In an admirably clear and concise introduction, Sara Burdorff sets out the central thesis of her monograph—that monstrosity is a ‘common ground’ which unites mothers and warrior-heroes in the Iliad, and that these ‘Iliadic patterns’ can be seen both in ‘a broad selection of Greek and Greco-Roman narratives about Troy’ and in Shakespeare’s later ‘mother-warrior’ plays (p.13). Her concept of monstrosity, which draws on Jeffrey Cohen’s foundational 1996 essay, has two main facets. The first is that the monstrous is that which is liminal, ambivalent, and ‘other’—and with this capacious definition, it is perhaps unsurprising that she concludes that most characters in the Iliad can be described as ‘monstrous’. The second facet concentrates more specifically on what Burdorff terms the ‘belly-monstrous’, that is to say, on the overlap between birthing and eating, expelling and ingestion, creation and destruction, that centres on the belly in its capacity as both womb and stomach. It is this, more focused definition of ‘monstrosity’ that leads to the most fruitful discussion of the intersection between warriors and women.
In the first chapter Burdorff fleshes out the idea of the ‘belly-monstrous’ by surveying the tradition—well canvassed in motherhood studies—of connecting the birthing body with monstrosity. She here covers a a great range of material in only 15 pages, flitting back and forward across time from Hesiod to Pliny to seventeenth-century French medicine to Hippocrates. The next two chapters benefit from a tighter focus, concentrating on the Iliad to argue that mothers (and/or women—Burdorff slips between the two categories) share elements of monstrosity with warrior-heroes. There are, however, still chronological jumps, as Plutarch is joined with the Iliad as evidence of ‘the ancient Greek tradition’ without acknowledgement that the two are separated by some thousand years (pp. 72-73). Some evidence is also cherry-picked; for example, Burdorff confidently asserts that ‘fire was associated with the female body in ancient Greek thought’ (pp.75-76), even though Empedocles and Aristotle, among others, associated the female body with cold and the male with heat.[1] There are nevertheless some interesting suggestions made, such as the connection drawn between the stress placed on bodily integrity after death, and the mother’s role as both generator of the physical body and caretaker of the corpse. The idea that heroic immortalization mirrors childbirth as both involve ‘the generative translation of violence, bloodshed, suffering, and pain into new life’ (p.77) is also attractive, although Burdorff underplays the importance of the male bardic tradition in her bid to establish female lament as the central vehicle of that ‘heroic immortalization’.
In the second part of her study, Burdorff presents three case studies of female characters who epitomise the ‘belly-monstrous’—namely Helen, Clytemnestra and Hecuba. The focus here is particularly on their representation in Greek tragedy, and Burdorff’s close readings are elegant and compelling. She demonstrates that their maternally-rooted monstrosity is not only destructive but also works to generate immortality within the heroic tradition, either for themselves or for the male warriors with whom they interact. Across all three chapters, common strands—most notably the recurring animal imagery of vipers, lions and dogs—are skilfully woven together, and fruitful connections are drawn with related characters such as maenads and the Furies/ Eumenides. With this comparative consideration of multiple characters and plays, Burdorff makes an important and accessible contribution to our understanding of motherhood within Greek tragedy.
Burdorff’s final and most substantial section turns to Shakespearean drama, considering Titus Andronicus, the first tetralogy of history plays, and Coriolanus. While Burdorff’s analysis here feels more disparate than her character studies of the preceding section, there are recurring threads across the three chapters. Convincing connections are drawn not only with the various aspects of the ‘belly-monstrous’ established in her earlier study of the Greek texts, but also with the ambivalent ‘mother’ figure of Elizabeth I. Interesting associations are also made with early modern medical texts, but otherwise Shakespeare is presented as somewhat isolated from his wider literary culture. For example, Spenser’s Faerie Queene is never mentioned, even though Burdorff’s themes would seem to be epitomised by the half-female, half-serpent Errour, whose young suck at her poisonous breasts then hide in her mouth, and finally gain life by feeding on their monstrous mother’s blood as she lies dying, slain by the heroic male knight. Throughout her discussion, though, Burdorff seems heavily invested in asserting an uninterrupted line from Homer to Attic tragedy to Shakespeare. This is most problematically seen in the almost complete excision of Latin literature, which Burdorff considers as briefly as possible in the introduction to the Shakespeare section. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is granted only two pages of summary, Senecan tragedy fares little better with six. Yet fuller consideration of these authors would likely have greatly strengthened Burdorff’s arguments, as both develop many aspects of the ‘belly-monstrous’ themes that she identifies in the Iliad and in Greek tragedy.
Burdorff seeks to explain her emphasis on Greek as opposed to Latin literature by pointing to recent scholarship which argues that Shakespeare would likely have had much greater access to Greek texts, both in the original and in Latin translations, than has previously been thought. However, that does not negate the powerful influence that Seneca and Ovid (not to mention Plutarch) had upon Shakespearean drama—yet Burdorff seems bent on acknowledging this only when completely unavoidable (for example, when Ovid’s Metamorphoses is brought onstage in Act IV of Titus Andronicus). The Greek focus is particularly odd given that two-thirds of Burdorff’s Shakespearean section considers explicitly Roman plays—but Titus and Coriolanus are both described as ‘Iliadic warriors’ without consideration of how their Roman context complicates this description. Equally odd is that Troilus and Cressida isn’t mentioned at all, even though Burdorff repeatedly claims to be focusing on narratives of the Trojan war (and the play’s potential for maternally-focused readings is well recognised, for example in Janet Adelman’s 1992 monograph).
On the topic of secondary literature, it should be noted that, while Burdorff’s bibliography runs to twenty closely typed pages, only about thirty of her cited works were published within the last fifteen years. As such, several important contributions to motherhood studies in the Classics are omitted, including the edited volumes Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome (2012) and Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy (2020).
The production quality is of a high standard, with no obvious typographical errors. Greek is transliterated, making the volume more accessible for non-classicists, and useful abstracts at the beginning of each chapter aid the reader in navigating Burdorff’s discussion.
Works Cited
Adelman, J. 1992. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays: Hamlet to the Tempest, Routledge.
Cohen, J. J. 1996. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press: 3–25.
King, H. 1998. Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece, Routledge.
Lloyd, G. E. R. 1964. ‘The Hot and the Cold, the Dry and the Wet in Greek Philosophy’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 84: 92–106.
Petersen, L. H., & Salzman-Mitchell, P. (eds). 2012. Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome, University of Texas Press.
Sharrock, A., & Keith, A. (eds). 2020. Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy (Vol. 57), University of Toronto Press.
Notes
[1] See e.g., King 1998: 10–11; Lloyd 1964.