Woman’s Lore by Sarah Clegg - a review
Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi by Sarah Clegg
Review by Lucy Ashe
I stumbled upon this book when I was browsing in Hatchards Piccadilly last week. I remember feeling unsettled that afternoon, as though my mind was moving too fast, circular thoughts that refused to find a resting place. Perhaps this was what drew me to Sarah Clegg’s book: Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi. The title with its accompanying illustrations of female serpents and mermaids seemed to offer me a promise. If I could immerse myself in the stories of demonic and demonized women, perhaps I could let go of the demons that were possessing me that day.
In the end, the impact was not at all what I expected. Rather than letting go of the demons, I found myself drawing them even closer towards me. Rather than exorcising them, I let myself embrace them. Clegg writes of ‘our monsters’, a phrase she often uses to reference her cast of female demons, serpents, mermaids, ghosts, and femme fatales. There is a fondness to the way she re-defines the entire concept of what it means to be monstrous. She takes us through centuries of monsters, making fascinating links between familiar and unfamiliar names. There is Lilith, the first wife of Adam who is often depicted as a snake, transforming dangerously into a temptress who refuses to accept Adam’s authority. There is Lamia, condemned as a deceptive woman, a serpentine creature who hides her monstrousness beneath a false and seductive beauty. Lilitu is a virgin ghost who visits men at night to act out her thwarted desires. Gello are vengeful ghosts who died as ‘unfulfilled virgins on the brink of womanhood’, reminding me of the Wilis from the ballet Giselle, ghosts of women who died before their wedding day. They dance to death any man who crosses their path at night. And then there are the Mermaids. With the vanity of their mirror and comb, mermaids in the middle ages emblematised the medieval church’s fears about threats to male chastity: the mermaid is ‘a creature created by men who thought all women would lure men to their doom simply by existing.’
Clegg tells us how, as the centuries progress, attitudes to these monsters shift and change, reflecting societal fears of the time. A sympathy for stories about the intersection of the fairy and mortal world in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century hardened into didactic tales of warning of moral decline in the Victorian age. The chapter on the ‘Monster Outside’ (a term coined by Gilbert and Gubar in their 1979 critical work The Madwoman in the Attic) is a rollicking journey through the presentation of women in Victorian literature and art – Waterhouse’s nymphs, Stoker’s Lucy Westenra in Dracula, Ruskin’s obsession with ‘seductive and sexual coiling’ in his repeated imagery of snakes, Rossetti’s serpentine Proserpine, Thackeray’s beautiful and dangerous Becky Sharp, Gwendolen’s ‘Lamia beauty’ in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
But there is one constant: female demons were created by men to control concepts of womanhood. As Clegg writes, these monsters were used to police women: ‘a warning for women who stepped out of line that they faced literal demonisation, a reminder that a failure at womanhood [fertility, motherhood, submission, obedience] would place you outside of society, with the snakes, wolves and monsters.’
A fear of the unruly, dangerous, sexual woman lies beneath every monster. It takes until the 20th century for women to claim these stories for themselves, transforming them into powerful symbols of female desire and freedom. With increasing social change, the New Woman, suffragettes, the second-wave feminism of Judith Plaskow, Betty Friedan, and Germaine Greer, women could embrace the parts of themselves that, for centuries, had been presented as monstrous. Clegg puts it powerfully: ‘her sexuality is not in the service of men, is not for the pleasure of others, but for her pleasure and hers alone.’ Finally, Lilith could be a symbol for women rather than a warning and punishment created by men. Clegg takes us through the way Lilith is a powerful intersectional character, exploring Octavia Butler’s 1979 sci-fi novel Dawn about a Black American woman. The novel complicates the claims of ‘enabling Eves,’ the criticism thrown at women who seem to be enablers of an oppressive patriarchal system: ‘simple survival can be a means of resistance, and one that we, the children of those who survived, should be grateful for.’ The mermaid has also become an important symbol for trans women, as has Lilith: ‘Lilith was the woman who was always there,’ quotes Clegg.
There is a freedom that comes from acknowledging the complexity of monsters. While it may be depressing to look back at all the ways oppressive societies have tried to control women through transforming them into monsters, when we claim these monsters for ourselves, we can take back control.
Sarah Clegg’s journey through the history of ‘our monsters’ is an exciting read, packed with fascinating details that reveal so much about changing attitudes to the nature of women. To end, here is my favourite line from the book, one that I know will stay with me for a long time:
‘If you’ll be painted as a monster no matter what, you might as well make your own choices, and take control of your own destiny, rather than attempting to mould yourself to a contradictory ideal of womanhood that can be taken away no matter what you do. As symbols of ‘unacceptable’ women, Lilith and our demons are symbols of us all.’