Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology by Jess Zimmerman

Author:Jess Zimmerman [Zimmerman, Jess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: feminism, literary theory
ISBN: 9780807054932
Google: CuUbEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0807054933
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

The Sphinx is doubly othered: her form, though not her name or her story, came over to Greece from Egypt, and Greek accounts retain her foreign origins. She is sent into Thebes by a vengeful god, from elsewhere, bearing a maddeningly opaque secret. She thus taps into anxieties about the intelligence of women and of outsiders. In the society I grew up in, these fears—and the privilege-protective lies they generate—manifest in slightly different ways: nonwhite people and immigrants are implied to be intellectually inferior because they are closer to animals, women because they are closer to children. These slanders are related in the way they cast the Other’s intelligence as incomplete—sometimes atavistic, sometimes immature, but in any case, stunted. And they are related in the deep-seated disquiet they protect: the dominant party’s fear that the Other may not only be equal in intelligence but have intuition or judgment or arcane knowledge that penetrates all his protective bluster and sees to his rotten, weak heart.

We don’t enshrine the idea of the inferior Other into culture because we think it’s true. (I say “we” here because I’m partially culpable. I may not be a man, but that doesn’t mean I’m never a patriarchal villain.) Certainly there are people simple and scared enough to believe the line they’re sold, that anyone different is lesser, but that’s not why the story’s for sale in the first place. It’s for sale because it’s a comforting lie, a salve for the fear—for the knowledge—that men and white people and Westerners and the wealthy win because we cheat. We have raised up these self-serving falsehoods as a fortress against the fear, a way to kneecap any marginalized group’s attempt to take the dominant parties down. There is nobody more delicate, after all, than the person who has set himself up to win without a fight.

This is why we tell ourselves fairy tales about the IQ bell curve, as though it means anything to ace a test when you’re the one who wrote the questions. This is why we have tropes like the Magical Negro and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, so even those Others whose special skills and insights are acknowledged must be seen putting them to use for the good of the white male hero. This is also why we normalize, even valorize, the idea of the naive young woman and the authoritative man. If you set things up so the Other has no chance to challenge you—because she can’t get a foothold, because the rules won’t let her win, because she lacks the experience or resources or advancement that you’ve granted yourself—then your position stays secure.

The Sphinx breaks these bulwarks in two with her lion’s claws. Her power is seeing beyond the stories allowed to her, with their paltry linear paths. Her view is broader, a perspective from the zenith of wisdom, all possibilities and connections and syntheses arcing out like fireworks. She will not give up or diminish her stores of wisdom for anyone’s comfort; she will not pretend to know less than she does.

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