Pandora
In my last post I mentioned the tale of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods. Zeus punished Prometheus by condemning him to eternal torture, chained to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, which then would grow back every night only to be eaten again the next day. But this was not enough to avenge Prometheus’s deed. In addition, Zeus punished the entire human race by sending the first woman, Pandora. Pandora is a woman of “all gifts,” since all of the gods and goddesses in the Greek pantheon bestowed a gift upon her, one of which was curiosity. It is curiosity that drives Pandora to open the jar she was forbidden to open, and in so doing unleashed all the evils and miseries onto the world. Woman as punishment; woman as the bringer of evil and misery. These themes have shaped the western view of women for millennia.
Eve
Similarly, the Judaeo-Christian story of Eve tells of how the first woman, but also curiosity, eats the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, bringing mortality and evil into the once idyllic Garden of Eden. With Tertullian’s[i] condemnation of all women as Eve -- "Do you not know that you are Eve? . . . You are the gateway of the devil,” and Augustine’s regard of Eve as the originator of sin, women would henceforth be regarded as the source of all evil in the world.
Pandora
While women have suffered condemnation and secondary status based on these myths, it is women’s curiosity in particular against which we are warned. Curiosity killed the cat after all. We see this theme repeated as well in the stories of Psyche and Bluebeard. Psyche was the youngest of three daughters whose beauty was so great she scared off would-be suitors. The god Apollo directs her parents to dress her as a bride and leave her on a mountaintop to face “dire mischief.” Instead, she awakes in a palace where she is visited by her unknown husband, with whom she falls deeply in love. Her paradisial life comes with one stipulation – that she meet her husband only in darkness and never attempt to look upon him. However, at the urgings of her sisters, Psyche’s curiosity gets the better of her, and with the light of an oil lamp[ii], she looks upon the face of her love, who is awakened when a drop of oil from the lamp falls upon him. Her husband it turns out is no monster, as her sisters imagined, but rather Eros. Thus ensues the wrath of Venus, Eros’s mother, who beats Psyche and sets her upon several tasks. Though unlike Pandora and Eve, she is not responsible for the ills of humanity, and is eventually reunited with Eros, her inquisitiveness does cause her suffering.
Bluebeard
In the story of Bluebeard, the wealthy nobleman Bluebeard tells his young wife that while he is away she is free to explore any room in the castle, except the one opened by a tiny key. Like Psyche, the wife’s sisters, who are very curious to see what lies behind that door, urge the wife to try the key. When they open the door, they find a room filled with the blood and corpses of Bluebeard’s previous wives, whose curiosity had gotten them killed. When Bluebeard discovers that his wife has opened the door, he screams, “’Now it’s your turn, my lady.’” In the end, the wife gathers the support of her sisters and brothers who kill Bluebeard, but the warning against curiosity is there nonetheless.
I’ve become curious about this caution against curiosity. What is to be feared in women’s curiosity, who fears it, and why? The answer seems obvious. Those upholding the status quo -patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, militarism – are fearful of those who would render these suspect, because they want to maintain a system that profits them, that upholds their power and status. “So many power structures – inside households, within institutions, in societies, in international affairs – are dependent on our continuing lack of curiosity,” (3) writes feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe.
When my son was about three, his persistent word was “why”? He wanted to understand so many societal norms and puzzled over things that didn’t make sense – like why fire fighters were referred to as “firemen.” Girls can be fire fighters, too, he reasoned. I wish I’d written down all of his questions. I was struck by how many of them made me wonder about things I’d just taken for the way things are. Like Psyche’s lamp, his questions were illuminating.
The way things are. That phrase can justify and normalize so much that is simply privilege and power for some. Enloe names several other phrases that dampen our curiosity – “natural,” “tradition,” “always.” It’s natural for women to take care of children. It’s tradition that the father gives away the bride. The last, “always” is so often used to justify women’s secondary status – it’s just the way it’s always been, as if patriarchy didn’t have a beginning. (And as feminist historian Gerda Lerner said, if patriarchy had a beginning, then it can have an end.) “With the passage of time, certain ideas. . . begin to seem as if they have always existed,” wrote Susan Griffin. “In this way they move outside the confines of doubt. . . . and give [them] the illusory sense of natural law” (204).[iii]
Similarly, our bodies can exhibit symptoms -- tension in the neck and shoulders, a twitch of the eye, an ache in the lower back, a continual nausea -- that over time we come to regard as “normal.” In Somatic Experiencing® and Indigenous Focusing-Oriented trauma therapy, we are trained to approach these body clues with curiosity. Befriend them; ask them questions -- why are they there? what do they need to say? are the familiar? are they all yours? With sincere inquisitiveness and loving attention, the body slowly releases the trapped energies, often revealing aspects of our lives that have long been hidden, but that are important for us to know. Likewise, we need to approach the aches and disquietudes of our body politic with curiosity in order to reveal the things that are important for us to know in order to act to change them.[iv]
In the tales of Psyche and Bluebeard, it is the women’s sisters who fan the flames of curiosity, and in the case of Eve, it is the serpent goddess. While some may interpret this as women undermining other women – at least that is the implication in the ways some of the tales are written – I regard it as the gift of sisterhood -- women encouraging women to ask questions, to wonder, to seek forbidden knowledge, to question authority, to upend the patriarchy. As Christine Downing wrote of Psyche’s sisters, “they are precisely the sisters able to push her in the way her soul requires” (47).
This was the power of consciousness-raising groups which consisted of asking questions, and answering them honestly from one’s experience, without judgment or critique from others or oneself. Commenting on Bluebeard, Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote the forbidden key is the one that would awaken consciousness, and that “to forbid a woman to use the key to consciousness strips away Wild Woman, her natural instinct for curiosity and her discovery of ‘what lies underneath” (51). She continues that trivializing women’s curiosity “denies women’s insight, hunches, intuitions . . . . It attempts to attack her fundamental power” (52). Consciousness-raising groups, on the other hand, encouraged this curiosity, this uncovering of truths, validated women’s intuitions and knowings, and empowered women to act to change their lives and the world.
In this time of the erosion of women’s rights, environmental protections, gay rights, affirmative action, and the grip of the radical right in Congress and the courts, it is easy to fall into cynicism. However, as Enloe warns, “cynicism dulls curiosity” (18). Curiosity is what we most need at this time – to be sure that those choices of a few don’t, in Griffin’s words, “fade into the background of normalcy”( 204). Rather we need to continue to ask questions, approaching every impingement on the body politic with the curiosity that keeps the possibility of hope alive.
After Pandora has unleashed all the miseries into the world, and puts the lid back on the jar, the only thing left in her jar is hope. The hopes of the world rest on the gift of curiosity that the Pandoras of the world, the curious feminists, have to give.
Sources
Downing, Christine. 1990. Psyche’s Sisters: ReImagining the Meaning of Sisterhood. New York: Continuum.
Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. 1992. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine Books.
Griffin, Susan. 1992. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. New York: Anchor Books.
Hamilton, Edith. 1942. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York: New American Library.
Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Menachem, Resmaa. 2017. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press.
______. 2022. The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press.
Norris, Pamela. 1998. Eve: A Biography. New York: New York University Press.
Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, (On the Apparel of Women) Sec. 1.1, part 2.
[i] Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220) was a Christian theologian who is often considered the founder of Western theology.
[ii] That lamp is now the symbol of knowledge and education.
[iii]In her masterpiece, A Chorus of Stones, Griffin shows how the strategies, tactics, and armaments of war indeed the very existence of war and militarism, have rested on the choices of just one or a few individuals, who might have chosen differently. War is not “inevitable” or “natural,” or “just the way things are, but rather the result of individual choices that can be questioned and changed.
[iv] Our awareness of dis-ease in the body politic may first appear in our physical bodies. Resmaa Menakem provides an excellent analysis of the ways in which the politics of racism in this country surface in our physical bodies. Similar analyses can be made of the ways patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism, and so on manifest in our bodies.