Bitchery
Arianna Stassinopoulos
Females of the Species Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Duckworth £8.50) Mary and Misogyny C. R. Boxer (Duckworth £4.95)
No literary device has a longer history than the allegorical use of animals to describe human attributes and draw human moral conclusions. We find it in Egyptian folk tales three thousand year before Christ, in Horace's fable that man's irascibility was due to an element in his nature derived from the lion, in Hesiod's fable of the harmless nightingale in the claws of the ruthless hawk (helpless innocence against naked power) and most systematically in Aesop's beast fables. It is probably an Aesopic fable that forms the basis of Semonides's poem on the creation of women — the first surviving poem in European literature to have woman as its theme. Not woman as Temptress, or woman as Mother, but woman as Animal. Ten types of women are described: seven made out of animals (sow, vixen, bitch, ass, ferret, mare, monkey) two out of elements (earth and sea), and one out of a bee. They are not in fact so much described as unequivocally abused. Only the bee is spared. And just in case any reader has not got the misogynistic message, it is spelt out in the last twenty-two lines, where women are vilifed wholesale, as the greatest curse that Zeus has sent to man.
Hugh Lloyd-Jones's translation of the poem directly contradicts the thesis he has developed in this month's Encounter. "On the whole it remains true," he writes, "that a translation of a poem is either a bad poem or an unfaithful rendering." His own translation of Semonides's poem cannot be faulted on either ground. In his splendid introduction, he dismisses the attempts of worthy German scholars to evaluate the poem as a sociological treatise, and interprets it instead as a satire on the sexual stereotypes of seventh century Greece, rather than as a solemn verdict on the female sex. In fact, the poem is the longest specimen we have of the Greek literary genre known as iambus — which literally means "pelting with abuse." (Trust the Greeks to have actually invented a special literary style, as a vehicle for their enthusiasm for abuse, satire and caricature.) The problem with satire, however, is that it is the most difficult commodity to transplant. It would be difficult enough today to respond to That Was The Week That Was in the way that a wrapt audience did a mere twelve years ago. And only a great poet can make the
cultural leap from archaic Greece to modern Britain and still unerringly touch the satirical nerve of a generation two thousand and five hundred years later. And Semonides is not a great poet. His poem is a rather heavy-handed comedy of manners, without a plot, that has lost any hold, however tenuous with reality. He is neither Juvenal nor Swift, and in the book it is Marcelle Quinton that saves the poem — the photographs of her marvellously evocative sculptures set against the text restore that sense of reality that is the sine qua non of successful satire. "In the beginning the god made the female mind separately. One he made from a long-bristled sow. In her house everything lies in disorder, smeared with mud, and rolls about the floor; and she herself unwashed, in clothes unlaundered, sits by the dungheap and grows fat." These are the opening lines of the poem, and the sculpted depiction of one type of woman as a long bristled sow on the opposite page, has the power and immediacy of all cruelly real caricatures — it stops these first lines from sounding too hysterical, it provides a sense of irreverent entertainment and it does incidentally forestall any solemn charges of sexual slander.
In fact if you are in a particularly mischievous mood, you can use the illustrations in the book as the basis of a parlour game for two or more. All: that is needed is a sufficient number of common (and commonly 'unloved) acquaintances — "Whom does the wicked vixen woman remind you of?", "Whom does the proud mare remind you of?", or "the vicious bitch always yapping?", or "the awkward monkey?" or "the blameless bee?" ..
If the aim of republishing an ancient book is as Dr Johnson suggested, "to correct what is corrupt and to explain what is obscure," then nobody could have done a better restoration job on Semon ides than Professor Lloyd-Jones. Not only does he correct what is corrupt and explain what is obscure, he also gives us hurried but illuminating glimpses into many broader themes — the position of women in Ancient Greece, the history of character study, the development of poetic styles.
It is not his fault if the corrected and clarified product is too frail to survive without Marcelle's Quinton's brilliant sculptures. And it is certainly not his fault if the price we have to pay in 1975 for an exceptionally beautifully produced book of one hundred and nine pages is £8.50. It is at least a book that can appeal at many different levels — near the floor for those who keep books on coffee tables, on the bookshelf for the classical scholar or lying open on the desk for the lover of the visual arts.
It would be difficult to know where to keep Mary and Misogyny except perhaps in the reserve stack of a large Metropolitan Library. The position of women in the Iberian expansion overseas between 1415-1815 is not in itself of merely narrow scholarly interest. But the treatment that Professor Boxer has meted out to the subject is to compile a dreary inventory of misogynistic quotations made even drearier by the kind of academic writing that is usually condemned as academic. Such is the blighting effect of this arid erudition, that even the sadistic practices of Dona Catalina de 'os Rios Lisperguer make you shrug with boredom -after all she only killed her own father, one of her lovers and forty slaves of her household, having naturally first tortured them to death with singular barbarity.
If The Female of the Species is a fine example of a marvellous production drawing the last ounce of interest out of a not too exciting raw material, Mary and Misogyny is a case study in how to bury any insight and understanding in a haystack of well researched facts and immaculately recorded evidence.
Arianna Stassinopoulos is currently engaged on writing a book on leadership
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