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.