Problematic Myths and the People Who Love Them

I grew up on d'Aulaire's Greek myths. My father brought it back from the library one day when I was about five or six, and my initial attempts to sound out the phenomenally impossible word "Aphrodite" sent my mom into well-muffled hysterics. (The best I could do, before she took mercy on me and corrected me, was "uh-PRO-fa-deet." And now you know.) The pictures were gorgeous, the stories were entrancing, and I wanted to be Artemis or Atalanta when I grew up. More recently, my boyfriend introduced me to the d'Aulaire book of Norse myths, which is just as awesome and explained a lot of things that confused me about the Norse gods. Safe to say, I'm a fan.

But reading those myths when I was seven, and again when I was seventeen, were two very different things. The d'Aulaires took great pains to avoid the word "mistress," even and especially when it was applicable. Zeus had a ridiculous number of "wives." Odin's seduction of Gunnlod, the mother of his son Bragi, god of bards, is hinted at but

Odin and Gunnlod, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

never outright stated. (The story itself, in which Odin drinks up all three of her kettles of precious mead, then leaves her to weep beside her lost treasure, is suggestive enough.) The d'Aulaires told you that Aphrodite was in love with Ares, but I never learned the tale of Hephaestus catching them in flagrante - in a net, for maximum humor - until I was a teenager. Thor is outraged at the cutting of his wife Sif's hair not because she has awesome hair, but because a woman with shorn hair is branded a whore. It took a long time for me to realize that Daphne and Syrinx flee from Apollo and Pan because they're threatened with rape, rather than an awkward proposal of marriage.

Loki, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

Odin, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

And not even the d'Aulaires could
whitewash out the incredible sexual tension between Odin and Loki. They're attracted to each other at first sight. They mingle their blood. They swear fidelity. Odin even offers Loki a lovely, patient goddess as his beard. (Poor Sigunn also winds up as the beard for Loki's other marriage to the ogress Angerboda, mother of Hel, Fenris, and the Midgard Serpent. My guess is, safe and loving didn't do much for Loki's libido.)

I was shocked when I first read a kids' version of Edith Hamilton and asked my parents what "out of wedlock" meant. "But I thought Zeus was married to all his wives," I said. My long-suffering mother gently made clear that this was a polite fiction. And one of the great building blocks of my imaginative life began to shift. Zeus was no longer a responsible if reckless husband. He was a cad, a seducer, a thoughtless pig who cared more about the kids he sired than the women who bore them, and about his own fun most of all. The king of the gods, came the awful thought, was a jerk. And in that case, why was he the king? Why should I root for such a careless user?

The Abduction of Persephone,
Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

The floodgates had been opened, and the rush of criticism was impossible to stop. Hera gained a lot more of my sympathy. I stopped trying to excuse Aphrodite on account of her beauty. Hades and Persephone became one of my favorite couples for the simple reason that he was faithful to her. Suddenly the gods had faults, huge gaping faults of personality and behavior. Their humanity - the squabbles, the contests, the grousing - had been charming before. Now it became deeply problematic. The gods were worse than most people I knew. They acted with impunity, taking whatever they wanted and only offering an explanation if they felt like it. (Often those explanations were woefully inadequate. I've never been able to get behind the transformation of Niobe into a stone, just to shut up her crying. Especially since the stone itself keeps crying.)

Freya, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

Other mythologies were equally subject to the criticism of my now-jaded expectations. So what if Freya's married? Her husband's missing, she's the goddess of love, and she has a hall full of strapping warriors. What do you think she's going to do with them? I revisited the tale of Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnell, understanding finally why he couldn't choose whether to have her beautiful by day or by night. I was dismally unsurprised to learn that Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys were all siblings. I'd hoped for better from the Egyptians than from the Greeks, but it was par for the course; gods liked incest. Myths became more important to me for the stories than for the codes of conduct they supported, or even for the reverence of the supernatural that they'd previously made me feel. Why should I revere Zeus the rake, or Loki the asshole, or Osiris the idiot? They didn't practice what they preached; they gleefully ignored their own rules. I enjoyed the stories; it didn't mean I had to like the characters as people.

The Wooing of Gerd, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

Which, I suspect, is exactly why the d'Aulaires did what they did. It's impossible to like or respect some of the choices that the gods make. Hera dooms Semele to a horrific death for sheer spite. Set takes vengeance to an appallingly vindictive level. The wooing of Gerd is an uncomfortable story of dubious consent, with a fertility moral that transforms rape into love. You could list every altruistic act of Loki's on one hand and still have fingers left over. These are awful people: morally corrupt, shamelessly self-serving, and whiny when someone else's underhanded gambit beats theirs. But they are also the core of the world's great stories, most of which wouldn't have happened without the appalling deeds committed by the gods.

So in telling those stories, you have to bowdlerize. You have to leave out the worst of the gods in order to communicate the real wonder and excitement of their stories. Especially when writing for kids, who may be encountering them for the first time, the magic should come first. There's plenty of time later for kids to learn the shades of gray. If you're going to entrance them with the glory of myth, you'd better make it as entrancing as it can be.

The Olympians, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

Because it does lose something. I used to fling myself headlong into those stories, trusting in the awe-inspiring power and beauty of invincible immortals to do the right thing and save the world. I still love those stories, and I've forgiven the gods for not being as perfect as I wanted them to be. But I read them with my tongue in my cheek now. I ask questions; I groan at bad decisions; I mock the gods. I'm not sorry that I learned to think and doubt, but sometimes I miss the way it used to be. And I'm hugely grateful to the d'Aulaires for making me fall so hard for those stories that I can still love them even after I learned the truth.

Tale as Old as Time

My favorite fairy tale, in any and every form, has always been Beauty and the Beast.

Beauty and the Beast, Mercer Mayer

It's as feminist as mainstream fairy tales will ever get: Beauty is an outspoken and brave heroine whose sacrifices and triumphs alike are directly due to her own choices. It upends the pretty-people-are-good theory that runs rampant throughout so many fairy tales; the Beast presents the best case of character development in folklore. It has everything anyone could ask for in a story: adventure, danger, glamour, magic, romance, jealousy, and an important point elegantly made.

I'm not alone in my love for this story, either. There are tons of variants on any fairy tale; Egypt and China have their own Cinderella stories, and the beautiful-girl-with-evil-stepmother story is ubiquitous in every culture. But not necessarily popular. Beauty and the Beast is so beloved a story that we've popularized its variants as well. Cupid and Psyche; East of the Sun, West of the Moon; Tam Lin: they're the same story in new clothes.

Possibly the best common thread in all the variants is the heroine. Whether her name is Janet, Beauty, or Psyche, the heroine of a Beauty and the Beast story will always be the kind of girl you'd want your daughter to grow up into. She'll be gutsy and independent and passionate. She'll own her mistakes and learn from them. She won't be afraid to defy authority, or to dream big, or to carve out a place for herself when she doesn't fit into any acceptable norms. She is, quite simply, a badass.

Eros and Psyche, Marta Dahlig

And the hero, while always a swoon-worthy sweetheart, will be oddly passive once the heroine comes onstage. His proactive steps to break his curse generally end after he procures the right girl. Cupid is perfectly happy never to appear to Psyche; the bear-king fetches a bride and then settles down to a nocturnal existence; Tam Lin, knowing he'll be used to pay the Fairy Queen's tithe to hell, is content to wait until Janet realizes she's pregnant and demands some answers before he tells her how she can save him. The Beast's nightly proposal to Beauty is actually the most go-getting strategy of them all. Unlike the others, he's not willing to hang around until the lightbulb goes off in Beauty's head; he keeps the question in her (and our) minds at all times, reminding us just how unhappy he is in his cursed form. And his gracious acceptance of her constant rejection, especially in the face of his obvious misery, ennobles him long before we realize he's a human.

Then there's the antagonist.

One of the most fascinating things about a Beauty and the Beast story is that it doesn't actually need a villain. It's not a story about defeating evil; it's a story about finding love and acceptance in unexpected places. It's about human nature, and human expectations of and responses to love. It's beautifully complex in the questions it asks about who we are.

Psyche at the Throne of Venus,
Edward Matthew Hale

But if you simply must have a villain, there is one who keeps coming back to plague our supernatural couple. Powerful, intimidating, tyrannical, and fond of toying with prey. And a woman.

Remember what I said about feminism? It is all over this story. Invariably, the final confrontation in a Beauty and the Beast story is between two strong-willed women deciding the fate of a passive man. Janet faces down the Fairy Queen. Psyche performs every task Aphrodite sets her, even the one that by rights should have killed her. The bear-king's wife tricks her way past the troll queen's magical cheats to snap her husband out of his trance. And even Beauty, when she finally tells the Beast that she loves him, shatters the spell laid on him by a vindictive sorceress. These are formidable foes, with lots of magic and very few scruples. It's abundantly clear that the heroes cannot win against them. The bear-king doesn't want to get engaged to the troll queen, but he does. The Beast can't break his spell alone. Running away on his own never occurs to Tam Lin. Cupid displays the most defiance, but it consists of marrying in secret and whispering hints to Psyche when his mother's back is turned. Only the women can defeat those who menace their men.

Charon and Psyche, John Roddam Spencer
Stanhope

And they don't even have to do it through traditionally feminine ways. Psyche's tasks - sorting grains, stealing golden fleece, traveling to the Underworld - are exactly the kind set for male heroes. The Underworld descent in particular puts her on a level with Hercules, the only other human to go to Hades and come back successful. (And Hercules was a demigod.) Janet's wrestling match with the transforming Tam Lin requires her physically to fight a lion, a snake, a newt, and a living flame, just as Peleus does when struggling to capture Thetis. The heroine of "East of the Sun,

Beauty and the Beast, Edmund Dulac

West of the Moon" pulls off the kind of deception that would make Loki proud. Beauty's task is easier, since her variant has no physical antagonist, but she still suffers the trauma of believing she's come too late to save her beloved, and has to search for him in a vast garden at midnight. We're not talking the cliched healing-power-of-a-woman's-love here. This is battle on the front lines. This is facing death and nightmares and coming back victorious.

But the best part, of course, is the end. So many fairy tales have an incredible protagonist who defies the odds for the love of someone who just doesn't seem worthy. The Little Mermaid gives up everything for a truly dopey prince who never really gets it. The soldier who solves the mystery of the Twelve Dancing Princesses has to marry someone who plotted his death. Tons of third sons fall for haughty princesses who set them impossible tasks before they'll deign to look twice at them.

Tam Lin, Dan Dutton

But in a Beauty and the Beast story, there's no such unequal relationship. These couples don't deal in love at first sight. They spend time with each other. They get to know each other. They fall in love with personalities, not with outward appearances. And when the spell is finally broken and they're free to be together, the story has created an actual romance that an audience can believe in. "And they lived happily ever after" isn't just a conventional platitude in these stories; it's a statement of fact, built on an established and proven relationship.

There's even some equity in the ultimate resolution of who winds up where. Psyche and the bear-king's wife take up residence in their husbands' worlds; Tam Lin enters Janet's. The Beast and Beauty do a lovely little trade-off: the broken spell allows him to be an acknowledged part of her world, and her marriage to him makes her part of his. These couples are a match for each other in every way. Rewarding the courage of one means rewarding the dedication of the other.

A Beauty and the Beast story requires you to think. It raises questions about equality, the flaws of humanity, and the nature of love. And it provides answers by presenting us with the most developed and sophisticated sets of lovers in any fairy tale. It's that rare treasure, something popular that is also something good.