a cautionary tale

grad school

has changed me

but not

for the better.

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Thanks for checking in. I know it's been quiet around here lately. Check back next Sunday; I plan to get back on a weekly posting schedule. And happy start-of-the-school-year for everyone who's starting fall semester.

O, pankakiste!

      I’ve been wanting to cover Jason for a really long time. Jason gets a bad rap these days, as well he should. I’d love to see The Toast do a “dirtbags” write-up of him. The basics of his story are well known; Euripides’ play Medea is for the most part one big shouting match between Jason and Medea, an ugly breakup scene where the former lovers snipe at each other and argue about who was worse to whom, so Medea is quick to hurl all of Jason’s offenses in his face. To hit the highlights: Jason travels from Greece to the ass-end of the world essentially because someone dared him to; the gods curse Medea (who lives in Ass-End-of-the-World-ville) to fall hopelessly in love with this dubious hero. In the course of winning Jason’s affections Medea ensures that she’ll never be able to go home again, but Jason offers to take her back to his home and protect her. They marry and have a few kids, but Medea is a foreigner, and the Greeks refuse to accept her or recognize the marriage--so a few years on, a king (in a deliberate slight against Medea) offers to let Jason marry his daughter. Suddenly Jason can’t abandon Medea fast enough. When Medea confronts Jason--this is the big shouting match that the audience of Medea gets to listen in on--she tears him apart for going back on his promises to protect her, for abandoning his wife and children in a hostile land, for prompting her to do all the horrible things (burglary, murder, dismemberment) that made her a wanted criminal in her hometown. Everyone hates her in Greece, so she can’t exactly open a Domino’s franchise or go on welfare like an accepted member of society; she has nowhere to go and no way to support herself. Jason, who is much less anxious about the future than Medea, defends himself with a number of questionable arguments, including, ‘Hey, it’s not MY fault you did all those horrible things,’ and (in a classic colonialist argument) ‘But you should be glad you made it to Greece, because you got to enjoy all the benefits of real civilization!’ As you may realize, my sympathies have always been with Medea, and I love the ending, where she remorselessly slays the patriarchy one by one, ascends onto her dragon chariot, and soars off to a grander destiny.

      Anyway, Euripides’ Medea doesn’t present a terribly sympathetic Jason; right at the beginning Medea calls him “pankakistos” (the worst of all, the worst man imaginable), and his characterization easily lives up to that. It’s easy to trash him in an article like this. But Euripides isn’t the only one who writes about Jason, and I thought before I wrote about him I should give Apollonius’ Argonautica a really thorough examination.

      The Argonautica is an epic about the voyage of the Argo, a magic ship in Greek myth (in the Argonautica, the Argo is a speaking character, although she doesn’t speak much--her big line, near the end of the epic, is to announce that Zeus is angry). Jason (something of an aimless youth, and much younger than I expected--when the story opens, he’s just beginning to show a beard) is sent on an errand to the middle of nowhere to recover a certain treasure for no very good reason. Uncertain of what dangers lay in store, and doubtful of his ability to complete the challenge alone, Jason assembles a team of adventurers to help him, each of whom has a specific talent--there’s the one who can run really fast, the one who can see really far, the twins who can fly, the one who can navigate perfectly, and a pile of others; the opening of the epic has a LONG expository section describing what’s so great about each individual. Jason himself is kind of glossed over in this section; his exceptional qualities are unspecified--or, one may suspect, nonexistent. Throughout the work, he’s referred to most commonly as “amechanos” (which means “ineffective” or “useless”), as well as “meleos” and “anenytos,” which have similar meanings--although he is specified to be quite pretty. He’s a delegator. When a challenge arises, he always gets one of his talented underlings to deal with it, and Medea becomes his most powerful underling of all--she has magic powers, and, afflicted as she is with a preternatural love, she’s willing to do anything Jason asks. So she lies, she steals, she murders her brother, she dismembers his body; she’s determined to marry Jason and that means that his mission must succeed at all costs.

      The Argonautica story stops once they arrive back in Jason’s hometown, so we never see how Jason rewards Medea for helping him, whether he will unceremoniously toss her aside as soon as the prospect of wealth and influence appears. Still, the Argonautica was written long after Euripides’ Medea, and given that background it almost seems like the author was trying to make Jason look bad. When Jason and Medea start plotting how to commit their crimes and how to get away scot-free, Jason makes a series of extravagant promises to Medea--promises that the reader knows that Jason is destined to break in Euripides’ version. For someone who knows Euripides, the Argonautica Jason comes off looking untrustworthy and worthless. There’s also a rather emasculating simile applied to Jason after he steals the treasure he wanted: the narrator says that Jason is as excited to get the Golden Fleece as a girl trying on a new dress--bear in mind that making slights against a man’s masculinity is rather a big deal in the author’s time. Reading the Argonautica, you can get the sense that the author doesn’t respect his own protagonist and is just sort of putting up with him. Maybe he was more interested in writing about Medea’s awesome powers, and he resented having to include Jason alongside. Maybe he felt that Medea was such a forceful and awe-inspiring personality that no man could make a conventional marriage with her. (In the afterlife she was supposed to have married Achilles, one of the most forceful--and, in my opinion, implacably petty--personalities in all of Greek myth; I’m glad I never had to sit next to them at an afterlife dinner party.) For whatever reason, Jason certainly comes off poorly throughout the epic. I still would recommend reading the Argonautica--there are some marvelous settings and some spectacular events--but read it for the journey, not for the hero.

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.