Legendary Women Research Articles

A Woman Warrior in Alternative Voices: Analysing English and French Translations of the Chinese Classic Mulan Ci ( “The Ballad of Mulan”)

ABSTRACT “The Ballad of Mulan” (Mulan Ci (<木蘭辭>)) is a widely recited folk poem in Chinese culture. It celebrates the filial piety and courage of the heroine, Mulan, who has joined the army on behalf of her father to defend her homeland. Not only is this story passed down across generations and familiar to the Chinese people, but it is also widely known globally by its various forms of adaptations and translations. This article investigates, from a perspective informed by feminist translation criticism, the representative English and French translations of the Chinese poem conducted by renowned translators. Based on the inadequate translations in presenting the woman warrior’s voice, the article argues that translation is a gendered activity where a translator’s gender cultural presuppositions play a significant role in the translation. It is found that the Western male translators have projected their stereotypical perceptions about the literary image of Chinese women in their interpretation of Mulan and adopted the position of speaking for the female protagonist by making up a faked female voice in their translations. Mulan’s subjectivity as a legendary woman has been reconstructed in the translations due to the absence of the translators’ gender sensitivity in rendering gender-related text.

Autobiography and Audre Lorde’s Matriarchal Sphere

Audre Lorde, one of the most prominent black women poets of the 21st century, is concerned about the horrors of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia and genuinely attempts to erode them through the power of art. Audre Lorde’s life and work are inspired by an arsenal of powerful women, both cruel and kind, who give her the energy to strive in a world wrought with suffering, pain, and ostracism. Lorde celebrates women of her immediate maternal descent: her mother’s sturdy female relations; she celebrates her friends and lovers; seeks sustenance from a pantheon of mythic goddesses from West Africa; and finally celebrates legendary women who have stood for the women’s cause. This paper explores how these women influenced her poetic production. Her predominantly maternal and matriarchal influences become evident when one places her within the political and intellectual background. Her life and work are not generated by the normative patriarchy that permeates Western institutions but by a self-proclaimed matriarchy. The paper employs new historicism in investigating the impact of Lorde’s family and social heritage, a heritage that was predominantly maternal and matriarchal. Lorde’s family lineage comprises an arsenal of influential female relatives and ancestors. Lorde's family is replete with maternal influences, beginning in her immediate family, where her mother was a real matriarch, and extending to her grandmother and great-grandmother. These maternal influences will push her in the long run as she matures to research women in history and myth. Discovering that the image of powerful and assertive women met with opposition in America, Lorde discovered that the erasure and silencing of women were orchestrated by patriarchy to render women helpless and malleable. Lorde, like other radical feminists, was influenced by the powerful and creative force of the mother, and she sought throughout her struggles to re-inscribe the woman into the center of the body polity.

A multi-dimensional reality: Carol Lally Shields.

A multi-dimensional reality: Carol Lally Shields.

Legendary Women in Dentistry: Racquel Z. LeGeros.

Racquel LeGeros' life demonstrates an inspirational phenomenon by which, through scholarly and academic production, one woman can have a dramatic effect shaping society. Although famous for her focus on biomaterials, ranging from bioceramics to calcium phosphates, her personal experiences likely shaped her work in public health, which took aim at oral health disparities. LeGeros left her home in Manila, Philippines and came to Manhattan at 18 years old to pursue her Master's degree at New York University. She served with great distinction NYU for over 50 years, rising to the rank of professor and associate chair of the Department of Biomaterials and Biomimetics. Her life experience allowed her to improve conditions for others like her. Her roles in life, the oldest daughter of eight children, a mother and a wife, likely gave her the tools to mentor. Not only did teaching and mentorship within her laboratory research generate a pipeline of independent researchers carrying forward biomaterials research, development, and implementation, but it also exemplified inclusion of individuals from a variety of demographics around the world who, today as independent scientists, bring diverse perspectives to science. A thorough evaluation of her over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, tells a story that extends beyond the very important pioneering strides beyond materials development and public health dentistry. Her career arc amplifies the understanding of how scientific discovery translates to improve and upgrade society. LeGeros' progressive and comprehensive mindset is evident as she considered the implications of her science on larger problems facing society, dedicating her investigations to uncovering the causes and structures that reify healthcare inequity. Beyond clinical science, LeGeros applied research findings to improve health equity, social justice. Through her work and its impact on society, Dr. Racquel LeGeros is a remarkable figure.

Queen Caroline's Umbilical Hernia.

Never a monarch nor head of state, Queen Caroline of Ansbach (1683-1737) is among the legendary women rulers of England and Great Britain alongside Queens Elizabeth I and II, Queen Victoria, and Lady Margaret Thatcher. As queen consort, she was the acknowledged power behind the throne of her husband, King George II (1683-1760), working with Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of England. George accepted her intellectual superiority and backstage dominance even before he acceded to the throne in 1727. "[He had] no pretensions toward intellect and [was] basically interested in little more than military glory, political power, and a wife who would do her duty by providing him with male heirs," wrote popular historian John Van de Kiste. After they were wed in 1705, Caroline carried out her task with a remarkable fecundity: a male heir, Frederick Louis, in 1707, followed by Anne (1709), Amelia (1711), Caroline (1713), George William (1717), William (1721), Mary (1723), and Louise (1724). With good reason she believed that her influence over George came from his sexual attraction to her. It was a conceit that proved to be her undoing as she strove to hide from common knowledge an unsightly umbilical hernia. The rupture caused her death in 1737 at age 54. It strangulated, perforated, and spilled feculent succus entericus and fetid fluid onto the royal bed, a vivid example of the consequences of an untreated surgical condition.

Embodied Objects: Chūjōhime’s Hair Embroideries and the Transformation of the Female Body in Premodern Japan

The female body in medieval Japanese Buddhist texts was characterized as unenlightened and inherently polluted. While previous scholarship has shown that female devotees did not simply accept and internalize this exclusionary ideology, we do not fully understand the many creative ways in which women sidestepped the constraints of this discourse. One such method Japanese women used to expand their presence and exhibit their agency was through the creation of hair-embroidered Buddhist images. Women bundled together and stitched their hair into the most sacred parts of the image—the deity’s hair or robes and Sanskrit seed-syllables—as a means to accrue merit for themselves or for a loved one. This paper focuses on a set of embroidered Japanese Buddhist images said to incorporate the hair of Chūjōhime (753?CE–781?CE), a legendary aristocratic woman credited with attaining rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land. Chūjōhime’s hair embroideries served to show that women’s bodies could be transformed into miraculous materiality through corporeal devotional practices and served as evidence that women were capable of achieving enlightenment. This paper emphasizes materiality over iconography and practice over doctrine to explore new insights into Buddhist gendered ritual practices and draws together critical themes of materiality and agency in ways that resonate across cultures and time periods.

Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception ed. by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall

Reviewed by: Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception ed. by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall Gillian Adler Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception, ed. Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 2015) 264 pp. Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception, a collection of essays edited by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall, comprehensively explores the central idea of fame, or fama, as it arises within Chaucer’s poems and pertains to the poet’s afterlife. The theme of surviving time permeates the speeches of Chaucer’s characters and connects his poems to medieval works including Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, but these essays primarily demonstrate how later readers, authors, manuscript compilers, and printers perpetuated and shaped Chaucer’s name and reputation. Chaucer and Fame appeals essentially to scholars of Chaucer; however, the focus on intertextual dialogues and reception, multilingualism, and book history also make this collection a significant contribution to the scholarship of medieval literature and medievalism. The eleven chapters of Chaucer and Fame reflect a wide range of topics pertaining to Chaucer’s works and posthumous fame, and address a variety of historical, biographical, and cultural contexts, but Davis justifies this breadth by stressing Chaucer’s own complex engagement with literature, ancient and medieval. The volume aims to investigate not an independent Chaucer, whose works are to be read in a literary vacuum, but rather a “diachronic and international exchange,” considering how Chaucer imagines himself in relation to classical auctores, as well as French and Italian medieval authors, including Dante and Petrarch, who frequently obsessed over their connection to figures like Virgil and Ovid, and gave Chaucer material for his exploration of fama (2). For one, Davis’s introduction considers how, in The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer not only recognizes the canonical positions of Virgil and Ovid, eliciting concerns with celebrity found in Chaucer’s earlier dream vision The House of Fame, but also intervenes in the two ancient poets’ dispute over Dido’s reputation. Recognizing Chaucer’s object in the Legend to fix the reputations of legendary women, Davis emphasizes authorial omission and inclusion in a useful context that prepares for the subsequent essays in the volume. For a discussion of the preoccupation with presence and absence in the “making” of Chaucer, Davis points to the essays by Andrew Galloway and Thomas Prendergast. Considering the idea that “absence…defines and even [End Page 271] makes possible the idea of celebrity,” Prendergast explores “the transition of the invented textual presence of Chaucer in the late Middle Ages to the invented personal presence of the poet in the early modern period” (186). He persuasively argues that while the Middle Ages construed Chaucer’s celebrity through the invention of the text, as indicated by the gaps and fill-ins within the manuscript tradition, early modern writers more blatantly resurrected Chaucer’s person, marking this latter period as the era in which “an ur-culture of celebrity took hold” and in which “the poet himself began to make a quasi-appearance in literary works” (192). In Galloway’s examination of the Lancastrian reception of Chaucer, the image of a penitential Chaucer calls attention to the ways in which fifteenth-century readers legitimized English poetry and opens into compelling readings of early poetic laments on Chaucer’s death and representations of his life and identity. Mike Rodman Jones’s essay, “Chaucer the Puritan,” also investigates the shift of reception between pre- and post-Reformation England, first demonstrating how Chaucer’s name in the Renaissance gave cultural weight and authority to various projects and suggesting the role that the early modern period assigned Chaucer in the religious conflicts of early English Protestantism, but primarily making the case for the idea that “our sense of what ‘Reformed’ or ‘Protestant Chaucer’ was has to be alive to the shifting ground, the fragmentation, diversity and complexity of ecclesiastical controversy in this most controversial of religious and historical periods” (168). Jones’s compelling argument in this essay challenges the simplification of religious terminologies and absolute, monolithic categorizations of early modern religions, and brings to light some of the more interesting citations of Chaucer in Tudor and Stuart texts, beyond those that a...

Legendary Women and Greek Womanhood: The Heroines Pyxis in the British Museum

The Heroines pyxis in the British Museum is a fifth-century B.C.E. Attic red-figure vase that is attributed to a follower of Douris and appears at first glance to depict a generic scene of women's life. The scene, however, is transformed by the artist's use of inscriptions that give the names of mythological heroines to almost all the figures: Helen, Klytaimnestra, Kassandra, Iphigeneia, and Danae. Scholars have found the subject difficult to interpret because these women do not appear together in any one known story. This article argues that the vase painter meaningfully paired the women to prompt viewers to compare and contrast them in the same way that the tradition of Greek catalogue poetry does. The inscriptions name legendary women who would have evoked stories that reflect a range of ideals and ideas about Greek womanhood. The heroines resonate with one another in deliberate juxtapositions, articulating paradigms of womanhood that reveal the self-fashioning of contemporary aristocratic Athenian women. The pyxis expands our way of looking at Greek vases by suggesting that the inscriptions are not mere labels that clarify a scene, but cues that can create layers of complexity and meaning.

Boccaccio's Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society by Margaret Franklin

582 Reviews relatives and dependent interrogatives are often difficult todistinguish, thedepen dent clause of the example is indeed not a relative but a dependent interrogative: dime cossa che xe sucesso 'tell me what happened' is the embedded version of the corresponding main question cossa ze successo? 'what has happened?', p. 133:What the author calls some common adverbs of time and manner' are per haps better described as 'time,manner, (and place) wh pronouns', corresponding to English how, when, where. This can help us to understand their syntactic behaviour. p. 134: To the best ofmy knowledge, Venetian does not distinguish nouns from pronouns in subject position with respect to the resumptive clitic:with both types of subjects the clitic copy is optional (with very subtle pragmatic differences, as the author says). p. 135: The idea that the 3rd person subject clitic is compulsory because the verb forms are identical in singular and plural appears common sense but iswrong; in Friulian 3rd sg. and plur. are very distinct but the subject clitic isobligatory in all contexts (even in thepresence of an overt subject). p. 178: Comparing medieval Venetian in texts of the Lagoon with other medieval Venetan varieties and modern Venetian, the author says that sigmatic inflection is absent in central-southern Venetan, and partially present in Lio Mazor. This is a small but important point, since sigmatic inflectionmeans preserving -s inflection (a Ladin feature): inflectional -5 is preserved inVenetian till after the Second World War, when protected by the enclitic interrogative pronouns; it is absent in central Veneto, present in Friulian, but completely absent in Lio Mazor texts;what can appear as an inflectional -s isnot inflectional but part of the ending, with -5remaining infinal position aftervowel-dropping: themost trickyexample is tuseres /seres/,but ifcompared with a language thatvery consistently preserves inflectional -s, such as Friulian, we find the corresponding form tu seress-is and conclude that Lio Mazor's form has undergone the loss of inflectional -s.This is confirmed by the fact that 3 sg.has the same structurepares /pares/; ifthe -swere inflection, itshould appear only in 2 sg. (or plur., in some cases). The amount of space I have devoted to the above corrections should not obscure the wealth of valuable observations and information contained in this volume, which makes amajor contribution to the history ofVenetian from a variety of interlinked perspectives. Itwill surely serve as amodel for thedescription of other dialect areas and stimulate further research intoVenetian. University of Padua Paola Beninca Boccaccio's Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society. By Margaret Franklin. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. 206 pp. ?47 50. ISBN 978-0-07546 5364-6. Margaret Franklin's study of Boccaccio's celebration of exemplary women, theDe mulieribus claris (c. 1360), and its subsequent 'fortuna'within Italian literary and MLR, 104.2, 2009 583 visual culture is based on the bold assertion that the text presents a consistent delineation of theparameters of acceptable female authoritywith thegoal of provid ing a pre-emptive defence of a social framework implicitly challenged by legendary women who participated actively inpublic life*(p. 1). In distinguishing her project from earlier readings which have stressed the impossibility ofdefining a clearly iden tifiable female subject position within the textFranklin sets the frame forher study: the rearrangement ofwhat were seen as fragments by others to produce a coherent definition of female subjectivity in the text,a configuration which defines 'theappro priate functioning ofwomen in society (p. 2). Such a critical stance, it is claimed, also serves a further corrective role in seeking to remove themisogynistic label attributed to the textby a generation of feminist scholars whose political and ideo logical concerns prevented amore historicist evaluation of the text's status. Instead of chiding the author forhis failure to espouse social and political reform, Franklin argues thatBoccaccio's De mulieribus sought to 'draw the teeth from the challenge posed by unconventional women by co-opting their stories into the service of con temporary Italian standards and mores' (p. 8). In thisway they are assimilated into a moral economy thatwas never going tobe anything but patriarchal in a text thatwas primarily aimed at amale readership and the restatement of normative gender roles. For Franklin...

Edmund Spenser, George Turberville, and Isabella Whitney Read Ovid's Heroides

IN the Heroides, perhaps the ancient world's most prominent ex ample of literary transvestism, Ovid adopts the personae of legend ary women who lament the amatory crimes of the men they love. It may have been some of the first poetry in Latin that Spenser encoun tered, as it was for many schoolboys from the twelfth century onward, in accordance with its traditional pedagogical status, admirably docu mented by Ralph Hexter.1 Since it was part of Eton's Erasmian curricu lum as early as 1528, its familiarity and centrality to Spenser, whom Richard Mulcaster inculcated with a similar humanism at the Merchant Taylors' School, should not surprise.2 It served as a primary text for beginning Latin students in England through the nineteenth century. For early modern readers, it also served as a celebrated exemplum of the potential for inventive excellence by an ancient author in his juve nile endeavors, another reason why the burgeoning New Poet would probably have read it. To Spenser and his innumerable poetical prede cessors who sought to work meaningful improvisations on the tradi tions they wished to embody in their work, Ovid's cadre of mythical heroines (Lat. herois, -ides) exemplified doubly literate women-those

Sor Juana and the Guadalupe

Connections are drawn here between the writings of Mexico's most important seventeenth-century poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1650-92) and the development of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, still today a dominant feature of Catholic worship in Latin America. Techniques of conversion used by the Spanish missions are examined as background to the apparition of the Virgin, in 1531, and to clarify Sor Juana's response in her public verse. Later uses of the synecdoche are set out to illustrate the Guadalupe's shape-shifting powers besides those of other legendary women in Mexican myth and history. A final section looks at the possibilities for new, creative aspects of feminist spirituality and liberation theology challenging Latin American Catholicism, and suggests ways in which women worshipping, and the worship of woman, are evolving in modem Mexico.

The Strange Birth of Santa Claus: From Artemis the Goddess and Nicholas the Saint

Yes, Virginia, once upon a time there lived a gift-bringer who sometimes came down the hearth smoke to leave presents, a friend and patron of children and women, especially maidens (Jones 300, 315). And, Virginia, her name was Artemis of Ephesus. Oh, I know what you were thinking, but let me explain and you will learn that the story of Santa Claus reveals more wonderment than you have imagined. This story is for you, Virginia, now that you are considerably older. Please pardon the delay. Long ago and far away, so say the legends, there lived a Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor, a bearded Father of the Catholic Church named Nicholas. This Patriarch won his way into the hearts of the people, recently converted from idolatry to Christianity, by destroying the temple of Artemis, a many-breasted goddess of the sea and of grain, a pagan Earth Mother who had a and distinguished career as a midwife and protector of women. Her story begins when Leto, wived by the great god Zeus, clung to the sacred date palm, the tree of birth and nurturant life, as she bore Artemis without pain. Immediately--and amazingly--the infant goddess arose and assisted in birthing her own twin, Apollo. In later years, Leto and her daughter often went hunting together (Tripp), no doubt a consequence of such early bonding. At any rate, Virginia, you can now understand better the meaning of long and distinguished career, and you will soon note similarities between Artemis and the precocious Nicholas. Surely it is easy to understand why at the first pangs of labor women might call upon Artemis for relief, or why maidens wishing to marry might offer a lock of hair to this Nurse of Youths, goddess of fertility, birth, and the many-breasted tree (Zaidman 361). But women who wished to remain virginal or chaste, who did not wish to approach or be approached by men, also turned for protection to this goddess sometimes called Diana. The Cretan goddess Britomartis, pursued by the god-king Minos, escaped his clutches into the sacred precincts of an Artemisian grove. Orion, as he attempted to violate Opis, was killed by arrows of Artemis who, like Hecate, was also a goddess of death. Her kindly darts brought sudden but mercifully painless death to women, as did her bother Apollo's to men (Tripp). The greatest of many temples dedicated to this goddess of life and death, at Ephesus on the south coast of what is now Turkey, was inevitably founded by Amazons. Amazons, legendary women warriors, refused to submit meekly to men. If they wished to reproduce, they might take men, but on their own terms and temporarily (Tyrrell). The immense marble temple, a wonder of the ancient world, was gloriously gilded; decorated in cobalt blues, brightest reds, brilliant yellows; overflowing with statuary appropriate to Artemis as Great Goddess, Earth Mother, Lady of the Animals, of Wild Things, the source and sustainer of all life. There were bulls, lions, stags, rams, boars, and wolves; horses and chariots; centaurs and hippocamps; bees, quail, and rabbits; serpents that were emblematic of Artemis, symbolic of wisdom, prophecy, and eternal life; women as warriors and as sirens and sea nymphs; men as warriors and devotees of the goddess (Lethaby). And at the sacred center of this symbolic universe teeming with life stood the golden idol of many-breasted Artemis (although some say her breasts were dates or pomegranates or eggs or bulls' testicles or other emblems of cornucopian fertility) (Goodrich 68-70). Her worshippers were not sedate, Virginia. Later commentators, often admirers of the Christian Nicholas, report and lascivious dances, bacchanalian revelry, animal--and intimations of human--sacrifice, temple harlots, self-mutilated eunuch priests in female dress, and Apollo as subordinate to Artemis, perhaps even as a servile lover (Farnell II 445, III 301, IV 173). To become marriageable, prepubescent Greek girls performed a ritual bear dance at an annual women's festival of Artemis Brauronia (Papadimitriou), itself much like the orgiastic rites of spring planting and fertility, the April Artemisia. …

Woman and the City: The Semiotics of Embodiment

C'est toujours cela que j'ai voulu donner sur scene: faire voir la force violente des idees, comment elles ploient et tourmentent les corps.Antoine VitezTwo years ago, a philosophy professor friend remarked that he would never forget Jules and Jim and the sense of walking with Jeanne Moreau through the beautiful French countryside in spring with its colours in full bloom. When reminded that the film was shot in black and white, he replied that it must have impressed him so much that his imagination had added colour to it. To remember a walk through the landscape of another country and time, to insert one's own colours into a scene: does this occur in theatre as in film? And if the landscape can be transformed, what becomes of Jeanne Moreau? More specifically, what happens when such a star is imported onto the stage as a legend of woman incarnate? What happens semiotically when the ‘incarnate’ legendary woman confronts the material presence of the actress? These questions had already begun to emerge a year earlier, when I saw Moreau in person at Avignon, first on a performance on the open-air stage of the Com d'honneui in the fourteenth-century Palais des Papes, and then at a public discussion just outside the palace wall.In Antoine Vitez's 1989 production of La Célestine, Jeanne Moreau played the mercurial, irascible procuress Célestine, the first picara, a larger-than-life character popular in Spain for four centuries. The play was written in 1499 by Fernando de Rojas, who coined the term tragicomedy to describe it.

Chieko Irie Mulhern (ed.), Heroic With Grace: Legendary Women of Japan (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1991), xvii, 326 pp. Cloth $39.95. [Paper $15.95

Chieko Irie Mulhern (ed.), Heroic With Grace: Legendary Women of Japan (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1991), xvii, 326 pp. Cloth $39.95. [Paper $15.95

Heroic with Grace: Legendary Women of Japan

Heroic with Grace: Legendary Women of Japan

Book Reviews : Chieko Irie Mulhern (ed.), Heroic With Grace: Legendary Women of Japan (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1991), xvii, 326 pp. Cloth $39.95. [Paper $15.95

Book Reviews : Chieko Irie Mulhern (ed.), Heroic With Grace: Legendary Women of Japan (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1991), xvii, 326 pp. Cloth $39.95. [Paper $15.95

Heroic with grace: legendary women of Japan

Heroic with grace: legendary women of Japan

Heroic with Grace: Legendary Women of Japan

Heroic with Grace: Legendary Women of Japan

Legendary Women: Alceste and Criseyde within 'Boundes They Oghte Keepe'

Students of Chaucer have always found the Legend of Good Women difficult to understand. This is owing in part to its chronological situation, coming between Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales. The apparent return to the dream vision of earlier works like House of Fame and Book of the Duchess is mystifying. The poem's meaning is further clouded by the God of Love's contradictory professions and the narrator's contradictory signals. Current interpretations of the poem suggest its multivalent functions: it functions as a satire on the narrowness of literary conventions; as a treatise on the function of art; as an artistic movement into other subjects and treatments; and as a palinode to Troilus and Criseyde.1 I would like to take up the God of Love's specific criticism of the narrator and the ostensible purpose for writing the Legend in order to suggest that Alceste functions as a commentary on Criseyde.2 The God of Love confronts the narrator upon first seeing him:

Self-fulfilling Visions in The Woman Warrior and Thousand Pieces of Gold

Imaginative vision informs Kingston's autobiography and McCunn's biographical novel, transforming Chinese fantasy into American possibility. Kingston's protagonist learns to fight by seeking inspiration from a legendary woman warrior; McCunn's protagonist maintains her self-esteem by seeking reassurance from the Chinese metaphor for daughter. Although the actual status of daughters belies both the legendary and metaphorical projections, the heroines eventually develop identities which answer to their original fantasies.