(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns

Book Review

Leona Anderson

Aug 2006

O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. (1980). Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. Chicago: University of Chicago.

In Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts, Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty brings together diverse crosscultural narratives in support of the religious use of animal symbolism and sexual metaphors in the polarized conception of good and bad, masculine and feminine, supernatural and humans, and gods and goddesses. Using structuralism to support her postmodern enterprise that brings horses, cows and androgynes together, there seems to be no end to her ability to create relationships to support her binary mapping and no notion of cultural agency within her molding of survivals to support her fluid and open-ended analysis.

Taking a series of papers that are loosely organized around how religious imagery, both in print and in iconic presence, forwards unequal hierogramies, O’Flaherty succeeds in explaining how and why both Hindu and Indo-European gender concepts are tipped towards the patriarchal position within those societies, and in showing the historical development of these concepts at work deep within the religious conceptions. While her use of male imagery as containing “female aspects” (202) as inverted forms to support her theory of mare mythology weakens her arguments at times, her understanding, or at least her ability to apprehend the sources of scholarship of these societies, is outstanding, with her explanations of cultural transference being both historically linked to time and place, as well as being reciprocal in nature. Unfortunately, this is not applied to her use of North and South American cultures.

Operating from the assumption of the validity of the land bridge theory of cultural transference, First Nations, Amerindians, and South Indigenous peoples narratives are brought into the fold of her creative scholarship without reciprocal relationships of transferring survivals from their cultures into European conceptions. It is in her concluding chapter where her reliance on the Aarne-Thompson Index of Tale Types may have guided her into unanalyzed territory far outside her specialized area; a give away to her lack of research is found with the inclusion of the “Trickster” of Native American cultures to support her androgyne layer of argument. This shows her lack of recognition of scholarship on the Navajo seven classifications of gender, and the transformative power of the “Trickster.” It is through the Trickster that oral traditional cultures understand and utilize classification systems and structures more suited to their culture, much like O’Flaherty’s classification system of links between “mare mythology,” “androgyne,” and “deities” that supports academic classifications. While much has been researched and written on these topics and more since the publication of this book, it is points such as these that show how dated her work is within the larger historic body of scholarship and how dangerous the assumptions of publications from even the 1980s can be in making some cultures into the derogatory “mares” and others into the austentatious “stallions.”

Postmodern Analysis

(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
Book Review
Leona Anderson
August 13, 2006

In Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts, Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty is trying to classify Hindu, Indo-European, and other crosscultural narratives through the gender differentia of male, female and androgynous, only to come to the conclusion that the latter category serves the male category through its one-sided emphasis on male androgyne. While she is a postmodernist that understands that her project is not to find absolute truth or perfection, she is a masterful structuralist that can take even the narratives of males and the male gods and differentiate the feminine attributes that they cast into the plotline and attach these as support for her argument.

Her argument is multifunctional and multi-layered. Beside the support of structural gender biases, her classification structure includes mare mythology versus stallion mythology, cow mythology versus bull mythology and the relationships obtained between all four of these categories. The play of relational characteristics is staggering, and at times overwhelming to one’s rational sense. The overwhelming nature of her analysis occurs when she brings multiple animal and mythical forms, such as wolves, vampires and the like, to support either the mare or the cow categorical construction. While gender analysis is the deepest structure used by O’Flaherty, two thirds of her book leads up to her classification category of “mare mythology” and how it is differentiated and relates to the categories of stallion, cow and bull. The concept of the sacred cow only receives one chapter and the analysis of androgyne only occurs in the last chapter. While this book structure was overwhelming at times, especially with the mare mythology receiving so much attention at the start but very little at the conclusion, and with the other images and concepts receiving recognition within the mare mythology itself without analysis until later chapters, by the conclusion many of her insinuations and attachments fall in place pertaining to her argument; that gender is the root to all these various mythological categories, despite the historical changes, rearrangements and adjustments to surface images and supporting belief structures. This book was frustrating in its web of attachments, with no notions of cultural or individual agency read into the narratives themselves outside of patrimonic overtones. The only relationships concerned where to emphasize the male over the female, and the diffusion of all counter-imagery in both text and iconography.

Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty is definitely a postmodernist in her push for belief in her abstract recategorization of Hindu and crosscultural myths, her plural coding of some narratives into the different categories of her conception, and her mixed styles of analysis and reformulation of data is confusing at worst and misleading at best, as seen in her interpretation of the Navajo “nadle” as only a male-orientated androgyne. I recognize this point because it is one of the few mythemes that she uses that falls within my field of reference; most of her narratives are drawn from many crosscultural sources within the Indo-European domain, her specialized area, that makes it hard for me to quantify her interpretations, let alone qualify her use of sources. While I do not have the expertise to judge the nuances of her argument, the core images, especially those surrounding her concept of the mare as being more dangerous than a stallion, especially to her male offspring, breaches my own Canadian experience with horses where the stallion must be kept away from the offspring. This essentialist position has been documented in both print and video formats, while she herself gives examples of stallion misbehaviour that is then attributed to either his “female aspect” or “acting as a mare,” or is left unanalyzed in any nuanced form that is given to the mare stories. Her categories at many times overlap with lack of clarity separating them from each other except for taking her expert word for it. The use of multiple locations of narrative sources in both time, place and cultural locations, her use of multiple images that collapse into either the mare or the cow category, and the pessimism of any androgynous representation every providing equity between the gender marks her postmodernism while also tempering a modernistic method found in her use of structuralism and its functioning in keeping the patriarchal gender superior in Hinduisms (and other cultures) over both the feminine and the androgynous. It is within this book that O’Flaherty’s postmodern use of imagery meets the methodological functionality of structuralism at its best which confused me for most of her book and made for hard reading.