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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (59196)	2/28/2001 10:52:17 PM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Actually women are portrayed through the years as dependent, as supporters of the hero figure, as beautiful and "good". THey aren't ACTIVE. They aren;t out there slaying the dragons, not even PRincess Leia. Or CatWoman. Or Lois Lane. They still are googlyeyed over men. ANd they wear slinky outfits. Yes, well, there is also a long tradition of portraying "adventurous women" as being transgressive, or even sinister. Until recently, it has been unusual for women to be portrayed as "heroic" in the sense of being dragonslayers. Instead, the overly-powerful, transgressive woman would end up being destroyed because she was too dangerous and unnatural... H. Rider Haggard's "Ayesha: She Who Must Be Obeyed" comes to mind... She ends up melting or burning up at the end of the novel... a fate which seemed to be reserved for women who didn't respect the boundaries of normal Victorian society at the fin-de-siecle. Actually, there was a little "outbreak" of dangerously transgressive women in art, literature and theatre around the turn of the century in England. Women who, in general, were portrayed as uppity and rather frightening The fact that these representations of women coincided with the suffragette movement in England is not without some significance.... On a slightly different tack, my favourite place to find strong, adventurous women are in autobiographical travel writings. There were certainly many adventurous women around... women such as Mary Kingsley who travelled alone into the Congo in the mid-1890s (Travels in West Africa). Often, their travel journals received little acclaim or were discounted as "unimportant" during their own time, but have been "recovered" as part of the recuperation of herstory over the past couple of decades.

To: Rambi who wrote (59196)	3/1/2001 1:29:40 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Absolutely. I read a book to our class called the Four Gallant Sisters- I think you would love it. It's about four sisters who go out into the world to seek their fortune. And they save the princes. I always loved the play Twelfth Night because Viola is such a strong female character. After all, she goes around as a man.

To: Rambi who wrote (59196)	3/1/2001 7:32:26 AM
From: Poet	Respond to of 71178

Good morning, I love what you said here: I think the women of DAR are women who are into dragonslaying, each in her own way. On her own heroic quest. Joseph Campbell just didn't quite get this. We don't want to be just watching the heroes with their swords, we want to BE the heroes wielding our own swords. What Campbell, and most historians, didn't seem to understand is that dragons are rarely mythical firebreathing apparitions. They are most often small, gray, unassuming monsters which wheedle their way into peoples' lives under the guise of alcoholism, abuse, poverty, and the like. They are common and insidious. They're fought all the time with little fanfare. To my mind, real heroes are people who slay these dragons and who live the rest of their lives with a small measure of grace for having done so.