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Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India
Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are doubled, who double themselves, who are seduced by gods doubling as mortals, whose bodies are split or divided. In Splitting the Difference, the renowned scholar of mythology Wendy Doniger recounts and compares a vast range of these tales from ancient Greece and India, with occasional recourse to more recent "double features" from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Face/Off.
Myth, Doniger argues, responds to the complexities of the human condition by multiplying or splitting its characters into unequal parts, and these sloughed and cloven selves animate mythology's prodigious plots of sexuality and mortality. Doniger's comparisons show that ultimately differences in gender are more significant than differences in culture; Greek and Indian stories of doubled women resemble each other more than they do tales of doubled men in the same culture. In casting Hindu and Greek mythologies as shadows of each other, Doniger shows that culture is sometimes but the shadow of gender.
Myth, Doniger argues, responds to the complexities of the human condition by multiplying or splitting its characters into unequal parts, and these sloughed and cloven selves animate mythology's prodigious plots of sexuality and mortality. Doniger's comparisons show that ultimately differences in gender are more significant than differences in culture; Greek and Indian stories of doubled women resemble each other more than they do tales of doubled men in the same culture. In casting Hindu and Greek mythologies as shadows of each other, Doniger shows that culture is sometimes but the shadow of gender.
383 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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August 8, 2025
#Reviewing my previous reads, #Overrated Books To Roast:
If Splitting the Difference were a dinner party, it would be the kind where the host insists on serving moussaka and masoor dal on the same plate, then spends the evening telling you how they’re “basically the same dish” if you squint hard enough. Ancient Greece and India? Sure, both are ancient, both have myths, and both had people who could string a coherent narrative together without TikTok, but from there the similarities collapse faster than Icarus’s career prospects.
Doniger tries to build a bridge between the Parthenon and the Ganga, but it’s the kind of bridge that creaks ominously, has missing planks, and was clearly designed by someone who has never actually been to either shore.
Greek myth is essentially the family drama of a divine soap opera: gods with Olympic abs and the emotional range of reality TV contestants, squabbling, seducing, and throwing thunderbolts when bored. Mortals get caught in the crossfire, doomed to tragedy because of hubris, fate, or some god who woke up in a bad mood. Indian myth, by contrast, is a vast, cyclic, meditative swirl—creation, preservation, destruction, repeat—with time scales so absurdly huge that an entire Greek epic would register as a lunch break.
The Greeks give you Oedipus blinded by the truth; India gives you Shiva with a third eye that can literally incinerate the universe. Trying to “split the difference” here is like comparing a chess match to the Mahabharata because “they both have kings.”
But here’s the real fun—Doniger seems undeterred by these tectonic cultural differences. In her hands, Zeus and Indra become essentially the same archetype: sky dudes with lightning toys and authority complexes. Never mind that in Greece, the thunderbolt is a prop for kingly dominance, while in India, Indra’s vajra is embedded in a cosmological and ritual framework tied to Vedic sacrifice and Buddhist symbolism.
By flattening these into a single “male storm-god” template, Doniger commits the comparative mythologist’s cardinal sin: she trades in the richness of context for the cheap thrill of spotting a motif. It’s like claiming Dracula and Hanuman are the same character because they both climb walls.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where the dangers of overgeneralization rear their head. Comparative mythology at its best is nuanced, historically aware, and allergic to one-size-fits-all readings. At its worst—and Splitting the Difference occasionally flirts with this worst—it’s basically mythological speed dating. “Flood myth?
Oh my god, India and Greece both have one! Twinsies!”
Except no, not twinsies.
In Greece, the flood is Deucalion and Pyrrha repopulating the earth through a kind of stone-based miracle. In India, it’s Manu and a fish with serious cosmic responsibilities, leading into moral and metaphysical territory the Greeks never touched. Reducing these stories to “just two flood myths” is like calling Hamlet and The Lion King the same story because there’s an uncle problem and someone dies.
Then comes the pièce de résistance: the Doniger-ism. If you’ve read enough of her work, you start to recognize the signature spice blend. Step one: pour Freud on everything until it drips with latent sexuality.
Step two: reinterpret ritual objects, architectural elements, and cosmological symbols as erotic stand-ins. Step three: deliver it all with a wink, half daring the reader to be shocked.
When it works, it’s subversive and exhilarating. When it doesn’t, it’s like watching someone misinterpret a fire extinguisher as a fertility idol. You can practically hear Shiva sighing in the background, “Not everything I touch is a metaphor for sex, Wendy.”
Greek myth doesn’t escape unscathed from this treatment either. Marriage rituals become elaborate penetrative metaphors; chariot races become symbolic seductions; Hera’s jealousy is sexual insecurity with a crown.
The problem isn’t that sex is irrelevant—it’s often deeply relevant—but that Doniger sometimes applies it like ranch dressing at an American chain restaurant: to everything. The tragedy of this approach is that it can eclipse equally important readings—theological, philosophical, and sociopolitical—until the myths look less like cultural blueprints and more like an extended therapy session for the gods.
Another delightful quirk is how the book’s title, Splitting the Difference, promises negotiation and balance but delivers more of a mythological mash-up. The phrase implies a kind of even-handed arbitration between two sides; what we get instead is a sustained exercise in forcing two very differently shaped puzzle pieces to fit by sanding off their edges. And yes, you can eventually jam the Parthenon into the Kailasa Temple if you ignore 90% of the architecture and just point at the columns—but you’ve also missed the point of both structures entirely.
The danger here isn’t just academic sloppiness; it’s cultural distortion. By hammering Indian and Greek myths into the same archetypal frames, you risk erasing what makes them distinctive, what makes them worth studying separately in the first place.
Greek anthropocentrism—where the gods are humanlike in flaw and form — is fundamentally different from Indian cosmocentrism, where gods are vast, elemental principles incarnating to balance the cosmic ledger. Zeus sleeps around because he’s a horny power broker; Krishna dances with the gopis because he’s the bliss of divine play manifest in human form. Call them both “godly lovers” and you’ve missed the profound chasm between lust and līlā.
Of course, Doniger is too smart a scholar to be unaware of these differences, which makes the oversimplifications all the more exasperating. It’s like watching a world-class chef knowingly put ketchup on a soufflé.
You want to yell, “You could do better than this!” but by then the soufflé is red and the ketchup bottle is empty. She does occasionally acknowledge that parallels have limits, but then barrels on as if those limits were charming aesthetic choices rather than fundamental problems in the method.
The book’s intellectual energy is undeniable—Doniger writes with a verve that many drier mythologists could envy. But in Splitting the Difference, that energy becomes a kind of relative adrenaline rush, an academic extreme sport: how far can we stretch the parallels before they snap? Sometimes they hold; often, they fray. And when they fray, the reader is left dangling over a pit of questionable analogies.
The funniest part is that even if you buy into the comparative method wholesale, the “gender” part of the subtitle doesn’t always get the nuanced treatment it deserves. Gender in Greek myth is bound to the polis, to civic order, to the drama of public and private spheres; gender in Indian myth is tied to dharma, cosmic order, and often the transcendence of binary categories.
Hera’s authority plays out in the council of Olympus; Parvati’s power is embedded in tantric theology and the shakti principle. To treat them as iterations of the same “goddess archetype” is not splitting the difference—it’s flattening the terrain until the mountains and valleys vanish.
By the time you finish the book, you half-expect a sequel comparing Norse frost giants and Japanese kami because “they both live in chilly places.” And maybe that’s the real point: Doniger’s comparative reach is bold, almost recklessly so, and for readers who love the fireworks of improbable parallels, it’s a wild ride.
But if you’re hoping for methodological discipline, careful cultural contextualization, and respect for difference as much as similarity, you might feel like you’ve been sold a bridge that doesn’t quite reach the other side.
It’s tempting to wrap this review with a fake academic blurb: “Finally, a book that proves Shiva and Zeus are basically bros separated at birth, united by their mutual love of weather control and questionable romantic ethics.” — Journal of Overstretched Analogies. But that would be too easy.
The truth is, Splitting the Difference is at once dazzling and infuriating, a high-wire act that sometimes lands gracefully and sometimes plummets into the net. The real tragedy is that the fall is almost always preventable—if only the book had respected difference as much as it adores splitting it.
Give it a pass. I’ve already wasted my time on this one.
If Splitting the Difference were a dinner party, it would be the kind where the host insists on serving moussaka and masoor dal on the same plate, then spends the evening telling you how they’re “basically the same dish” if you squint hard enough. Ancient Greece and India? Sure, both are ancient, both have myths, and both had people who could string a coherent narrative together without TikTok, but from there the similarities collapse faster than Icarus’s career prospects.
Doniger tries to build a bridge between the Parthenon and the Ganga, but it’s the kind of bridge that creaks ominously, has missing planks, and was clearly designed by someone who has never actually been to either shore.
Greek myth is essentially the family drama of a divine soap opera: gods with Olympic abs and the emotional range of reality TV contestants, squabbling, seducing, and throwing thunderbolts when bored. Mortals get caught in the crossfire, doomed to tragedy because of hubris, fate, or some god who woke up in a bad mood. Indian myth, by contrast, is a vast, cyclic, meditative swirl—creation, preservation, destruction, repeat—with time scales so absurdly huge that an entire Greek epic would register as a lunch break.
The Greeks give you Oedipus blinded by the truth; India gives you Shiva with a third eye that can literally incinerate the universe. Trying to “split the difference” here is like comparing a chess match to the Mahabharata because “they both have kings.”
But here’s the real fun—Doniger seems undeterred by these tectonic cultural differences. In her hands, Zeus and Indra become essentially the same archetype: sky dudes with lightning toys and authority complexes. Never mind that in Greece, the thunderbolt is a prop for kingly dominance, while in India, Indra’s vajra is embedded in a cosmological and ritual framework tied to Vedic sacrifice and Buddhist symbolism.
By flattening these into a single “male storm-god” template, Doniger commits the comparative mythologist’s cardinal sin: she trades in the richness of context for the cheap thrill of spotting a motif. It’s like claiming Dracula and Hanuman are the same character because they both climb walls.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where the dangers of overgeneralization rear their head. Comparative mythology at its best is nuanced, historically aware, and allergic to one-size-fits-all readings. At its worst—and Splitting the Difference occasionally flirts with this worst—it’s basically mythological speed dating. “Flood myth?
Oh my god, India and Greece both have one! Twinsies!”
Except no, not twinsies.
In Greece, the flood is Deucalion and Pyrrha repopulating the earth through a kind of stone-based miracle. In India, it’s Manu and a fish with serious cosmic responsibilities, leading into moral and metaphysical territory the Greeks never touched. Reducing these stories to “just two flood myths” is like calling Hamlet and The Lion King the same story because there’s an uncle problem and someone dies.
Then comes the pièce de résistance: the Doniger-ism. If you’ve read enough of her work, you start to recognize the signature spice blend. Step one: pour Freud on everything until it drips with latent sexuality.
Step two: reinterpret ritual objects, architectural elements, and cosmological symbols as erotic stand-ins. Step three: deliver it all with a wink, half daring the reader to be shocked.
When it works, it’s subversive and exhilarating. When it doesn’t, it’s like watching someone misinterpret a fire extinguisher as a fertility idol. You can practically hear Shiva sighing in the background, “Not everything I touch is a metaphor for sex, Wendy.”
Greek myth doesn’t escape unscathed from this treatment either. Marriage rituals become elaborate penetrative metaphors; chariot races become symbolic seductions; Hera’s jealousy is sexual insecurity with a crown.
The problem isn’t that sex is irrelevant—it’s often deeply relevant—but that Doniger sometimes applies it like ranch dressing at an American chain restaurant: to everything. The tragedy of this approach is that it can eclipse equally important readings—theological, philosophical, and sociopolitical—until the myths look less like cultural blueprints and more like an extended therapy session for the gods.
Another delightful quirk is how the book’s title, Splitting the Difference, promises negotiation and balance but delivers more of a mythological mash-up. The phrase implies a kind of even-handed arbitration between two sides; what we get instead is a sustained exercise in forcing two very differently shaped puzzle pieces to fit by sanding off their edges. And yes, you can eventually jam the Parthenon into the Kailasa Temple if you ignore 90% of the architecture and just point at the columns—but you’ve also missed the point of both structures entirely.
The danger here isn’t just academic sloppiness; it’s cultural distortion. By hammering Indian and Greek myths into the same archetypal frames, you risk erasing what makes them distinctive, what makes them worth studying separately in the first place.
Greek anthropocentrism—where the gods are humanlike in flaw and form — is fundamentally different from Indian cosmocentrism, where gods are vast, elemental principles incarnating to balance the cosmic ledger. Zeus sleeps around because he’s a horny power broker; Krishna dances with the gopis because he’s the bliss of divine play manifest in human form. Call them both “godly lovers” and you’ve missed the profound chasm between lust and līlā.
Of course, Doniger is too smart a scholar to be unaware of these differences, which makes the oversimplifications all the more exasperating. It’s like watching a world-class chef knowingly put ketchup on a soufflé.
You want to yell, “You could do better than this!” but by then the soufflé is red and the ketchup bottle is empty. She does occasionally acknowledge that parallels have limits, but then barrels on as if those limits were charming aesthetic choices rather than fundamental problems in the method.
The book’s intellectual energy is undeniable—Doniger writes with a verve that many drier mythologists could envy. But in Splitting the Difference, that energy becomes a kind of relative adrenaline rush, an academic extreme sport: how far can we stretch the parallels before they snap? Sometimes they hold; often, they fray. And when they fray, the reader is left dangling over a pit of questionable analogies.
The funniest part is that even if you buy into the comparative method wholesale, the “gender” part of the subtitle doesn’t always get the nuanced treatment it deserves. Gender in Greek myth is bound to the polis, to civic order, to the drama of public and private spheres; gender in Indian myth is tied to dharma, cosmic order, and often the transcendence of binary categories.
Hera’s authority plays out in the council of Olympus; Parvati’s power is embedded in tantric theology and the shakti principle. To treat them as iterations of the same “goddess archetype” is not splitting the difference—it’s flattening the terrain until the mountains and valleys vanish.
By the time you finish the book, you half-expect a sequel comparing Norse frost giants and Japanese kami because “they both live in chilly places.” And maybe that’s the real point: Doniger’s comparative reach is bold, almost recklessly so, and for readers who love the fireworks of improbable parallels, it’s a wild ride.
But if you’re hoping for methodological discipline, careful cultural contextualization, and respect for difference as much as similarity, you might feel like you’ve been sold a bridge that doesn’t quite reach the other side.
It’s tempting to wrap this review with a fake academic blurb: “Finally, a book that proves Shiva and Zeus are basically bros separated at birth, united by their mutual love of weather control and questionable romantic ethics.” — Journal of Overstretched Analogies. But that would be too easy.
The truth is, Splitting the Difference is at once dazzling and infuriating, a high-wire act that sometimes lands gracefully and sometimes plummets into the net. The real tragedy is that the fall is almost always preventable—if only the book had respected difference as much as it adores splitting it.
Give it a pass. I’ve already wasted my time on this one.
November 8, 2020
This book was engaging, beautifully written, and well-researched.
This was my first experience with Wendy Doniger but it is far from my last.
This was my first experience with Wendy Doniger but it is far from my last.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews