Never Never Land

      Among the tragedies of my youth: I was exposed to Peter Pan too late. I’m not sure when I was first exposed to Peter Pan--it wasn’t one of those classic books or movies that became fixed as a cornerstone of my childhood--but by the time I heard about Never Never Land, I was too mature and responsible to appreciate it for the escapist fantasy it was supposed to be. When I hear someone exuberantly wish for a place where no one ever cleans up messes or takes a bath, I imagine a place that smells terrible and is covered with bacteria, and when I hear that the primary sources of entertainment in this place are lazing around or picking fights with pirates--well, the first sounds phenomenally boring and the second sounds needlessly belligerent. There’s always been something uncomfortable to me about a place where children are encouraged to be as chaotic and destructive as possible. Maybe it’s just me. Flying is appealing, so I might have come along if someone had told me I could spend all my time flying, but I would have wanted a good library nearby for when flying got boring, and I would have worried constantly about the Lost Boys damaging my library books.

      And the Greeks are with me. If you want to hear the ancient Greek equivalent of the Peter Pan story, you have to read Euripides’ Hippolytus. But when Hippolytus says the Greek translation of “I don’t wanna grow up” he doesn’t mean that he wants to fly off to Never Never Land and pick fights with pirates; he means that he refuses to get married and assume the responsibilities of the head of a family. He spends his days in the woods hunting (you don’t have to deal with any women out there!) and devotes himself to the virgin goddess Artemis, who, despite her disproportionate devotion to him, will remain perpetually unavailable sexually.

      This sylvan seclusion might not have gotten him in trouble by itself, except he goes so far as to disdain Aphrodite, to insult her and refuse to participate in her worship. Greek gods tend to be vindictive about petty slights like this, so Aphrodite’s response is to engineer his disgrace, his exile, his excruciating death, and the death and disgrace of several of his relatives (Greek tragedies don’t do things by half measures). Although Hippolytus has sworn himself invulnerable to love, he doesn’t count on the effect that love can have on others, and Aphrodite cunningly curses his stepmother to fall in love with him. The stepmother is a very honorable and devoted woman, and won’t let herself be unfaithful to her husband. So after suffering an agonizing obsession with her stepson for an extensive period of time, his stepmother commits suicide in despair--but in order to maintain her reputation in death and prevent her husband from noticing her romantic obsession with Hippolytus, she claims that her suicide was prompted by Hippolytus trying to rape her. Although she initially comes off as principled and faithful, by the end her self-interest has eclipsed any good qualities she might have had, thus prompting the downfall of Hippolytus and disasters all around.

      One thing that the casual reader might not realize about this play is the ages of all the principal characters. Hippolytus has to be old enough that people think it’s really weird for him not to be attracted to anyone, female or male. (And while today most people can respect an asexual (or celibate, or otherwise unattached by choice) person’s decision to stand outside of traditional romantic entanglements, such a decision was not acceptable in the traditional mores of classical Athens: everyone had an obligation to marry and reproduce.) Hippolytus is probably in his late teens or early twenties. His father, of course, is old enough to be his father--about forty, minimum; maybe closer to fifty. But Hippolytus’ stepmother is married for the first time, and she and Theseus haven’t had any of their own children yet, which at that time would put her in her early teens, probably no older than fifteen or sixteen. Her stepson is almost certainly older than she is. And if you’re a fifteen-year-old girl in a house with your forty-year-old husband and his twenty-year-old son, which one do you think Aphrodite is more likely to strike you with a longing for? But then, Hippolytus wants none of that: he’s rather spend his days hunting and generally avoiding women. And that total blindness toward sexuality is something that Hippolytus and Peter Pan clearly share.

      If you believe Ovid, Artemis in her devotion to her most loyal worshipper is able to abduct Hippolytus before he dies and transport him to Italy, where he becomes the mythic, semi-divine “King of the Wood” made famous in Frazer’s Golden Bough. Mythologically, Hippolytus is treated as her consort, even though it’s against Artemis’ nature to lose her virgin status. In many respects, Tinkerbell in Peter Pan makes an interesting, and rather nauseating, analogue for Artemis. In Disney’s version of Peter Pan, I always found Tinkerbell’s attitude extremely off-putting. I read her as a grown woman who is, inexplicably, romantically obsessed with a boy who refuses to have an adult relationship with anyone, or even develop an understanding of sexuality. Even worse, Tinkerbell is antagonistic toward Wendy because Tinkerbell reads Wendy as a threat to her non-romance with Peter. There is some ground for this, insofar as Wendy and Peter play house together--they adopt the roles of mother and father to the Lost Boys--but neither of them really understands romantic love, so they can’t build a romantic relationship. Tinkerbell perpetuates negative stereotypes about women to the effect that women only read each other in relation to men, even though Wendy isn’t the obstacle to Tinkerbell’s relationship with Peter--Peter himself is. And since coming to understand love would be “growing up” in Peter’s eyes, he will never become romantically or sexually available. The takeaway, I suppose, is that it’s pointless to seek a relationship with someone whose entire personality is defined by not evolving, not changing, not growing up. It’s much more healthy to mature.

The Less Spectacular Sister

      Maybe when you were in high school you read Sophocles’ Antigone. The drama, for a large part, is grounded in conflicts that may arise within a family, and how other members of the family (who are not directly involved) need to cautiously navigate these tensions. In the play, the famous king Oedipus has been removed from his throne, leaving his two sons as potential heirs. The brothers are unable to agree on who should inherit the crown, to the extent that they go to war over the matter and in fact kill each other in single combat. When the new king (no relation) forbids the burial of the brother he considers a usurper, Oedipus’ daughters Antigone and Ismene are left in the difficult position of being unable to complete their family obligations in the form of burial rites, and they disagree over how to handle the issue. Antigone takes the bolder course, which is why the play is named after her: she buries her brother illegally, openly declares the fact, and challenges the new king to punish her. (He does punish her, as it turns out, not with mere execution but by burial alive.)

      But I don’t want to talk about Antigone today (if you want to know more about her, ask any high school English teacher). I’m more interested in Ismene. Of the two sisters, she’s the more compliant, or the more risk-averse. She’s in a very difficult situation: all the members of her family are bold and rash and committed to disastrous courses of action, but Ismene never wanted to get into any trouble. She never herself would have started an internecine war or angrily defied the king’s orders in the name of justice. In a way she’s cast as the ideal, conventional Greek woman, someone who would spent most of her time at home and not form strong opinions. She would have been better suited for a non-royal family; no doubt she would have been happier if she could have spent her life surrounded by people who don’t need to kill each other to make a point.

      Unfortunately for her, she’s been born into a royal family full of strong personalities, and she suffers for it. At the beginning of Antigone, Antigone asks Ismene to collaborate with her in burying their brother. When Ismene tells Antigone, in cautious terms, that Antigone is courting a death wish, Antigone says ‘Fine, I’ll do it without you.’ Later Antigone returns, she’s apprehended, she admits to everything, she’s condemned to death. Ismene’s future looks pretty bleak at this point. She’s stigmatized from the start as a child of incest (her parents are Oedipus and Jocasta), and therefore unable to contract the marriage she might have expected. By now, most of her family is either dead (her brothers, Jocasta) or disgraced (Oedipus), and now her last sibling has been condemned to execution. In despair, Ismene offers to be executed alongside Antigone, but, because of their earlier disagreement, Antigone rejects this offer and says that Ismene is unworthy to die at her side. Antigone considers it virtuous to have honored religious observances even in the face of the king’s prohibition, and thinks Ismene a coward for failing to do so. In the end, Antigone dies alone, and Ismene will live the rest of her life in poverty and disgrace.

      Ismene in this play represents an interesting character type that recurs frequently in literature with strong willed women. Although Greek culture prescribed that women should be modest, retiring, obedient, and so forth, classical literature often features women who reject these ideals and demand a more active role in life. Antigone presents herself as a champion of religious right, bravely defying a sacrilegious king. Ismene doesn’t like defiance. She exists as a mouthpiece of conventional opinions, to create a contrast with Antigone’s unconventionality. In my opinion, it’s not until she offers to die with Antigone that she comes into her own as a personality, and even then her attempt at solidarity is coldly rejected.

      Ismene’s not the only woman in myth who pales in comparison to a more famous sister. Classical literature is full of conventional-minded sisters who serve to provide context for how outlandish their sisters’ ideas are. In the Aeneid, Dido is famous for her frenzied, all-consuming love for Aeneas, but when she discusses the matter with her sister, her sister only speaks of how sensible and mutually beneficial it would be to marry Aeneas, entirely missing the fact that Dido was practically drooling on Aeneas’ chest when they ate dinner together. Later, when Dido despairs of her failed love affair and decides to commit suicide, she feeds her sister a plausible story about wanting to destroy everything that will remind her of her ex-lover, and her sister never guesses that Dido means to destroy herself too. She doesn’t even have the imagination to realize how unconventional and problematic her sister’s desires are.

      Is it a bad role, to be the less spectacular sister? Well, much of it depends on whose sister you are. Ismene was left destitute and futureless, but there are better possibilities. Medea had her own adventures--as a princess of Colchis, she betrayed her family, ran off with a visiting hero, and went on a tour of all the exotic sights of the world before she settled into a series of powerful roles (both condoned and condemned) in Greece. Meanwhile in Colchis, her sister Chalciope served as Medea’s confidante until Medea left town, at which point Chalciope was forgotten. Presumably she lived an ordinary life with marriage, children, and very little power. The core of it is that the sister’s fate is far overshadowed by the heroine’s, and most of the audience doesn’t worry about the sister’s future when so little is at stake. While the heroines shine out with their impossible desires and brash plans, the sisters embody the life that the heroines are simply unable to lead: a quiet marriage, with lots of time spent on domestic work. They often signify female success, in a highly restrictive sense, and not the sort of success that a daring heroine like Medea or Antigone would ever want.

A too-prolonged winter

I understand, dear Winter.

We’re all afraid to die.

But I think we’ve been buried under glaciers long enough.

Developments

Hello again! I'm sorry to have been absent for a while, but there have been developments in my professional life: I got a job! And I'm quite excited about it and, significantly, I expect it is going to put some pressure on my schedule this spring. For this reason, I am officially changing my update frequency from "weekly" to "when possible." I look forward to talking more mythology and poetry with you as the year goes on.

Untitled

It was grandma who told me

that Heaven is great and wide

and full of power and sway,

but still very far away.

A Story for January

      What with the new year and the beginning of January, it seems an appropriate time to discuss Janus. I’m not really sure how famous Janus is today; I suppose most people are familiar with him as the Roman god with two faces that point forward and backward, but I don’t think most people know any of the stories associated with him. Of course, the popular understanding of classical mythology leans toward the Greek side (as made famous in the Roman work Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and Janus is one of the distinctly Roman gods who has no obvious equivalent in Greek myth, so you could point to that as a reason why the Janus stories are not commonly known. Nevertheless, there’s more to Janus than his status as the two-faced god.

      Specifically, buried in Janus’ mythology is the story of a vaguely defined young woman named Carna. Carna apparently gets a lot of street harassment. It is an unfortunately common incident in her life that she’ll be minding her own business, and some jackass will catcall her and suggest that they hook up on the spot. Now everyone who’s been the victim of street harassment knows that it’s often very hard to decline such invitations without escalating the situation. Say anything aggressive, and you may get a much more aggressive response. Say something neutral, and you may still get an aggressive response. Say nothing and you may still get an aggressive response. Pretend to be nice and you’re likely to be dragged into an unending conversation about why you don’t want to sleep with them, why you won’t give them your number, why don’t you want to just visit their apartment, why can’t they drop by your place another day, and if you run out of polite excuses they’re likely to break out that aggressive response anyway. Carna has devised a response to these advances that, although it’s not something I would try out in real life, apparently works for her: when someone propositions her, she says, “Well, not right here. But lead the way to a more private place, and I’ll follow.” When her admirers are hurrying to a more private place, they’re so excited by her apparent enthusiasm that they don’t notice when she slips away.

      For obvious reasons, this doesn’t work when she tries it on Janus. Janus notices her slipping away, grabs her, and forces her to have sex as she promised. On top of this violation, he provides her with the extremely insulting reward of making her the goddess of hinges (stand in awe of the mighty hinge!), thus eternally subordinating her to himself (he’s the god of doorways, remember) and guaranteeing his perpetual sexual access to her. Although this promotion to divinity is ostensibly a reward, I feel terribly sorry for her--all she wanted to do was deflect some street harassment and go on with her own plans without having to cater to the sexual demands of random passers by, and instead she was forced into service as someone’s concubine.

      What’s worse is how Ovid reports the incident in such an insulting way. He flat-out calls her an idiot (“stulta!”) and heavily implies that Carna was, as they say in moronic victim-blaming discourse, “asking for it.” After all, she agreed to have sex with Janus. She made a practice of agreeing to have sex with men on the street! She gave some sort of affirmative consent, and it’s not Janus’ fault that she said this with no intention of carrying it out, it’s not Janus’ fault that she had found it was the least dangerous way to respond to street harassment.

      Affirmative consent is a great idea. I’m glad it passed in California last year and I hope that in the coming year other places follow suit. But there’s still much more to be done in the way of eliminating sexual objectification and convincing street harassers that the people they harass may have other purposes in life aside from someone’s sexual gratification. The idea that so many people today daily face the same obstacle that Carna faced in ancient myth gives me little hope that this problem will be resolved anytime soon.

      So, happy new year. For my resolution, I’ll be thinking about Janus, trying to prevent rapes like the one he committed, and trying to fight the victim-blaming culture that crashed down on Carna.