Unconventional women in myth history

Abstract

The history of Greek Myths is full of transgressive female characters: witches, brutal fighters, deplorable mothers, cruel killers, unforgiven and unforgivable lovers, to mention a few. It’s just in Myth history that they find themselves a position, next to the larger, and maybe more known, male counterpart. But the rulebreakers here portrayed, divided by the Author into three separate types of women (the indipendents; the heartbreakers; the truly not very exemplar wives and mothers), speak for themselves: they find their own narrative context that gives them leading roles (that sometimes are not so praiseworthy) in Classical Mythology. Among the different functions, reported in this article, a Myth could have, there’s the one that shows what is ethically inaccettable for a certain culture. The criminological analysis of these stories helps to focus more on which female behaviours are not accettable in a particular culture, the Greek one, on which the whole Western culture in based upon.