The department of English language at the college of education for humanities (Ibn Rushd) held a virtual workshop entitled “Opening Pandora’s box of suffering and unleashing the evils of the world and its representation in the American poetry of the 19th century” chaired and delivered by Prof. Dr. Sabah Atallah Khalifa , a faculty member at the department and Dr. Zaid Ibrahim Ismail from Al-Mansour University College. Dr. Sabah Atallah stated that Pandora, in Greek mythology, was the first mortal woman on earth created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus. As the ancient Greek poet Hesiod related it, each god cooperated by giving her unique gifts.
The workshop aimed to study the importance of ancient legends from the feminist perspective of the 19th-century American literature through an analysis of selected American poems with a focus on the myth of Pandora’s myth and the negative view of this character which condemns and blames women in general, accusing them of being responsible for the suffering of all human beings. The workshop came up with a number of prominent recommendations, including emphasizing the role of legends on shaping the literary works throughout the ages. The opening of Pandora’s box is a widely used metaphor, which means doing something seemingly innocent, but that can have serious or even catastrophic consequences, since the box contained all the evils of the world, all bitterness, anger or contempt and until the sixteenth century it was not a wooden box but a jar.
