By Meredith O’Donnell

Dr. Wendy Doniger, famous for her translations of Hindu texts, brought insightful, new meaning to the symbolism of rings when she spoke at the University.

Doniger grew up in Great Neck and was educated at Harvard, Oxford and Berkeley universities. Since she grew up around the area she is not a stranger to the campus and she opened her standing-room-only speech by saying, “Thomas Wolfe was wrong, you can go home again.”

Sponsored by Phi Beta Kappa and the University’s Department of Philosophy and Religion, Doniger’s speech “The Ring of Forgetfulness and the Narrative of Recognition” used stories and myths to demonstrate the significance a ring has to lovers.

A ring is valued as a memento by the receiving party, Doniger said, because it reminds her of the giver. If the wearer were to lose the ring the lover would lose a part of his identity that would not be rediscovered until the ring is recovered.

A ring is also counter-intuitive, in that the owner cannot avoid his own fate. To illustrate her point, she referred to a scenario where the owner attempted to erase his past by deliberately tossing his ring into the ocean.

The ring was returned to the own because of the mythological belief that humans cannot determine their fates, she said. In one variation of the story, the owner found his ring after eating a fish that swallowed it.

“The lesson is that we cannot escape our own fate, whether we desire to, or fear it,” Doniger said.

Doniger referred back to the myth of the ring retrieved by the fish to introduce the final type of ring – the magical ring of memory and forgetfulness. This type of ring indicates a resurgence of the past.

She used Sigmund Freud’s theory of “The return of the repressed” to further describe this ring. The theory states that humans fall in love with the wrong people because of repressed memories from childhood.

All memories “Are hidden in the oceanic depths of the mind,” according to Freud.

“Rings are proof that the giver exists,” Doniger said.

“A myth is a narrative, not a statement. They are not meant to be taken literally, but they are truthful,” Doniger said. “People believe them to be true despite the evidence that they are not. When they are taken literally, they lose their symbolic value.”

Doniger closed the lecture with a true story based on the theory of a “resurgence of the past.”

On Dec. 27, 1984, 7-year-old Roger Clay played on a beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Doniger said he wrote on a piece of paper “To whoever finds this letter please write to me” and included his family’s address in Fairfield, Ohio, put it in a Pepsi bottle and set it out to sea.

Nearly five years after Clay was killed in a motorcycle accident. On July 4, 2003, Clay’s parents received a note from a person who found the bottle. Clay’s mother said she knew he was still playing tricks on the family and interpreted the note as a voice from the other side saying, “I am okay, and I can still find you,” Doniger said.

“At first I was intimidated because of her long list of credentials, but then she opened up with her personal stories,” said Katie Cubisino, a senior Speech Communication & Rhetorical Studies major. “The jokes made it easier to understand, and the speech flowed. “I came because I had to for a class, but I ended up enjoying it.”