![]() ![]() She, eager to be joined with him, pulls him into the lake. The myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus can be read in this way: The boy Hermaphroditus, reaching a lake in the mountains, is being seen by the nymph Salmacis. (Ovid, Metamorphoses III, 138 - 252)Īnother aspect of the woman as a dangerous person for men is, what Siegmund Freud called the "fear of castration". His own hunting dogs chase him and tear him to pieces, because they do not recognize him as their master any more. ![]() The myth of Diana and Actaeon is a good example: Actaeon, who has the bad luck to be watching the goddess Diana swimming in a lake, gets transformed into a deer by the angry Diana. Although in Ovid ´ s Metamorphoses we read about women causing the death of a man, even they do not kill him by themselves. It already roots in the ancient mythology, whose well-known examples are mainly Circe, the Sirens and Ulysses as well as The Medusa theme. The idea of the woman´s bad influence on men, of course as a male concept, is very old. In the novel The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner, there is a relation to the idea of the fatal woman which was a major theme in the late nineteenth´ century literature and can in a certain way be transferred to the role of Caddy Compson, and partly to her daughter Quentin, mainly in her function consisting the decay of the whole family, their members, their ideals and their way of life. Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Englisches Seminarĭer amerikanische Roman des 20. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |