Centaurs and Amazons: women and the pre-history of the great chain of being

184 Pages·1994·13.831 MB·English

by  DuBois, Page

~,. S Women and Culture Series
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CENTAURS AND AMAZONS

CENTAURS AND
AMAZONS
Women and the Pre-History
of the Great Chain of Being
Page duBois
ANN ARBOR
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
ISBN-13 978-0-472-08153-0 (pbk.)
ISBN-13 978-0-472-02154-3 (electronic)
For Bob

Preface
This book began as a study of Amazons, the band of fear
less, independent creatures so often inspiring to women now, near
the end of the twentieth century A.D. Studying the myth of the
Amazons in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., however, I real
ized that just as a new Amazonian myth belongs to our history of
liberation movements, of changes in the sex/gender system, of
new ideas of community, so the ancient myth of Amazons is
embedded in a network of events, ideas, and social relations.
Thus this study became an attempt to see the whole of a complex
system, the ancient Athenian speculation about sexual, racial, and
species difference, in works of visual as well as verbal art, in
myths, vase-paintings, monumental sculpture, tragedy, comedy,
philosophy. It is a study of culture, of a particular culture's ideas
of same and other; my goal was a mapping of how the changing
representation of these patterns of same and other occurred in the
world of the Athenians. A deliberate effort was required, to
transgress the limits of traditional academic disciplines and to
move towards a sense of a complex lived reality.
Thus this book is not "history of ideas," not art history, phi
losophy or literary criticism. And its writing demanded certain
polemical choices. I limited my choice of examples, omitting
some significant works of visual art; others were selected because
they seemed illustrative of a patterning at work in Greek culture.
I did not intend to offer an encyclopedia of all references to
difference in the ancient world. Three tragedies, the Persae, the
Trachiniae, and the Medea, were chosen because they are master
pieces, because they exemplify principles of reasoning about
sameness and otherness. To be exhaustive, to mention every
tragedy in which difference is an issue, seemed to me to risk los
ing the lines of my argument in a mass of detail.