Female autonomy and the monstrous feminine

Female autonomy and the monstrous feminine describes the gendered conversion of women’s power into a threat: female desire is made monstrous, while the violence used to contain it is presented as a response to female excess. The novel develops this idea through mythic figures such as Medusa, the Siren, the Sphinx, and Dahud, and through Sabine de Kercoz’s objection to the assumptions by which male interpreters turn women’s passion into a source of collective fear. The pattern is not simply that powerful women are feared; it is that their power is named, judged, and punished from a perspective that treats masculine authority as the norm.

Mythic Power and Punishment

A poem contrasts the treatment of male and female forms of power. When love takes a perfect human form and rises in anger, it flees; when power takes a female form, however, that power itself is punished. Medusa embodies the resulting recoil: men shrink from her, and her writhing locks mark the fearful image through which female power is made repellent. The contrast turns the poem’s attention from the supposed danger of women to the unequal response that danger provokes. Power is not condemned in itself; it becomes intolerable when embodied as female.

The Siren and the Sphinx extend the argument through different mythic fates. The Siren continues to sing, while virtuous men protect themselves by binding their ears and eyes and sailing away. Her desire is lovely in song but mortal in its kiss, so the narrative gives her allure and danger together, while the men’s withdrawal presents containment as prudent self-defense. The Sphinx, by contrast, moves freely through the desert and smiles at men who fail to recognize that the answer to her riddle is merely Man. Once men discover the answer, they spill her blood for her presumption and monstrous shape. Naming the answer becomes an act of mastery: man names himself and assumes power over the questioner who had been his fate. The Sphinx’s death thus joins the designation of female form as monstrous to the seizure of interpretive authority by men.

Dahud and the Politics of Desire

Sabine’s account of Dahud brings the mythic pattern into an argument about freedom and authorship. She had intended the wild sorceress to embody the desire for freedom, autonomy, and women’s own proper passion—qualities that, in her formulation, men seem to fear. Dahud is loved by the Ocean, and her excesses bring about the engulfing and drowning of the City of Is by that same Ocean. In the inherited interpretation Sabine considers, the catastrophe is explained through a gathering of fears: pagan cults, sensual passion let loose in women, and the Ocean as nemesis and fate. Woman, paganism, and the sea are made into interlocking dangers, and the legend’s violent ending appears to confirm the threat attributed to them.

Sabine also records an alternative possibility in her father’s account of Dahud’s name: in ancient times, it meant “The good sorceress.” He suggests that Dahud may preserve a memory of a pagan priestess, perhaps a virgin priestess of the Druids on Île de Sein, or of an earlier world in which women held power. The possibilities he invokes include Avallon, the Floating Isles, and the Gaelic Síd. This alternative does not erase the destructive ending of the City of Is, but it changes what the story can mean: the sorceress may recall female authority displaced by the arrival of warriors and priests, rather than simply personify a danger that must be defeated.

Sabine’s objection is directed at the authority that turns a particular reading of fear into a universal claim about humanity. She asks why women’s desire and the senses should be so terrifying, and challenges the author who presents men’s fears as the fears of the whole human race. In the interpretation she resists, women become witches, outcasts, sorceresses, and monsters: categories that make female desire legible as deviance while obscuring the male perspective that imposed them. Her criticism gives the myth an explicitly gendered interpretive conflict. The issue is not only what Dahud does, but who gets to explain her actions and define what they signify.

Myth in Daily Life

The conversation between Sabine and Christabel LaMotte carries the question of female power from legendary women into customs and stories shared in the household. During her recovery, Christabel walks with Gode and Dog Tray, takes part in daily domestic life, and talks with Sabine about the meanings of myths and legends. Their exchange includes Sabine’s account of the village girls’ May Day dance around a standing stone: they move in two circles, one clockwise and one widdershins, and the girl who tires, falls, or touches the stone is attacked by the others. Sabine’s father interprets the rite as a possible remnant of ancient sacrifice and reads the stone as a male symbol, while the women’s nighttime practices around it are associated with hopes for strong sons or husbands’ safe return.

Christabel responds to the dance by identifying its fallen girl with the Fallen Woman, saying that the others stone her. Sabine corrects the literal detail: the women now strike the fallen girl with hands and feet rather than stones. Christabel answers that those are not the most cruel punishments. The exchange makes the social logic of the myth visible in a living custom: the woman who falls outside the circle is disciplined by the group, while the ritual’s possible sacrificial meaning remains present beneath the changed form of the blows. Female power and female transgression are not confined to supernatural figures; they are also organized through communal judgment of women who stumble.

The discussion of the standing stone further complicates the boundary between old and new authority. Sabine recounts the view that a church spire transformed the earlier stone into another form, and that local saints could be understood as powers inhabiting a particular spring or tree. Christabel laughs at the account of the Church absorbing and partly overcoming pagan deities, yet the story leaves that absorption incomplete: older powers persist within altered names and sites. The same interpretive pressure operates in the treatment of women. A tradition may rename, domesticate, or condemn female power without making its underlying presence disappear.

Significance

Across the poem, Dahud’s story, and the May Day rite, the monstrous feminine is shown as an effect of interpretation as well as an image within myth. Medusa is recoiled from, the Siren’s song is resisted, and the Sphinx is killed once men have named the answer to her riddle; Dahud’s passion is folded into an account of catastrophe and male fear. These stories distribute authority unevenly: women appear as the questions, desires, or dangers to be managed, while men claim the power to interpret and define them. Sabine’s reading contests that arrangement by insisting that women possess their own desire for autonomy and that male fear should not pass as universal truth.

The concept therefore connects literary representation with everyday discipline. The fallen dancer’s punishment echoes the legendary woman made monstrous, while Christabel’s intervention identifies a cruelty that a description of the custom as mere blows might otherwise minimize. Neither the myths nor the village ritual offers a simple escape from violence; instead, the novel places their inherited meanings under discussion, allowing women’s interpretation to expose what those meanings conceal. Female autonomy appears in this struggle over who may speak, what women’s desire means, and whether a woman who resists the prescribed circle must be condemned as monstrous.