#this is what happens when you reconcile your tumblr posts with your Actual Academic Opinions

[finelythreadedsky]

“we can tell that women participated in the formation of their culture’s folklore because women’s trauma is embedded in it” i want to learn more about this!! Are there any journals, articles, authors, and/or books that you’d recommend reading that explore this idea in more detail?

unfortunately almost all my thoughts about this come from just reading a lot of ancient literature and listening to a lot of folk ballads and pointing out things i think are cool.

i have come across some relevant stuff in my research for my paper on the weaving women of ovid’s metamorphoses, BUT these sources tend to be ones that claim to be able to tell something about the oral culture out of which a particular written work arose, which i find highly questionable. 

with ovid in particular, since he’s the first recorded (and surviving) telling of the stories i was looking at, there is no way to tell how much of his version is his own innovation and how much is drawn from oral traditions or previous works that he had access to but that are unknown to us. but that certainly doesn’t stop people from trying to write very specifically about how certain myths arose out of the context of female storytelling and were later appropriated into men’s repertoire.

for instance, ann suter’s article “the myth of procne and philomela” tries to reconstruct the philomela myth in its pre-ovidian incarnations in a way that i find highly suspicious– essentially she reads the myth as originally being about female fertility and the relationships between women that do not revolve around men (rivalry about fertility) and as being later transformed by men into a myth about the control of female fertility by men through violence. but we really have no way of knowing that!!! it’s highly speculative!!! and also john heath’s article “women’s work: female transmission of mythic narrative,” which gets close to claiming that ovid’s source for a lot of the metamorphoses is an oral tradition of epic storytelling circulated among women. as if ovid listened to or cared about the real women in his life, not just the symbolic ones in his poetry.

basically i am not on board with anything that so much as mentions “original myth” or tries to claim that a story in its entirety came out of women’s storytelling or women’s experiences. i’m looking for an approach that acknowledges that certain elements of a myth, like for instance the motif of magically-prolonged childbirth, can be traced back to women’s experiences, or that one (of the many) cultural realities that the homeric hymn to demeter addresses is a reality of women’s lives. i don’t think it’s ever accurate to say that any myth comes originally solely from women, as the two scholars i mentioned above are on the verge of doing, but i also don’t think it’s usually accurate to say that a myth comes solely from men, as is our inclination given that the vast majority of our sources from the ancient world are men. 

i think that myth and folklore come out of culture, and that it can be helpful to take a step back and ask “would a group of men have come up with and included this specific element of the story?” and sometimes the answer is yes: the magically-prolonged childbirth motif might be traced back to women’s traumatic experiences with childbirth, but it could also be a product of men’s fears for their wives (and daughters and sisters) as the women in their lives went through a potentially fatal undergoing that they had no way of understanding. but do i think an entirely male group would have described demeter’s grief as sympathetically and accurately as the homeric hymn to demeter does, given that those men would have been complicit in taking their own daughters away from their homes to be married? less convincing.

this is long and not particularly coherent and not really what you asked for, but the short answer is that i don’t have anything to recommend because the only things i’ve seen about women’s participation in the formation of their culture’s folklore take it way too far and overcorrect that assumption that myth was formed by men by claiming that certain myths were formed by women, when what i really want is an acknowledgement that myth comes out of culture and a culture is made up of more than one gender.