Abrahamsen, 'Ancient Stepmothers: Myth, Misogyny and Reality', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9506
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9506-abrahamsen-ancient
@@@@95.6.18, Ancient Stepmothers
Patricia A. Watson, Ancient Stepmothers: Myth, Misogyny and
Reality (Mnemosyne Suppl. 143) Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995. Pp.
xii + 288. ISBN 90-04-10176-4.
Reviewed by Laura Abrahamsen -- Cleveland State University
Stepmothers are notoriously wicked. Anyone, with any
cultural literacy, whether derived from the Brothers Grimm
themselves or from the large-screen Disney interpretations of
their collected tales, knows that stepmothers are always out to
destroy their stepchildren. In Ancient Stepmothers: Myth,
Misogyny and Reality, Patricia Watson explores whether this
prejudice against stepmothers, shared by the Greeks and Romans,
had any basis in reality.
Watson takes a two-fold approach to the problem of the
ancient stepmother, exploring various characters and situations
as they are depicted in myth, and then trying to determine
whether the portrait received from myth reflects contemporary
sociological realities, primarily in 5th century Athens and late
Republican-early Imperial Rome. The central chapters of her book
then follow that organizing principle: II. Stepmothers in Greek
Myth, III. Stepmothers in Classical Athens, IV. The Saeva
Noverca in Roman Literature, V. Stepmothers in Roman Life.
Chapter VI (Historical Figures: Livia, Agrippina and Octavia)
tilts the balance slightly in favor of the Roman side, which
admittedly has more evidence.
In her introduction, Watson surveys the general ancient
stereotypes about stepmothers, carefully separating those that
are common to both Athens and Rome, and those that seem to be
specific to either culture. Watson sees in the stepmother
stereotypes "an encapsulation of the negative traits assigned to
females in general by a misogynistic tradition which flourished
in Greece and Rome," (2) and in fact, makes throughout the book
the important connections between the cultural suspicions about
the female gender generally and the amplified examples the same
suspicions locate specifically in the figure of the stepmother.
While both Greeks and Romans assumed malevolence on the part
of stepmothers, the forms this malevolence takes were perceptibly
different in the two societies. Watson contends that the
murderous stepmother is peculiarly Roman, particularly when she
shows up as the saeva noverca of declamation. The amorous
stepmother, however, of which Phaedra is the prime example, seems
to be more typically found in Greek literature rather than in
Latin. The stepmother/witch association, so familiar from
European fairy-tales, also seems to appear more frequently in
Roman sources than in Greek. While these nuances in the formation
of the stereotype are significant, I find the common assumptions
of the two cultures even more compelling. In both Greek and
Latin, the noun "stepmother" (MHTRUI/A, noverca) through a
derived adjective, passes into the general vocabulary as a
synonym for "cruel" or "harsh". Noverca became for the
Gromatici (land-surveyors) a technical term indicating places
risky for military encampment (4).
Watson's arguments in her central chapters are clearly laid
out, with subchapters and heading in an outline format. In the
second chapter, "Stepmothers in Greek Myth," she questions the
mythic implications of the stepmother figure. Do the myths use
the figure practically, to explore the problems of remarriage, or
is the figure symbolic, an "anti-mother" who embodies the
negative emotions that cannot be comfortably assigned to the true
mother figure ? (20) As she surveys the extant stepmothers of
Greek myth (catalogue, with sources, in Appendix One), she
assigns them to one of two categories: either the cruel or
jealous stepmother, out to destroy her stepchildren; or the
amorous stepmother. These categories are sufficient, as Watson
notes, because no story survives in which the kindness of a
stepmother is a major plot point. (23) She expands her analysis
of the cruel stepmother in order to determine the common thematic
characteristics of stepmotherly malevolence; in the case of
Euripides' Ion, Watson demonstrates that some of the
controversies in interpreting the play derive from Creusa's
shifting roles as wife, mother and stepmother. In concluding the
chapter, Watson turns to the somewhat scantier evidence for
stepfathers and step-siblings as comparanda for the
stepmother role in myth. She continues this comparative approach
regarding the members of the stepfamily throughout the central
chapters of the book, strengthening her contention that the role
of stepmother is unique.
In her third chapter, Watson investigates the historical
evidence for the stepmother role in Classical Athens. It was, in
fact, a social reality that stepmothers were common in Athenian
society, although due to divorce at least as much as to death.
Watson looks closely at the legal cases outlined in the Attic
orators to find what little evidence there is for stepfamily
relations, somewhat augmented by inscription. This chapter is
perhaps the most frustrating of the book, but that is hardly
Watson's fault; the obscurity of the evidence makes it difficult
to draw definitive conclusions. For example, on pp. 54-57, Watson
considers the information related by SIG3 1168.13, the record of
a cure from the temple of Asclepius at Epidauros. Afflicted with
leeches, a young man slept in the temple, saw his cure effected
in a dream, and went out from the temple in the morning, leeches
in hand. The last line of the inscription claims that "he had
swallowed them tricked by his stepmother, who had put them in a
posset that he drank." Watson is surely correct in seeing that
last line as evidence of conflict between stepson and stepmother,
but it is impossible to tell in which direction the line of
conflict ran. If the story is accepted at face value, then the
stepmother attempted to harm the stepson; but it is equally
possible that the leeches came from another source entirely; the
stepmother may have given the young man a posset to alleviate his
symptoms, after which he chose to claim that she tried to harm
him. This survey of possibilities is Watson's; no conclusion can
be reached because of the nature of the evidence.
In fact, because there were no thrones at stake,
contemporary Athenian behavior bore little resemblance to the
stepfamily conflicts outlined in the myths. There was no right of
primogeniture in Athenian inheritance laws, so there was no
particular material advantage in a stepmother's ridding herself
of a stepson. As for the "amorous stepmother," while Athenian
marriage practices made it likely that second wives were often
close in age to the offspring of their husbands' first marriages,
there simply is no evidence in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE for
such intrafamilial romantic triangles. It is at this point that
Watson posits a bias and questions its origins, turning to modern
sociological studies of the stepfamily to shed light on the
problem. Careful to "make the due allowance for differences in
social mores," she wishes to see the emotions and tensions of the
modern stepfamily "to have existed in Athens as well." (73). As
she admits in her own note to this statement, however, the
evidence, which was scanty enough when just pressed for the
existence of step-relationships, yields nothing about emotion.
Furthermore, due to the restrictive nature of respectable women's
lives in Athens, we can know nothing of their feelings in these
matters. Finally, the demographic differences between ancient
stepfamilies and modern ones (modern stepmothers are less likely
to be quite so close in age to their stepchildren; ancient
stepfathers were less likely to share a household with their
stepchildren, etc.) make the cross-cultural comparison tenuous at
best.
Watson finds that the Romans refined the portrait of the
malevolent stepmother in their literature. Stepmothers appear as
characters at least 21 times in the extant Roman declamatory
collections. (93) Again, we are dealing with the literary
stereotypes, rather than the historical evidence, but we see more
poisoners in the Roman literature, and more attempts to
disinherit rather than to murder a stepson. Phaedra shows up in
Ovid and Propertius, where she is linked with the venefica
noverca (2.1.51); Watson sees Seneca as much more sympathetic
to Phaedra than Euripides had been, and notes that in Roman
terms, a relationship between Phaedra and Hippolytus would have
been incest, technically, where in Athens it would not have been.
The stepmother par excellence in Roman literature,
however, is Juno. Watson devotes some 15 pages to careful
readings of Juno in the two Hercules plays of the Senecan corpus;
she assumes the Oetaeus to be Senecan, a question she
admits is far from settled. In reading the two plays as a
progressive triumph of Stoic virtus over furor,
Watson claims that the prominence of the saeva noverca
theme is appropriate because "the stereotypical stepmother
encapsulates those qualities thought to be essentially feminine:
emotional instability, lack of self-restraint, jealousy and
treacherousness." (128)
When she turns to the evidence for "Stepmothers in Roman
Life," Watson is somewhat less constrained than she was in her
chapter on Athens. Roman law made the possibility of stepmothers
quite common, as children remained with their fathers in the
event of either death or divorce. The age differences between
husbands and wives, as in Athens, made it likely that stepmothers
and sons were coeval, but the Augustan marriage legislation
specifically made such a union incestum. (137) Again, the
historical evidence for the "amorous stepmother" is as scanty in
Rome as it was in Athens; the relative prevalence of the theme in
literature, however, may reflect the "perceived danger" in these
common situations of remarriage. The last part of this chapter,
in which Watson surveys the burial inscriptions for the inclusion
or exclusion of step-relations in the family tomb, is one of the
most interesting and important parts of the book. Its usefulness
is enhanced by the collection Watson makes in Appendix Four. The
last of the central chapters of the book combines the features of
the literary and historical considerations of Roman stepmothers
by looking at the cases of Livia, Agrippina and Octavia, who,
while being historical figures, are nonetheless used as literary
stereotypes. Octavia, of course, is particularly remarkable in
that she becomes a paradigm of virtue because of her role as a
stepmother.
Watson's Ancient Stepmothers is an admirable effort
to collect and evaluate the evidence about a family role that has
suffered bias from ancient world to our own. The appendices, in
which Watson has carefully catalogued The Stepmother Myths and
their sources (One), Origins of the Stepmother Myths (Two), The
Stepmother in the Folktale (Three) and Establishing a List of
Inscriptions (Four), are not only essential to her own analysis,
but are a great service to other scholars who may be interested
in the figure of the stepmother. While accessible to the general
reader, with all quotations from ancient sources offered in both
the original language and translation, this is more a book for
specialists, and a welcome addition to the growing emphasis on
family studies in the social history of the ancient world.