Caputi, Jane. Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture . Madison : U of Wisconsin P (Popular Press series), 2004.

hough some will disagree with its theoretical assumptions and specific conclusions, the essay collection Goddesses and Monsters finds cultural critic Jane Caputi engaged in three decades of carefully sustained, wide-ranging, and valuable conversation about the relationship between feminism and popular culture. The volume will be especially enjoyable for those feminists such as Nancy Summers, who fear that “feminism has come to seem even more endangered, more cut off from a popular and a political base, more threatened by conservative tendencies from without and by divisions from within” (in Greene & Kahn, 1993). In Caputi's work one finds a refreshingly explicit political and substantially radical second wave agenda, one honed and refined by the many feminisms of the third wave.

Most centrally, Caputi works from the second wave anthem “the personal is political,” connecting the most private issues of patriarchal oppression (incest and rape for example) to the institutional means of enforcement (developments in technology and “nuclearism” in particular). Though the emerging portrait of modern culture is unceasingly grim, Caputi sustains herself and her readings with a passionate belief in re-visioning the world through a radical, ecofeminist, goddess-centered consciousness:

A master consciousness (Griffin, 1989) splits the integrity of being, releasing destructive power as surely as when the atom is split and generating a series of false oppositions. “Otherness,” the basis of oppression, is created when the self is split, and what is disowned, feared, and denied in the self is projected onto another being or group (Hock, 1979; Eugene, 1994). The ‘other' is the stigmatized and warred against. A holistic, green, and gynocentric imagination seeks to restore to the divine (and to the self) those necessary aspects of the whole that have been demonized and made into the ‘other.'

Caputi's consistent goal in the last thirty years has been nothing less than tracing the signs of the “master consciousness” in past and contemporary popular culture—and then digging out the signs of an ongoing feminist resistance, “faint markings that can be deepened and filled in, trails that can be followed, not only into the mythic past, but also into an alternative future.” Although she recognizes that “Feminist invocation of various ancient Goddess traditions is often dismissed as naïve, simplistic, static, and essentialist,” she holds firmly to the reclaiming of a “necessarily dynamic and dualistic Nature” that has been lost through a patriarchal distortion of goddess and monster myths.

Essays are organized into four sections: “Patriarchal Myths,” “Gods and Monsters,” “Myths and Technology,” and “Female Potency.” They date from her influential 1978 essay “Jaws as Patriarchal Myth” to the newly penned and co-authored “Femme Noire,” both part of the opening section which outlines Caputi's claim that the sexist and racist foundations of popular culture rest in the patriarchal narrative of inequality. In “Sleeping with the Enemy as Pretty Woman Part II,” for example, two films that appear to be polar opposites are explored as equally dependent on pervasive and destructive myths of female submission and male reform found both in the romance and thriller genres. And these narratives, in turn, are most often dependent upon a dark “other,” a “monstrous” woman (or sometimes man) of color, making the white woman complicit in the colonializing agenda of a film such as Aliens. Caputi is highly aware of the controversial nature of her claims, and of the political climate that shapes counterclaims. In the section's closing essay, “Pornography of Everyday Life,” for example, she locates her critique of pornography within the highly charged feminist debate on the topic, resisting the binary argument that to oppose pornography is to advocate “sexual repression or censorship.” It is a sexuality grounded in inequality, not sexuality itself, that she resists.

In “Gods and Monsters,” Caputi focuses on recurring mythic figures such as the serial killer, and especially Jack the Ripper (who reappears throughout the volume). She sees such men as a necessary outcome and not a perversion of core patriarchal values and visions. Of the main character in Natural Born Killers , for example, she claims, “The serial killer is actually ‘the cop,' the enforcer of such foundational values as male supremacy, violent masculinity, egocentrism, consumerism, excess, and the erotic joys of domination.” Equally charged is her companion claim for the “morally bankrupt vision” of Forest Gump and “the utter banality of the ‘good' in Gump , which makes the aesthetically rich and sensualized evil in Natural Born Killers irresistibly attractive.” In opposition to this normative popular culture, Caputi offers us Peter Bratt's Follow Me Home, a box office and critical failure which “reverses the damages, the hidden pain, of colonial terrorism.”

In “Myth and Technology,” the idea of the “personal as political” emerges most explicitly, as Caputi interrogates the links between technology, especially nuclear weaponry, and patriarchy. We see, too, in “Seeing Elephants: The Myths of Phallotechnology,” written in 1988, Caputi's emerging new historical approach, which plays out in clever, detailed critique of the disturbing congruencies between Reagan's and Lucas' versions of “Star Wars” and in strong condemnation of the subliminally seductive and misleading advertising campaigns for developing computer technologies in the 80's. Linking all this to the Nazi produced Triumph of Will , Caputi believes that “under the influence of such systematic lying, we are expected to forget and forgo originality and/or reality, finally accepting the apparitions as the inevitable or preferred replacements for the palpable life.”

In her final section Caputi excavates the sites of goddess history and meaning, first uncovering the patriarchal distortions of ancient goddess figures in order to then construct “new visions of divinity, pleasure, sex, and power.” Moving among the works of French feminist Luce Irigaray, second wave radical Mary Daly, Native American writers Louise Erdrich and Paula Gunn Allen, ecofeminist Susan Griffin, and artist Judy Chicago among many others, Caputi turns to a feminine principle rooted in the natural body, one which stands equally in opposition to the patriarchal caricature and fetish—and to the Donna Haraway cyborg, which, for Caputi, “emerges out of a disastrous perception of human separation from animals.” Moments such as this, when Caputi directly engages the many feminisms of the third wave, make this a potentially valuable text for Women's Studies courses of many kinds, especially feminist theory or gender and popular culture.

Caputi's critique of popular culture moves toward engagement in any number of current popular and academic conversations with a goal of conversion. She is careful to contextualize her argument and to set out her method and its scope, as for example when she enters into the highly charged area of censorship: “I am not in any way calling for censorship. Banning something is akin to psychological defense mechanism of denial and repression. What is denied will find expression another way; what is repressed will return, sometimes with more force than it had in the first place.” Her hope, instead, is that “Those who want to shift the shape of things to come in the direction of justice, peace, and communitarianism can tap into the powers of imagination, soul, and myth to tell a different story about who we are and what and where we have been, to imagine possibilities for growth, transformation, and healing, and to effect these changes via their art/work. And viewers can, too.” She offers her readings in contrast to the mainstream cultural criticism that she believes all too often participates in the patriarchal vision of the works they read. In this comment on Psycho and cannibalization, for example, Caputi indicts film, filmmaker, and critic alike: “So complete is his [Bates'] consumption of the mother that other characters in the film, as well as most reviewers, accept as true his version of what she actually, in life, was like. Murdered by her own son, of course, she cannot speak for herself.”

Goddesses and Monsters is a rewarding read. Anyone with an interest in the popular culture of the last three decades, especially as it resonates with traditional myths from a wide range of cultures, will enjoy this narrative of a perceptive feminist reader hard at work, one equally at home talking about Tolkein, The Matrix, the Internet, Susan Griffin, Native American myth, and widely circulating jokes. And, though valuable as individual readings of isolated artifacts, these essays taken together provide compelling evidence for Captuti's claims about both feminism and popular culture, and the future of our world. Equally interesting, this is an instructive history of a second wave feminist making her way into the new millennium, a scholar and a woman, dedicated equally to careful textual, critical analysis and to her readers' individual and social well being. Although few readings will seem startlingly new to most readers of this journal, it is the comprehensive nature, the weight of the evidence that impresses. Caputi means to teach us through depth, repetition, and congruence to be resisting readers of the images and ideas that inundate us. Like Adrienne Rich, Caputi continues to play a pivotal role in bringing theory into practice, in seeing that the academic conversation comes out into the fresh air and moves the culture forward in perceptible ways.