& WOMEN, POWER HISTORY
Classics professor connects ancient myths and Twitter trolls
Women & Power: A Manifesto Mary Beard Liveright
LONDON For Mary Beard, the image of Hillary Clinton’s severed head was the last straw.
The Cambridge University classics professor had been pondering the influence of the ancient world on modern political and public life when she came across mugs and T-shirts bearing an image from Greek mythology: the hero Perseus holding the bloody head of the snake-haired monster Medusa. In this version, Perseus had Donald Trump’s face and the monster bore Clinton’s.
Beard was shocked both by the brutality of the image and “the domesticity of it ... The idea that you’d be sitting at your breakfast table and you’d have a mug with Hillary Clinton being beheaded on it.”
Beard asks how that ancient image ended up in a modern political campaign in Women & Power: A Manifesto, a short but punchy book published by Liveright.
The book explores the way images and ideas from ancient Greece and Rome have burrowed the way into the Western collective consciousness — and how many of them are about keeping women in their place. “When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice,” Beard writes.
On the page, Beard is crisp and authoritative. In person, she is friendly and forthright. But she says she “became furious” while working on Women & Power.
The book begins with one of the first works of Western literature, citing a scene in Homer’s 3,000-year-old Odyssey, in which Telemachus tells his mother, Penelope, to get back to her weaving because “speech will be the business of men.”
Beard argues that modern ideas about public speaking are still shaped by its definition as a male thing. In the book’s second half she explores how power, more widely, came to be defined as something wielded by men.
“If you say to a group of women professors, ‘Close your eyes and think of a professor,’ what they will see is a guy,” she says. “I will. And I’ll stop myself and think, ‘Hey, hang on, what am I doing here?’
“The real problem is what is going on in our cultural brains.”
Those brains, she says, bear strong imprints from the ancient world. The monstrous Medusa is just one example, appearing repeatedly in art and satire.
As well as Clinton, female politicians including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May have been caricatured as the serpenthaired Gorgon.
Beard argues that such images draw little criticism.
In contrast, when comedian Kathy Griffin posed with a fake severed Trump head, it prompted an outcry that saw her fired by CNN.
In an echo of the ancient image, online abuse aimed at prominent women often includes threats to rip out tongues or cut off heads.
“(It’s) the idea of cutting off, not just the brain and the beauty but the speaking organ of a woman,” Beard says.
Beard, 63, is that rare thing: a celebrity academic. Her books are bestsellers, and she hosts popular TV series on ancient Rome and Pompeii. As a well-known woman, she knows about online abuse firsthand. She has more than 166,000 followers on Twitter, where her willingness to tackle online trolls has made her a heroine for many younger women.
“It doesn’t feel particularly heroic to me,” she says. “You have to do what you feel comfortable with. And I didn’t feel comfortable just blocking them and turning the other cheek. “
Some of the abusers confronted by Beard have ended up apologizing. When Beard threatened to tell one troll’s mother what he’d tweeted, he said sorry and bought her lunch.
Beard says she was drawn to study of the classical world by “a sense of wonderment” that she still feels. But she doesn’t shy away from its dark side.
“Greek myths, early Roman history, is configured around violence against women,” she said. “And I think we need to get in there, get our hands dirty, face it and see why and how it was.”
Reviewers have remarked on the book’s timeliness, appearing amid a wave of sexual misconduct allegations against prominent men by women who are often speaking out after long periods of silence.
Reviewing Women & Power in The Guardian, Rachel Cooke said she might have found Beard’s argument a bit strained several months ago.
“But reading it in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it seems utterly, dreadfully convincing,” Cooke said.
The book is subtitled “a manifesto,” but it does not provide obvious solutions.
“When I was an undergraduate, we thought that if we got workplace nurseries, we’d be fine,” Beard says. “Workplace nurseries, equal pay and a few other practical things.
“We were partly right — they were good reforms. But it doesn’t solve the problem.”
The book suggests that, instead of women trying to fit into male definitions of power, society should redefine what power looks like. That, Beard admits, is a giant task. “I just want us to know what we’re looking at,” she says. “This is, I hope, the building blocks towards the solution.”
One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning David Moody St. Martin’s Press
Hatred abounds from the first page in David Moody’s One of Us Will Be Dead by Morning, the first in a dystopian trilogy. After a jolting opening scene in which a murderous adolescent beats her classmates to death with a chain, readers are whisked away to Skek, an unforgivingly cold, wet island, home to Hazleton Adventure Experiences. This week, Hazleton is playing host to a group of office workers who despise one another. We get to know them as they grudgingly begin their final team-building exercise of a corporate excursion. Everyone is itching to leave the bleak landscape and return to the U.K., but a slip leaves one person dead. What’s more, the boat to retrieve the group is nowhere to be seen.
People continue to die, proving something sinister is at work.
Most of the characters hold tightly to assigned roles. Some receive physical descriptions but others are presented with merely a name and job title, producing a lopsided nature to many interactions.
The novel has an intriguing premise but is largely a feverish loop of arguments and brutal killings with few detours for character development.
Insidious Intent Val McDermid Atlantic Monthly Press
A highlight of Val McDermid’s novels is the tight control she maintains over her complex plots, enhanced by believable and complicated characters. McDermid brings something special to the table in her latest novel about detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan and psychologist-profiler Tony Hill.
Insidious Intent delivers an incisive British police procedural that illustrates how a tight-knit squad works together and how a behaviour profiler can add to the investigations. The case is always paramount in this series but also important is the relationship between Carol and Tony that has developed over the years. Not only are they close friends who care deeply about each other, but in their own way they love each other and depend on one another in ways they can barely verbalize.
ReMIT — the Major Incident Team that Carol now heads — investigates its most unusual case. Single women are being killed and then placed in their cars, which are set on fire. The only link seems to be that each woman attended a wedding where she met a man who seemed too good to be true.
While they investigate, Carol still feels guilty that the dismissal of her drunk-driving arrest resulted in cases against other drivers being dropped, and one of those drivers then killed several people in an accident while drunk.
The intense plot moves briskly. McDermid keeps each twist believable while delving into the personal lives of other ReMIT squad members. Her expert exploration of the human experience has never been better.