Minor and Marginal(ized)? Rethinking Women as Minor Characters in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

• Author: Sonik, Karen

ONE AND MANY: MINOR CHARACTERS IN NARRATIVE SPACE

In his seminal study on character and characterization, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (2003), Alexander Woloch defined character space as the intersection of a character, an "implied human personality--that is, as Dostoevsky says, 'infinitely' complex--with the definitively circumscribed form of a narrative." (1) Within the structure of the narrative, the protagonist, the one, asserts significantly more space than the many, the "minor characters." But we ignore these many, who are often unique and coherent personalities in their own right, despite the more limited character spaces they assert, at our peril--or, at least, the peril of eliding much of the richness and variety of the larger narrative. Narrative meaning, Woloch observed, emerges in the dynamic attention to and neglect of the characters who inhabit the same story but occupy different positions therein. (2)

Woloch's foregrounding of character represented a marked departure from major literary approaches of the twentieth century, in which characters and characterization had been subordinated to investigations of narrative form. Theorists like Vladimir Propp (1895-1970), Algirdas Greimas (1917-1992), and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) deliberately decoupled "literary characters from their implied humanness... [as] the price of entry into a theoretical perspective on characterization." (3)

The Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, for example, analyzed characters on the basis not of personality or psychology but rather of the "unity of the actions assigned them by the narrative." (4) He argued that "characters of a tale, however varied they may be, often perform the same actions" or (in his terminology) functions, villain (e.g., pursuit), donor (e.g., provides hero with magical agent), helper (e.g., rescue from pursuit). (5) Function was defined as the act of a character, seen from the point of view of the act's significance for the course of the (narrative) action. (6) Propp's work influenced that of the French-Lithuanian semiotician Algirdas Greimas, whose development of an actantial typology defined characters not by what they are but rather by what they do. (7) The many characters in a narrative were thus regarded as "equivalent to the elementary functions of grammatical analysis." (8)

The work on character by the Russian philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin, which gained posthumous popularity in the 1980s, was more complex and challenging. Bakhtin's polyphonic characters were not objects of authorial discourse but rather autonomous carriers representing "a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world." (9) Bakhtin also developed the idea of character zones, the character's "sphere of influence on the authorial context surrounding him, a sphere that extends--often quite far--beyond the boundaries of the direct discourse allotted to him." (10) This conceptualization may have influenced Woloch's own elucidation of character spaces to a degree, but Bakhtin's interest in character zones was primarily for their relevance to stylistic and linguistic analysis. (11)

In effacing the personalities within the narratives they investigated, many twentieth-century theorists seemed to render narrativity more visible: each (major or minor) character or implied person within a narrative, after all, represents a potential disruption of or from that narrative. But this effacement came at the cost of diminishing the complexity and power that characters bring to these same narratives:

Every character has two destinies... his or her fate as an implied person within the plot or story-world itself and his or her fate as a potential narrative site of attention with a precarious, contingent, and always dynamically developing space in the narrative discourse... all characters are potentially over-delimited within the fictional world--and might disrupt the narrative if we pay them the attention that they deserve. (12)

My aim in this study is to do exactly this: to pay the minor characters of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, with a focus on the women, the attention they deserve, and so to shed new light on both characterization and narrative. This approach counters the tendency to regard the characters of Mesopotamia's extant literature as flat stereotypes or archetypes rather than as rounded personalities in their own rights (13)--a tendency that has impeded the work of elucidating narrative meaning.

MINOR CHARACTERS AND CHARACTERIZATION IN THE SB EPIC OF GILGAMESH

The SB Epic of Gilgamesh--although it is the most widely known and researched of Mesopotamia's extant literary compositions--has been little studied in comparison to the great works of the ancient Greek or Roman world. But Andrew George's magisterial 2003 edition of the extant Akkadian Gilgamesh narratives has facilitated research into the SB epic, casting its narrative structure, events, and characters in striking new lights. (14)

Analyses of the SB Epic of Gilgamesh are, unsurprisingly, usually centered on Gilgamesh as protagonist--and, to a lesser extent, on Gilgamesh in relation to his companion, Enkidu. (15) But the epic also includes a number of personalities who, though they cannot and do not anchor the narrative, yet assert sufficient space to emerge as distinct and important individuals. (16) In addition to a series of male or ungendered figures, (17) the cast of minor characters includes a number of striking female personalities: Aruru, the often-overlooked mother goddess who actually creates Enkidu in the wilderness; Shamhat, the prostitute who initiates Enkidu into civilization; (18) Ninsun, mother of Gilgamesh, who adopts Enkidu into her family and thus completes his social integration and metamorphosis from homo ferus to homo urbanus; (19) Aya, goddess and wife of the sun god Shamash, who is asked by Ninsun to intercede with her husband to assure Gilgamesh's safety on his dangerous journey to the Cedar Forest; (20) Ishtar, the goddess associated with sexuality, war, and various transgressive deeds, whose marriage proposal to Gilgamesh precipitates the unforgivably hubristic response that leads to Enkidu's death; the scorpion-man's woman--presumably a scorpion-woman to match her husband--who discerns Gilgamesh's true nature as part (one-third) mortal despite his bearing (two-thirds) of the flesh of the gods; Shiduri, (21) the alewife at the ocean's shore, who encounters Gilgamesh after he successfully navigates the Path of the Sun, and who directs him in how to cross the ocean and the Waters of Death; (22) and Uta-napishti's (immortal) wife, who intercedes with her husband to assure that the social demands of hospitality are met. Her intervention assures that Gilgamesh is not (inappropriately) sent home from his extraordinary quest empty-handed.

A number of interesting points emerge when the eight women of the epic are considered together:

1. Four of the eight are goddesses in their own right: Aruru, Ninsun, Aya, and Ishtar. A fifth, Shiduri, possesses divine status of a sort--her name is written with the divine determinative as dsi-du-ri X 1--though she is also named by her profession as alewife or brewer (sabitu). (23) The sixth, the scorpion-man's woman, is presumably possessed of "supernatural" status but does not number among the gods proper. And the seventh, Uta-napishti's woman, has been awarded immortality by Enlil and so rendered like, if not precisely one of, the gods (XI 204).

2. Two of the eight are explicitly named only as wives and are relegated thereby (at least on initial view) to the status of appendages to their mates: the scorpion-man's woman and Uta-napishti's woman. The speech of these women, which is recorded in the narrative, is addressed only to their husbands--who do speak and interact directly with Gilgamesh. A third, Aya, similarly appears in the narrative in reference to her husband, the sun god Shamash, with whom she is asked to intercede to ensure the protection of Gilgamesh. Ninsun, mother of Gilgamesh, is, interestingly, excluded from this group: her consort, Lugal-banda (I 35), is a distinctly remote presence in the SB epic. The many-times mated Ishtar is similarly excluded: she is never a mere appendage to anyone.

3. Three of the eight are explicitly unfettered women characterized as belonging to the "extra-domestic" domain: (24) Shamhat, Shiduri, and Ishtar. Shamhat, as a harimtu or (cultic?) prostitute, would not have participated in a normative family unit. She might live a fraught and wretched or comparatively pleasant life--as Enkidu's own alternate curses and blessings of Shamhat in the SB epic reveal (VII 102-61). But she is undoubtedly an urban figure and one with a standing that should not be overlooked. In the city of Uruk especially, which had the boundary-transgressing Ishtar as its patron goddess, many such women were employed as cultic prostitutes in temples of Ninsun or Ishtar (III 42, VI 158-59), and Shamhat herself might have belonged to the temple of Anu and Ishtar (II 216-17). (25) The alewife Shiduri, similarly, has a profession typical to urban settings, even if this is not where she is spatially situated in the narrative. (26) Shiduri in the SB epic is specifically described as veiled (X 4), a signifier of respectable status not typical of the usual alewife; this signifier has been associated with her other functioning within the composition as a "mysterious goddess of wisdom." (27) Both Shamhat and Shiduri, then, are distinguished by their roles not only as "working women," (28) but also as women characteristic of an urban setting--even if neither is encountered within the city. (29) They are distinguished also by their ties to the goddess Ishtar, who is associated both with the alehouse and with prostitution. (30) Ishtar, a major goddess in her own right, is an unfettered woman par excellence...