Fifty Fifty

This chapter showcases the mythical Danaids—the fifty ‘daughters of Danaus’-- as an advertisement, if one were needed, for the historical neglect of old stories about women – compared to old stories about men. Eternally labouring at a domestic task that can never be completed (they have to fill leaky containers), the Danaids have been regularly ignored—unlike Sisyphus, famously rolling his boulder up the hill, with equal futility but somehow (in Camus’s mid-twentieth-century version) with existential aplomb. But the Danaids are also shockingly feminist: their inescapable domesticity is a punishment for multiple murders, when they killed their new husbands on the wedding night. With diverse literary and philosophical versions, from Aeschylus’ tragedy The Suppliant Women to Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria , the myth of the Danaids involves a remarkable array of complaints and counter-claims that can be linked to later feminist repertoires.

Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Modernist Literature and Criticism