Hell Hath No Fury

It's no secret that the Greek gods had a very over-the-top idea of punishment for mortals who crossed them. Brag about your musical talent? Apollo will flay off your skin and make a drum out of it. Display pride in your vast brood of children? Whoops, they're all dead and now you're a stone because you just wouldn't stop crying about it for some reason. And gods all help you if Aphrodite catches you (or anyone close to you) even thinking you're prettier than she is.

But then there are some punishments that really cross a line. Some of the foulest monsters of Greek mythology started out as mortals or demigods who actually didn't do anything. Arguably the most memorable metamorphosis in the mythos was in fact right. And there's something else they all have in common, aside from the varying degrees of innocence: the cruelest transformative punishments in Greek mythology are all perpetrated on women, by women.

Let's start off light. Atalanta, fastest human who ever lived, has just lost the race to Hippomenes, who cleverly employed divine assistance from tricksy Aphrodite. But lo and behold, the frigid ice-queen falls head over heels in love with the man who defeated her! It's a happy ending all around, with Atalanta bending her murderous pride enough to fall in love, Hippomenes' guts and devotion being amply rewarded, King Iason getting his troublesome daughter off his hands, and Aphrodite getting plaudits for arranging the whole thing.

Except not so much with that last one. No, Atalanta and Hippomenes are way too busy going at it like rabbits to toss a nod in Aphrodite's direction. Granted, this was a dumb thing for them to forget, but it's hardly on the level of, say, Agamemnon forgetting to sacrifice to Artemis and then being forced to kill his daughter in penance. A newlywed couple forgets to thank Aphrodite, goddess of love and desire, because they're too busy having sex. Of all the sins of omission, this has got to be the easiest to forgive.

But Aphrodite, as previously stated, is a vindictive bitch. One roll in the hay too many, and poof! Atalanta and Hippomenes are now lions. "So what?" you ask. So plenty - the Greeks thought lions couldn't mate with each other. Aphrodite harnesses the pair to her chariot, furnishing them with an eternal bondage setup that, according to the wisdom of the day, they could never take advantage of.

Atalanta and Hippomenes Changed into Lions, Crispijn van de Passe

Biology saves the day here. I like to imagine the two of them in the Olympian stables, unharnessed after a long day's work, turning to each other and saying, "Oh, honey, those gods are so dumb, aren't they? Move that fine feline ass over here!" But for the Greeks, there was no happy Darwinian ending. For a perfectly understandable slip of the mind, a pair of consumingly passionate lovers are kept apart forever. And it's not difficult to interpret this as Aphrodite's reaction to being threatened. Hippomenes isn't the problem child; his petition to Aphrodite before the race proves him very aware of the gods' power. No, the stone in the sandal here is Atalanta, determined virgin, spurner of Aphrodite's gifts, the dream convert who forgets to thank her sponsor. Aphrodite likes Hippomenes, but Atalanta is the prize she's after. And when famously independent Atalanta doesn't instantly fall to her knees and thank Aphrodite for the gift of a sex drive, there are no second chances. How dare Atalanta enjoy her sexy times? How dare she imagine it's got more to do with her and Hippomenes than with Aphrodite's influence?

Circe Invidiosa, John William Waterhouse

And like I said, that's the light version. The first you ever hear of Scylla is that she's half-woman, half-monster, with six ravenous animal heads instead of a lower half, and that she gets the munchies when Odysseus' ship sails by. But this beast started out as a perfectly normal naiad whose only "crime" was being unrequitedly loved by Glaucus, the first merman. When Glaucus goes to Circe for a love potion, Circe decides that his fish tail isn't nearly the turnoff that Scylla thinks it is and puts the moves on Glaucus herself. He rejects her, which she really should have seen coming, given the whole love-potion thing. Circe's reaction? She poisons Scylla's bathing pool, turning her into the monster Odysseus meets.

Scylla, GENZOMAN

Keep in mind that Circe has never met Scylla. She knows nothing about her except that Scylla's her rival, which isn't even really true; Scylla's not interested in Glaucus at all. Circe directs her anger at a completely passive noncombatant who has tried repeatedly to step offstage and live her damn life. Because one fish-legged weirdo said no, a freaking goddess destroys the life and future of a harmless would-be passerby. Poor Scylla is condemned to eternity as a hideous monster because Circe can't be bothered to vent her anger constructively. At least Aphrodite had a reason for flipping out on Atalanta and Hippomenes - a stupid and flimsy reason, but a reason. In Scylla's story, Circe behaves with all the wisdom and maturity of a fifteen-year-old nursing a first crush.

And she never suffers for it. Sure, she loses Glaucus, but she'd already done that; transforming Scylla is retaliation, not Plan B. She never gets called to account; she just goes on with her seductive witch-goddess gig. And she never gives a second thought to the innocent whose immortal life she just ruined. I never thought I'd say this, but she might be worse than Aphrodite.

Continuing the "unexpected bitch" trend, guess who makes it on here twice?

Only my favorite goddess, Athena. You know. Goddess of wisdom. The one who you'd think would be immune to all this nonsense. Dammit.

Athena and Arachne, SnittyCakez

I've already covered the reasons why Athena massively overreacted to Arachne's stupidity. But the fact remains that Arachne was right. Greek mythology's most famous metamorph arguably deserved what she got, but inarguably had a valid point. Because the only thing the gods hate more than being shown up is being wrong.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that Arachne challenges Athena on that most womanly of her talents, weaving. It's easy to forget, what with her armor and badass nature and patronage of Odysseus, that Athena also taught handicrafts to humankind. By picking a fight over weaving, Arachne issues a direct challenge to a surprisingly masculine goddess's sense of femininity. No wonder Athena gets defensive; in modern terms, Arachne is blatantly implying that even a goddess can't have it all. But it's hard to see Athena's reaction as a feminist triumph when it comes at the expense of an even more talented woman (not to mention a melodramatic tantrum that could provide a textbook case of that most female of fake diseases, "hysteria").

Medusa, Peter Paul Rubens

And what about Medusa?

This one is even sadder than Scylla, and the vindictive goddess involved is even worse than Circe. Medusa, like Scylla, started out as quite a looker (in fact, the only pretty Gorgon). Like Scylla, Medusa was desired by a god, in this case Poseidon himself. But Scylla actually lucked out in her unwanted admirer; the worst Glaucus did was try to buy a love potion. When Medusa refuses Poseidon, he rapes her in Athena's own temple and waltzes off scot-free.

Perseus, Medusa, and Athena, 5th century (artist unknown)

Again, you would think that the goddess of wisdom would understand about victim blaming. You would think that her longstanding feud with Poseidon would lead her to direct all her righteous anger at the desecration of her temple on her asshole of an uncle. Appallingly, Athena turns on Medusa instead. As "punishment" for "Medusa's" sacrilege, the goddess of wisdom turns a rape victim into Greek mythology's most famous monster, a being so hideous that the simple act of looking at her turns you to stone. And that's not even enough. She carries such a grudge that when Perseus is sent to kill Medusa, Athena actually tells him how to do it. And when he succeeds, using her tips and equipment, he gives her Medusa's head, which she promptly fixes on her shield to make herself even more invincible. That's right - not content with destroying Medusa's life and arranging her death, Athena is so committed to punishing this poor girl that she has to be the winner even after Medusa's been murdered. There are so many levels of bitter and overkill here that I don't even know where to begin.

The Medusa, CarrieAnn Reda

Okay. I know god logic follows no rules of actual logic. But can someone please explain to me exactly what Medusa did, herself, to deserve such vicious treatment?

Nothing. The answer is, she did nothing. She, in fact, is the only one in the whole sordid situation who did anything right. She said no to a guy she didn't want to sleep with. Is it her fault that she happened to be in Athena's temple? Is it her fault that Poseidon couldn't take no for an answer? The entire case against her is circumstantial at best and built on others' faults at worst.

The Despair of Scylla, Le Minh Bui

But the helpless woman is a much easier target than the righteous man, the love interest, or the powerful god. Even in stories where the whole point is their superior might, goddesses are never pitted against men. The worst of their wrath is reserved for other women, regardless of whether or not they deserve it, because the women don't fight back. Hera found that out long ago; fighting Zeus is a no-no, but plotting against the women he sleeps with is almost consequence-free.

So why isn't Hera in this post more? Well, because even she never goes to these extremes. She's persistent and vindictive, sure, and her treatment of Semele in particular is unnecessarily harsh. But all Hera wants is a quick proof that she's better than whatever hussy her husband's shacking up with today. She's not after the long-term revenge, the slow torture, the painful day-after-day agony of a life utterly blighted. She doesn't want her rivals to suffer endlessly; she just wants them gone. She's not a patch on Athena for inventiveness, or Aphrodite for cruel irony. Hera invented the technique of persecuting the defenseless woman; the other goddesses perfected it.

Athena, Leonidas Drosis

These goddesses' ultimate goal is to assert their power and regain face. In every situation, it's a goddess who's lost face somehow, whether she's been romantically rejected or ritually desecrated. And the gender code of the times guarantees that if she goes after the man responsible, she is unevenly matched and will not regain the fear and respect crucial to her worship. So she pursues the woman involved, whether or not that woman actually was responsible, because that makes the match uneven in the opposite way: the X-chromosomes cancel each other out, and we're left with immortal versus mortal (or demigod, which is just as useless sometimes). Which is not to say that goddesses don't go toe-to-toe with males and kick their ass: Artemis and Actaeon come to mind, as do Athena and Poseidon fighting over the city of Athens. But in those cases, there was no handy woman to take the blame. When there is, the goddesses come down like she-wolves on the fold. And there will never be mercy.

It's Time to Listen

I don't generally like to let harsh realities invade this blog. It's my happy space where I get to blather about stories, not a soapbox from which I shout what I think you should be thinking. But then Todd Akin opened his idiotic mouth, and I remember how little has really changed since the days of the stories I love. Rape is a huge plot point in so many myths, but so often the victim's story is rarely even listened to. Worse, his or her experience is mostly brushed aside, with the rape-conceived child being seen as justifying the assault.

It all sounds a little too familiar.

The Rape of Europa, Noel-Nicolas Coypel

Take, for example, Europa. Really, you could take any of Zeus' conquests, including his wife. But Europa's the one who gets the word "rape" in the title of her story. Search for "Europa" on its own, and you get images of a moon and the official EU website. Search "Rape of Europa" and you get stories, pictures, and a film about stolen art treasures that turns the seizure and assault of a girl by a god-turned-bull into a metaphor for the loss of Europe's artistic identity. In our cultural mindset, Europa is nothing without the rape. Before, she's not even a blip on the radar; after, she's only important because she conceives from that rape, and gives birth to the future king of Crete and the greatest judge of mythological Greece. The only story we tell about her - the only one we know about her - is that she was raped by Zeus in the form of a bull. Oh, and did I mention stolen away to a freakin' island afterwards, by her rapist? And then handed over to the current king of Crete like a door prize once Zeus gets bored?

The Rape of Europa, Felix Edouard Vallotton

It actually gets worse. When her father, showing a unique moral and familial affection, sends his sons out to look for his missing daughter, Zeus distracts them by giving them their own cities, thus barring them from ever locating their sister and depriving Europa of anything from her pre-rape life. But this ban isn't forever; when Europa's sons Minos and Sarpedon clash over a boy they both love, Sarpedon flees Crete for his uncle Cilix's kingdom. Obviously he can leave the island; obviously he knows, or has been allowed to discover, where his mother's family is. A young man who's never seen his uncle is easily permitted to take up residence with him, but a rape victim torn from her home is flatly denied even a glimpse of her brother. "Double standard" doesn't begin to cover how appalling this is.

Sun, Moon, and Talia, Chris Beatrice

We've been over the arguably-worse horror that is "Sun, Moon and Talia," the original Sleeping Beauty. But it bears repeating. While in the grip of an enchantment, Talia is raped while unconscious and left pregnant by an already-married king. She only wakes up when her newborn son mistakes her finger for her nipple and sucks the spindle splinter out. Again, it gets worse; when King Rapist returns to his perma-sleeping sex doll and finds that, whoops, she's awake and he has twins, he doesn't even have the guts to own up to what he's done. He keeps her in her castle and goes about his life, blissfully unaware that his actual wife (or sometimes his ogress mother, depending on whether it's Perrault or Basile telling the story) is trying to serve him his children for dinner. It is purest luck that Talia and her children survive; the only time the king ever takes responsibility for what he's done is when he marries Talia at the end, which is both a foregone conclusion and a horrifying ending.

Talia, like Europa, does literally nothing to deserve or earn the fate she gets. Both are victims of passing proprietary lust. Both bear children conceived in rape. Both are cut off forever from their families, and from any support system to help them cope with the upheavals in their lives. Their stories are ones that we've heard many times. They're the realities that too many women live with every day. And if they were real and alive today - a kidnapped young woman and a teen mother - they would be among the many that Todd Akin suggested were not "legitimately" raped.

While you let that sink in, let me introduce you to Chrysippus. Because surely you don't think only women get raped.

The Rape of Chrysippus, KidaGreenleaf

If Talia's and Europa's stories make me think of faces on milk cartons and sexual slavery, Chrysippus reminds me of the also-too-common priest scandals in the Catholic Church. Chrysippus, an athletic young nobleman, sets off for the Nemean Games (basically the Olympics), accompanied by his tutor Laius. He never gets to compete in the Games, because Laius abducts him, rapes him, and carries him to Laius' home city of Thebes. Stories vary on the precise details of the ending, but in all of them Chrysippus dies: sometimes by his own hand out of shame, sometimes by his half-brothers, afraid that he would inherit their father Pelops' throne. In all of them, Laius feels no guilt or remorse for his hijacking of the life of a young man whose well-being is his responsibility. In all of them, only Chrysippus bears the burden of what has happened to him.

Chrysippus and Laius, KidaGreenleaf

And as so often happens, the victim does not see justice done. Chrysippus dies long before Laius meets his fate at the hands of his son Oedipus (you might have heard of him). Typically for Greek myths, divine vengeance for Chrysippus' suffering comes too late and very over-the-top: the family of Laius, from Oedipus to Jocasta to Antigone, all pay an impossibly high price for the sins of the father. But Chrysippus is long dead when that happens, and his life in tatters even before his death. What can it matter to Chrysippus that the children and grandchildren of his rapist suffer agonizing moral and physical torment? What difference can it make now? It can't. Nothing that the Theban royal house endures can change or heal Chrysippus in any way. It's an empty vengeance, and the rapist who set it in motion gets off lightest of all. Laius is allowed to marry, to have a child, to rule for decades after he destroys Chrysippus' life. And worst of all, he wins. Chrysippus' is a forgotten story. Even though his tale jumpstarts Oedipus', you never hear it when you hear the story of the fall of the house of Thebes. Laius successfully spins the story to make himself essentially an innocent bystander, a victim of Oedipus' irrational wrath, rather than the root cause of such destruction.

Math Son of Mathonwy, Margaret Jones

I can think of precisely one rape myth with a somewhat happy ending. The Welsh king Math lives under a spell that requires him, whenever he's not in battle, to rest with his feet in the lap of a maiden. Being a king, he chooses Goewin, the most beautiful virgin at court. Things go swimmingly until Gilfaethwy, a warrior kinsman of Math, falls in lust with the king's designated virgin. Gilfaethwy's sorcerer brother sets up a smokescreen war to distract Math, and the two men together rape Goewin while Math is away fighting.

Appalling as this is, Goewin has, crucially, what Europa, Talia and Chrysippus do not: access to a support system. When Math returns, she confides in him that he can no longer put his feet in her lap, since she's no longer a virgin. And Math responds in a manner that makes him a strong candidate for Best Human Being Ever: he comforts Goewin, marries her, and makes her his co-ruler, with as much authority and power as he himself has. And he punishes Gilfaethwy and his brother

Gwydion and Gilfaethwy, Margaret Jones

Gwydion by turning them into paired animals for three straight years, alternating who is male and who is female so that by the end of their punishment, they have both experienced rape firsthand.

We never hear from Gilfaethwy again. But Gwydion, the enabler and co-rapist, is one of the greatest and most popular figures in the Mabinogion, the great Welsh collection of tales and sagas. He's a consummate trickster, on par with Loki and Coyote; he wins praise and accolades for his magic and his skillful manipulation of his enemies; and after his three-year punishment is over, Math welcomes him back to his court and relies on his skills just as he always did.

Olwen, Alan Lee

You wonder what Math's queen had to say about that. You wonder how many women have to look their rapist in the eye every day. You wonder how many bite their tongues and keep quiet for fear of disturbing the peace, sacrificing their own inner peace in the process. You wonder how long it's been going on.

What stories like these tell us is that it's been going on forever. This has been happening all around us, basically since humans figured out what they could put where. We're supposed to learn from the past, from the stories we tell. Why haven't we, yet?

Because, for as long as it's been happening, we've been excusing it. It's okay that Uther raped Igraine; it produced King Arthur. It's no big that Zeus raped Europa; she got to be queen of Crete. Todd Akin is the latest in a long line of whitewashing assholes who have been telling us for millennia that the experience of a rape victim does not matter.

But what seems to shut them up, or at least make them think twice, are stories. The stories of the victims, not the rapists or the narrators; the stories told by the people whose experiences are routinely dismissed and belittled. It takes courage, in such a cultural climate, to speak; to insist that your experience is "legitimate"; to demand recognition from those who would prefer to shrug you away. The victims in legend have been used to justify one way of looking at the world; the victims of today, more and more, are refusing to be so used. It's astonishingly, heartbreakingly brave of them.

And we all need to listen.

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.

Shh, It's a Baby

Your classic fairy tale ends with marriage. The villain's defeated, and nothing stands in the way of conjugal bliss for our hero and heroine. What Disney doesn't let on is that sometimes, the bliss happens before the wedding. There's a small but notable section of fairy tales whose heroines are pregnant well before the prince puts a ring on it.

Heroic, 2013

The most famous of these stories is the one you don't actually hear told that way. Rapunzel and the prince were not just making a rope ladder all that time. Dressing this story up for kids does enormous damage to Rapunzel's image; the version I heard growing up required her to ask, idiotically, why the witch is harder to pull up than the prince. What she originally asked (of her surrogate mother, let's not forget) was why she feels so tired and why her belly's getting bigger. All of a sudden Rapunzel's no longer a loose-tongued bimbo; she's a pregnant teen with important questions. (For extra points, the whole story started with the pregnancy of Rapunzel's mother. Pregnancy is the single greatest plot mover in this fairy tale.)

It also makes the witch's reaction doubly cruel. Instead of deserting her stolen daughter because she feels betrayed, the witch sends a frightened girl with literally nowhere to turn out into the world to deal with an unexpected pregnancy and the death of her beloved. She doesn't even answer Rapunzel's question, apparently thinking that if Rapunzel doesn't know she's pregnant, the baby might just go away. She just dumps the girl in the desert and wreaks blinding vengeance on the prince. This is serious evil here, all the more so because it's so determinedly one-sided. It doesn't matter to the witch whether Rapunzel is safe or scared; all that matters is getting what she wants.

The scariest part? It could be worse.

For all the horror she goes through, at least Rapunzel fell in love and gave her consent. The pre-Disney Sleeping Beauty (who is fifteen, not sixteen), wakes up not when the prince kisses her, but when her newborn infant mistakes her finger for a nipple and sucks the splinter out. "Infant?" you say. "But she wasn't pregnant when she went to sleep..."

Sleeping Beauty, Gustaf Tenggren

No. No, she wasn't. The prince was so moved by her beauty when he found her that he just couldn't resist raping an unconscious girl. That doesn't wake her up. Pregnancy doesn't wake her up. Delivering her twins doesn't wake her up. The thirteenth fairy really knew how to make a curse stick.

Let's recap. Sleeping Beauty is a fifteen-year-old girl who, the last she knew, just learned about this nifty thing called spinning. When she next opens her eyes, it's a century later and she's the sex slave of a necrophiliac. It's not even a surprise to learn that the prince's mother is an ogress who wants to eat Sleeping Beauty and her kids; at least Mom's up front about her evil. This is one that I'm grateful to Disney for bowdlerizing. True Love's Kiss is a much nicer thing to grow up with than date rape.

Janet and the Transformation, Dan Dutton

Both Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty are rather passive about all this. Rapunzel has her child and wanders around looking for her prince; Sleeping Beauty doesn't even get the luxury of consent. Luckily, pregnant heroines aren't all noncombatants. Janet, the spunky Scottish heroine of "Tam Lin," is in every way active and involved in her own fate. Aware of the rules of civilization (unlike Rapunzel), she still chooses to sleep with Tam Lin; even better, when her father and his knights try to shame her into marrying to cover up her pregnancy, she loudly declares that they're all wusses and she'd never deny her child its true father and heritage. Upon finding out that Tam Lin's due to be sacrificed to hell, Janet performs one of the most impressive physical displays of devotion and guts in any story ever: she faces down the enraged Fairy Queen and grimly hangs on to Tam Lin in whatever form he's magicked into taking. This includes a lion, a snake, and fire. The girl wrestles a lion and holds fire still. While pregnant enough to show. She goes the Greeks one better: Thetis put Peleus through the same mess, but he didn't have to deal with an outside foe trying to kill him.

But Janet's the exception. Pregnant heroines are rare as it is. For the most part, that pregnancy renders them instantly passive. There's a Cinderella variant where the two older sisters try to kill their youngest sister as she recovers from giving birth; it's extra easy because the poor girl can't physically fight back. Sometimes the heroine of "The Seven Swans" is pregnant at the climax, but her story is a strange combination of agency and passivity: if she defends herself, she dooms her brothers.

And there's a level of discomfort with acknowledging premarital sex in fairy tales. How old were you when you first heard Rapunzel? And how old were you when you heard the pregnancy variant? Those aren't the versions we tell to children. Fairy tales in their oldest form are meant to scare people into good behavior, in which context a disastrous premarital pregnancy makes perfect narrative sense. But nowadays they're supposed to be light and fluffy stories for kids, with some common sense nestled at the heart of the happily-ever-after. "Mother, why is my belly so large?" was practically a punch line for adult audiences who already knew the answer; if you tell a five-year-old that Rapunzel was pregnant, you're jump-starting "the talk." Even "Tam Lin" gets censored on occasion; the first time I read the story was in a folklore anthology that had Janet visiting Tam Lin to hang out and chat. I'm certainly not averse to fairy tales that prioritize the intellectual and personal bond, but Janet is far more powerful when she takes complete control of a potentially disastrous scenario like out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Disney Princesses as Mothers, sheerisan

I'm not advocating putting children to bed with tales of rape and abandonment. The purpose of fairy tales has changed drastically from Grimm to Disney; you can't make the train run backward now. But it's important to remember where things started. It tells us something about life then, and the changes tell us something about life now. And once in a while, we get a trend-bucker like Janet who makes it all worthwhile.

The Dark Side of the Moon

Fair warning: Today's the day wherein I crush all your youthful ideals.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about Camelot.

Arthur's Camelot, Alan Lee

The name itself is a universal shorthand for perfection, for a time of ideals, for the realization of a few impossible dreams. It's about as rose-colored as you can get. And for good reason: the whole point of having a legend like Camelot is to believe that things can be better, that justice can win over brute force, that one brief shining moment of good is worth all the suffering it takes to win.

So all things considered, we've done a really good job at forgetting that every single one of Camelot's turning points is rooted in betrayal (at best) and rape (at worst).

Take five minutes. Make a list. The moments where everything changes. I'll bet it includes:
- the conception of Arthur
- the sword in the stone
- the conception of Mordred
- Merlin and Nimue
- Galahad
- Lancelot and Guinevere's affair
- the death of Arthur

Let's go through it one thing at a time.

Arthur's very existence is due to betrayal and rape, depending on who tells the story. After fighting the Saxons back to the shores, Uther and his kingdom figure they can settle in for some well-deserved peace. Instead, Uther falls wildly in lust with Igraine, the wife of his most stalwart supporter in the war that just ended five seconds ago, and provokes a whole new war against Gorlois because the man gets touchy at the thought that the king wants to sleep with his wife. Ultimately, unable to prevail against Gorlois' forces, Uther resorts to magic and trickery: he has Merlin enchant him to look like Gorlois, so he can pass through the defenses of invincible Tintagel and sleep with Igraine. While wearing her husband's face.

I don't care how you interpret that. It's messed up. And it's wrong.

To be fair, interpretations vary wildly, mostly in how they deal with Igraine's reaction to this whole mess. Malory casts her as loyal wife to Gorlois, who in fact proposes the flight to Tintagel herself. Mary Stewart has a proud but lovesick Igraine conspire with Uther and Merlin to trap Gorlois. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Igraine loves Uther, but refuses to betray her husband (up until he betrays her, that is). On the whole, people shy away from the notion of rape. But in Malory's version, that's what Arthur's conception is. Uther intentionally misleads Igraine to trick her into sex, when she already refused consent to his face.

The once and future king is a child of rape. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The sword in the stone is far less drastic, but treachery is still involved. Young Arthur, in search of a sword for his forgetful foster brother Kay, turns to the unclaimed sword stuck randomly through a stone in the churchyard. He pulls it out as easy as blinking and gives it to Kay. Problem solved! Go Arthur, savior of the day!

Until Kay recognizes the sword and what it means, and decides that the best possible option is to lie.

Granted, Kay is not the nicest guy, and certainly not nominated for brother awards in this or any century. But this is low, even for him. He knows Arthur pulled out the sword. He knows exactly what that makes Arthur. And instead of being a man about it, accepting that his annoying younger brother might actually be the long-awaited king (who, by the way, is supposed to SAVE THE KINGDOM), Kay's first instinctive move is to grab the glory for himself. You can argue that Camelot owes its existence more to Sir Ector's ability to smell a lie than to Arthur's go-getting nature; young Arthur certainly gives the impression of wanting to please, and it's not hard to imagine that he'd back Kay's lie in hopes of impressing his brother.

Nigel Terry and Helen Mirren as Arthur and Morgana, Excalibur, Warner Bros.

We don't even need to discuss why the conception of Mordred is betrayal and rape, right? It doesn't matter if the treacherous sister is Morgause or Morgan; if she wore Guinevere's face to fool Arthur; if Arthur was young and raw when it happened, or if he was already king. Mordred's mother does the exact same thing to Arthur that Uther did to Igraine: deliberately lies and distorts events for the sake of her own agenda, regardless of Arthur's consent or input.

The Beguiling of Merlin, Edward Burne-Jones

Merlin and Nimue... yeah, I'm going to go ahead and skip the rape charge on that one. Merlin's consent is a weird issue here, since he knows from the start that he will fall for her and she will betray him, but he's an absurdly powerful magician: if he really wanted to avoid her, he would have. (Besides, I've seen versions where her final treachery comes by promising him sex if he'll just climb inside that tree for two seconds, in which case the rape question is a moot point.) Betrayal, on the other hand, is all over this. Merlin gives Nimue everything she asks for, teaching her all his most powerful magics, and in return she seals him alive inside a tree. (Or in a cave, as your preference may be. I like the tree, personally.) Despite the rather fantastic revisionist versions I've read over the years, this story has never really been about anything but betrayal. Even though Nimue takes her mentor's place at Arthur's right hand, and saves him as many times as Merlin had, you get the sense that she'd have to do it to make up for taking Merlin away.

Lancelot and Elaine, Henrietta Rae

Lancelot and Elaine's relationship is the most unhealthy in the whole damn mythos. Yes, that's a bold statement; yes, I stand by it completely. Elaine may be the first stalker fangirl on literary record. She willfully fails to realize that nursing Lancelot back to health does not entitle her to love-of-his-life status. She thrills to find that he wore her token to a tournament, and conveniently ignores the fact that he wore it (like a cad, I must admit) only to assist in fighting incognito. When he rejects her (again, not with the best grace), what's her gut impulse? Is it to get over him? Is it to find another love? Is it to plot bloody vengeance?

It's to force him to marry her by raping him.

Oh, yeah. Elaine-on-Lancelot action is the most straightforward case of rape in the stories. He doesn't want her; he doesn't like her; he's told her no multiple times. Sometimes she only uses magic to make herself look like Guinevere; sometimes she also roofies Lancelot. And then she just doesn't understand why he literally goes insane at the revelation of what's happened.

The irony of it all is that out of this appalling encounter is born Galahad, the perfect knight. But for Lancelot at least, the ends don't justify the means. He never returns to Elaine. He and Galahad have a nonexistant father-son relationship; Galahad saves Lancelot on the Grail Quest, but that's about it for bonding time. And it's hard not to imagine that Lancelot would be grateful that his unwanted son wasn't around after the Grail Quest to remind him of the absolute darkest chapter in his life.

Lancelot and Guinevere, Herbert Draper

Not to mention that Lancelot's got his own bit of betraying to do back home.

Again, no explanation needed. This might be the world's most famous love triangle. It's not supposed to happen, but it does, and the exploitation of Lancelot and Guinevere's affair destroys Camelot.

The Rescue of Guinevere, William Hatherell

The betrayal here is colossal: betrayal of a spouse, betrayal of a friend, betrayal of loyalty, betrayal of a lifetime of work, betrayal of a dream. I'm not saying that Lancelot and Guinevere are singlehandedly responsible for all this betrayal; a lot of it was done by Mordred and his cadre of jealous knights. But this was the fulcrum they used to move their world, and it worked so well because they didn't have to make anything up. They just had to enhance what was already there.

Which leads us to the most unkindest cut of all: Mordred's betrayal of Arthur.

How Mordred was Slain by Arthur, Arthur Rackham

To give Mordred his due, Arthur was an absentee dad who tried to have him killed at birth. But just destroying Arthur's kingdom, marriage, and closest friendship wasn't enough for Mordred; he had to go that extra mile and mess deeply with Arthur's head, winning his trust, appearing to support him, and then backstabbing him at the earliest opportunity. Arthur's last stand at Camlann is one of hopelessness. He's had everything stripped from him in a breathtakingly short amount of time, and all by the long-lost son he wanted to trust. To be honest, I tend to forgive him for the child-murder thing, if only because he suffers so much by the end that I feel like he's atoned and then some. Mordred, on the other hand... for his sheer cold-blooded viciousness, for his total dedication to making Arthur's life hell just because he can, Mordred can never suffer enough. (Yes, I'm biased. I love Arthur. Arthur the person does not get enough love.)

Could you argue that the incredibly depressing roots of the legend are the reason why its trappings are so bright and hopeful? Sure. All that agony and betrayal is ten times worse if it's pointless. If it's endured in the service of a higher ideal, that makes it a little easier to bear. And I don't think we'd still be telling these stories if their surrounding framework didn't provide more hope than they do on their own.

But it's still depressing. The heart of Camelot is very dark. And it makes the legend too simple if we forget that.