The hero's handmaid: Female helpers in the Homeric epics and the 'Mahabharata' (Greece, India)

This dissertation presents an analysis of six scene-types found in the Homeric epics and the Mahabharata, most of which involve the interactions of male heroes with semi-divine female helper-figures. The first type under discussion is the hero's encounter with a powerful demi-goddess, represented by Circe and Calypso in the Odyssey and Hidimba in the Mahabharata. The second type contains a water-dwelling, and often theriomorphic female and comprises two pairs: Leukothea and Ulupi, and Eidothea and Varga. The "Encounter with the Marriageable Young Princess" treats the meetings with Nausicaa and Citrangada, and Athena and Ganga provide examples of the powerful goddess who steps in to drive the hero's chariot in battle. Finally, the Cyclops is paired with the Mahabharata's Baka to provide a counterpoint to the examples of female helpers, and to provide evidence for the contention that the parallels found in the helper-episodes are not the product of universal archetypes governing male-female relations, but the result of descent from a common source.; Genetic relationship between the paired scenes is indicated by the presence of underlying narrative patterns upon which each set of scenes is constructed. Though the episodes have all undergone significant evolutionary change, the narrative armatures which underly them have preserved enough unique themes to leave intact groups of elements which we can point to as parallels. Several of the narrative pairs also preserve an identical ordering of their components, and others present us with philological evidence for a relationship. The themes and motifs which make up a narrative are far more "portable" than verbal elements; in transmission a story is far more likely to retain its sequence of major events than its exact words. Thus the presence of parallel verbal elements suggests that there was some degree of textual fixity to the proto-epic material which subsequently evolved into the separate traditions. These constellations of similar elements indicate that the epics arose from a common source, and one more structured than a diffuse mass of individual folktales from which each tradition picked and chose.