Monstrous Women -Elisabeth Brooke

Why does Greek mythology matter in the modern age? The Greek Gods and their accompanying mythology have coloured European and Western thought for millennia. Myths are never neutral; they are teaching tools. And Greek myth has a great deal to say about women. Although childbearing women ensured the survival of a culture, in the classical world women’s unbridled sexuality was seen as dangerous and subversive. Women represented a double bind: they were both totally necessary and a threat to civilization. Olympian male gods absorbed and appropriated the powers of older Goddesses and wrote the myths that claim them as their own. The common Medusa myth demonstrates how badly things go wrong when women misbehave. But there is another story…

Monstrous Women re-examines the ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ women of Greek mythology. It reconsiders the mythology of the Sirens and the Furies, who punished wicked and vain men; it…