Notes from a Reading Life: Wendy Doniger's Implied Spider

"When Kevin Costner wanted to learn an Indian dialect for his film Dances with Wolves, he didn't realize that there were different grammatical forms for men and women; he learned the language from a woman, and hence, apparently unknowingly, throughout the film referred to himself as 'she' and 'her'."

This delightful anecdote in Wendy Doniger's book The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth reminded me of my first attempts to learn the Mohawk language on and off reservations. In Mohawk the primary nouns and pronouns are feminine. So Okwari is Bear but in English it is also she-bear. If you want to specify you are talking about a male bear you must add a prefix and say Rokwari.

Doniger's Kostner anecdote comes in a discussion of how women's voices have been suppressed in the literature of many cultures. Throughout Doniger displays the fruits of her omnivorous reading and proves herself a worthy successor to Mircea Eliade as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago.

Myths are her passion but she declines to give any fixed definition of the word "myth". You can catch her on the fly, however, saying things like this:

"A myth is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it."

And this:

"Myths from other people's cultures often provide us with useful metaphors that are more refreshing than our own."

I strongly endorse the last statement. Doniger gives an example of what it has meant to her in another provocvative book, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. Here she describes how she found her “seed text”, bija mantra, in the story of an Indian goddess, Saranyu. This goddess, little-known in the West, cloned herself in order to get away from a husband she detested, leaving a compliant Hindu version of a Stepford Wife at home while she ranged free as a wild mare. This story kept after Doniger for decades, prompting her to reach deeper and deeper into its well. Whenever she heard it, she would say, “That’s the story of my life.”

I weave  myths from every culture accessible to me into my courses, refreshing old stories as they refresh us. To touch our lives a myth must come vitally alive in our imaginations and our experience of the world.