In myth, woman’s boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity. Io turns into a heifer, Kallisto becomes a bear, Medusa sprouts snakes from her head and Skylla yelping dogs from her waist, the Sirens and the Sphinx accumulate unmatching bestial parts, while Daphne passes into leaf and Pasiphaë into a mechanical cow. The Graiai are three old women who make themselves repellent by sharing one human form amongst them, passing an eye and a tooth back and forth as needed. Salmakis is a nymph who merges her form with that of her lover to produce a bisexual monster named after him, Hermaphroditos. The Hydra generates heads as fast as they can be chopped off. The Amazons (lacking a breast) owe their fearsomeness to the zeal with which they adapt personal form—their own.
At the same time, the women of myth are notorious adaptors of the forms and boundaries of others. They repeatedly open containers which they are told not to open (e.g., Pandora, the daughters of Kekrops, Danaë) or destroy something placed in a container in their keeping (as Althaia does the psyche of Meleagros). They prove unreliable as containers themselves: both Zeus and Apollo find it necessary to snatch offspring out of a mother’s womb and internalize it for safekeeping (as Zeus takes Dionysos from Semele, Apollo rescues Asklepios from Koronis), while Kronos swallows his children alive as soon as they emerge from Rhea. Even more distressing are the numerous women of myth who submit masculine form to direct and violent reform. Skylla clips a vital lock from her father’s head, Agave beheads her son with her bare hands, Medea pulls the plug on Talos, Kybele unmans Attis with an axe. Mythical women frequently violate masculinity by enveloping male form in a fatal formlessness, as Euripides’ Klytemnestra encloses Agamemnon in a “garment that has no boundaries”; as Sophokles’ Deianira covers Herakles in a “vapor of death” that eats the form of his flesh; as Pindar’s Nephele entraps Ixion in the delusion of her own body:
He lay with a cloud—sweet lie!
Love is the principal motivation in these stories for women’s flight from form or tampering with boundaries. Indeed, the goddess of love, Aphrodite herself, is said to have been born from the earliest recorded revision contrived for manly form by any mythical Greek woman, the castration of Ouranos.
[…]
There is, then, a mythological groundwork of assumptions, also operative in the arguments of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and which can be related to historical behavior, that regards women as formless creatures who cannot or do not or will not maintain their own boundaries and who are awfully adept at confounding the boundaries of others. When we begin to look for the etiology of this conception, we encounter, I believe, a deep and abiding mistrust of “the wet” in virtue of its ability to transform and deform.
Anne Carson, excerpt of “Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity”, in Men in the Off Hours (via antigonick)
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