Feminist Interpretations
Light and dark female rivals, Helen and Queen Meriamun, both cause men’s deaths; Odysseus is “beguiled” by the snake of Meriamun, as was Eve, and the Argive Helen dwells with death, yet she is “beauty’s self.” These characters represent abstractions, rather than individuals. The hero is the ideal to which the reader is meant to aspire, but Haggard and Lane fuse together in their depiction of the fierce Meriamun. Meriamun is an embodiment of the independent New Woman they strongly disliked, however they cannot help their attachment to the character.
Read more about this topic: The World's Desire
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“The belief that established science and scholarship—which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making—are “objective” and “value-free” and that feminist studies are “unscholarly,” “biased,” and “ideological” dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)