Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India / Edition 1

by Wendy Doniger

Overview

Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are doubled, who double themselves, who are seduced by gods doubling as mortals, whose bodies are split or divided. In Splitting the Difference, the renowned scholar of mythology Wendy Doniger recounts and compares a vast range of these tales from ancient Greece and India, with occasional recourse to more recent "double features" from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Face/Off.

Myth, Doniger argues, responds to the complexities of the human condition by multiplying or splitting its characters into unequal parts, and these sloughed and cloven selves animate mythology's prodigious plots of sexuality and mortality. Doniger's comparisons show that ultimately differences in gender are more significant than differences in culture; Greek and Indian stories of doubled women resemble each other more than they do tales of doubled men in the same culture. In casting Hindu and Greek mythologies as shadows of each other, Doniger shows that culture is sometimes but the shadow of gender.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226156415
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/15/1999
Series:	Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion
Edition description:	1
Pages:	383
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School and a professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prelude: Comparing Texts Comparing People
ONE: The Shadow Sita and the Phantom Helen
Sita 9 / Helen 28 / Interlude: Saranyu and the Sun and the Shadow / Comparison: Sita and Helen / Conclusion: Abuse and Flight
TWO: Indra and Ahalya, Zeus and Alemena
Indra as Guatama with Ahalya / Zeus as Amphitryon with Alcmena / Interlude: Pandora / Comparison: Ahalya and Alcmena / Conclusion: Did She Fall, or Was She Pushed?
THREE: Nala and Damayanti, Odysseus and Penelope
Sukanya and the Ashvins / Nala and Damayanti / Damayanti and Nala / Penelope / Comparison: Damayanti and Penelope / Interlude: How to Tell a Human from a God / Conclusion: Why Prefer a Human to a God?
FOUR: Mariatale/Renuka and Scylla/Charybdis
Mariatale/Renuka / Scylla/Charybdis / Interlude: Splitting Lucy / Comparison: Heads You Lose / Conclusion: Put a Bag over Her Head
FIVE: Transposed Male Heads and Tales
Transposed Male Heads / Splitting Male Androgynes / Interlude: Self-Impregnating Androgynes / Comparison: Victorians and Others / Conclusion: Mind and Body (and Soul)
SIX: Bisexual Transformations
Males into Females in India / Females into Males in India / Males into Females in Greece and Europe / Conclusion: Male and/or Female
Postlude: The Shadow of Gender
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Mary Douglas

Splitting the Difference goes deep. It is a burning glass to cut down through layers of civilization to the universal hard rock of sex and seduction, knowledge and power, primordial reflections on the boundaries of knowledge.

Gregory Nagy

Doniger's explorations of the human condition, especially in terms of individual as well as social responses to the Indic and Greek cultural constructs of immortality, are perceptive and, much more, just plain wise.
— Harvard University

Editorial Reviews

Doniger, a distinguished professor of the history of religion at the University of Chicago and author of several previous studies of mythology, has written a perceptive and compelling new book on gendered themes in classical Greek and Hindu mythology. But while her comparative focus is on tales from those two cultures and eras, her insights extend to later cultural stories and contemporary variations on ancient themes. Each chapter examines an aspect of the doubling or splitting of women, and sometimes men, and the cultural and mythic functions of such divisions. While the stories are inflected by both gender and culture, Doniger concludes that gender is more significant in determining the relationships between the myths. Throughout, she interprets the stories, old and new, in terms of fundamental aspects of the human psyche, illuminating the ways in which "myth responds to complexities of the human condition." Well written and engaging, this book should appeal to specialists and generalists alike.--Julia Burch, Cambridge, MA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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