The English language is a queer instrument of thought. While coyness
has the various meanings of shyness, modest reserve, bashfulness,
shrinking from advances or familiarity, disdainfulness, the verb "to
coy" may mean the exact opposite--to coax, allure, entice, woo, decoy.
It is in _this_ sense that "coyness" is obviously a trait of primitive
maidens. What is more surprising is to find in brushing aside
prejudice and preconceived notions, that among ancient nations too it
is in this second sense rather than in the first that women are "coy."
The Hebrew records begin with the story of Adam and Eve, in which Eve
is stigmatized as the temptress. Rebekah had never seen the man chosen
for her by her male relatives, yet when she was asked if she would go
with his servant, she answered, promptly, "I will go." Rachel at the
well suffers her cousin to kiss her at first sight. Ruth does all the
courting which ends in making her the wife of Boaz. There is no
shrinking from advances, real or feigned, in any of these cases; no
suggestion of disguised feminine affection; and in two of them the
women make the advances. Potiphar's wife is another biblical case. The
word coy does not occur once in the Bible.
The idea that women are the aggressors, particularly in criminal
amours, is curiously ingrained in the literature of ancient Greece. In
the _Odyssey_ we read about the fair-haired goddess Circe, decoying
the companions of Odysseus with her sweet voice, giving them drugs and
potions, making them the victims of swinish indulgence of their
appetites. When Odysseus comes to their rescue she tries to allure him
too, saying, "Nay, then, pat up your blade within its sheath, and let
us now approach our bed that there we too may join in love and learn
to trust each other." Later on Odysseus has his adventure with the
Sirens, who are always "casting a spell of penetrating song, sitting
within a meadow," in order to decoy passing sailors. Charybdis is
another divine Homeric female who lures men to ruin. The island nymph
Calypso rescues Odysseus and keeps him a prisoner to her charms, until
after seven years he begins to shed tears and long for home "because
the nymph pleased him no more." Nor does the human Nausicäa manifest
the least coyness when she meets Odysseus at the river. Though he has
been cast on the shore naked, she remains, after her maids have run
away alarmed, and listens to his tale of woe. Then, after seeing him
bathed, anointed, and dressed, she exclaims to her waiting maids: "Ah,
might a man like this be called my husband, having his home here and
content to stay;" while to him later on she gives this broad hint:
"Stranger, farewell! when you are once again in your own land,
remember me, and how before all others it is to me you owe the saving
of your life."
Nausicäa is, however, a prude compared with the enamoured woman as the
Greek poets habitually paint her. Pausanias (II., Chap. 31), speaking
of a temple of Peeping Venus says:
"From this very spot the enamoured Phaedra used to
watch Hippolytus at his manly exercises. Here still
grows the myrtle with pierced leaves, as I am told. For
being at her wit's ends and finding no ease from the
pangs of love, she used to wreak her fury on the leaves
of this myrtle."
Professor Rohde, the most erudite authority on Greek erotic
literature, writes (34):
"It is characteristic of the Greek popular tales which
Euripides followed, in what might be called his
tragedies of adultery, that they _always make the woman
the vehicle of the pernicious passion_; it seems as if
Greek feeling could not conceive of a _man_ being
seized by an unmanly soft desire and urged on by it to
passionate disregard of all human conventions and
laws."