2.2.7: Feminist

Feminist theory examines the share of the cultural literary landscape that women can claim. Keeping the focus on the social and psychological state of women, Feminist critics often draw conclusions based on the comparison of male characters, their goals, ambitions, privileges, conquests, and the effects of their conduct on female characters. Their analysis may also include the use of feminine language in description to contrast or balance masculine language. In The Iliad, Homer opens each book with long descriptions of “Rosy fingered Dawn,” and the quiet calm of the morning to contrast the brutality of the cutting, bloody, and relentlessly cruel descriptions of the battles, which are only interrupted for dialogues of vicious insults between the male leads.

Religious researcher Karen Armstrong in her book, A History of God, describes the precursor of the male Judeo/Christian God as the Great Goddess. Her evidence pulls from written history of pre-Christian goddesses including those from Ancient Sumerian epics Gilgamesh and The Epic of Creation which feature Inanna and Ishtar as potent arbiters of generative life as well as death. Ancient Egyptian epics identify Isis as the primordial mother, and other Indo-European cultures have their own Great Goddess: Aphrodite, who, like Athene may also have been a grafted deity. The Ancient Greeks identified Gaea as their Mother Goddess. Each of these manifestations is a variation of the Great Goddess, a figure who is both creative, destructive, and restorative as needed to provide cosmic balance.

Theologian Carol Christ writes of archeological evidence of a Great Goddess found abundantly, especially for Aphrodite, who though often trivialized as the goddess of love or lust, had temples built to her near marshlands and coastal areas, where the land merged with sea, or high up on cliffs that hovered over rocky shores where sea mist surrounded the temples (Christ 60). The proximity to the sea reminds adherents of her sea foam birth, and Feminists and anthropologists would also recognize the alignment with primordial life, which also sprang from the oceans and found footing on land.

Further physical evidence dates back to the Upper Paleolithic and “Venus” artifacts, such as the “Venus of Willendorf,” a curvaceous female stone figurine who appears pregnant with life.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The Venus of Willendorf is a Paleolithic fertility figure, perhaps a depiction of the Mother Goddess, and is so valued as an artifact that when it travels for exhibition, it is protected by a motorcade of tanks (Tedlock). (CC BY, Wikimedia Commons)

G. Rachel Levy argues “that the caves where Paleolithic worship was performed were understood to be the womb of the Creatrix,” and others have asserted that during the Neolithic era (from 7,000-3,500 B.C.E.) in both Asia and Old Europe, “the prominence of Goddess symbolism in religion coincided with enhanced social and religious roles of women who were the inventors of agriculture, pottery and weaving, (Christ 63) (Barstow 12), technologies that allowed cultures to survive as well as document their achievements.

The decline of the Great Goddess coincided with the emergence of the male-dominated Greek Pantheon of gods, and was finalized with the evolution of the Judeo God, who later merged into the Christian God. During this process, the role of the Great Goddess was reduced, minimized Feminists might say, into the role of the holy vessel, the Virgin Mary in the Western world, who, while important, is hardly the key figure in either religions’ view. A Feminist interpretation of this transition might identify the subjugation of the Great Goddess as evidence of the patriarchal fear of her authority, or more plainly, a female CEO is bad business sense for a masculine economy.

Feminist theory has a wider application due to its diversity of positions, which allow us to examine aberrant characters, such as Medusa, as sympathetic, a victim of a vindictive set of Olympians. A priestess of Athene, Medusa is approached by Poseidon (some versions say she is a lover of Poseidon, while others say she is raped by the god) during the execution of her temple duties. Here we find a question about consent, as some Feminists would argue that a mortal woman couldn’t render consent to a god, nor deny him, thus all human/mortal relations were a version of rape. As a consequence of the act, the goddess Athene directs her ire at the priestess, turning her previously ravishing face into a monstrosity that would repel any who look upon her. We moderns would call this “blaming the victim” or “re-victimizing the victim,” but we must be cautious of faulting the past for being the past. Instead, a Feminist might argue that Medusa comes into her power after the superficial outward appearance of beauty was stolen from her. As a supernatural being, she is able to control her own space and those who might trespass upon her. She is also given a significant role within the Graeae, her sister Gorgons, as the mother of a race of monstrous and wonderful guardians and aides, including Pegasus and Chrysaor (bearer of the Golden Sword) (Mortford and Lenardon162).

Feminist theory also offers the opportunity to further previously mentioned theories, such as the Freudian concept of penis envy. Zeus, by swallowing the female intelligence represented by his first wife, Metis, achieves a measure of balance in his previously aggressively male thinking, and by giving birth from his head, with the aid of midwife Hephaestus who cut a birth canal into Zeus’ head, he has demonstrated his own version of “womb envy,” and his desire to appropriate the lifegiving aspects of women. Ultimately, he lacks the compassion and nurturing that is traditionally aligned with women, and spends the rest of his reign chasing after female archetypes to the ongoing insult to his wife. Hera, in no small irony, is the goddess of marriage.