We Are Not Amused

"All right, people. Our next lot is one Muse of fire, a bit late for Shakespeare but just in time for you lucky folks! Do I hear one thousand?

"What do you mean, what's she like? She's a Muse! Of fire! Isn't that all you need to know?"

Well, that's the thing. Muses are weird that way. They might be Greek mythology's greatest crossover success story. Countless modern artists invoke them, whether in blame or in thanks. We love the idea of patron goddesses of the arts, watching over those brave and reckless souls who dare to pursue art.

We just don't know a single thing about who the Muses actually are.

Apollo, Mnemosyne, and the Nine Muses, Anton Raphael Mengs

Sure, we know what they represent. Poetry, theater, dance, even history and astronomy. All cool, worthwhile things. But beyond each Muse's designated area of specialization, we know squat. They're the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, they hang out with Apollo (who got around with quite a few of them), they serve on occasion as jury and record-keepers for the Olympians. Calliope has a bunch of sons. That's about it.

Okay, so maybe they're the personifications of their individual arts, not just the patron goddesses. All well and good, except even in the arts that have definable personalities, they come off as extremely one-note and confusing. Is Thalia, Muse of comedy, an absurd gigglefest? Does Clio get frustrated with Terpsichore dancing away while she's trying to give a lecture on history? How does personifying epic poetry get Calliope all that action? Shouldn't that logically be the domain of Erato, Muse of love poetry? If a solution raises more questions than it answers, it's probably not the right solution.

Hesiod and the Muse, Gustave Moreau

There's another problem with the Muses and their lack of personality, related directly to the artists who call on them for help. Those artists consider the Muses their personal property. "Sing, Muse, of the rage of Achilles." "My muse isn't cooperating." "I'm blocked; I can't get to my muse." Shakespeare in Love uses the introduction of its title character to let him discourse on his need to "find" his muse. Did you check under the bed yet, Will?

From benevolent patrons who can withhold their needed assistance, the Muses become things that are owned. Part of it comes from the close identification of art with artist: it's "your" artwork, after all, and it's easy to see where the muse that inspired it could become "your" muse. But it's easy to do precisely because the Muses lack personality. Can you imagine anyone owning Zeus, or Poseidon, or Aphrodite? Artemis turns a guy into a deer and has him slaughtered by his own hounds for nothing more than the implication that he might want to possess her. The Muses don't even put up a fight. Instead they take on the personality of the artist who claims them.

The Nine Muses, wegs

There are no Muse-centric stories. In the stories where they feature, it's always as side characters, and always in a group. They judge the music contest between Apollo and Marsyas (three guesses as to who wins); they gather Orpheus' strewn limbs; they get super-vindictive when a prize idiot named Thamyris tries to do a rerun of the Apollo-Marsyas contest, except with himself as Marsyas and the Muses as Apollo. When he fails to outsing them, they blind him and strip him of his skill with the lyre. But here's the kicker: yes, it's excessive punishment, but it's completely par for the course among the Greek gods. It only strikes us as over-the-top because the Muses, unlike the Olympians, have no personality to justify their harshness. Apollo, let's not forget, flayed Marsyas and made a drum out of his skin. The Muses were merciful in comparison. So we still don't know anything about them as characters.

It may well have something to do with the fact that the "traditional" nine Muses took a while to show up. For quite some time there were only three - Melete, Aoide, and Mneme (kind of like the equally character-less Three Graces, who receive Aphrodite on Cyprus and do basically zip for the rest of the mythology). It's tricky to make up lasting stories when no one can even agree on the number and names of your prospective characters. But even after the Romans cemented their names, number and specialties, no one had any Muse stories to tell. They stayed as they always had: benevolent but shadowy figures, popping in and out of the narrative.

The Muses, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

It's a tricky business, looking for inspiration to an unknown quantity. You never know what she'll bring you, if she brings you anything at all. Artistic narcissism raises the uncomfortable question: is your muse actually you, an idealized you who only has good ideas? And why ask for help from someone randomly designated by some clown in a toga?

The Muses, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

If the Muses have personality, it comes from the artists who supplicate them, who see in them the personification of inspiration, that rush of excitement and energy in which nothing bad can be created. But they're not individuals. In a pantheon full of living, breathing characters, the Muses are as three-dimensional as a line. And it's very weird to have nonentities presiding over humanity's greatest form of individual expression.

Give a Girl a Break

The Peacock Complaining to Juno, Gustave Moreau

As every Greek myth will tell you ad nauseam, Zeus's wife Hera is one jealous meanie. She's territorial to the point of obsession, with a nasty vengeful streak and a vivid imagination. The queen of the gods is, to put it bluntly, a cow.

All of which is true. As gods go, she's one of the worst to cross. (Only Artemis really equals her in terms of vicious retribution. The men, in contrast to either woman, are sissies who can't deal out pain.) But the classic portrait of her is rather one-sided. She deserves far more of a break than she gets.

Why, you ask? Well, let's start off with some early childhood trauma. The girl was swallowed whole and alive by her father at the moment of her birth. And stayed alive, in his stomach, until her littlest brother was ballsy enough to fight back. That right there should win our sympathy.

Oh, and that littlest brother? With a woman already on his arm (Metis, mother of Athena and all-around badass herself), Zeus decided to sleep with his older sisters. Demeter said yes, which is how we get Persephone; Hestia just snorted and went back to her fire; Hera flat-out

Hera and Zeus, Jun-Pierre Shiozawa

refused him. Zeus, selfish even then, would not let this stand. His solution? He made a thunderstorm, turned himself into a bird, and flew to Hera for shelter. Moved by pity, she cuddled the bird close, when all of a sudden - whoops! It's Zeus, and it looks like he just moved you both into Rapetown-on-Incest.

Who else thinks that the subsequent wedding of Zeus and Hera must have been the most awkward event ever?

Right now, we've got a plucky young goddess who survived life inside Dad's belly, only to be claimed as spoils by her liberator. At this point, Hera does one of two things. Either she decides that she might as well make good on what she's got, or she decides to spend her whole life avenging herself on the bastard brother who dealt her this crappy hand. It depends on your interpretation, really, but it's understandable either way. She can be admirable for doing her best, or she can be tragic in the same way as Macbeth. Whichever you prefer, it makes her a far more interesting character than a cardboard villainess.

Hera Imprisons Io, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

I can never make up my mind about her choice there. When you consider the outright torture she perpetrates on Zeus's other conquests - keeping Io a cow, inciting Semele to arrange her own death, screwing up Heracles's entire life with vindictive abandon - it's easy to think that this is a woman consumed by vengeance, with no pity or sympathy left in her. But then you run into her relationship with her son Hephaestus, who backed her in a fight with Zeus at incredible bodily cost to himself. And her patronage of Jason is downright tender during the quest for the Golden Fleece, and lasts all the way until he throws Medea over. (And come on, Jason - did you really think Hera, of all goddesses, would support a cheater?)

And then there's the hilarious, but also touching, scene in the Iliad where Hera seduces Zeus to distract him from the fighting so Poseidon can help the Greeks. His opening gambit is to recite a list of women he's slept with, something usually guaranteed to send Hera into a rage. But

Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida,
James Barry

then he tells her that of all of those women, none of them - not even Hera herself, way back when he pulled the wet-bird trick - was as beautiful and enticing as she is now. And then he makes a move that even I get a little swoony over: he takes her to Mount Ida and wraps them both in a golden cloud through which no one can see their lovemaking. Granted, Hera's motivated here by resentment at Zeus for not allowing the gods to interfere with Troy; granted, Zeus does not start out as the smoothest of operators. But it's bizarrely sweet, after all these tales where you assume it's a hellish marriage of a philanderer and a shrew, to see that Zeus at least has strong feelings for his wife, and that she is well aware of them. Later, when Zeus wakes up and sees Poseidon running rampant, he blames Hera; she swears her innocence by their marriage bed, a vow she says she would never make falsely. Despite their horrible beginning, there's something there that's important to them both.

Juno Ludovisi, artist unknown

And if Hera does care for Zeus, in spite of it all, it explains why she pursues his mistresses with such rabid hatred. She might not like the fact that she cares about her lousy husband, which means she might find it difficult to admit to his face. For a woman whose adult life was inexorably shaped by trauma, the kind of abuse Hera inflicts on her "rivals" might be the psychologically safest way for her to express love.

It doesn't make it right, and I still feel awful for poor innocents like Semele. But it does make more of Hera than she usually gets. And she gets so little that there's got to be some parts of the story missing.

Shut Up, You're Only Getting Married

What is the deal with fathers in legends? Either they're criminally neglectful and allow their second wives to mistreat their daughters, or they're stiflingly protective and would rather kill a guy than let him say boo to his baby girl. It's as if the state of being the father of an attractive young woman triggers a chemical reaction that turns even the mildest of dads into psychotic serial killers.

You think I'm kidding? The father of the Twelve Dancing Princesses killed an unspecified number of princes before the soldier came along. Forgall sent Cuchulainn to fight a deadly warrior woman before he'd let him marry Emer. Ysbaddaden practically replicated the labors of Hercules to keep Culhwch from marrying Olwen (although to be fair, that was also to preserve Ysbaddaden's own life). And then there was the total nutjob who was so opposed to the idea of his daughter having a life of her own that he locked her on top of a glass mountain. They do say your kids drive you crazy, but that is just uncalled for.

Atalanta and Melanion, John Dickson Batten

And then there's Atalanta.

Full disclosure: this girl is My Girl. I wanted to be her when I grew up. I spent hours practicing my running, hoping one day to be as fast as her. She was a bow-shooting, speed-racing, take-no-prisoners badass, and I was dazzled from day one. But even I couldn't turn a blind eye to the engagement challenge that she, not her father, dreamed up. Beat her in a race or die? There's loading the dice, and then there's not even playing.

I always thought that that absurdly cruel challenge was a power play between Atalanta and her father. "You want to marry me off? Fine. But we'll do this my way, and even then you won't really be able to pretend you've got any say in my life." Dozens of poor saps, as infatuated as I was, got sent to their deaths for something that had absolutely nothing to do with them.

Atalanta's engagement challenge is doubly unique: 1) The potential bride gets input, and 2) her input creates the challenge. The other promised girls rarely get a word in edgewise about what they think of the unnumbered men who die for their sakes. Emer slips out of a marriage proposal while she's waiting for Cuchulainn, but only because Fiance Number Two decides not to be a jerk and steal Our Hero's girl. The Twelve Dancing Princesses certainly connive at their suitors' deaths, but their actions are never judged within the story, and they never comment on how they feel about dooming these men.

The Prince Enters the Briar Wood, Edward Burne-Jones

The worst-case scenario, as in so many other things, is poor Sleeping Beauty. No one ever asks her what she wants. She exists in limbo while men die in sight of her tower. None of it is her fault - unlike Atalanta, she has no say in whether or not anyone dies - but what a lot of baggage to wake up to. The knowledge that a century of death and pain went on while you slept, unaware and unable to help, must be devastating.

Culhwch at Ysbaddaden's Court, Ernest Wallcousins

And what about someone like Olwen, where the choice is between your father's life and your future? Culhwch kills Ysbaddaden at the end of the story without a second thought, neatly getting vengeance for a broken promise, fulfilling the gimmick of the plot, and securing his task-free life with his blissful bride. Except for the bit about how he just cut her father's head off. Have fun with that in marriage counseling. Would Olwen be happy with Culhwch, who after all is brave and stubborn enough to fulfill her father's insane challenges, or would she prefer to have her dad alive? Or was there someone else she'd rather have married? Or did she want to get married at all? No one ever asks.

The fulfillment of the challenge is always treated as the bride's answer: of course she'll marry the hero! He's jumped through all these hoops for her sake! It would be a total bitch move, not to mention anticlimactic, if she refused him! No one wonders what life would be like, married to a prince who happened by the castle on the right day, or to a guy who'd let her dad get flayed and beheaded, or to a girl who'd have sent you to die without regrets if you hadn't happened to toss her a few shiny apples. Sometimes the story goes out of its way to prove that there will be a happy ending: Olwen does in fact fall in love with Culhwch, Emer holds out for Cuchulainn, Atalanta and Hippomenes actually get busted by the gods for having too much sex. But what about the soldier, married to a Dancing Princess who wanted him dead? What about Sleeping Beauty and the prince from another century? What about all the rescued princesses who get handed over to whatever schlub pries them free from the dragon, or the wizard, or the sacrificial knife?

Brides are mute. No one's interested in what they have to say, unless they're a wild card like Atalanta, and the most even she can do is amend the engagement challenge rather than dispense with it completely. When brides try to have a say in their future, it's disregarded. The most Olwen can do to help Culhwch is to get him an audience with Ysbaddaden, at which the men do all the talking despite Olwen's presence; after that, she has to sit around and wait for outside factors to decide her fate. Sleeping Beauty's castle throws a wedding party about ten seconds after waking up. Spell or no spell, that is no way to treat a disoriented teenager in the grip of someone else's will (in this case, the goddamn fairy who was supposed to fix her life). We know it'll work out; we flipped to the end and saw "Happily Ever After." But the implications of the silencing of the women at the moment of crucial choice are terrifying. A fairytale bride's entire culture conspires jointly to shut her up at the very moment when her voice should be heard. And this is the happy ending.

For extra weirdness, often the stated reason for an engagement challenge is to ensure that the prospective bride's husband is "worthy of her." If you care so much about your daughter's welfare and happiness, wouldn't it make more sense to ask her what she thinks?