Sherry Chandler » May Sarton on mythology
May Sarton on mythology
from The House by the Sea: A Journal (W. W. Norton, 1977):
Tuesday, March 30
What is it to be a woman? I have been thinking a lot about this lately because of Karen Elias-Button’s PhD thesis (I am an adjunct for her at Union Graduate University) that uses mythology and comes out over and over again with how male-oriented mythology is. We are born and bred reading about Eurydice, the passive, who has to be rescued by Orpheus, and so on. Leda!
But mythology cannot be artificially created. We have to come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves, and that must include our own instincts both for kinds of nurturing and kinds of self-preservation. This cannot be done against men, and that’s the real problem. It is what makes me less than enthusiastic about a good deal of feminist literature at present. It is not either/or. It cannot be woman against man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man.
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