Toeti Heraty (1933–2021)

Blaming women for anything that goes wrong has a long history. In Judeo-Christian cultures it goes right back to Eve being responsible for the Fall of Man, and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Not only does the God punish Eve more severely because she tempted Adam to disobey the command that forbade them to eat from the Tree of Good and Evil—he also sets her up to be under the patriarchal thumb for evermore:

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. (King James Bible, Genesis 3:16)

In countless depictions of this allegory by artists, (see Albrecht Dürer's version) Eve is a saucy wench while Adam is depicted as a victim of her wiles.
In Greek mythology there is the story of Pandora whose curiosity led her to open a jar mistranslated, (according to Wikipedia) as a box by Erasmus in the 16th century), thereby releasing all the evils that beset humanity. When the Romans appropriated Greek mythology and made it their own, they appropriated Pandora too. So you only have to spend a cursory amount of time among Roman writers (or Robert Graves' I Claudius (1934) which I'm currently reading in a desultory sort of way) to find that women cause all the trouble — Livia Drusilla, for example, presiding as arch-villain over generations of Roman emperors, confirms the role of women as interfering, wilful, and handy with poison into the bargain.

From a feminist point-of-view, whenever people seek to vindicate God to answer the question of why a good God permits evil, (theodicy) women are at fault. Both Eve and Pandora were the first women on Earth; and each is condemned for provoking the transition from a paradise of plenty and ease in eternity to a life of suffering, struggle and death. Human misery is the punishment for woman's transgression of divine law, and you can see all kinds of depictions of her perfidy in any number of Renaissance artworks. All our fairy tales from the Snow Queen to Cinderella to the Sleeping Beauty show any woman with power to be misusing it, and the only way any other kind of woman can triumph is through the power of loving kindness. (And then all she gets as a reward is some prince lording it over her instead). In the Middle Ages, any woman who knew anything about herbalism was promptly burned as a witch if anything terrible happened, and the modern tragedy of burning and disfiguring women in places like India is just one example for how blaming the woman persists to the present day.
So it comes as no surprise to find that there is a version of Blame the Woman from 12th Balinese and Javanese folklore. Wikipedia tells us that Calon Arang was a witch and a master of black magic.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/01/19/calon-arang-the-story-of-a-woman-sacrificed-...… (plus d'informations)