Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth by Ariadne Konstantinou

Abstract

Reviewed by: Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth by Ariadne Konstantinou Vanda Zajko Ariadne Konstantinou. Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. xiv + 189 pp. 1 black-and-white map. Cloth, $102. Since feminism began to make its presence felt in the 1970s, and certainly since the publication of Sarah Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Greece in 1975, the question of the access of ancient Greek women to public space has been fiercely debated. What counts as reliable evidence for the experiences of women? How do the representations of women in literary texts relate to the material realities of their lives? And what is the relationship of myth, as broadly conceived, to other kinds of data? This book both summarises and evaluates these discussions by painstakingly working through a wide range of material relating to female characters in myth and mapping their trajectories through domestic, civic and natural spaces. The methodological issues familiar to classicists are foregrounded throughout the four main chapters, to the extent that at times the explication of approach distracts from the overall argument; the interesting theoretical perspectives from the emergent fields of space and mobility studies are, for the most part, restricted to the introduction and the final chapter. This is a shame because it means that insights derived, for example, from the conceptualisation of space as socially produced, or the contemporary focus on the moral effects of mobility are tantalisingly alluded to (e.g., 9, 11) but never allowed fully to irrigate the ancient texts. The desire to avoid the anachronistic use of conceptual vocabulary, explicitly articulated and presented as a virtue (11), positions the work within a tradition of scholarship that privileges a certain [End Page 367] kind of historicism over other approaches. While there is nothing wrong with this per se, when dealing with myth and the ancient Greek imagination, a more relaxed attitude towards creative hypothesis tends to produce more engaging results. The book is divided into two halves, the first devoted to female deities and the second to mortal heroines. Within these sections there is further division into chapters on virgin goddesses, Olympian wives and mothers, mobile heroines in Greek tragedy, and female mobility and gendered spaces between myth and ritual. Each chapter has its own introduction and conclusion and is comprehensively annotated with accurate references to up-to-date bibliography and relevant primary sources. From this perspective, the book will be invaluable to students and scholars wishing to familiarise themselves with the current state of play regarding discussions of gender and space in archaic and classical Greece. In the first chapter, the famous description of Athena, Artemis and Hestia from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite is used as a springboard for discussion of the connection between the three goddesses' sexual status, their gender, and their mobility. There is much that is familiar here, from the association of Hestia with the domestic and public hearth, to the exploits of Athena in the Trojan war, and the characterization of Artemis as a mountain-dwelling huntress. The critique of Vernant's hugely influential article on Hestia and Hermes (Vernant, J.-P., 1963, "Hestia-Hermès. Sur l'expression religieuse de l'espace et du mouvement chez les Grecs," L'Homme 3:12–50) results in an adjustment of the view that Hestia's fixity is a result of her femininity and suggests instead that her lack of mobility results from the divine privileges which involve receiving honours in both private and public spheres and which identify her primarily with "the centre." Otherwise, the chapter reaffirms the idea that virginity for these female deities does not automatically entail any kind of restriction of movement and thus argues that they cannot be regarded as paradigmatic for human women. The second chapter continues the discussion by focusing on Aphrodite, Demeter, and Hera and concludes similarly that in epic contexts, divine wives and mothers are free to move where they want to, apart from in the case of Hera, whose limited mobility is either the result of her superior position in the divine hierarchy or a form of punishment by Zeus. These...