take that care away, because the very individuality
of ‘things’ is part of that lesson itself and of what makes us care.26

26 When Lucretius does confront the process of grieving, his approach is
still from the point of view of the dead person (3. 894–911). He imagines
the griever pitying the dead, which in Epicurean terms is ridiculous, because
the dead know nothing of their loss. But he cannot by this means destroy the
power of loss which his discussion evokes—the griever’s loss. Could it be

268 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

There is another story which must be allowed to link up with the
mother cow: Iphigeneia, another victim dead at the altar, another
grieving parent (DRN 1. 84–100).27 It is a story which seems to
make us question, right at the beginning, the efficacy of the lesson
against fearing death. The account of how the innocent virgin
Iphigenia was sacrificed on her father’s orders so that the Greek
fleet could pursue its voyage of aggression to Troy is told in order to
persuade the reader that it is ‘religion’ which is impious, not Lucre-
tius’s poem. It does its job fairly well. But it must be recalled when
we get to the mother cow. The scenes are set in similar ways, with a
victim, the altars, and blood poured out on the ground. In the
Iphigenia story, however, the focalization remains closely tied to
the victim herself, with her father receiving only the oblique com-
ment that she maestum simul ante aras adstare parentem j sensit (‘at
the same time, she realized that her sad father was standing beside
the altars’, 89–90), and that it did her no good to have been the first
to call Agamemnon father (94). Iphigenia’s mother, and the web of
tragic myth which that story evokes, are wholly suppressed, but
after we have read about the mother cow, it is hard not to ask
the question of how the first victim’s mother might have felt also.

that the imagined interlocutor has the point—the grief of death is not so
simply laid aside? Epicureanism is just another comfort-blanket against the
struggles of living and dying. On the plague, see David Sedley, Lucretius
and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge, 1998), 162. Al-
though a very pro-Lucretian reader (who also thinks that Lucretius would
have changed the ending a lot, to make a better moral, if he had lived to do
the final revision), even Sedley sees that Lucretius’ do-it-yourself lesson
would be very hard to learn from the poem. It may have told us about not
fearing death, but it hasn’t done much for not fearing pain. On the funeral
passage: it’s called ‘this cloying overpersonalization of death’ by Segal,
Lucretius on Death and Anxiety, 70, even though his general point is that
Lucretius offers two voices in what he says about death—detached and
involved.

27 For discussion of how the ‘digressions’ in didactic may link together to
make cognate images or even continuous narrative, see my ‘Love in Paren-
theses: Digression and Narrative Hierarchy in Ovid’s Erotodidactic Poems’,
in R. K. Gibson, A. R. Sharrock, and S. Green (eds.), The Art of Love:
Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris (Oxford,
forthcoming).

gendered reading of lucretius 269

She too did not know that her child was to be killed at the altar. If
Sedley is right that the Iphigenia story relates to the objection in
Empedocles to animal sacrifice (in case you kill your child who has
been reincarnated as a bull), then the connection between the two
digressions is all the stronger, and acknowledges its allegiance to a
non-Epicurean tradition.28

Female personifications are also on the receiving end of a tendency
in Lucretian discourse to structure the world around penetration. It
is not literal sexual penetration that interests me here, but rather the
prevalence of the image elsewhere—the mind which penetrates the
nature of things (especially the mind of the Man Himself, Epicurus),
like a hunting dog (1. 404, in this case it is the mind of the reader
which is to sniff out the truth); the spear which proves the infinity of
the universe by its incessant penetration of new space (1. 968–73);
water spouts and flames which are forced upwards (2. 203); and
horses in a race (2. 265). None of these images is particularly
surprising, poetically powerful though they may be, at least to
readers who have experienced the long scientific tradition of the
relationship of scientist to subject matter as one of exploration,
penetration, dominance, and knowing every nook and cranny.

Where it seems to me more remarkable is in the activity of the
atoms, those fundamentals of Lucretius’ universe. Nominally, of
course, the atoms are gendered neutral, both grammatically and
by implication from their lack of other direct characteristics such as
colour, odour, or sense. The neutral things, however, are at some
level the real workers in the poem, the only entities which really
make things happen, rather than just metaphorically, imagistically,
making things happen, which is the only way that such action is
performed by Earth, Nature, and Venus (who perhaps stand for the
forces of agency rather than actually being those forces). I said

28 Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, 30. See
also Keith, Engendering Rome, 107–11, on the fetishization of the dead
female body. She sees the Iphigenia-story as an erotic myth which has it
both ways, since the reader is meant to experience the voyeuristic pleasure
but also to be aroused to sympathy for Iphigenia and abhorrence towards
the religious viewpoint which sacrificed her. The female is associated with
body, sexuality, and death (also dirt, earth, disgust), and loses out by having
her generative force reassigned to the (male) Greek fleet.

270 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

above that ‘the atoms get some kind of peculiar high status with
respect to reality, and as a result, perhaps, can support some degree
of personification despite apparently being gendered male’. In sug-
gesting that the atoms are gendered male, I am basing this interpret-
ation on the attribution to them of features which are traditionally
associated with masculinity. Such an interpretation requires a cer-
tain degree of buying into the very oppositional structures and
reifications which feminist discourse (at least in some of its mani-
festations) has attempted to explode. My case, however, is that this
is precisely what Lucretius does: his ‘neutral’ is not really neutral at
all once he comes to talk about it; nor is the insensate nature of the
atoms really senseless in his discourse. But this implied masculine
gender and implied personification (in the sense of presenting an
abstract in the guise of a real thing) are acceptable to Lucretius’
philosophy because the atoms, unlike women and nature, are sol-
idly and unproblematically real, indeed the only real thing.

They too are penetrators: particles penetrate void.29 This makes
me wonder whether ‘void’ is being gendered female, although it too,
as inane, is grammatically neuter. Nothing exists, and because of its
existence movement, and thus all activity, is able to happen. That
‘nothing’ is the space in which the atoms can do things, the gaps, the
interstices, the fissures of the universe which cannot be seen or
perceived, but which create the conditions in which things can
be.30 This is a story of the female which has been told in many
places and ages. It is the female as necessary but invisible, an open,
passive, containing space in which action can happen. It must have
affinities with Cixous’ ‘in between’ abstract space in which she
situates e´criture feminine.31 The risk in such a reading, as ever,
and as has been said of Cixous, is that we perpetuate the gender-
imbalances on which it is based. I would suggest that perhaps what
we need is an updated version of the feminist second-wave strategy
of celebrating things female: we need to accept the risk, and work
with it, to make the identifications anyway, and try to mould them

29 Discussed also in Nugent, ‘Mater Matters’.
30 See particularly 1. 329–69.
31 He´le`ne Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and
Paula Cohen, Signs, 1.4 (1976), 875–93.

gendered reading of lucretius 271

in a useful way for the increase of sensitivity and understanding of
texts and the world.

This gendering of atoms and void can be seen particularly, and in
Roman terms, in the discussion of solidity: atoms are hard, but the
matter they make up gets softer as they have more void among the
particles (1. 565–779).

Huc accedit uti, solidissima materiai
corpora cum constant, possint tamen omnia reddi,
mollia quae fiunt, aer aqua terra vapores,
quo pacto fiant et qua vi quaeque gerantur,
admixtum quoniam semel est in rebus inane.
at contra si mollia sint primordia rerum,
unde queant validi silices ferrumque creari,
non poterit ratio reddi; nam funditus omnis
principio fundamenti natura carebit.
sunt igitur solida pollentia simplicitate,
quorum condenso magis omnia conciliatu
artari possunt validasque ostendere viris.

So it happens that although the bodies of matter [i.e. atoms] are most solid,
yet all things can be explained, things which are soft, air water earth and
vapours, how they come to be and with what force each is borne, since void
is once mixed in among things. But on the other hand if the first principles
of things were soft, reason could not explain from where strong flint and
iron could be created; for all nature would completely lack the framework
of foundation. Therefore there are solids, flourishing in their simplicity, in
whose denser conglomeration can all be packed tight and show their
powerful strength.

Lucretius explicitly rejects the alternative possibility of the existence
of atoms which are mollis, because otherwise it would be impossible
for any hard substances to have their validas . . . viris, ‘strong
powers’ (nothing, of course, directly to do with the word vir, except
by Lucretian word play).

But if this reading of atoms and void as male and female entities
has any validity, then we should pay attention to a passage at 1.
1008–20:

Ipsa modum porro sibi rerum summa parare
ne possit, natura tenet, quae corpus inane
et quod inane autem est finiri corpore cogit,
ut sic alternis infinita omnia reddat,

272 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

aut etiam alterutrum, nisi terminet alterum eorum,
simplice natura pateat tamen inmoderatum,
nec mare nec tellus neque caeli lucida templa
nec mortale genus nec divum corpora sancta
exiguum possent horai sistere tempus;
nam dispulsa suo de coetu materiai
copia ferretur magnum per inane soluta,
sive adeo potius numquam concreta creasset
ullam rem, quoniam cogi disiecta nequisset.

Nature herself ensures that the universe cannot procure a limit for itself,
since she forces bodies to be bordered with void and void with bodies, so
that thus by alternating she might render the universe infinite. If either of
them were to place a limit on the other, then that one would stretch out
without boundary in its pure form, and neither sea nor earth nor the bright
temples of the heavens, neither the race of mortals nor the holy bodies of the
gods could persist for a least moment of time; for torn from their gathering
the abundance of matter would be set free and would be carried through the
great void, or perhaps they would never have gathered together and created
any thing, since they would be too scattered to be forced together.

A feminist reader might want to respond to this passage in a posi-
tive, recuperative way: it might offer a paradigm of the world in
which the male and female principles are mutually dependent and
co-operative in creating the activity of things.

The funny thing about these atoms—colourless, senseless, death-
less, and genderless as they officially are—is that they are also the
subjects of some of the most entertaining pieces of personification in
the poem. The atoms get all the best lines; the void, by contrast, gets
no lines at all. Not only are the atoms cast as epic heroes, given
ceaseless action and guaranteed victory, but also they come alive.
Several times they are anthropomorphized. On one occasion
(1. 919), they are cracking up with laughter at the stupidity of
Lucretius’ implied interlocutor who thinks, with Anaxagoras (or
Lucretius’ satirical representation of his position), that there are
tiny particles of all kinds of things mixed up in things, rather than
the ‘truth’, which is that the atoms are first principles of a different
nature from the multitude of material items which they can form,
not miniature versions of them. Lucretius’ laughing atoms are a
satirical picture, of course, deliberately absurd, but it is hard to
resist the implication that they are laughing with him. A later

gendered reading of lucretius 273

passage develops the same idea further. At 2. 976–90, Lucretius has
just been arguing for the insensate nature of the atoms, against the
notion that they must be sensate in order to produce sensate matter.
Again the atoms burst out laughing, and even start discoursing on
themselves as first principles, and on the nature of things. Now, of
course this personification is being explicitly rejected by Lucretius,
reduced to absurdity, but it is also creating a very close analogy and
fellow-feeling between the atoms and the Lucretian position. (The
atoms also [don’t] go into Council to work out how they ought all to
join together: 1. 1.021, 5. 419.) They laugh, with Lucretius and
anyone else in the philosophical know, at the idea that they might be
able to laugh at things.

It seems to me, then, that the atoms make the most acceptable
male personifications. They do so, I imagine, because they are
absolutes, more real than reality—and perhaps also because they
are Lucretius’ mates.

It often seems to me, and has seemed to critics in the past, that
Lucretius’ poem works against itself, its glorious images and strong
sense of commitment belying the ataraxia which is its stated aim.
I suspect, even, that the message of the poem may be that Epicurean
ataraxia needs to be balanced with a more intensely personal ethic,
although I realize that many modern critics would not accept this
position. Of course, Lucretius does insist on the absolute truth of his
message, especially when he is talking about it explicitly, and indeed
it seems plausible that he refuses to consider any chinks in Epicur-
ean orthodoxy, even from later Epicureans, as argued by Sedley.32
The totality of the poem, however, forces the reader to question the
certainties of orthodoxy. It would be hard to ignore entirely the
tendency towards self-undermining which lurks below the surface
of the work. This tension may perhaps also be designated a kind of
‘feminine writing’.33 I mean that a style of argument which refuses

32 Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom.
33 In the French-feminist strand of thought under the sign of which the
present volume comes into being, there is something ‘feminine’ about a style
of writing which is anti-teleological, swirly, poetic, repetitive, metaphor-
ical, and imagistic. In Cixous’ works which are particularly influential in
moulding this way of thinking (‘Coming to Writing’ and the ‘Laugh of the
Medusa’ and her Coming to Writing and Other Essays, trans. Sarah Cornell

274 a l i s o n s h a r r o c k

to give absolute answers, which sows the seeds of its own undoing,
refuses even to be pinned down about what it might mean, might be—
if not ‘feminine’—then at least in contrast to the phallogocentric
tradition of Western philosophy and science. Here again, as I have
warned before, there are risks: it is risky to associate the feminine with
lack of rigour, with being wrong, with woolly thinking. Reclaiming it
as a valuable way to read both poems and science takes care, but may
bring rewards.

The ‘mother cow’ offers an alternative view of the world to that
of the philosopher, a view in which suffering is real, and atomic
theory will not save us from grief. If we take the view that the female
perspective on DRN changes the substance of the argument (the
philosophy, the physics, the ‘message’, not just the medium), we
might indeed be suggesting that the ancient example implies the
possibility of a feminist science which is different, one which insists
on tensions and relativity. We might have to say that Lucretius the
poet offers us this reading. The danger of such a position is that we
then are forced to imply that poet ¼ female and philosopher/scien-
tist ¼ male, which inevitably undermines the poet ¼ female side of
the dichotomy. Since the mother cow is the representative of the
poet ¼ female side, we are in big trouble, and seem simply to
reinforce the dominance of the philosopher/scientist ¼ male. Can
the philosopher take up the subject-position of the mother cow? I’m
not sure that it would be possible. But this way lies despair, because
every feminist analysis is always already undermined by its associ-
ation with the mother cow. Maybe the answer lies in accepting and
living with the undermining, but still doing feminist analysis any-
way, because the process brings personal and intellectual growth,
even if it doesn’t bring answers.

et al., ed. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), it is the bodiliness of
writing which characterizes the feminist project, but in the process of
assimilation of this doctrine to literary criticism the creative mode has
infected also the process of reading—which is what most of us mortals
actually get to do, a passive activity thus (perhaps) rendered active. By this
means, ‘reading as a woman’ may involve a particular sensitivity to such
strategies of imagistic invention in texts—or even (this is problematic) to
the construction of them.

11

Science Fictions and Cyber Myths:

or, Do Cyborgs Dream of Dolly the Sheep?

G e n e v i e v e Liveley

Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present
political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent
myths for resistance.

(Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’)
A strangely potent tie is kinship, and companionship as well.

(Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound)
Here is a story from ancient Greece.1 An animated bronze man is
made by Hephaestus to guard the island of Crete, which he walks
around three times a day, throwing missiles at any strangers. His
body is made of indestructible bronze but beneath the tendon in his
ankle is a red vein covered by a thin membrane, his only vulnerable
point. One day, the Argo carrying Medea and the Golden Fleece try
to land and, as the monster hurls rocks at the Argonauts to prevent

My thanks to those who have been good to think and drink with while
working on this piece: Ben Corrigan; Duncan Kennedy; Miriam Leonard;
Charles Martindale; Ellen O’Gorman; Vanda Zajko.

1 See L. Coupe, Myth (London, 1997), 1–4.

276 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

their safe anchorage, Medea employs her magic powers to wound
his ankle, ichor flows out of the wound like molten metal, and he
crashes to the ground like a felled tree. The seemingly indestructible
metal man is destroyed and the Argo saved.

Here is a second story, from nineteenth-century Europe. A young
Swiss student, Victor Frankenstein, discovers the secret of animat-
ing lifeless matter and, by assembling body parts plundered from
graveyards and animating them with electricity, creates a monster.
The monster, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human compan-
ionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear.

Here is a third story, from the middle of the last century of the
second Christian millennium. A game is played with three people, a
man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either
sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The
object of the game is for the interrogator to determine which of the
other two is the man and which is the woman. When a machine then
takes the part of A in this game, the interrogator cannot distinguish
the performance of the machine from the performance of the man or
woman. The machine convincingly impersonates a human using
artificial intelligence.2

Here is a fourth story from the last century of the second Chris-
tian millennium. It recounts how in the year 2029, the rulers of
Earth attempt to assure the future by changing the past. They send a
Terminator—a cyborg monster, part human and part machine—
back in time to destroy Sarah Connor, future mother of the man
who will seek to overthrow them. The seemingly indestructible
metal man is destroyed and the future saved.

Here is a fifth and final story, from the last decade of the second
Christian millennium. In the year 1990 the first ever patented animal
OncomouseTM—a trademarked genetically engineered rodent—is
promoted by biotech company Du Pont (‘where better things for

2 There is much debate about the obscurity and ‘careless syntax’ of
Turing’s test. For a full discussion see A. Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma
(London, 1992), a biography whose title transforms Turing himself into a
cyborg, the human embodiment of an Enigma decoding machine. The
Turing test, as it became known, was to establish the foundation of research
and testing in artificial intelligence (AI) well into the 1980s. See N. K.
Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature and Informatics (Chicago, and London, 1999).

science fictions and cyber myths 277

better living come to life’) as a ‘little murine smart bomb’, and a new
‘tool-weapon’ to fight the biotechnical war against breast cancer.3

Mythographers of the cyborg assume that this monstrous hybrid,
part human and part machine, part being and part metaphor, has no
significant history before ‘being spat out of the womb-brain of its
war-besotted parents in the middle of the last century of the second
Christian Millennium’.4 For most science writers and theorists, the
history of the cyborg begins in 1960 with a neologism coined by the
research scientist Manfred Clynes and the clinical psychiatrist
Nathan Kline to refer to a technologically enhanced man or ‘cyber-
netic organism’—a fusion of organism, machine, and code—capable
of surviving and working in hostile alien environments. Others
might posit the genesis of cybernetics with the publication of Alan
Turing’s classic 1950s paper ‘Computer Machinery and Intelli-
gence’, or perhaps look further back to 1947 and the publication
of a theory of self-regulating or ‘cybernetic’ systems (from the Greek
kybernetes) developed by the pioneering research scientist Norbert
Wiener. Historians of science fiction might push back the imagina-
tive history of the cyborg to the nineteenth century,5 locating its
genesis with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—or, to give its full title,
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The casual ‘or’ of this
alternative title, however, emphasizes both the kinship of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley (to give the author her alternative title) to
Aeschylus and other classical myth-makers, no less than the kinship
between Victor Frankenstein and his Promethean ancestor, inviting
us to push back the imaginative history of the cyborg from the

3 D. J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleManß_
Meets_OncomouseTM (London, 1997), 83.

4 Ibid. 51.
5 See S. C. Fredericks, ‘Greek Mythology in Modern Science Fiction’, in
W. Aycock and T. Klein (eds.), Classical Mythology in Twentieth Century
Thought and Literature (Lubbock, Tex., 1980). Fredericks traces a history
of the ‘Promethean’ and ‘Odyssean’ modes of science fiction, reviewing
science fiction as a new mythology. Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree: The
True History of Science Fiction (London, 1973)—revised and reissued in
1986 as Trillion Year Spree—makes precisely this move, even though
Aldiss’s subtitle may remind classicists of Lucian and his True History, a
text that could be figured as a point of origin for the first ‘science-fiction’
narrative.

278 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

nineteenth century ce to the ninth century bce, from Shelley to
Homer. Frankenstein’s monster reminds us that the genealogy of
the cyborgs of the second Christian Millennium may be traced back
to the mythical monsters of classical Greece, and that in the narra-
tives of Homer, Hesiod, Apollodorus, Apollonius Rhodius, and
Pausanias, an alternative and ancient history for the cyborg may
be mapped.

While the goddess Athena, born from the womb-brain of her war-
besotted parent in the Olympian prehistory of ancient Greece, may
seem an obvious mythic archetype for the figure of the cyborg, it is
the ‘cybernetic’ creations of the god Hephaestus that claim the
closest kinship with modern cyborgs. Hephaestus, the classical
mythographers tell us, was the creator of miraculous automata:
tripods that moved of their own accord to and from feasts on
Mount Olympus (Iliad 18. 373–9), golden robotic slave-girls who
helped him with his work inside the inhospitable volcanic environ-
ment of his home and workshop (Iliad 18. 417–21), and gold and
silver watchdogs who guarded the palace of Alcinous (Odyssey
7. 91–4). Modern commentators and scholiasts, as Christopher
Faraone has observed,6 are unwilling to take Homer’s descriptions
of these creatures ‘at face value’, preferring to rationalize mythic
descriptions of animated statues and mechanical artworks as being
‘realistic’ and ‘lifelike’ rather than genuinely animated. Faraone
notes that in such euhemerizing interpretations of the Homeric
descriptions of Hephaestus’s works ‘the adjectives ‘‘undying’’ and
‘‘unaging’’ refer not literally to biological life, but rather to the
durability of the rust-proof metals from which they were fash-
ioned’.7 Such ‘demythologizing’ rationalizations of these Homeric
narratives seek to explain away rather than to explain the signifi-
cance and symbolic potential of Hephaestus’s automata, denying
the opportunity to see in such mythic descriptions of animated and
mechanical statues new possibilities for interpretation and meaning.
It is possible to see how this rationalization might be convincing in
the case of Alcinous’s watchdogs—so realistic that they frighten

6 C. A. Faraone, ‘Hephaestus the Magician and Near Eastern Parallels
for Alcinous’ Watchdogs’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 28
(1987), 257.

7 Ibid.

science fictions and cyber myths 279

away enemies as effectively as if they were real guard dogs—but it is
less obvious to see how tripods that only appeared to move of their
own accord might be useful at Olympian feasts, or how realistic
golden slave-girls might have offered effective assistance in
Hephaestus’s workshop. It seems clear that Hephaestus’s automata
are supposed in the Homeric epics to be animate, self-moving, and
thus—in Wiener’s scientific terms—even ‘cybernetic’. Could these
archaic automata be the ancestors of the cyborg?

Homer offers no account of how these automata might have been
animated, but in a comparative study of Near Eastern apotropaic
statuary and Hephaestus’s mythical metal creations, Faraone iden-
tifies a common ‘recipe’ for animation:8 hollow statues are first cast
in metal and then animated with pharmaka—that is, with organic
animal and vegetal matter, minerals, and gems, supplemented with
written codes and commands inscribed on pieces of papyrus.9
Might the animated statues of Hephaestus thus be seen to parallel
the apotropaic statues and magical talismans of Near Eastern ritual
no less than the cyborgs of the second Christian millennium—
cybernetic fusions of organic and inorganic material, animated
with diverse pharmaka, including the codes of DNA and the com-
puter commands of artificial intelligence (AI) programmes?

While some of Hephaestus’s automata may appear ostensibly
more robotic than cybernetic in character, the stories of Talos the
bronze giant suggest that here, indeed, the first recognizable
cyborg, hybrid of man and machine, metal and flesh, may be iden-
tified. Although they disagree upon the genealogy of the bronze
giant, the competing mythological sources for the story of Talos
or Talus agree upon the details that confirm the status of this
animated metal humanoid, possessing powers of self-regulation as

8 Ibid. 263–4.
9 Thus, according to an Oxyrhynchus fragment cited in Faraone,
‘Hephaestus the Magician’, ‘Hephaestus made a bronze lion and put into
this pharmaka beneficial to mankind’. See also ibid. 264 n. 19: ‘Among the
Greek magical papyri . . . are several recipes for the construction of figurines
that seem to come alive at some point in the process; some of these recipes
prescribe the insertion of some special material into a hollow part of the
statue; e.g. a hieratic papyrus inscribed with a logos (?) is inserted into a
statue in order to animate it (V 385f).’

280 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

a ‘proto-cyborg’.10 According to Apollonius Rhodius, as the Argo-
nauts sought to tie up in the harbour of Crete:

Bronze Talos broke off rocks from a great cliff, preventing them from
attaching their lines to the land when they sailed into the sheltered harbour
of Dikte. Among the line of semi-divine men, Talos was the last survivor of
the bronze race of humans born from ash trees, and the son of Kronos had
given him to Europa to guard Crete by walking around it three times [a day]
on his bronze feet. The rest of his body and limbs were made of indestruct-
ible bronze, but beneath the tendon in his ankle was a red vein covered by
thin skin which marked the boundary between his life and death. (Apollo-
nius Rhodius, Argonautica 4. 1638–50)

Richard Buxton, in his study of the myth of Talos, draws attention
to the different oppositions and categories that are destabilized by
this mythic monster, highlighting in particular ‘the oppositions
between divine/heroic, natural/artificial, and even human/ani-
mal’.11 However, a series of key oppositions between organic/inor-
ganic, self/other, mind/body, male/female, reality/appearance,
whole/part, active/passive, truth/illusion may also be traced in this
story. In Apollonius’s narrative, Talos is semi-divine, part mortal
and part immortal, part god and part man; the bronze monster
appears to be wholly made of impenetrable, inorganic metal, but,
in reality, is vulnerable in one penetrable, organic part of his anat-
omy; he is paired in this story with Medea, whose monstrous magic
conquers his monstrous violence, the power of her mind—‘not
exactly telepathic, not quite telekinetic’—overcomes his superior
physical strength.12 Talos’s veins flow with ichor rather than
blood, marking him out as something other than human. Despite
its obvious correlation with human blood, ichor is consistently

10 Apd. 1. 9. 26; Ap. Rhod. Arg. 4. 1635–88.; Pau. 8. 53. 2ff. See
R. Buxton, ‘The Myth of Talos’, in C. Atherton (ed.), Monsters and Mon-
strosity in Greek and Roman Culture (Bari, 1998), 83–112, for a convincing
reconstruction of the fragmentary and competing versions of the Talos myth.

11 Ibid. 89.
12 Ibid. 87. See M. Dickie, ‘Talos Bewitched: Magic, Atomic Theory and
Paradoxography in Apollonius Argonautica 4. 1638–88’, in F. Cairns and
M. Heath (eds.), Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar, 6 (Leeds,
1990), 267–96.

science fictions and cyber myths 281

contrasted with and distinguished from ‘ordinary human blood’.13
Yet the presence of musculature, skin, a vein, and a life-giving fluid
akin to human blood flowing through that vein, also marks Talos
out as something other than non-human. The ichor flowing through
and from the vein(s) of this metal man signify his monstrosity and
his mortality, his hybrid status as man and machine, human and
other—his identity not as a robot but as a proto-cyborg.

In her ground-breaking and now ‘classic’ analysis of feminism in
the post-modern Western world, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’,14 Donna
Haraway proposes some provocative ways of rethinking human
subjectivity, invoking the term ‘cyborg’ as a metaphor for the late
twentieth-century subject. She identifies the semi-organic, semi-
technological figure of the cyborg, an artificially constructed
being, as a symbol of and for the post-modern, post-human self.
In the hybridization of animal and machine that characterizes the
cyborg, Haraway sees a model for the contemporary subject as an
individual who is not identified according to an organic or natural
definition—particularly of gender—arguing that, in the figure of the
cyborg, category distinctions are collapsed, boundaries are trans-
gressed, and definitions are blurred, as the possible conditions for
any mode of unified subjectivity are denied.

As part of her cyborg ‘genealogy’ Haraway acknowledges her
indebtedness to a variety of ‘story-tellers’ or ‘theorists for cyborgs’.
Among those whose influences are explicitly recognized the science-
fiction writers Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany are named, together
with the feminist writers and theorists Luce Irigaray and Monique
Wittig. Haraway’s cyborg myth is clearly influenced by the gender-
free (or ‘post-gender’) utopias of feminist science fiction, but it is
also informed by the psychoanalytic writings of the French femin-
ists, who, she claims: ‘for all their differences, know how to write
the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from
imagery of embodiment . . . from imagery of fragmentation and
reconstitution of bodies’.15 It is story-tellers such as these who, for

13 See Buxton, ‘Myth of Talos’, 105–7.
14 D. J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and So-
cialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and
Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991), 149–81.
15 Ibid. 174.

282 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

Haraway, explore what it means to be embodied and engendered in
a high-tech post-modern world, and who constitute the mythog-
raphers of the cyborg.

Yet, like Haraway’s cyborg mythographers, the classical mythog-
raphers from Homer to Ovid—‘for all their differences’—also knew
‘how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and
politics from imagery of embodiment . . . from imagery of fragmen-
tation and reconstitution of bodies’. Furthermore, the cyborg myth-
ographers with whom Haraway claims kinship write within a
clearly delineated literary tradition in which explicit appeals to the
figures and narratives of classical mythology are common. The
classic work of science fiction by Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2,
and Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacra (originally entitled The First
Lady of Earth) reinscribe the Pandora/Pygmalion/Galatea myths.
Hermes has provided the theorists Michel Serres and William
Grassie with a potent myth and metaphor through which to explore
the hermeneutics of science and science fiction. Prometheus has
performed a similar role for Ihab Hassan in his analysis of ‘post-
humanist’ culture. The cyborg movie Blade Runner is reread by D.
Cifuentes as ‘Theseus’ struggle with the Minotaur’, and by Jay
Clayton as a revision of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story, in
which the Tyrell Corporation’s cyborgs are ‘replicants’ not only of
Frankenstein’s monster, but also of the monstrous Medusa.16 In-
deed, in a self-acknowledged ‘resolute over-reading’ of cyborg im-
ages represented in a collection of ‘mainline publications’ (Science
magazine, American Medical News, and Time magazine), Haraway
herself invokes Plato’s allegory of the cave, the Oresteian Trilogy,
and the story of Pygmalion and Galatea,17 alongside ‘heroic quests’
and ‘masculine parthenogenesis’ in a chart mapping the classical
myths that ‘are crusted like barnacles’ onto popular representations
of cyborg figures.18 In a cyborgian hybridization of modernity, post-
modernity, and classicism, Haraway’s cyborg mythographers (and

16 See G. Kolata, Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead (Lon-
don, 1997), who reads the science-fiction clone fantasy The City of Lost
Children as a retelling of the Prometheus myth and its ‘cloning’ in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, and H. G.Wells’s Dr Moreau.

17 Haraway, Modest_Witness, 253.
18 Ibid. 255.

science fictions and cyber myths 283

Haraway herself) re-member classical myths—fusing science, fic-
tion, and myth into one body.

In the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ and her more recent cyber-text
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleManß_Meets_Onco
mouseTM, Haraway sees a positive resistance to and redefinition of
conventional polarities and their attendant hierarchies embodied in
the figure of the cyborg. Among the hierarchical dualisms persistent
in the Western tradition, Haraway identifies a series of key pairings
between self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civil-
ized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource,
maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/
partial, and God/man—all of which, she claims, are radically desta-
bilized by the monstrous hybrid of entity and myth that is the cy-
borg.19 However, cyborgs do not reinscribe or re-embody the
traditional binarisms and polarities between such categories. Essen-
tial to the identity of the cyborg is its hybridity, the monstrous fusion
of different species and categories—human and animal, man and
machine, metal and flesh, masculine and feminine. The cyborg is
neither robot nor animal, neither machine nor organism; ‘The cyborg
is a cybernetic mechanism, a hybrid of machine and organism’,20
fusing the organic, the mechanical, and the written in one body.
Indeed, according to a revision of Haraway’s definition of the cyborg
in Modest_Witness:

The cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a fusion of the organic and the
technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices. Cyborgs are
not about the Machine and the Human, as if such Things and Subjects
universally existed. Instead, cyborgs are about specific historical machines
and people in interaction.21

As Haraway’s own competing definitions demonstrate, seeking a
comprehensive definition of the ‘cyborg’ is problematic—not simply
because the cyborg metaphor is supposed to undermine taxonomy,
but also because published definitions offer opposing, confusing,
and often incomplete classifications. New biotechnological devel-
opments and new science-fiction texts require definitions of the

19 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 177. 20 Ibid. 149.
21 Haraway, Modest_Witness, 51.

284 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

cyborg to be revised regularly. Some cyborg classifications place the
genetically engineered clone Dolly the sheep alongside a digitally
enhanced Lara Croft, the Terminator, and silicon-sculpted porn
stars. Other categorizations of the cyborg would include any organ-
ism augmented by chemicals, prostheses, or implants. As the editors
of The Cyborg Handbook maintain,22 ‘Anyone with an artificial
organ, limb or supplement (like a pacemaker), anyone repro-
grammed to resist disease (immunized) or drugged to think/be-
have/feel better (psychopharmacology) is technically a cyborg.’

Cyborgs are most familiar to us from the mythic narratives of
twentieth-century science fiction: Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep and its film translation Blade Runner, Star Trek, Terminator,
and Kubrick and Spielberg’s cinematic chimera A.I, to name but a
few. Yet for Haraway the cyborg is emphatically ‘a creature of social
reality as well as a creature of fiction’,23 a living being as well as a
metaphor—the distinctions between reality and representation, fic-
tion and fact, revealed as another set of polarities that the cyborg
redefines. This idea supports perhaps one of the most challenging
tenets of Haraway’s controversial thesis, the idea not only that
cyborgs exist beyond the realm of metaphor and myth, film and
fiction, but also—as clear distinctions between monstrous other
and human self are dissolved—that we are cyborgs and that
cyborgs are us. According to Katherine Hayles’s influential study
of posthumanism:

Cyborgs actually do exist: about 10% of the current U.S population are
estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with elec-
tronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug implant systems, implanted cor-
neal lenses, and artificial skin. A much higher percentage participates in
occupations that make them into metaphoric cyborgs, including the com-
puter keyboarder joined in a cybernetic circuit with the screen, the neuro-
surgeon guided by fiber optic microscopy during an operation, and the teen
gameplayer in the local videogame arcade.24

22 C. Hables Gray, H. J. Figueroa-Sarriera, and S. Mentor (eds.), The
Cyborg Handbook (New York, and London, 1995), 22.

23 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 149.
24 Hayles, How we Became Posthuman, 115.

science fictions and cyber myths 285

Thus, according to Haraway’s cyber myth, ‘By the late twentieth
century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and
fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are
cyborgs.’25 In the late-capitalist, patriarchal, Western world, our
daily dependence, direct and indirect, upon high technology renders
us all part of an integrated technological circuit: this configures us all
as cyborgs, whether or not we have prosthetic limbs, breast
implants, or use pharmaka to think/behave/feel better. For Haraway,
then, the cyborg of contemporary science fiction, of modern medi-
cine, modern mechanized production, and modern war (‘a cyborg
orgy’) becomes ‘a fiction mapping our social bodily reality’ and ‘an
imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings’.26

Haraway signals three ‘crucial boundary breakdowns’ concomi-
tant with technological developments in the late twentieth century
that make her self-avowedly ironic ‘political-fictional (political-sci-
entific)’ cyborg story possible.27 These include, first, the blurring of
distinctions between humans and animals, particularly primates,
brought about by the widespread acceptance of Darwinian theories
of evolution and the related ideological recognition of ‘animal
rights’; secondly, the synthesis of human, animal, and machine
brought about by new advances in biotechnology and cloning,
including the development of xenotransplant procedures and the
use of increasingly sophisticated machines capable of replicating bio-
logical functions; and thirdly, the fusion or confusion of human and
machine brought about by advances in computer technology such as
the development of machines capable of demonstrating ‘artificial
intelligence’, or succumbing to debilitating computer ‘viruses’.

One response to these boundary breakdowns, Haraway suggests,
might be to ‘see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal
and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices,
symbolic formulations, and physical artefacts associated with
‘‘high technology’’ and scientific culture.’28 Haraway’s response to
scientific innovation, exemplified in the figure of the cyborg, how-
ever, is to embrace the new possibilities and perspectives that it
promises. From one perspective, a technoscientific, post-modern,

25 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 150. 26 Ibid. 149–50.

27 Ibid. 151. 28 Ibid. 154.