Pandora’s Senses: The Feminine Character of the Ancient Text (review)

This is a book that I expect to return to many times as I attempt to digest more fully its complex argument and its implications for feminist criticism of ancient texts. It makes a number of claims that at first approach seem too sweeping (for example, in Lev Kenaan’s view not only “the ancient text” but “the text” tout court can be characterized as “feminine,” pp. 3, 170, 217 n. 12). At the same time, the book is closely argued, and on a second reading many of its bolder claims come across as more cogent. Above all, it is one of those rare academic books that can truly be called inspiring. Following two other feminist classicists, Alison Sharrock and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell, Lev Kenaan seeks to demonstrate a way out of the impasse in which some of us find ourselves: how do we proceed, given the dearth of testimony from ancient women, once we have named and deconstructed the misogyny of the male authors?

Without seeking to deny that the misogyny exists, and while situating herself in the line of feminist critics who have exposed it (of whom I am one, pp. 5–6), Lev Kenaan seeks to reclaim the figure of Pandora, the first woman in Greek mythology, as “a powerful source of inspiration” (p. 5) and a figure for the aspects of textuality that call for interpretation. In Lev Kenaan’s view, Pandora “binds together the dichotomies that underlie the most fundamental aspects of the Western literary canon: beauty and evil, body and soul, depth and superficiality, truth and lie” (p. 10). Whereas the Greek didactic and cosmogonic poet Hesiod identifies her duality as negative (duplicitous, seductive), Lev Kenaan sees aspects of this duality that are not only positive (for example, generative of philosophic reflection and aesthetic contemplation) but intrinsic to Hesiod’s own view of the wider cosmos (as both wondrous and dangerous, and infused with desire) and of the poetic text (as ambiguous in a way that reflects the “imperfection of the human condition,” p. 62). Employing an intertextual strategy, Lev Kenaan moves from Hesiod to his contemporary Homer, to the fifth-century Plato and Xenophon, to the Roman love poet Ovid, and back again to Plato and Homer, in a virtuosic survey of the dimensions of the “feminine” text: its beauty, its otherness, its embrace of contradiction, and its creation of a dialogic relationship with its audience. I was at first dubious of the emphasis on Plato and Ovid, who do not thematize the figure of Pandora in their works, but Lev Kenaan’s argument persuaded me that the crucial issues raised by Hesiod’s treatment of her persist in these later authors and can be illuminated by intertextual analysis. A particularly striking example is the comparison of the erotically charged figures of Pandora and Socrates, who by the contrast between their appearance and “interiority” can be seen to “privilege the . . . quest for meaning over and against any actual grasp of a determinate content” (p. 15).

My chief disappointment was that Lev Kenaan did not engage in more detail with the texts of Plato and Ovid, as she did with that of Hesiod in the first two chapters. Her analysis of the role of Socrates’s wife Xanthippe in the Phaedo is nothing short of revelatory (pp. 176–86), but I had expected her to do more with the Metamorphoses, given her focus in chapter 5 on rape and the female voice. It is to be hoped that in the near future she will devote a longer study to Ovid’s female characters.

In addition, the book could have used more careful copy-editing. It is marred by occasional typos and instances of awkward usage, as well as by a more substantive error; the Greek of the block quote on p. 96 does not correspond with the English that follows it but with the English of the quote embedded in the...