What if, instead of fearing these ancient monsters, contemporary readers embraced them as heroes in their own right? “The traits the represent-aspiration, knowledge, strength, desire-are not hideous,” Zimmerman writes. She also argues that the qualities that marked these female creatures as “monstrous” to ancient eyes might have actually been their greatest strengths. She says, “My hope is that when you do go back to the original texts to read these stories, you can think about, ‘What is this story trying to pass on to me?’” Zimmerman’s book takes a wide view of these stories and their history, linking the ancient past to modern politics. “Greek mythology a heavy, heavy influence on Renaissance literature, and art and Renaissance literature a heavy influence on our ideas now, about what constitutes literary quality, from a very white, cis, male perspective,” she explains in an interview.īelow, explore how the myths behind six “terrible” monsters, from the all-knowing Sphinx to the fire-breathing Chimera and the lesser-known shapeshifter Lamia, can illuminate issues in modern-day feminism. Though fearsome female monsters pop up in cultural traditions worldwide, Zimmerman chose to focus on ancient Greek and Roman antiquity, which have been impressed on American culture for generations.

Zimmerman also joins the ranks of other contemporary writers who have creatively reimagined the significance of these monstrous women-for instance, Muriel Rukeyser, who wrote poetry about the Sphinx Margaret Atwood, who retold the story of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope and Madeline Miller, who penned a 2018 novel about the Greek enchantress Circe. Bell’s Women of Classic Mythology and Marianne Hopman on Scylla. She relies on the translations and research of other classics scholars, including “ monster theory” expert Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Debbie Felton on monstrosity in the ancient world, Kiki Karoglou's analysis of Medusa, Robert E. Women and Other Monsters: Building a New MythologyĪ fresh cultural analysis of female monsters from Greek mythology BuyĪ mythology enthusiast raised on D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, Zimmerman writes personal essays that blend literary analysis with memoir to consider each monster as an extended metaphor for the expectations placed on women in the present moment. “Women have been monsters, and monsters have been women, in centuries’ worth of stories,” she notes in the book, “because stories are a way to encode these expectations and pass them on.” In this essay collection, newly published by Beacon Press, she reexamines the monsters of antiquity through a feminist lens. Medusa struck fear into ancient hearts because she was both deceptively beautiful and hideously ugly Charybdis terrified Odysseus and his men because she represented a churning pit of bottomless hunger.įemale monsters represent “the bedtime stories patriarchy tells itself,” reinforcing expectations about women’s bodies and behavior, argues journalist and critic Jess Zimmerman in Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. What’s more, the tales’ female monsters reveal more about the patriarchal constraints placed on womanhood than they do about women themselves. These stories may sound fantastical today, but for ancient people, they reflected a “quasi-historical” reality, a lost past in which humans lived alongside heroes, gods and the supernatural, as curator Madeleine Glennon wrote for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017. Both are described as unambiguously female. Earlier, in Homer’s Odyssey, composed around the seventh or eighth century B.C., the Greek hero Odysseus must choose between fighting Scylla, a six-headed, twelve-legged barking creature, and Charybdis, a sea monster of doom. epic Metamorphoses, for example, the Roman poet Ovid wrote about Medusa, a terrifying Gorgon whose serpentine tresses turned anyone who met her gaze into stone. The myths then, to a certain extent, fulfill a male fantasy of conquering and controlling the female.”Īncient male authors inscribed their fear of-and desire for-women into tales about monstrous females: In his first-century A.D. These villains, wrote classicist Debbie Felton in a 2013 essay, “all spoke to men’s fear of women’s destructive potential. In the classical Greek and Roman myths that pervade Western lore today, a perhaps surprising number of these creatures are coded as women. As figments of the imagination, the alien, creepy-crawly, fanged, winged and otherwise-terrifying creatures that populate myths have long helped societies define cultural boundaries and answer an age-old question: What counts as human, and what counts as monstrous? Monsters reveal more about humans than one might think.

Greek mythology creatures