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Depiction Of The Origin Of Women And Evil In The World In Myths
The passage I’ve chosen is about Zeus and his fellow Olympian Gods creating “the perfect woman” to enter the world of mankind as revenge for Prometheus stealing fire for men. The women, unnamed in this version, is the root of all evil in the new world. She introduces women to men, which destroys everything mankind has worked hard to maintain. The women are economic consumers, leeching off the men’s wealth and causing them eternal torture. The purpose of this passage is to explain the origin of women and evil in the world. When the woman brings all kinds of evils, pain, and sufferings to the world, mankind are no longer at peace, with nothing to worry about. They must not only work jobs to support the women now, but they must also try to avoid these evils that have no cures. Zeus accomplishes his revenge against Prometheus and mankind when he releases the evils into the world as a warning that nobody should ever cross him, using Prometheus as an example of why.
This point in human history is when mankind went from The Golden Age of peace and freedom to The Silver Age of work and strife. I chose this passage because out of every passage in the poem, the story of Prometheus and the origin of women was one of the most interesting to me. There were two versions by Hesiod so I had to decide between the Theogony version or the Works and Days version. At first I decide on the Works and Days version because it was less misogynistic but I changed my mind and decided on the Theogony version because it was more complicated. It is more of a challenge to analyze, while the Works and Days version is very straight forward. In both stories, mankind was free of care, without pain, disease, or suffering, before Pandora’s arrival. In Theogony, the arrival of women had destroyed that, interrupting their luxury and causing them to work while the women leached off of them. In Works and Days, it was simply the evils released from the jar that disrupted their peace. While the idea in Works and Days of “Curiosity killed the cat” was intriguing, and it was about Pandora not being the evil, but just her actions, the version in the Theogony has a more in-depth explanation of the myth, with metaphors and other devices, which will give me more to analyze. Some of the characters in this passage are Prometheus, The Woman, and Zeus.
The passage says that Zeus cannot be escaped, which tells us that no human or god, no matter how powerful or witty, can escape Zeus’ revenge if they betray him, even if Prometheus has metis. The Woman does not have much personality in the passage, as the gods created her as a sort of robot to bring the evil to the world, but she is depicted as this ultimate evil created to plague mankind. Prometheus is called crooked-minded and deceitful many times throughout the poem because he tried to trick Zeus but he seems to be trying to help men while Zeus wants to keep the gods more powerful.
The main theme of this passage is suffering with a side of men being holy and peaceful creatures while women are this evil that plagued the world. It focused on male dominance and patriarchy of society. It explained why society is the way it is, and that’s because men work and women are nothing but a plague to them, who torment them if they marry them and if they don’t. If the men marry the women, they must work for them and live with them forever, but they get a son. If they don’t marry them, they’re plagued with forever loneliness, with no son to take care of them when they’re old and inherit their estate.
