Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form / Edition 1

by Marina Warner

Overview

Marina Warner explores the tradition of personifying liberty, justice, wisdom, charity, and other ideals and desiderata in the female form, and examines the tension between women's historic and symbolic roles. Drawing on the evidence of public art, especially sculpture, and painting, poetry, and classical mythology, she ranges over the allegorical presence of the woman in the Western tradition with a sharply observant eye and a piquant and engaging style.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520227330
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/24/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Among Marina Warner's books are From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1995), Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1983), and Joan of Arc (California, 1999).

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FOREWORD

Part One: The Female Presence Today
1 The Monument (New York)
2 The Street (Paris)
3 The Front Page (London)

Part Two: The Figure in Myth
4 Engendered Images
5 The Bed of Odysseus
6 The Aegis of Athena
7 The Goddess of Success
8 The Sword of Justice
9 Lady Wisdom

Part Three: The Body in Allegory
10 The Making of Pandora
11 The Sieve of Tuccia
12 The Slipped Chiton
13 Nuda Veritas

Epilogue
The Eyes of Tiresias

ABBREVIATIONS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
INDEX

Editorial Reviews

Examining an impressive scope of materialart (Donatello, Vermeer, Judy Chicago), Greek mythology, the Bible, literature, linguistics and mass mediaWarner (Alone of All Her Sex) traces the different meanings which have been ascribed to the female form throughout the ages. ``Liberty is not represented by a woman because women were and are free''; allegory by definition requires a gap (and a resemblance) between the ideal and the real. But there is a give-and-take of meaning between the female fantasy figuresAthena, Wisdom, Temperance, et al.and actual women. Warner suggests that some women (the armed maidens of Justice and Chastity, etc.) may take on male personas (the brandished weapons) to best shield themselves from the masculine code. Pandora, the first woman of classical myth, and Eve, the mother in the Judeo-Christian story, bear the burden of men's dreams: made and named by others, agents of calamity through the desire they inspire but do not experience themselves. Unlike men, women lose their individuality as they become universal symbols, and the only way to rid the female form of contaminated meanings is ``to respect the individual inside the symbol''to look through the Statue of Liberty's eyes to see that she can represent freedom only if we were to forget the female condition. The difficulty with this sometimes brilliant study is that, like the history it examines, it never comes to rest with an unchanging definition. Illustrated. November 25

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Warner investigates a recurrent motif in allegory, ``the female form as an expression of desiderata and virtues,'' looking at literary and visual forms from classical times to the present. She assumes a working knowledge of classical writings, but her presentation is clearly thought out, and not burdened down with jargon, esoterica, or non-sequiturs. At the center of Warner's argument is an attempt to understand the paradox of using the form of a woman to represent ideas that are not considered womanly (Justice is represented as a woman, but not because women are thought to be just). She raises issues that are important to the continued development of a scholarly discipline of women's studies, as well as breaking new ground in the literary interpretation of traditional myths and images. Highly recommended. Patricia Scott, Comparative Arts Dept., Ohio Univ., Chillicothe

Library Journal

Feminist analysis has shown how female images in art and advertising reveal society's attitudes, conscious and unconscious, towards women. Warner's Monuments and Maidens provides a much needed historical context for today's debates.
—Village Voice

Wendy Smith