In my final put up I discussed the story of Prometheus who stole fireplace from the gods. Zeus’s punishment of everlasting torture was not sufficient to avenge the offense.[i] As well as, Zeus punished your entire human race by sending the primary lady, Pandora. Pandora is a girl of “all presents,” one among which is the curiosity that drives Pandora to open the forbidden jar, unleashing evils and miseries into the world. Girl as punishment, because the bringer of evil and distress — these themes have formed the western view of ladies for millennia.
Equally, the Judaeo-Christian story of Eve tells of how the primary lady, additionally by means of curiosity, eats the forbidden fruit of the tree of information, thereby bringing evil into the world. With Tertullian’s condemnation of all girls as Eve — “Do you not know that you’re Eve? . . . You’re the gateway of the satan,” [ii] and Augustine’s interpretation of Eve because the originator of sin on this planet, girls would henceforth be considered the supply of evil on this planet.
Whereas girls have suffered condemnation and subordination primarily based on these myths, it’s girls’s curiosity specifically in opposition to which we’re warned, a theme repeated within the tales of Psyche and Bluebeard. Psyche,[iii] commanded to fulfill her husband solely in darkness and by no means to look upon him, on the urgings of her sisters, lets her curiosity will get the higher of her. Utilizing lamplight[iv] to look upon his face, she discovers he’s Venus’s son, Eros, invoking Venus’s punishing wrath.
Bluebeard’s younger spouse, like Psyche, is urged by her curious sisters to open the door of the one room forbidden her. There they discover the corpses of Bluebeard’s earlier wives whose curiosity had gotten them killed. A livid Bluebeard screams that it’s now her flip. Ultimately, she gathers the help of her sisters and brothers who kill Bluebeard, however the warning in opposition to curiosity stays.
I’ve turn out to be inquisitive about this warning in opposition to curiosity. What’s to be feared in girls’s curiosity, who fears it, and why? The reply appears apparent. These upholding the established order -patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, militarism – are frightened of those that would render these suspect as a way to keep a system that earnings them, that upholds their energy and standing. “So many energy buildings – inside households, inside establishments, in societies, in worldwide affairs – are depending on our persevering with lack of curiosity,” writes feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe.[v]
When my son was about three, his persistent phrase was “why”? He puzzled over issues that didn’t make sense – like why fireplace fighters have been known as “firemen.” Women will be fireplace fighters, too, he reasoned. Like Psyche’s lamp, his questions have been illuminating, and made me surprise about issues I’d simply taken for the way in which issues are.
The best way issues are. That phrase can normalize a lot that’s privilege and energy for some. Enloe names different phrases that dampen our curiosity – “pure,” “custom,” “at all times.” It’s pure for girls to handle kids. It’s custom that the daddy offers away the bride. “All the time” is commonly used to justify girls’s secondary standing – it’s simply the way in which it’s at all times been — as if patriarchy didn’t have a starting.[vi] “With the passage of time, sure concepts. . . start to look as if they’ve at all times existed,” wrote Susan Griffin. “On this manner they transfer outdoors the confines of doubt. . . . and provides the illusory sense of pure regulation.”[vii]
Equally, our our bodies can exhibit signs – neck stress, decrease backache, nausea — that we ultimately regard as “regular.” In Somatic Experiencing® and Indigenous Focusing-Oriented trauma remedy, we’re skilled to method these bodily clues with curiosity — befriend them; ask them questions — why are they there? what do they should say? are they acquainted? are all of them yours? With honest inquisitiveness and loving consideration, the physique releases the trapped energies, usually revealing features of our lives which have lengthy been hidden, however which are essential for us to know. Likewise, we have to method the aches and disquietudes of our physique politic with curiosity as a way to reveal the issues which are essential for us to know as a way to change them. [viii]
Within the tales of Psyche and Bluebeard, it’s the girls’s sisters who fire up curiosity, and within the case of Eve, it’s the serpent goddess. Whereas some could interpret this as girls undermining different girls, I regard it because the present of sisterhood — girls encouraging girls to ask questions, to hunt forbidden data, to upend the patriarchy.
This was the ability of consciousness-raising teams which consisted of asking questions and answering them truthfully from one’s expertise, with out judgment or critique from others or oneself. Commenting on Bluebeard, Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote the forbidden secret is the one that may awaken consciousness, and that “to forbid a girl to make use of the important thing to consciousness strips away Wild Girl, her pure intuition for curiosity and her discovery of ‘what lies beneath.’”[ix] She continues that trivializing girls’s curiosity “denies girls’s perception, hunches, intuitions . . . . It makes an attempt to assault her elementary energy.”[x] Consciousness-raising teams inspired this curiosity, this uncovering of truths, validated girls’s intuitions and knowings, and empowered girls to behave to vary their lives and the world.
On this time of the erosion of ladies’s rights, environmental protections, homosexual rights, affirmative motion, and the grip of the novel proper in Congress and the courts, it’s straightforward to fall into cynicism. Nonetheless, as Enloe warns, “cynicism dulls curiosity.”[xi] Curiosity is what we most want right now to make sure that these decisions of some don’t, in Griffin’s phrases, “fade into the background of normalcy.”[xii] Fairly we have to proceed asking questions, approaching each impingement on the physique politic with the curiosity that retains the potential for hope alive.
After Pandora unleashed all of the miseries into the world, and put the lid again on the jar, the one factor left in her jar was hope. The hopes of the world relaxation on the present of curiosity that the Pandoras of the world, the curious feminists, have to provide.
Sources
Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Looking for Ladies in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: College of California Press.
Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. 1992. Ladies Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Tales of the Wild Girl Archetype. New York: Ballantine Books.
Griffin, Susan. 1992. A Refrain of Stones: The Personal Lifetime of Struggle. New York: Anchor Books.
Hamilton, Edith. 1942. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York: New American Library.
Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford College Press.
______. 2022. The Quaking of America: An Embodied Information to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning. Las Vegas: Central Restoration Press.
Norris, Pamela. 1998. Eve: A Biography. New York: New York College Press.
Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, (On the Attire of Ladies) Sec. 1.1, half 2.
[i] Prometheus was chained to a rock the place an eagle would eat his liver day-after-day, and it might develop again each evening solely to be eaten once more the subsequent day.
[ii] Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220) was a Christian theologian who is commonly thought of the founding father of Western theology.
[iii] Psyche is commanded at Apollo’s course has been dressed as a bride and left on a mountaintop to face “dire mischief,” as an alternative awakens in a palace the place she is visited by her unknown husband, with whom she falls deeply in love. who beats Psyche and units her upon a number of duties. In contrast to Pandora and Eve, she is just not chargeable for the ills of humanity, and is ultimately reunited with Eros, she does undergo from her inquisitiveness, utilizing what has turn out to be emblematic of the lamp of information to mild her manner
[iv] The lamp is now emblematic of the sunshine of information.
[v] Enloe,3.
[vi] And as feminist historian Gerda Lerner stated, if patriarchy had a starting, then it will possibly have an finish.
[vii]Griffin, 204. In her masterpiece, A Refrain of Stones, Griffin reveals how the methods, ways, and armaments of battle certainly the very existence of battle and militarism, have rested on the alternatives of only one or just a few people, who might need chosen in a different way. Struggle is just not “inevitable” or “pure,” or “simply the way in which issues are, however moderately the results of particular person decisions that may be questioned and altered.
[viii] Our consciousness of dis-ease in our physique politic could first seem in our personal bodily our bodies. Resmaa Menakem offers a superb evaluation of the methods wherein the politics of racism on this nation floor in our bodily our bodies. Comparable analyses will be manufactured from the methods patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism, and so forth manifest in our our bodies.
[ix] Estes, 51.
[x] Ibid., 52.
[xi] Enloe, 18.
[xii] Griffin, 204.
