Beschreibung
417 p., w/ images. From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Slightly soiled binding, otherwise in good condition. - Content: The gold seals on gallon cans of olive oil, guaranteeing that since some far-off date the precious contents have been considered worthy of the title, virgin, first pressing, are stamped with girls; female figures lie on the portals of stock exchanges and watch from the entrances of banks; the main doors of Macy s, the biggest department store in the world at the time it opened, carry a quartet of caryatids, holding hands in couples as young women used to do in friendship during the last century; the coins we handle in half the countries of Europe bear the heads and sometimes the full figures of imagined ideal states, of Republics and Empires and Victories, or of real queens who embody in their person the pretended unity of the nation; Justice raises her sword over law courts and the White Rock fairy promises the sparkle of fresh water inside the bottle she identifies. Every day, in public and private, we exchange goods, both as commodities and as ideas, as shared aspirations, desired proofs of status and badges of identity through the symbolic form of the female figure; and as we do so we are participating in a living allegory whose tap-root runs down deep in classical Christian culture. Allegory means other speech {alia oratio), from alios, other, and agoreuein, to speak openly, to harangue in the agora', it signifies an open declamatory speech which contains another layer of meaning. It thus possesses a double intention: to tell something which conveys one meaning but which also says something else. Irony and enigma are among its constituents, but its category is greater than both, and it commands a richer range of possible moods. It is a species of metaphor, and, as a part of speech, has provided one of the most fertile grounds in human communication. This book attempts to examine a recurrent motif in allegory, the female form as an expression of desiderata and virtues. I hope, in spite of omissions, ignorance, unwarranted personal likes and dislikes, to throw some light on the plural significations of women s bodies and their volatile connections with changing conceptions of female nature. Justice is not spoken of as a woman, nor does she speak as a woman in mediaeval moralities or appear in the semblance of one above City Hall in New York or the Old Bailey in London because women were thought to be just, any more than they were considered capable of dispensing justice. Liberty is not represented as a woman, from the colossus in New York to the ubiquitous Marianne, figure of the French Republic, because women were or are free. In the nineteenth century, when so many of these images were made and widely disseminated, the opposite was conspicuously the case; indeed the French Republic was one of the last European countries to give its female citizens the vote. Often the recognition of a difference between the symbolic order, inhabited by ideal, allegorical figures, and the actual order, of judges, statesmen, soldiers, philosophers, inventors, depends on the unlikelihood of women practising the concepts they represent. Yet the first definition of allegory given by The Oxford English Dictionary is Description of a subject under the guise of another subject of aptly suggestive resemblance (emphasis added). The female figure s aptly suggestive resemblance to the concepts and claims it has represented historically is the central paradox this book attempts to describe, and by describing, to understand. Although the absence of female symbols and a preponderance of male in a society frequently indicates a corresponding depreciation of women as a group and as individuals, the presence of female symbolism does not guarantee the opposite, as we can see from classical Athenian culture, with its subtly psychologized pan.
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