Author: Rebecca Resinski

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After my presentation on “Post-Patriarchal Pandoras” (pegasus-reception.com/paper10), one of the audience members asked if I knew of other presentations of mythological figures in children’s literature which might be considered “post-patriarchal.” I said I didn’t—and, in fact, I had chosen to give a presentation on Victoria Turnbull’s Pandora and Joan Holub and Leslie Patricelli’s Be Patient, Pandora! because I found their post-patriarchal qualities very striking. But the question lingered in my mind well after the conference panel concluded, and it made me review the reading lists for past courses I’ve taught to see if anything on them might have slipped my mind. Betty Miles’ short story “Atalanta” jumped out at me—not as post-patriarchal exactly, but as a text clearly invested in both illustrating and enacting a break with patriarchy. (I see Holub and Patricelli’s Please Share, Aphrodite!, pegasus-reception.com/post3, as undertaking a similar, though not identical, move.)

Ovid provides us with an ancient account of Atlanta in his Metamorphoses. The story appears in book 10 and is presented as a cautionary tale told by the goddess Venus to the young mortal hunter Adonis. Atalanta, having been told by an oracle that she would “be deprived of” (Latin carebis) herself if she married, presents suitors with a challenge: she will marry the man who bests her in a race; losers will face death. A spectator at the race, Hippomenes, is smitten by the sight of Atalanta and enters the contest. While Atalanta laments Hippomenes’ decision, Hippomenes himself prays to Venus for aid. The goddess gives him three golden apples, which Hippomenes throws during the race to distract Atalanta and slow her down. Venus even adds weight to the third apple, ensuring Hippomenes’ victory. He and Atalanta are wed, but he runs afoul of the divine when he forgets to thank Venus. The goddess sparks such desire in him that he has sex with Atalanta in the precinct of Cybele, and Cybele turns both Hippomenes and Atalanta into lions who pull Cybele’s chariot. Atalanta is doubly “deprived of herself.” She loses the power of self-determination as well as her human form.

Miles’ “Atalanta” focuses on the race and Atalanta’s movement away from patriarchal expectations. In Miles’ version, so many young men are drawn to Atalanta because of her cleverness that her father, a king, is at a loss to choose a husband for her. Atalanta tells him that he needn’t worry, for perhaps she won’t marry at all. The king, “very ordinary…powerful and used to having his own way,” (76) is discomfited and decides to hold a race to determine Atalanta’s future husband. Atalanta reclaims some agency for herself by declaring that she will join the race and marry the winner if she loses. To prepare for the race, Atalanta trains each morning, as does Young John, a townsman who wants only to win the chance to talk with her, “‘[f]or surely,’ he said to himself, ‘it is not right for Atalanta’s father to give her away to the winner of the race.  Atalanta must choose the person she wants to marry, or whether she wishes to marry at all.  Still, if I could only win the race, I would be free to speak to her, and ask for her friendship” (82). On the day of the race, their time spent training holds both Atalanta and John in good stead. They cross the finish-line at the same time, and though the king is willing to give Atalanta to John in marriage, both John and Atalanta disavow his authority. Instead, they spend the afternoon talking and forging a friendship. The next day, they each make their way separately out into the wider world.

Miles makes the king a representative of staid patriarchy in general. He is not vilified, but his comfort with the status quo puts him at odds with representatives of the younger generation, both Atalanta and John. Despite her father’s attempts, Atalanta charts her own course, building and fixing things, looking through her telescope, and (eventually) exploring the world. She is not distracted from following her desires, and in Miles’ story there are no golden apples to lead Atalanta astray as she runs. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the three apples provided some rhythm to the race. Promoting a similar pacing, Miles presents three competitors; Atalanta passes the first two, but the third is John, with whom she ties. Atalanta and John’s equality is affirmed not only by the story but also by the language used to tell it. Atalanta states that she “will run fast as the wind” (82), and John is described as “running like the wind” and “swift as the wind” (83). Contention and competition are replaced with togetherness and delight when “[s]miling with the pleasure of the race, Atalanta and Young John reached the finish line together, and together they broke through the golden ribbon” (83, emphasis mine). Their responses to the king echo one another when they each tell the patriarch that, despite his assumptions, they “could not possibly marry” (85).

Miles’ story cultivates a fairytale atmosphere more than a mythological one. Indeed, Miles provides a fairytale frame for it, with “[o]nce upon a time” (76) at the outset and “happily ever after” at the close (85). Barbara Bascove’s illustrations further the fairytale setting with their medieval feel. But Miles invokes fairytale in order to undo its stereotypical narrative dictates. Atalanta is capable, active, and independent, no passive princess, and she and John are living their happily-every-afters separately. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Atalanta’s experiences fulfill the oracle; in Miles’ story Atalanta’s decisions and persistence determine her path.  And that path, we learn, is still unfolding and uncertain: “Perhaps some day [Atalanta and John] will be married, and perhaps they will not.” (85). At the start of the story, Miles compresses the distance between fairytale time and the readers’ present day by following “[o]nce upon a time” with “not long ago,” and here—at the end—she gestures to an as-yet-undetermined future. Miles thus imparts to her fairytale an air of contemporary relevance. What seems long ago or set in narrative stone is not.

Departing from traditional expectations is a large part of the project in Miles’ “Atalanta,” and we might fairly call it didactic in its modelling of emancipation, equality, and a departure from inherited paradigms. Atalanta is attractive because she is clever not beautiful, and she partakes of activities not stereotypically associated with women. Her various remarks to her father serve as a kind of script responding to patriarchal demands, and John espouses enlightened ideas about relations between the sexes. When Ovid’s Venus tells the story of Atalanta to Adonis in the Metamorphoses, her intent is somewhat didactic. She explicitly aims to explain why Adonis should steer clear of wild animals, and she implicitly schools Adonis in her own power. Miles reworks the instructional nature of Atalanta’s story, making it a lesson in gender equality and self-actualization.

Such a lesson fits the general goals of Free to Be…You and Me, the anthology in which Miles’ “Atalanta” appears. Free to Be…You and Me was a project organized by Marlo Thomas in the early 1970s with the goal of providing empowering, non-sexist media for young people through cartoons, stories, songs, and, poems (see Kois in the bibliography below for a history of the endeavor). “Atalanta” is the only piece in this liberatory enterprise that reworks Classical material, and its conflation of myth and fairytale enables it to simultaneously reconfigure the canon and disrupt a popular narrative pattern in ten earnest pages. I can’t help but compare it with Robert Munsch’s Paper Bag Princess. Published in 1980, The Paper Bag Princess also tackles fairytale assumptions head-on, but it does so by flipping the gender hierarchy: Princess Elizabeth takes on the active role usually assigned to a prince, and Prince Ronald needs to be rescued. When Ronald scolds Elizabeth for her disheveled appearance—she just finished fighting a dragon!—she declares him a “bum” and leaves him (23). There’s a kind of tidy satisfaction in Munsch’s topsy-turvy picturebook, but ultimately I find more potential promise in Miles’ strategy of not flipping a hierarchy but moving beyond it.

Bibliography

Kois, Dan.  “Free to Be You and Me 40th Anniversary” trio of articles: “How Did a Kids Album by a Bunch of Feminists Change Everything?” “Rosey Grier Tells Boys It’s All Right to Cry,” “So Why Do We Still Have Princess Dresses?” Slate 2012.  slate.com

Miles, Betty.  “Atalanta.”  Free to Be…You and Me.  Marlo Thomas and Friends.  1972.  Running Press Kids, 2008. 

Munsch, Robert and Michael Martchenko.  The Paper Bag Princess.  Annick Press.  1980.

Ovid.  Metamorphoses.  Trans. A. S. Kline.  poetryintranslation.com (English) and latinlibrary.com (Latin)

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My conference paper on post-patriarchal Pandoras (pegasus-reception.com/paper10) included a consideration of Be Patient, Pandora!, a boardbook in the Mini Myths series written by Joan Holub and illustrated by Leslie Patricelli. In my paper I suggested that Be Patient, Pandora! significantly adapts the myth of Pandora by situating it outside a punishing patriarchal context. As I wrote the paper, I became curious about the way the other books in the Mini Myths series might present or transform patriarchy, so I read Please Share, Aphrodite!, which uses the Judgment of Paris as its mythological touchstone.

The 16th and 17th letters of Ovid’s Heroides provide details about the contest over which the Trojan prince Paris presides. The goddesses Juno (Greek Hera), Minerva (Greek Athena), and Venus (Greek Aphrodite) are competing for a golden apple to be granted to the most beautiful. Mercury (Greek Hermes) relays the command of Jupiter (Greek Zeus) that Paris adjudicate the dispute. Each goddess entices Paris with a bribe: Juno/Hera will give him ruling power, Minerva/Athena offers valor, and Venus/Aphrodite promises Paris the beautiful human woman Helen. Paris chooses Venus/Aphrodite and Helen, and because Helen is already married to Menelaus, the king of Sparta, war between Greece and Troy ensues when Paris claims her.

The Judgment of Paris seems to me to highlight some aspects of patriarchy—and by “patriarchy” I mean a social system which supports and perpetuates male power, privileges, and perspectives. Three females compete for a male’s assessment of their relative beauty. The fact that the females are divine while the male is human underscores that the gendered perspective of a male—even one ontologically lower than the females themselves—is prioritized. While the goddesses’ bribes, as well as Paris’ openness to them, may raise ethical questions, I am more interested in the bribes for other reasons. The goddesses’ willingness to offer inducements emphasizes their goal to win Paris’ approbation, whether or not his judgment corresponds to any “objective” reality. The male’s verdict is more valued than its veracity. And the proffered enticements themselves cater to the concerns of socialized masculinity in political and personal spheres. The bribe that wins the day reinforces male identity through the possession of a female and highlights a human woman’s status as object: she is a thing to be traded. Venus/Aphrodite realizes that she can purchase male regard with feminine currency. Chaos results, however, from the divine female’s entry as seller into the marketplace of women. Helen already belongs to Agamemnon, and when she is redirected to Paris, the male-brokered marriage economy is disrupted. War—violent conflict between men—follows. In the Judgment of Paris we can see crucial aspects of patriarchy crystallized: the privileging of a male perspective and masculine desires, the competition among females which that privileging causes, the view and use of females as objects, and the potential for disorder posed by a female’s exercise of agency within such a male-driven system.

Please Share, Aphrodite! is situated in the present day and shows readers four children. The boy (unnamed) has a caramel apple for which he is willing to trade. Aphrodite wants it, but so do two other girls. One of them offers the boy a jewelled crown; the other, a puzzle. Although these girls are unnamed, their offers connect them to their mythological counterparts, the queen of the gods, Juno/Hera, and goddess of wisdom, Minerva/Athena. (The latter girl also has Minerva/Athena’s emblematic owl on her pullover.) Aphrodite says that she’ll trade her toy horse—which serves as a wink to the Trojan Horse and to her divine counterpart, since it bears a heart decoration, just like Aphrodite’s shirt, headband, and shoes. The boy chooses Aphrodite’s proposed trade and promptly exits page right. The other two girls are initially saddened at the outcome, but while Aphrodite exalts, “I won! I won! I won!” (14) and “The apple is mine!” (15), the other girls go off together, sharing the crown and the puzzle. Aphrodite, alone in her victory, asks the girls if they would like to share the apple, and the girls ask her if she wants to play with them. The story ends with the three of them enjoying one another’s company, eating apple slices and working at the puzzle, with the Hera/Juno girl wearing Aphrodite’s heart headband and Aphrodite sporting the crown. Above this picture is the satisfied declaration “Yum!” (21).

I think that Holub and Patricelli’s narrative works to undo much of the patriarchal encapsulation accomplished by the Judgment of Paris. In the mythological story Paris is enlisted by Zeus/Jupiter to settle the dispute among the goddess. In the boardbook the boy initiates the trade. He remains a “judge” in that he will decide which offer to accept, but he’s not wearing the mantle of decisive, patriarchal authority which the king of the gods passes to Paris in the myth, and his perspective, desires, and choice aren’t tied to a gender hierarchy. Although the three girls compete in the sense that they each offer the boy something in trade for the apple, the interaction is framed primarily as a trade rather than a contest. This lowers the stakes and to some extent evens the field: the girls themselves are not being judged, and they are equally able to participate in an open marketplace. And in this marketplace a female isn’t presented as a potential object of trade! While it’s arguable that Aphrodite’s winning offer of a horse plays into gender stereotypes—the horse may be viewed by some as a more “masculine” item than the jewelled crown or puzzle—it doesn’t bolster male identity through the subordination and objectification of a female. Please Share, Aphrodite! doesn’t fundamentally pit females against one another nor present them as means to an end. In her vaunting, the girl Aphrodite initially treats her success as if it were a victory over her peers, but it becomes clear that they—though disappointed—haven’t been vanquished and, in fact, are not operating within a competitive or conflict-defined context. They exercise their agency to create a mutually beneficial situation, and Aphrodite realizes that she can exercise her own to join in. Instead of the competition among females and the ensuing conflict between males found in the Judgment of Paris and its Trojan War aftermath, Please Share, Aphrodite! closes with the comforts of a female community.

The ancient myth privileges the male perspective. Although the goddesses take some initiative with their bribes, they move within a limited, male-catering field and are subject to masculine judgment. Holub and Patricelli shift the weight of the story to a female perspective in a number of ways: Aphrodite is the only named character; her desire for the apple is the first “fact” or event of the story; her emotions are tracked throughout; the one male character exits the story half-way through; and the second half of the book concentrates on the girls’ feelings and relationships. Holub and Patricelli’s adaptation of the Judgment of Paris refocalizes it, and in doing so moves beyond the ancient story’s patriarchal message. John Stephens and Robyn McCallum discuss the need for refocalization (among other narrative strategies) if new versions of culturally inherited tales are to do something other than reinforce traditional, constricting “metanarratives” (22). Although Stephens and McCallum are concerned with “retellings” more than “adaptations” like Holub and Patricelli’s, I think that Please Share, Aphrodite! bears out their general point.

The last page of the boardbook provides a selective summary of the mythological Judgment of Paris. While Holub’s abridgment retains the goddesses’ contest for the title of the most beautiful and the golden apple, it somewhat downplays the patriarchal dynamics at work. In particular, the goddesses’ bribes are presented more in the spirit of a trade, and Paris’ choice of Aphrodite and Helen is depicted as a tidy, win/win outcome: with Aphrodite’s “help” Paris finds “his true love” (22)—there is no mention of the Trojan War—and Aphrodite gets the apple she wants. I see Holub’s summary as a kind of compromise approach to patriarchy: through the careful inclusion and exclusion of particular details it tries to reframe the Judgment of Paris as something more balanced, mutually beneficial, and not destructive. But the boardbook’s main narrative goes farther than the summary. The summary stops with the goddess Aphrodite’s solitary attainment of the coveted prize; the boardbook’s story, however, makes the girl Aphrodite’s lonely “victory” a step toward a more satisfying conclusion in a community that recognizes and addresses the desires of all the girls. I don’t consider Please Share, Aphrodite! “post-patriarchal” the way that Be Patient, Pandora! is. Rather, I think of its narrative as illustrating and enacting a turn away from patriarchy. The last two-page spread of the book juxtaposes two options: the left page offers the final image of the girls in shared delight; the right page provides the mythological summary and its compromise with patriarchy. I imagine that I’m not the only reader who feels the pull of the girls’ joyful gathering and wants to turn to it, preferring its pleasures.

Bibliography

Holub, Joan and Leslie Patricelli. Be Patient, Pandora! Abrams, 2014.

—–. Please Share, Aphrodite! Abrams, 2015.

Ovid. Heroides. Trans. A. S. Kline. poetryintranslation.com

Stephens, John and Robyn McCallum. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature. Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998.

In 2021 I was part of the “Think of the Children!” panel sponsored by the Women’s Classical Caucus at the Society for Classical Studies annual meeting.  The panel was organized by Melissa Funke and Victoria Austen.  I presented “Post-Patriarchal Pandoras for Very Young Readers” (click for PDF).   The PDF contains the script of my talk with the addition of two opening paragraphs, footnotes, and bibliography.