The One We’d Like to Meet

Margaret Anne Doody

• Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India by Wendy Doniger
  Chicago, 376 pp, £43.95, June 1999, ISBN 0 226 15640 0
• The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth by Wendy Doniger
  Columbia, 212 pp, £11.50, October 1999, ISBN 0 231 11171 1

Do real queens or goddesses get raped? Can beauty become vile? Such problems are raised by Helen of Troy, wife of King Menelaus, and by Sita, wife of Rama. Their stories (in multiple versions) are entertainingly retold and analysed by Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of religions and of South-East Asian languages and civilisations. As Doniger – who can read Sanskrit and Hindi as well as Greek, Latin and modern languages – tells us, in the earliest versions of these stories (the Iliad and the Ramayana), both women are carried off by a rival to the husband king; both are ravished (or commit adultery). The kingly husband then fights his rival to retrieve his wife, in order to punish the abductor and his now guilty (or at least suspect) spouse. But the story of the stories of Helen and Sita does not end there.