You Will Be a Man, Hercules! Dialectics of the Subject and Heroic Manhood: A Gender Reading of the Myth of Hercules at the Crossroads

Drawing on the idea that gender is a useful category of analysis for a mytho-critical approach to exploring the construction of cultural representations, this paper sketches a gender reading of the myth of Hercules at the crossroads. From Xenophon to Wieland and Shakespeare, the paper demonstrates how this myth, which articulates its dialectic of the subject with that of gender, (re)produces an ancient ideal of heroic and epic manhood, turning into a nationalistic one during the 18th century while also elaborating a rationalist paradigm equating manliness with civilization. The paper analyzes gender issues in two subversive rewritings of the fable, pointing out how the myth both participates in and resists gender ideology.