Motherless Daughters and Female Monsters

Androcentric Fantasy in Ancient Greek Myth and Freudian Theory

Jessica Elbert Decker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031780653
• eBook ISBN: 9783031780660
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

This book is a feminist analysis of Greek myth and tragedy that reimagines the structures of Freudian theory. The objective of this analysis is political—by revealing the structures that undergird patriarchal oppression, feminist thinkers can work to transform these symbolic constellations through the work of sabotage, parody, and imagination. Jessica Elbert Decker attempts here to read Freudian theory through a wider lens of Ancient Greek culture, since our contemporary philosophical and social culture has inherited many of its symbolic structures (e.g., patriarchy, binary thinking).
The major argument of the book is that our Western philosophical, social, and symbolic systems are, as they were in the Ancient Greek world, suffused with a set of values that reflect one version of masculinity and androcentrism, and that those values are destructive to human beings as well as the non-human world, including other beings.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: How Athena Wins the Olympian Throne
• Part I. First Movement: Origin Stories and Myths of Ancestry
• Part II. Second Movement: Reimagining Freudian Theory
• Part III. Third Movement: Sapphic Love and Narratives of the Future Multiply
• Back Matter