Author: Rebecca Resinski

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Grayson, the sixth-grade protagonist and narrator of Ami Polonsky’s Gracefully Grayson, is a girl, but she is seen and treated as a boy. Protecting what she feels is her secret, she isolates herself from her classmates and uses her imagination to transform her “boys’ clothes” into “girls’ clothes.” Tired of trying to be invisible, Grayson decides to audition for the school play and at the last moment reads for the part of Persephone rather than Zeus. When Grayson is cast as Persephone, her time spent practicing—and inhabiting—the role becomes a crucial step in privately and publicly owning her identity as a girl. I am interested in how Polonsky reshapes the myth of Persephone and how she makes Persephone and Grayson’s experiences resonate with one other.

Within the world of the novel, the script of the play—titled The Myth of Persephone—is written by Grayson’s Humanities teacher Mr. Finnegan, and Mr. Finnegan (called Finn by his students) also directs the production. Finn’s play presents the Olympian gods as basically good. Gone is the political maneuvering between Zeus and Demeter which escalates the conflict in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter or the imperial ambition of Venus that sets off the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Finn’s benign characterization of the gods on Olympus lends stability to the world: the powers that be are okay; they are even forces of light. Hades’ abduction of Persephone seems motivated by a desire for light in the dark Underworld, and the abduction itself becomes the kidnapping of a child rather than the rape of a maiden. While Finn’s adaptation does not un-gender Persephone, it does de-sexualize her. Distancing Persephone from the brink of matrimony and avoiding the portrayal of Hades as a potential husband reinforce Persephone’s identity as a child whose primary relationship is with her mother, Demeter. And Persephone eats the pomegranate seeds because her mother, the goddess of growing things, is on her mind. It is not a trick on the part of Hades (like in the Homeric Hymn), nor is it something that Persephone tries to keep secret (as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Instead, it simply stems from her longing for the comfort of home. A distraught Demeter longs for her daughter as well and enlists the help of Zeus in retrieving Persephone. Here again we see Finn’s play departing from ancient sources, which figure Zeus as Demeter’s antagonist (in the Homeric Hymn) or a neutral arbiter (in the Metamorphoses). In ancient myth Zeus is the father of Persephone, but Polonsky makes him Persephone’s grandfather. This move erases the parental tension between Zeus and Demeter and softens, while also securing, the positioning of Zeus as both familial and cosmic patriarch. Polonsky’s choice to present Zeus as a grandfatherly advocate for Persephone reinforces the general depiction of the gods as good and conveys a sense that things will come right in the end.

Characters in Polonsky’s novel repeatedly mention that the myth of Persephone explains the change of seasons. Although this is a common feature of post-antique retellings of the myth, neither the Homeric Hymn nor the Metamorphoses—the two most prominent ancient literary renditions—has this aetiological bent. In those works, Persephone’s cycling between upper and lower worlds coincides with seasonal changes but isn’t explicitly their sole, root, or original cause. In presenting the myth as the reason for the seasons, the school play naturalizes Persephone’s experience and thereby blunts the violence of the ancient story. The emphasis on the myth’s connection to nature may also implicitly contribute to the novel’s overall investment in cultivating empathy for Grayson: Polonsky works to get readers to see Grayson as a person rather than an aberration, someone who, like Persephone, participates in the natural order of things.

The Myth of Persephone is, fittingly, the spring play at Grayson’s school. We begin the novel in the autumn and move with Grayson through the winter to the spring. Like Persephone in the Underworld, Grayson at the novel’s start is lonely and going through dark times. Her grandmother dies, and her attempt to make a new friend at school—promising at first—proves disappointing. But as winter yields to spring, better days come for Grayson, and Grayson’s performance in the play leads to her flourishing beyond the stage as well. Grayson’s isolation dissolves as she finds support from various members of her community. Just as Persephone is attended by kindly Elves when she is above ground, Grayson makes friends with classmates who are also in the play. And various characters provide Grayson with Demeter-like or Zeus-like encouragement and aid. The teacher Finn realizes how important the play is to Grayson and remains committed to Grayson’s playing Persephone when other adults question the casting choice. In response to the flak that Grayson encounters at school, Paige, the eight-grader cast as Demeter, and her mother become protective maternal surrogates, all the more welcome because Grayson’s own mother and father have died years before the start of the novel. Yet they too provide crucial support when Grayson’s grandmother leaves behind letters which Grayson’s mother had written when Grayson was young, and those letters make it clear that Grayson’s mother would affirm Grayson’s identity as a girl. The reassurance of the letters is heartening, and the photographs contained in them fortifies Grayson’s recollection of her parents and their loving care. Grayson now lives with her aunt and uncle, and the uncle becomes Demeter-like in his desire to help Grayson live her identity openly. (Notice how Grayson’s grandmother and uncle echo the play’s Zeus and Demeter, but with a gender reversal.) Grayson’s aunt, however, is more skeptical of the situation than her spouse, and she becomes one of the blocking figures of the novel, along with some bullies at school. Like Hades and the Shades, they are representatives of the darkness at play in Grayson’s life. Just as Persephone oscillates between the Underworld and earth, Grayson repeatedly mentions experiencing alternations of dark and light, bad and good: “White and black. Light and dark. And me, in the middle of it all. Gray. There’s nothing else for me to do but walk through these columns of dark and light, so I do…” (215). I’ve tried to outline here, in broad strokes, the ways in which Polonsky makes Grayson’s experience reflect Persephone’s, but throughout the novel there are small details which connect Grayson’s life to the myth—for instance, mentions of feeling frozen or of the sun finally coming out, or Grayson’s memory of her mother handing her a piece of fruit. While some readers may be on the active look-out for such correspondences, for other readers they will go unnoticed but do real connective work nevertheless, knitting together the mythological and contemporary registers.

In Finn’s play, Zeus intervenes to deliver Persephone from the Underworld; she does relatively little to save herself. By contrast, while Grayson is supported and helped by a variety of people, she is the one who takes some critical steps in her own rescue. She decides to audition for the play as a bid for self, and she also reads for the role of Persephone because she doesn’t want to pretend any longer. She eventually goes shopping for actual “girls’ clothes” instead of imagining them. When her arm is fractured by bullies at school, she resolutely asks for a pink cast, and she persists in the role of Persephone despite the injury, the bullying, and pressure from her aunt. In the final scene of the novel, Grayson excuses herself from class to change her clothes; she takes the sequin-heart T-shirt she was wearing underneath a thermal shirt, puts it on top, and adds clips to her hair. Grayson carries into the rest of her life the courage she musters in playing Persephone onstage. The role is, in a way, like the pink cast: a temporary aid that helps Grayson to become whole again.

Although Persephone receives a lot of air time in Polonsky’s novel, the mythological phoenix—a bird reborn from its own ashes—is also a recurrent motif. A painting of a phoenix by Grayson’s mother hangs in Grayson’s room and serves as a touchstone to her lost parents as well as a symbol of freedom. We (and Grayson) learn from old letters that Grayson’s mother incorporated the phoenix into the painting because Grayson had loved the description of the phoenix in a book of Greek mythology which her grandmother had sent as a gift. The young Grayson’s interest in the phoenix proves prophetic. While the role of Persephone provides a Grayson with an intermediary step in understanding and owning her identity as a girl, the figure of the phoenix becomes a symbol for Grayson herself. When Grayson decides to lay to rest the assumption that she is a boy, she emerges openly and unapologetically a girl. Polonsky makes readers of Gracefully Grayson into witnesses not only of a figurative Persephone’s return to earth but also of a phoenix’s rebirth.

Bibliography

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. theoi.com

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

Polonsky, Ami. Gracefully Grayson. 2014. Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

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Mina is nine years old. She lives with her mother in Heston, UK; her father has died. Mina faces challenges. The very process of growing up presents difficulties, compounded by her grief for her father. She is also smart and unusual, which makes it hard for her to forge friendships at school and fall in line with the expectations and assessments of traditional education. After Mina has some run-ins with the school administration, Mina’s mother decides to homeschool her, and Mina begins writing in a journal. My Name is Mina is that journal; the print edition of the book even uses handwriting fonts to make readers feel like they are holding something personal and private. And in her private book Mina relates memories, catalogs wonders, writes poems, records observations, and more. She thinks on its pages. As she processes her past and present through her writing, Mina invokes three mythological figures repeatedly: Orpheus, Persephone, and Icarus.

Orpheus arises first. Mina explains that she used to imagine that a tunnel in a local park was an entrance to the Underworld and that she could succeed where Orpheus had failed by bringing her father back from the dead. One day she enters the tunnel. A stream in the tunnel represents the River Styx. A growling dog becomes Cerberus, whom Mina tries to soothe with a song. When a man at the other end of the tunnel calls out for his dog, Mina retreats. Mina reflects on the episode: “Did I really believe that the tunnel would lead to the Underworld? Did I really think I could bring Dad home again? I’m the one who did it and even I don’t know. I was a little girl. Awful things had happened and I was confused” (60). Mina’s experience in the tunnel makes her realize that her father’s death cannot be undone. Orpheus’ failure may be a crystallization of a hard truth, but myth offers some solace. Mina is not unique in her sadness; myth refracts her desire to retrieve her father from the dead so that it can be seen as a specific manifestation of a human impulse.

Persephone provides more comfort. Mina writes of the day that she, impatient for spring, knelt in her yard and struck the ground, calling “Come on, Persephone! Don’t give up!” (103) Mina connects her actions to ritual practices, recollecting that “in ancient Greece, they had music and singing to call [Persephone] back, to make sure that spring arrived again” (104). A mythical figure again allows Mina to put her feelings in a larger, transhistorical human context. When an old woman named Grace stops to talk with Mina, she joins Mina in calling on Persephone, and they even dance a little, despite Grace’s aches and pains. Mina’s conversation with Grace about Persephone connects Mina not only to the ancient past but to someone in her own present as well, and Grace offers Mina further consolation. She assures Mina that while sadness is “part of everything” (106), Persephone and spring will return. Grace also tells Mina of a dream she had in which both she and Mina were little birds, fledgling creatures of a fresh season. If the myth of Orpheus emphasizes the one-way road of human mortality, the myth of Persephone presents a cyclical experience of time through the seasons, fellowship across centuries and generations, and the possibility of symbolic rebirth and rejuvenation.

When David Almond has Mina mention Orpheus and Persephone, he makes sure that Mina explains enough about these mythological characters so that readers who may not be familiar with them can understand how they are functioning in the novel. Almond takes a somewhat different tack with the figure of Icarus. Mina refers to Icarus a number of times but does not give a full summary of his story—his escape from Crete on wings crafted by his father and his subsequent death when he falls from the sky after flying too close to the sun, whose heat loosens the wax holding Icarus’ wing-feathers together. Mina’s invocations of Icarus seem to focus on him as a powerful image: a human in flight. Grace’s dream of herself and Mina as birds is one instance of avian imagery in the novel, and it is by no means an isolated occurrence. For instance: Mina watches the birds who nest in a tree she loves to climb; she learns about prehistoric birds during homeschooling; she and her mother have an epiphany-like experience with owls in Mina’s grandfather’s old house; Mina notes the seasonal migration of goldfinches; she likens “people who trap the spirit, people who cage the soul” (180) to bird trappers; her mother jokes that a fallen feather must be from Mina’s own wings; and Mina herself writes, “I sit in my tree / I sing like the birds / My beak is my pen / My songs are the poems” (181). The catalog of examples could go on and on. Part of this associative web, Icarus is a mythological manifestation of winged spirit.

Near the end of the novel, Mina and her mother pause on a walk to look at the star-filled sky: “We try to make out the beasts and weird winged beings that the Greeks described up there: bears and dogs and horses and crabs and Pegasus and Daedalus and Icarus” (280-281). That night Mina dreams “of centaurs, of Pegasus / of Daedalus and Icarus / falling from the sky” (289). The constellation creatures come to Mina’s bedroom and urge her wake up. She does awaken—and not just physically. Mina has worked through her difficulties and sadness, spring has come, and she is ready to engage the world in new ways. Although Almond has not mentioned Icarus’ fatal mythological fall in the course of the novel, he implicitly revises or supplements it. Icarus’ (new) fall in Mina’s dream is now an intentional descent from the heavens, an encouragement or exhortation rather than a cautionary tale. Almond’s Icarus keeps his wings, and Mina gains her own.

Throughout My Name is Mina Mina writes about time, and especially the persistence of the past into the present: Heston’s old mining tunnels lie beneath the contemporary city; Mina and Grace’s dancing echoes ancient rites for Persephone; dust motes are flakes of skin, sometimes from people now gone; Mina’s father may be dead, but he’s present in and among the words of her journal; the light from the stars is millions of years old by the time we set our eyes on it in our present. “We’re time travelers!” Mina declares (281). When Mina says this, she is referring specifically to the time warp caused by starlight’s journey across the cosmos, but her exclamation conveys something about My Name is Mina more generally. Almond shows us that, while we may not be able to reverse the arrow of human mortality, we can also have other experiences of and with time. Like the stars, myth can collapse or confuse temporal distinctions, and its ancient characters and narratives may continue to shed light on the present. My Name is Mina models myth as a source of resonant symbols that can help us make sense of our particular circumstances and find the heart to move forward.

Bibliography

Almond, David. My Name is Mina. 2010. Yearling, 2012.

 

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I taught my first course on Classics and children’s literature in spring 2011, and we focused on anthologies of myth. Almost all of the students in the course had also taken the general course on Classical mythology which I teach, and near the end of the semester we talked about which myths hadn’t been featured in the anthologies we read. The story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela was one of them. I then searched on Google Books and found Favourite Greek Myths by Lilian Stoughton Hyde, first published in 1905 and containing a chapter entitled “Procne and Philomela.”  What a curious piece!

Hyde’s alterations to the ancient story will make better sense if I first reprise Ovid’s rendition, which is Hyde’s (and our) fullest Classical source for the myth. As Ovid recounts in book 6 of the Metamorphoses, the Thracian Tereus helps Athens in war, and the king of Athens, Pandion, gives one of his daughters, Procne, to Tereus in an ill-omened marriage. Tereus and Procne return to Thrace and have a son, Itys. Five years later, Procne wants to see her sister, Philomela, and Tereus travels to Athens to fetch her. Pandion lets Philomela go, albeit with some misgivings. The misgivings prove founded, for Tereus desires Philomela and, upon arrival in Thrace, takes her to a cabin in the woods where he rapes her and cuts out her tongue. He tells Procne that her sister is dead. A year passes. Philomela weaves an account of her experiences and has the weaving delivered to Procne, who retrieves Philomela one night during a festival of Bacchus. Together they kill and cook the young Itys and serve him to Tereus. When Philomela reveals Itys’ severed head, Tereus chases the sisters. All three are transformed into birds: the sisters into a swallow and nightingale, Tereus into a hoopoe. Red feathers on the swallow and nightingale mark the murder of Itys, and the beaked hoopoe retains Tereus’ aggressive spirit. When I teach this story in my myth course, we talk about the vicious cycle of violence in which the victims turn into perpetrators themselves, the focus on human action (the gods do not cause this bloody mess!), and the non-resolution of the ending.

The absence of this story in anthologies geared toward younger audiences is not surprising. Hyde’s inclusion of it can be explained in part by her general program, her choice to present stories which “have in some measure exercised a formative influence on literature and the fine arts in many countries” (iii). Philomela is invoked multiple times by Shakespeare (among others), and knowledge of this myth could be considered a matter of cultural literacy. Hyde’s story could aim to prepare young audiences for later encounters.

And yet Hyde’s rendition also alters the ancient myth in some significant ways. Hyde has Tereus hide Procne away, not Philomela, and Philomela marries Tereus because she believes Tereus when he tells her that her sister is dead. Fearful that word of what he’s done may get out, Tereus commands Procne’s tongue to be cut out; he uses his royal position to order violence rather than commit it directly himself. After Procne weaves and embroiders to create a tapestry informing her sister of what has happened, Philomela sends for her sister and the two plan to escape with Itys in tow. A creaking palace door betrays them, and Tereus pursues. The gods “in pity” (106) transform the sisters into birds. Tereus is left unchanged and Itys unharmed. Procne-as-swallow is thwarted in her attempt to bond with Itys; Philomela-as-nightingale sings her sorrowful story at night.

Hyde’s version could be said to rescue Procne and Philomela. They do not commit violence themselves, and their transformation lifts them out of their imperiled situation. A side-effect of this rescue, however, is a diminishment of their agency. They do not confront Tereus, and the fact that they are saved by an act of the gods underscores their status as victims in need of rescue. Tereus remains a villain, but Hyde distances him somewhat from violence. Hyde’s switch of the sisters makes Tereus into a bigamist who exploits the institutions of marriage and monarchy rather than a rapist who ignores social constraints. The wronged sisters are delivered from this patriarchal malefactor, but the patriarchal structure of human father and son remains intact even as the females of the family are removed from the scene. While Ovid’s narrative shows violence’s consuming, destructive reach, Hyde’s story has violence more narrowly directed at the women in the tale. In a new kind of vicious cycle, Procne and Philomela are rescued by being made more exclusively victims deserving of pity and in need of divine deliverance.

In the preface to Favourite Greek Myths Hyde explains that her choice of stories is not solely motivated by a desire to foster cultural literacy. The myths which post-antique artists have revisited are also “the very ones that have the greatest depth of meaning,” and as they grow up children will come to “see them as the embodiment of spiritual truths” (iii). Is there not some sleight of hand here?  Hyde justifies her inclusion of a story like “Procne and Philomela” by referring to its “depth of meaning” and “embodiment of spiritual truths,” but she invests it with a new meaning and makes it embody a “truth” different from its Ovidian predecessor. Hyde’s retelling seems to undermine the foundation she provided for undertaking it and crystallize women’s need for rescue as a “spiritual truth.”  Is the perpetuation of women’s victim status a rescue at all or itself an uninterrogated perpetration of violence in an ideological register?

As I was thinking about Hyde’s story recently, I decided to do another Google search for this myth in children’s literature, and I found this entry on the Britannica Kids site:

Philomel (or Philomela), poetic name for nightingale; Philomela, in Greek mythology, was sister of Procne, wife of Tereus, king of Thrace; in revenge for their wrongs the sisters killed Itys, Tereus’ son, and served him as food to his father; the gods punished them by turning Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale.

I see this encyclopedia entry as having a motivation similar to Hyde’s story: giving young people access to or information about a Classical myth which they may encounter in other contexts. However, it takes the opposite tack in its depiction of the sisters, presenting them as worthy of punishment, not pity. Tereus’ transformation is not mentioned, his violence unspecified—and hence, to my mind, minimized. Readers don’t learn what “wrongs” Procne and Philomela are responding to, and that vagueness makes their treatment of Itys even more striking and extreme. The punishment of the sisters is the point.

In the Metamorphoses Ovid does not explicitly attribute this myth’s avian transformations to divine intervention, but both Hyde’s story and the Britannica Kids entry clearly link the sisters’ metamorphoses to the gods. The gods become arbiters who offer a summary judgement of Procne and Philomela. The gods also become avatars for the retellers within the story, providing an unambiguous interpretation of a messy ancient myth whose messiness seems to me to be a crucial ingredient, a crux for meditation. Hyde and Britannica Kids attempt to deal with the tale’s disaster through an authoritative imposition of unambivalent meaning, and their attempts cast the women as objects of pity or agents deserving punishment. These presentations of the myth work to make a more straightforward “either/or” out of a challenging Ovidian “both/and.”

Bibliography

Britannica Kids. kids.britannica.com

Hyde, Lilian Stoughton. Favourite Greek Myths. 1905. D. C. Heath & Company, 1929.

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