In
a new book, the Cambridge University classicist, cultural critic, and
feminist chronicles a very long past with a very current relevance.
Among the myriad unpredictable events of 2017 are the literary successes
of women this season. Who would have predicted that among the most
talked-about writings of the year would be a very new, very short story, and a
very old, very long epic? Kristen Roupenian’s début, “Cat Person,” has struck a chord, or a nerve,
in its artful rendering of a predicament queasily familiar to many
female readers: that moment in an intimate interaction between
near-strangers in which sexual revulsion and social politesse are in
opposition, and the impulse to act on the former is repressed in favor
of adhering to the latter. (This week, Roupenian signed a seven-figure
book deal.) Meanwhile, the Odyssey has been granted fresh relevance with Emily Wilson’s
new translation, the first in English by a woman, which has been widely
praised for its immediacy and accessibility, making it an unlikely beach read.
Wilson, a British-born classicist who teaches at the University of
Pennsylvania, renders the famous first line of Homer’s epic, the poet’s
address to the Muse, as “Tell me about a complicated man”—a spin on the
Greek word polytropos, which has variously been translated as
“cunning” or “of twists and turns.” Wilson’s choice feels startling and
modern: one of the world’s oldest stories transposed to the vernacular
of Facebook.
Add to that classical recapitulation another: “Women & Power,” by Mary
Beard, the Cambridge University classicist, cultural critic, and
feminist. This book, which consists of two lectures Beard delivered, in
2014 and 2017, under the aegis of the London Review of Books, deftly
brings into conjunction the contemporary themes undergirding the embrace
of “Cat Person”—questions about sex and subjection, about gender and
control—with those longer-standing ideas about the potency of women, or
its absence, that are contained within the Odyssey and the tradition of
which it is a foundational text. Beard’s is a very short book about a
very long past with a very current relevance. #MeToo has been #ThemToo for millennia.
Beard, in addition to being a professor at Newnham College, Cambridge,
is the author of best-selling volumes about the ancient world,
including, most recently, “S.P.Q.R.,” a history of Rome. In Britain,
she’s a well-known presenter of medium-to-highbrow TV programs about the
ancient world, and a contributor to current-affairs talk shows—a
so-called “telly don.” As I wrote when I profiled
Beard, in 2014, she has also become one of Britain’s most visible
feminists, confronting trolls on Twitter and failing to crumble in the
face of personal and highly misogynistic insults, including, as she puts
it, “a load of tweets comparing my genitals to a variety of unpleasantly
rotting vegetables.”
Beard is in her early
sixties, an age at which women with a high public
profile can run the risk of being designated a national treasure, and
thereby neutralized. But Beard’s formidable intellect is in no danger of
being eclipsed, as the essays in “Women & Power” demonstrate. In the
first, she contends with the history, ancient and modern, of women’s
voices in the public sphere. How are women’s words heard, and in what
ways does their reception differ from that granted to the speech of men?
Beard begins her nimbly marshalled argument by going back to what she
calls “the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’
”—in Book 1 of the Odyssey, when Telemachus, the son of Odysseus,
dismisses Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, from the great hall of the palace.
(“Go in and do your work. / Stick to the loom and the distaff. . . . It
is
for men to talk,” is how Emily Wilson renders Telemachus’ slight to his
mother.)
Beard writes that Homer’s words imply that “an integral part of growing
up, as a man, is learning to take control of public utterance and to
silence the female of the species.” She goes on to show how, in the
classical world and beyond, women have been silenced, drawing parallels
between the changes wrought upon disruptive women in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses—Io being turned into a cow; Echo being consigned only to
repeat the words of others—and the contemporary verbal violence dealt
out to women on social media. “I’m going to cut off your head and rape
it” is, according to Beard, one tweet she received. Having updated the
essay since it was first delivered, she cites the example of Elizabeth
Warren being silenced in the U.S. Senate, last February, during her
speech opposing the appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General—an
incident that launched a thousand “nevertheless, she persisted” memes
and which, in the millennia-long context that Beard provides, seems both
wearingly predictable and freshly enraging.
The second essay in this volume was entirely written after the travesty
of the 2016 Presidential election, and after the debacle of Brexit, but
it sounds similar themes, reckoning with ancient and contemporary
representations of women who have achieved significant civic roles.
Beard points out the ways in which Theresa May, Angela Merkel, and
Hillary Clinton have all been characterized as Medusa figures:
snaky-haired castrator figures who are best dealt with by beheading. And
she makes the illuminating argument that Athena, the goddess of
wisdom, who might, from a contemporary perspective, be considered an
avatar of feminine potency, would have appeared otherwise to the ancients
who venerated her. “In the Greek sense she is not a woman at all,” Beard
writes; she’s a warrior, which is an exclusively masculine role, and
she’s a virgin, which is an abdication from a woman’s most important
function. The contours of power, as it is currently configured, are
structurally prohibitive of all but the most constrained expression of
femininity, Beard argues. The book is illustrated with what strikes me
as a heartbreaking image: a photograph of Angela Merkel and Hillary
Clinton in profile, embracing. Both are dressed in navy-blue blazers,
black slacks, mid-height heels, and a blond, bobbed coiffure, as if they
had coördinated world-leader outfits the night before, like anxious
teens on the eve of the first day back at school.
Beard points out the ways in which power is coded as masculine, and
argues that it will always be insufficient for women merely to adopt and
adapt those codes; rather, the codes themselves need to be revised, and
our understanding of what power consists in must be challenged and
reframed. To point the way to how this might happen, Beard suggests
revisiting the word itself: “thinking about power as an attribute or
even a verb (‘to power’), not as a possession.” This may seem like a
minor lexical adjustment, and yet, given a context in which the U.S.
President wields a profoundly limited vocabulary, a more subtle
understanding of the ways in which language shapes understanding offers
welcome insight.
Recently, Beard spoke with Clinton about her book “What Happened.” Reading a transcript of their conversation published in the Guardian, it’s clear that Clinton has a book to sell; she reiterates her talking points, including the
wish that she had told Trump to “back off, creep,” when he was stalking up behind
her during a Presidential debate, a month before the election. But what
is most striking about the conversation is how well prepared Clinton is,
not just to get out her own message but to actually engage with Beard.
She refers to the archaic roots of sexism, noting that women “are
constantly held to that good old double standard, which is so complex
and deep and charged with historical and mythological and cultural
totems.” As Beard later pointed out
in a blog post, whether or not Clinton really knew her work is almost
beside the point. What mattered is that she had made the effort to
familiarize herself with it sufficiently to discuss it: just as when she
was a senator, or the Secretary of State, or the Presidential nominee,
Clinton
had done her homework.
The most surprising turn in the conversation is when Clinton discusses a
figure well known in British politics, though less known in America:
Boris Johnson, the current Foreign Secretary and a prime proponent of
Brexit. Johnson studied Classics at Oxford; at the end of 2015, while he
was still Mayor of London, he and Beard debated the merits of ancient
Rome versus ancient Greece at a well-attended public forum. Clinton, to
her credit, had watched, or at least skimmed the footage, which shows
Johnson displaying the rhetorical skills—humor, bluster, and a
sometimes-shaky grasp of the facts—honed while an undergraduate as the
President of the Oxford Union, that famed seeding ground of many
successful British politicians. (More than one
British observer has remarked that Brexit was driven less by ideology
than by the efforts of ex-Union debaters to push an argument to its
maximal point.)
“He’s a reality-TV kind of character, from my observation, don’t you
think?” Clinton remarks of Johnson. “He knows it, and he knows how to
play it. It’s very deliberate. The same with Trump. I mean, it’s a
persona that they have assumed, which really works for them.” The idiom
of American reality television and that of the Oxford Union are hardly
identical, and Clinton may be erroneous in conflating them. But, as
Beard points out, Trump and Johnson do share the attributes of the
ill-prepared male undergraduate winging it while his female peers study
diligently. Both Trump and Johnson have “branded themselves around
gaffes, so that it no longer makes a difference,” Beard remarks. “One
extra gaffe doesn’t matter, because that’s the brand.” Clinton agrees.
“Women are going to have to learn how to pull off that trick,” she says.
“I think it’s difficult, but it has to be possible, because there’s no
alternative.”
To suggest that there is, for women, no choice but to join the boys in
their game of lying, bullying, and braggadocio is a deeply nihilistic
view of women’s potency, though it is perhaps understandable coming from
Clinton. Beard’s “Women & Power,” on the other hand, offers a slightly
more optimistic vision—a reflection upon three thousand years of
inequity and a modest hope for marginal progress, made through the
incremental raising of cultural consciousness. (More mutual
conversation, less heedless grandstanding.) This year, above the din of
depravity resounding from the White House, women’s voices, old and new,
have begun to be heard, seemingly for the first time. Maybe the long
view is the right one. We can only hope.
Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She is the author of “My Life in Middlemarch.”
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