BMCR 2009.07.46: Irwin on Hazewindus, When Women Interfere. Studies in the Role of Women in Herodotus' Histories. Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, 12

Minke W. Hazewindus, When Women Interfere. Studies in the Role of Women
in Herodotus' Histories. Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, 12.
Leiden:  Brill (originally Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben), 2004.  Pp. 256.
ISBN 90-5063-449-4.  EUR 68.00.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Irwin, Columbia University and Humboldt
Universitaet ([email protected])
Word count:  2108 words
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[The reviewer apologizes for the lateness of this review.]

As this book announces in the Preface, it is a thoroughly revised
doctoral thesis, submitted to the University of Amsterdam in 2001. Its
five main chapters focus on six case studies of logoi in which women
occupy center stage or otherwise perform a significant role in the
action of the narrative (see 'Table of Contents' below). As outlined in
the first chapter, H. attempts to bring to bear on these logoi a series
of theoretical approaches, treating them as microstorie, and invoking
elements of narratology, speech-act theory, feminist literary criticism
and deconstruction.  She states three, broad aims:


'Firstly, I want to read beyond the binary opposition "history" versus
"poetry". In other words, Herodotus the historian is not necessarily
opposed to but can coincide with Herodotus the poet. Secondly, I
intentionally included the microstorie of women in the erga megala te
kai tho^masta (the great and extraordinary or admirable works or
deeds). Lastly, I want to read as a resistant reader "against the
grain" of standard scholarship - which like any scholar, I seriously
consider' (40).


The introduction wades into the History-Fiction question plaguing
Herodotean studies. Hazewindus seems both to argue that we shouldn't
expect real history from a text of this period and that history a\ la
Hayden White is a 'fiction-making operation', unhappily rendering
Herodotus as a pre-modern author, but Herodotus the text as
post-modern, without entertaining the possibility that the author who
foregrounded (with flashing red lights) the subjectivity of narratives
about the past might have got there first. At any rate, Hazewindus's
account of the debate furnishes an unsatisfactory introduction: little
in her study actually requires the content of these stories to be
historically true as events, or to be true as accounts actually in
circulation for Herodotus to 'record' them. Hazewindus would have done
better to sidestep the issue altogether. That she doesn't seems to
indicate a contradiction in her approach to her material: she at once
seeks to elevate his narratives involving women and yet implies that
without the defense she provides they would be unworthy of discussion
as insufficiently historical (cf. Conclusion, p. 242).

The real introduction is Ch. 1, 'On method: Reconfiguring Herodotus'
women'. Hazewindus provides an account of the me/lange of theoretical
approaches to allow her to focus on the material she does in the way
that she does. The account is problematic and rather unnecessary.
Herodotus' stories involving women do not require the concept of
microstorie to allow them to be retrieved from the sidelines: not only
do his own explicit comments on the 'digressive' nature of his logos
(4.30) render the notion of the marginal problematic, but any audience
(ancient or modern) coming with expectations that a narrative about
megala erga will be solely about men and war is immediately put
straight by the proem and Candaules' story. Given the frequency with
which she invokes the concept of what we 'expect' or what is
'unexpected' about Herodotus' treatment of women, Hazewindus needed to
provide some account of what 'we' as 'readers' can reasonably expect
the expectations of the 'original audiences' to be. Indeed, the
homogeneity Hazewindus assumes across fifth-century audiences and
modern readers respectively is problematic in itself. Hazewindus fails
to contextualize adequately Herodotus' depictions of women against the
backdrop of other contemporary texts, not least Thucydides. The
relegation of Artemisia to five pages of the methodological chapter is
particularly unfortunate since her treatment raises the awareness that
there might be different reactions among Herodotus' contemporary
audiences to the female characters populating his text: what was a
disgrace for the Athenians (8.93) seems to have been axiologon for the
Halicarnassian narrator.

Had it not been for the title, it would only be on p. 19 that readers
would discover that the book will focus on female characters. The
lateness of the revelation raises the question of whether Hazewindus
wished to approach Herodotus through the lens of microstorie and
exploited Herodotus' female characters to this end, or whether she
found an intrinsic interest in the topic of women, whether in and of
itself, or in the Histories and Greek culture of the later fifth
century itself. The lack of any real engagement with the wider cultural
background suggests the first alternative, even though Hazewindus does
seem to foreground women in her claim that she will be a 'resisting
woman reader', both deconstructing Herodotus' text and defying the
interpretations of largely male critics (22, 238). I personally find
Hazewindus's use of the concept of a 'woman reader' problematic, as if
this should be a univocal position that Hazewindus's readings could
represent. It is hard to know how this gendered reader fits in with the
'we' and 'us' as readers of Herodotus' text that Hazewindus's otherwise
freely invokes. Moreover, since she claims to be resisting male
critics, there is some irony in that her most consistent attacks are
actually on other female readers (Dewald and Lang, see below), that is,
those whom she hasn't failed to consult (Munson).

The 'interference' of the title seems to have a dual meaning as
Hazewindus employs it, alluding both to the actions of females within
the logos and also to these stories as revealing instances in which
Herodotus' treatment of women seems to 'interfere' with the
thought-world presented by his text:


I shall first analyse these stories-on-women for their contents [sic.].
Then I want to explore if and to what extent they are contradicting our
expectations and what they tell us about the thought-world of Herodotus
and about his intentions to write a 'history' of great and admirable or
extraordinary deeds. I shall argue specifically that they interfere
with at least some tendencies - some leading ideas - in his work as a
whole' (p. 21)


The last sentence reflects an ambiguity characteristic of Hazewindus's
discussions - what are the tendencies, the leading ideas? One can only
assume it is the male-centric world to which the text belongs, but
Hazewindus doesn't say, and her invocation of deconstruction seems to
render the narrator the victim of a text wilfully throwing up
objections to the relegation of women to the 'supposed' sidelines of
itself. For instance, Herodotus' treatment of the Amazons  'seems to
surprise not only the reader of today but also probably his
contemporaries and even the narrator himself. For Herodotus himself
seems to be led on by his own story . . .' (p. 242).

Narratology is highlighted by Hazewindus as her distinctive
contribution to discussions of Herodotean women: 'As far as I can see,
none of [the scholars listed] tries to combine a narratological reading
of Herodotus with a close reading of the Greek text, which makes my
reading, if nothing else, a useful supplement'. Given the list she
provides, the comment is rather anachronistic, on the one hand, and on
the other, she seems to imply that a narratological reading, regardless
of how executed, must of necessity provide something that these close
readers have not or could not. Herein lies an unintentional arrogance
which is unfortunately too often latent even in narratology's more
sophisticated practitioners. Although Immerwahr 'did not yet have the
more recently developed narratological tools and the insights of speech
act theory', he is nevertheless even now one of Herodotus' most subtle
readers. By contrast, Hazewindus's application of narratology consists
mainly in some mention of focalization, observations on the absence or
presence of speech, and an obsession with the Historical Present  (e.g.
60, 103, 109, 134, 240) - hardly a narratological study, even if H does
credit Bal with making her 'aware of the manipulating effect of
focalization, in other words, of the subjectivity of the presentation
of fabula' (p. 238); but surely something is wrong if Herodotus could
not have made Hazewindus aware of this himself. The capacity to
redescribe texts is too often allowed to claim an awareness of the
dynamics and devices of narrative somehow denied to their creators. I
personally don't believe that there is anything about telling a story
that Herodotus (or 'Homer', for that matter) hadn't already understood.

There is little to garner from the work in terms of interpretation:
anyone working on any of Hazewindus's chosen stories is welcome to read
the individual chapters for themselves (see below for contents), but
her coverage is hardly comprehensive and the overall conclusions of her
analysis too often verge on the banal: we find that Herodotus 'does not
provide a ready-made model of gender roles' (219) and that '[w]hen we
read the Histories with an open eye for Herodotus' narrativity, we
discover that he has had an open eye for the far-reaching ways women
could re-act upon actions of men that they did usually not like' (243).
It is ironic that despite Hazewindus's claim to rescue these women from
the 'margins', she herself overlooks less conspicuous appearances of
female agents in the text: the text of book 3 is densely populated by
female agents, each playing salient roles, and several are
characterized by significant speech-acts: Nitetis, the daughter of
Apries (3.1) and Cassadane (3.3); the unnamed sister of Cambyses
(3.32); Phaedymia, the daughter of Otanes, 'who had exposed the Magus'
(3.68-9, 88); the wife of Intaphernes (3.119); the daughter of
Polycrates (3.124); and Atossa (3.88, 133-4). Individually some may not
be flashy enough to be noticed, but their presence is persistent and
renders Hazewindus's rhetoric of retrieving women from the sidelines a
little hollow.

In terms of argument, Hazewindus's discussions are too often guided by
responses to secondary literature, bouncing from author to author in
the main text (e.g. p. 146) when her disputes with their positions
would have been better relegated to footnotes, which instead are used
most conspicuously for digressive discussions of linguistic points. At
the same time, although dependent upon criticism of scholarship to
advance the various readings, the list of scholars she will focus on is
limited and idiosyncratic: 'The more general works are those of
Immerwahr, Hartog, Collingwood, Momigliano, Fehling, Fornara, Lateiner,
Waters, Long and Marg . . . Dewald . . . Lang . . . Flory' (41), and
the bibliography correspondingly thin: shared with standard texts of
modern literary theory, the approximately 100 entries (five pages) can
only scratch the surface of Herodotean scholarship, and leave little
room for discussion of women in other genres contemporary with
Herodotus.[[2]] This need not be bad, but important articles are
missing: where is Connor in the discussion on the history (p. 4), or
Munson on Artemisia?[[1]] In the absence of the latter, Hazewindus can
claim that  'None of the commentators remarks on the paradoxes that
make this story more than just a story about a remarkable woman' (p.
32).

Hazewindus's representation of previous scholarship is consistently
rude, not to mention repetitive, and not appropriate even in
sophisticated critiques: Dewald 'tends to over-interpretation (20),
'sometimes tends to look too one-sidedly at the role of women' (124),
'tends to over-interpretation' (147), being '[a]s usual, inclined to
over-interpretation' (177), except of course when she 'undervalues'
(207), but that fault is at least shared by others (Frisch, 136;
Reinhardt and Gray, 146); others 'tend to under-interpretation' (Flory
and Gould, 177); or are 'misguided' (Wolff); van der Veen 'tends to
force his issue . . . tends to generalize' (145) and 'does not pay
attention to' that which Hazewindus thinks important; while of Lang,
Hazewindus does not 'exactly see the use of this kind of analysis'
(117; 158 n. 25; 171). Even Immerwahr, Hazewindus's 'inspiring
professor' (12), gets it in the neck: reading in the days before
narratology and speech-act theory, he 'has no eye for women's (speech)
acts' (169 n. 37).

I would have preferred to have written a less critical review of this
book, but found that the many contradictions in its theoretical
approaches, and the patronizing tone taken in relation both to
Herodotus and to the contributions of other readers, got the better of
me. If the series editors were intent upon publishing this
dissertation, they should have offered better advice regarding its
revision.  The book is not cheap and libraries will have been induced
to buy it no less by the allurements of its title than by its claim to
employ modern theoretical approaches.

Table of Contents

Ch. 1 Reconfiguring Herodotus' women [here appears a short discussion
of Artemisia (7.99, 210; 8.68-102) and Semiramis and Nitetis
(1.178-188)]
Ch. 2. The story of Candaules' wife: a story of (not-)seeing (1.6-14)
Ch. 3. About fatal gifts and gruesome mutilations, the story of
Amestris' revenge (9.107-14)
Ch. 4 Women who made Cyrus live and die (1.107-114, 1.201-215)
Ch. 5. Amazons, or about presuppositions (4.110-118)
Ch. 6. Pheretime, 'a gender bender'? (4. (145-) 162-168, 200-205)
Ch. 7 Conclusion
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Notes:


1.   'The Histor in History', in Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of
Martin Ostwald, ed. R. M. Rosen and J. S. Farrell, 3-15. Ann Arbor.
'Artemisia in Herodotus', ClAnt 7:91-106.

2.   Hazewindus also dismisses (pp. 19-20) R. Bichler's excellent
'Herodots Frauenbild und seine Vorstellung ueber die Sexualsitten der
Voelker', in Geschlechterrollen und Frauenbild in der Perspektive
antiker Autoren, R. Rollinger and C. Ulf (eds.)
(Innsbruck/Wien/Muenchen, 2000) [now reprinted in
Historiographie-Ethnographie-Utopie. Gesammelte Schriften, Teil 1.
Studien zu Herodots Kunst der Historie, R. Rollinger (ed.) (Wiesbaden
2007)].