Revisiting Ancient Women: Pandora
Pandora, John William Waterhouse, 1896
Pandora. Upon only the utterance of her name, most everyone can envision a woman, her fateful box, and a world that suffers eternal consequences. Yet as a myth that’s become largely socialized into current pop culture and media, we often forget the original details of Pandora’s story. While no one can misremember the ending — a world tainted with every thinkable evil — we frequently erase key details that enabled that conclusion to come to fruition. In order to adequately understand Pandora and how ancient mythology continues to affect gender norms at large, we must revisit one of the myths we so often forget.
Pandora and her story are first written about by the Greek poet Hesiod. A contemporary of Homer, Hesiod lived circa 700 BCE and wrote in the style of epic poetry. His most distinguished works are entitled Theogony and Works and Days. It’s in both of those poems where Pandora’s story comes to life. Pandora is the first woman to ever be created, and is done so at the order of an enraged Zeus. For context, Zeus is angered by Prometheus, a Titan, who steals fire from the gods to give to humans. As a punishment to mankind, Zeus commands Hephaestus, another god, to create a female mortal. Enlisting assistance from other gods, Hephaestus and the likes of Hermes, Athena, and Aphrodite pass down traits to the new woman, such as beauty, charm, and curiosity. And with that, Pandora is born.
Following this origin story, Zeus sends Pandora to Earth with the intention of gifting her as a wife to Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus. Zeus provides Pandora with her infamous box as a wedding present and instructs her to never open it. Seeing as Pandora was designed to be curious, this instruction is impossible to follow. Her wandering mind wins, and Pandora opens the box to peek inside. With that, the contents are released into the world. And what was inside that box? Yes, you know it: Evils. Pandora quickly slams the box shut and leaves just one thing left inside: hope.
Now that we’re caught up on Pandora’s story, we can begin to dissect its implications for both the ancient and modern world. In its shortened form, Pandora is portrayed criminally as she introduces our world to all evils (notice how this trope arises again with the biblical story of Adam and Eve). But when looking further, we see that Pandora is less of a criminal and more so a passive pawn in a larger power grab between the gods and mortals. Firstly, Pandora is only created as a product of Zeus’s anger towards Prometheus. Secondly, Zeus is the one to arrange the marriage between Pandora and Epimetheus, which is the only reason Pandora ends up with her box in the first place. And lastly, Zeus is the one to fill the box with every evil and pass it off to Pandora. Zeus knows that Pandora was created to be curious, and as such, purposefully places the box in what he knows to be an unreliable hand, effectively fixing the outcome of this story. From this perspective, Pandora is simply a bystander caught up in a messy game of revenge; Zeus, instead, is the culpable perpetrator.
This deeper interpretation morphs the perception of Pandora from a determined evil-doer into something much sadder: a victim of the patriarchal system she existed within. After all, Pandora had little to no agency in her life. She was created by demand and ushered off into a marriage. The one time she thinks she’s making her own decision (when she opens the box), happens to have also been pre-determined by Zeus, an omnipotent male. But seeing as this analysis relies on details veiled in the original story and practically lost in modern retellings, we, too, lose this alternate understanding of Pandora’s humanity. Instead we’re left grappling with what it means for women to have been created as a punishment, for the first woman to exist to have been considered cruel, and for a female to be the one responsible for unleashing all things awful into our world, similar to Eve being the source of original sin.
If this attempt to avenge Pandora’s name is futile and her story in full instead remains forgotten, let us at least remember one thing: Pandora slammed her box closed when she realized what happened. In fact, that’s the only decision she made without the puppeteering hand of Zeus. And in that slamming of her box, she left us with one thing: Hope. So, I ask, if nothing else, let the hope she kept in that box be the same hope we use in this fight for women’s rights, in this fight to be anti-sexist.