In his Metamorphoses, Ovid is concerned with, among other things, images of woman and the men that love them. Perhaps that is a euphemistic way of saying: Ovid’s book of changes often features women as the victims of men’s desire.
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Palin Button & GOP Feminism
From my Flickr buddy Bearded Jon. He’s an Alaskan and the biggest Palin supporter I know. Just kidding, Jon. One of my other Flickr buddies Jim sent me a recent Newsweek article, also about Palin and the GOP’s surprising support of her. Quindlen writes that the “conservatives have probably used the word ‘sexist’ more in [...]
Ophelia
Sir John Everett Millais’ 1852 painting “Ophelia” might be subtitled “Western Literature’s Woman.” It seems to me that the history of Western Literature has prescribed this role for its women: the drowned suicide of men’s struggles for power and control. Ophelia is the metaphor for a real world of patriarchal desire for control. Ophelia is [...]
Revisionary Mythmaking
Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken” is about what it means to be a woman, and the battles they must fight to write today. It is an essay about revisionary mythmaking and the process Rich had to undergo to define her own idiom as a woman writer. She begins her theme by showing how [...]