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THROUGH SOCIAL INTERACTION knowledgeable agents, including both men and women, maintain the social structure. Significantly, their actions also contribute to the evolution of that social structure. Bourdieu calls the agency through which social perceptions are acquired and evolved through the recursive action of members in society the habitus. These actions, affected by the habitus, shape social expectations which, in turn, contribute to the structures in society by motivating action. This reciprocal relationship is witnessed when the evidence about the role and place of women in classical Athenian society is considered.
Women, both real and mythical, should progress through certain stages of liminality in their lives. Turner emphasised the liminal periods in the rites of passage first identified by van Gennep at the turn of the century. These stages of varying liminality and distance from status society are, interestingly, incorporated within the structures of status society as regularised and necessary periods within it. In classical Athenian society, women normatively shed their blood as they move through stages, from childhood to menarche to marriage to motherhood. Such transitions are indicated in the gynaecological texts investigated in Chapter 2. Some parts of women’s lives, particularly the biological, transcend the purely social. However, in many ways the female body itself is a social construct and is manipulated by society in order that women should reproduce in a socially acceptable format. There are social expectations of a woman’s role that combine the purely biological with the purely social: procreation within the marriage situation with access to social status. Women in myth often forestall these bleeding and the transitions they indicate, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. These failures to move through the normatively conceptualised rites of passage ensure that the woman maintains her social virginity.
The bleeding women in real life, as indicated in the gynaecological texts, move through the ideal total passage in their lives through individual rites of passage. The women who often do not accomplish such transitions in myths and rituals, are linked by the goddess Artemis. Artemis in classical times, was the virgin goddess who oversaw the movement of individuals through periods of heightened transition, called liminality, contained within status society.
Girls begin their transitions with rituals designed to set them apart from status society. Artemis oversees such a ritual, the arkteia performed for her at her shrines in Brauron or Mounichia, both liminal locations at harbour sites. With the completion of such rites the girl has entered into the liminal phase of her total passage. Whilst she is no longer a child, she is not producing a child either. She is not contained in status society in a woman's ideal role: as a wife and mother. She is on the path to such a role, but until she accomplishes the stages along the way she is liminal. Such rites of separation prepare the participants for the uncontrollable first bleeding of the menarche. The bleeding, once accomplished, signalled the body’s physical capability to bear children. Since the girl is not yet married and sex without the marriage situation was not the accepted norm, she is socially incapable of bearing a child. She is ripe for motherhood yet not married, and hence unable to bear a child according to the dictates of society. The menarche, then, is a ‘rite’ signalling marginality.
This biological rite signals that the girl is ready to produce but is not yet in a social position to do so. Marriage would ideally follow to bring the girl out of liminality. Ideally a woman should lose her physical virginity in defloration in the first Intercourse in the marriage situation. This ritual, the rite of passage of the marriage ritual, signifies the end of the liminal phase. The woman, and her reproductive capability, was now contained within the social institution of marriage. She was now both physically and socially able to fall pregnant.
The married woman who is no longer a physical virgin is still a social virgin until the birth of a child in the marriage situation. This birth is a biological ‘rite’ of aggregation and the lochia which accompanies it signifies the end of social virginity. At this point the woman is a fully-fledged member of status society. She is as closely contained in that culture as she can be; she is a wife and mother.
In myths and rituals this normative progression through the rites of passage are emphasised. There can be no deviation if there were not a norm, a standard practice, to which to compare the mythical women’s lack of progress through the proper rites of passage. The evolution of the myths of virgin sacrifice, the Amazons and the goddess Artemis illustrate, in part, the stresses and strains of the status structured society which created and reinvented such myths and religious rituals and figures. Virgin are killed before they can be married and bear children; Amazons forsake using their biological reproductive powers for the benefit of status society in which men are supreme in order to shed the blood of men instead. Both myths emphasis the need of women in real life to move through the normal rites of passage in their total passage by their outcomes. Virgins die unwed and childless, deprived of their social and physical fulfilment as wives and mothers. Amazons are subdued; killed in battle or raped. However it is done, the mythical women who deviate from the standard practice, either due to their own choices or circumstances, are nonetheless forced back into the structure of status society, normally by their death.
Social expectations influenced social actions. Giddens termed this structuration in society. Therefore, the social actions of telling, retelling and modifying certain stories and beliefs implies that they were obviously of worth and value in the society which reproduced them. They helped feed the habitus which, in turn, drove expectations and actions. The woman who marries, loses her virginity and gives birth is also the woman who engages at some level in a debate about the position of women in this place and time. As knowledgeable agents, women, by their participation in the above rites of passage, contribute to the place of such structures in society. We have attempted to produce a model which explains how the social construction of the female body, the myths which accumulate about the female body, the rituals which are part of the social construction of the female body (but which are not just the preserve of men) actually inform the conception of a normative structure for female life. This structure is not static but evolving and changing in response to the changes and stresses with society itself.
Artemis stands at the heart of the matter. She is the point of intersection between women in real life and women in myth and ritual. She combines all facets of the concept of women underneath the auspices of the need for women to move through a series of rites of passage in her total passage from child to gyne. In real life, if a woman did not bleed in these stages, according to the gynaecological texts she would be considered seriously ill. If she did not bear a child in a properly-attested marriage situation she would remain a social virgin. Women in myth were illustrated in the complex discourse of tragedy as being prevented from reaching the dénouement of such transitions through fate or unhappy circumstances. Artemis oversaw such debate both at the level of an enhanced ritual status, for example the arkteia, and an enhanced mythical position, for example the literary and artistic evidence of myths about the Amazons, virgins sacrifice. Artemis embodies in her personality and conception the contradictions of a society which felt the tension of the place and role of women so uniquely as to problematise them constantly in social discourses such as tragedy.
