Author: Rebecca Resinski

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In ancient myth Amazons are constructed through comparison and contrast with Greek, and at times specifically Athenian, society. The studies of Page duBois, Kristina Passman, Andrew Stewart, and William Blake Tyrrell may differ in their emphases and inflections, but they help readers to develop a general portrait of Amazon identity through disparate sources and centuries. They show us that, to a large extent, Amazons are configured as opposites to Greeks. Amazons are not Greek and not patriarchal. Amazon women do not conform to a Greek ideological identification with the inside of the house. Rather, they ride horses and fight. And their battle style—in light armor and/or on horseback—contrasts with the interlocking hoplite foot soldiers who serve as a symbol of Classical Athenian democratic community. The Amazons are sometimes presented as adhering to the male heroic code; they may also be presented as sexually desirable—though unmarried or unavailable—females. When I encountered some recent depictions of Wonder Woman, who is nominally an Amazon, I thought about the Amazons’ identification through comparison and contrast. But instead of considering how Wonder Woman relates to the ancient Greeks, I decided to look at how her identity is articulated through her relationship to figures from Classical mythology. In what follows I’ll discuss four texts: Diana: Princess of the Amazons (2020) by Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Victoria Yang, Wonder Woman Wrestles Circe’s Sorcery (2017) by Matthew K. Manning and Ethen Beavers, Wonder Woman and the Pandora Plot (2020) by Ivan Cohen and Greg Schigiel, and Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed (2020) by Laurie Halse Anderson, Leila del Duca, et al.

In the graphic novel Diana: Princess of the Amazons a young Diana struggles to find her place in Amazon society. As the only child on the island of Themiscyra, she is lonely, and she attempts to make a friend out of clay. When the sculpted clay figure appears to become animate, it encourages Diana in a series of pranks and goads Diana into proving herself by opening the door to Tartarus, something only a true Amazon can do. Unfortunately, Diana’s new friend is not a friend at all: she is Circe in disguise, and she knows that Diana’s opening of the fateful door will release a horde of monsters. When the monsters attack, Diana summons the other Amazons, but Circe, now revealed, turns them into animals. Queen Hippolyta keeps Circe at bay while Diana, at her mother’s urging, manages to re-close the door. Circe takes the form of a bird to fly away, and Diana takes her place more contentedly among the Amazons. She makes amends for her pranks, is appointed as a steward of the island’s wildlife, and bonds with her mother.

Circe is a featured character in book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey. The granddaughter of the Sun, she inhabits the island of Aeaea, where Odysseus and his men land on their journey from Troy. She turns some of Odysseus’ men into pigs, but Odysseus receives help from Hermes, avoids a similar fate, and gets his men returned to human form. However, Odysseus succumbs to Circe’s enchantment in another way: he stays with her for a year before his men press him to continue the trip back to Ithaca. The Homeric episode explores gender dynamics. Circe uses her powers to flip the male/female hierarchy, and though Odysseus seems to restore it with Hermes’ help, Circe’s sexual allure and its effects on Odysseus suggest that female power is not entirely subordinated.

The Circe of Diana: Princess of the Amazons also disrupts accepted hierarchies, though not the hierarchy of gender. Appealing to Diana’s insecurities like the Homeric Circe appealed to Odysseus’ desires, Circe encourages Diana to push against the adult/child social hierarchy by skipping lessons and playing tricks on the Amazons. Circe’s attempt to free the monsters kept in Tartarus is another move against the status quo and its disposition of powers. This Circe uses others to sow disorder, as she orchestrates Diana’s childish misbehavior and the more cosmically consequential attack of the monsters. In the course of the graphic novel, Diana comes to support order and finds a more established place in her society. Queen Hippolyta even ultimately speaks of Diana as if she occupies the pinnacle of the Amazon hierarchy: “Diana, you are the best of us” (132). The graphic novel uses Circe as a female non-role-model which Diana finally opts against, and her new sense of self is partly defined by that choice.

Diana—grown into Wonder Woman—meets Circe again in the easy reader Wonder Woman Wrestles Circe’s Sorcery. In the search for a necklace stolen from a museum, Wonder Woman tracks Circe to a tropical island and then follows her through a portal into a different dimension. Despite fighting in unfamiliar and disorienting territory, Wonder Woman uses her magic lasso and invisible jet to capture Circe and bring her back to Gateway City. The stolen necklace is returned, and two museum guards whom Circe had changed into pigs are returned to their human forms. The book closes with Wonder Woman leaping triumphantly from her jet over the Gateway City Bridge.

Wonder Woman Wrestles Circe’s Sorcery affirms Wonder Woman’s identity through the conflict and contrast with Circe. That Circe represents a possible, alternate path for Wonder Woman is illustrated when Wonder Woman pauses by a pool on the island and sees her own reflection shift into Circe’s. But when the two fight in the new dimension, Wonder Woman recalls her defining moment as an Amazon—her victory in the competition to become Wonder Woman and serve as the Amazon’s ambassador in the wider world. This memory fortifies her as she works to subdue Circe. And ultimately Wonder Woman undoes Circe’s deeds: the guards’ animal metamorphosis is reversed and the necklace is restored to the museum. In a final difference from Circe, Wonder Woman puts her powers to use to serve and save others, while Circe is selfishly interested in procuring a piece of jewelry for herself. Not only is Wonder Woman decisively not Circe, but she is also the “right” kind of woman.

Another easy reader, Wonder Woman and the Pandora Plot, uses Pandora—who, like Circe, is a mythological example of the “wrong” kind of woman—to bring the character of Wonder Woman into relief. In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Pandora is created by Zeus to cause problems for humans and is given gifts by the other gods. Opening a jar, she releases troubles into the world; closing it, she keeps hope in the jar. While Pandora herself doesn’t make a direct appearance in Wonder Woman and the Pandora Plot, the jar does.  Usually kept in a vault on the Amazons’ island of Themiscyra, the jar is taken by Ares and planted in a New York museum from which it is stolen by Giganta, a human woman able to increase her size and prompted to undertake the theft by a dream. A leak in the jar is making people violent, and Wonder Woman learns from her mother that the effect will be permanent if the jar is entirely opened and the troubles dispersed during an upcoming planetary alignment. That’s what Ares is banking on, and because only a human can open the jar, he is using Giganta to complete his plan. However, Wonder Woman persuades Giganta to resist Ares, reseal the jar, and repair its crack with the magic lasso. Although Giganta is surprised that Wonder Woman trusts her with her “most powerful weapon” (64), Wonder Woman concludes that the lasso isn’t her most powerful weapon:  hope is.

The mythological Pandora serves as a comparison/contrast case for both Giganta and Wonder Woman. Giganta seems to be a new Pandora: she is used by a god (Ares rather than Zeus), and her opening of the jar will cause misery for humans. But when Giganta defies Ares’ plan and closes the jar, she acts of her own accord for the safety of humans. Wonder Woman’s urging is instrumental in turning Giganta into a benign Pandora, and Wonder Woman herself can also be seen as a revised Pandora of sorts. Like Pandora, Wonder Woman was gifted by the gods (20), but she works in the cause of human security, not misery. While the mythological Pandora leaves hope in the jar, Wonder Woman sees hope as a force out in the world and in humans, a view reinforced by Giganta’s change of heart. Giganta may resume being a villain in the DC universe, but Wonder Woman more definitively departs from the example of a “bad woman” established by the myth of Pandora.

In the YA graphic novel Wonder Woman: Tempest Tossed, Anderson, del Duca, et al. give audiences a different view of the Amazon-turned-superhero. They present an awkward, teenaged Diana who is separated from Themiscyra when she leaves the island to aid some refugees caught in a storm at sea. After spending time in a refugee camp herself, she is brought to New York City by a gay couple, Steve and Trevor, who work for the UN. There, she lives with a Polish immigrant, Henke, and her granddaughter Raissa. Diana helps Raissa provide free meals for the neighborhood children, but their efforts on behalf of the community run afoul of corporate designs to develop the area commercially. The same corporation runs a child-trafficking ring, and Diana uses her powers to rescue some captured young people. The graphic novel ends with Diana and her new friends visiting the Statue of Liberty and embracing the idea of an America open to immigrants and committed to social justice. Although Diana uses more-than-human means in her fight with the child-traffickers, for the most part the graphic novel downplays her heightened physical powers, focusing instead on her efforts to use her background—like her gift for languages—to help others. Gone is Wonder Woman’s signature outfit, replaced by the jeans and t-shirts of contemporary America. This is Wonder Woman incognita and politically correct, a progressive role model.

Anderson uses Greek goddesses to chart Diana’s identity and her new connection to the United States. Readers are told that Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter, Artemis, and Hestia created the Amazons as “a race of peace-loving warriors—forged to protect the world” (10-11). These same goddesses granted the Amazon queen’s wish for a child and turned a clay baby into the animate Diana. Painfully awkward and weak at the time of her sixteenth birthday on Themiscyra, Diana prays to the goddesses, asking Athena for wisdom, Aphrodite for compassion, Demeter for the Earth’s strength, Artemis for a hunter’s skill, and Hestia for continued protection of the Amazon’s island as well as help in becoming “a worthy Amazon” (18). Diana brings the goddesses’ gifts to bear in the sea-storm, the refugee camp, and New York. Upon arrival in the city, Diana notes the likeness between the Statue of Liberty and the goddess Hestia, whose province is the hearth and home. By the end of the graphic novel, Diana is an animate manifestation of Hestia in the here and now, an enlivened Liberty, and Diana achieves her dream of becoming a “worthy Amazon” by championing American ideals and protecting those who need her help. Themiscyra and New York are connected by Hestia’s protection of the Amazon island and the Statue of Liberty’s promise of safe harbor to immigrants, by Diana’s early training among the Amazons and her use of that training as she works for justice in the modern metropolis. Awkward no longer, Diana realizes her identity as “a worthy Amazon” not by staying on Themiscyra but by coming to America and putting the gifts of the goddess into action.

While the ancient Greeks used their own social norms as a basis for articulating the Amazons through comparison and contrast, the texts I’ve discussed here use Classical mythology to express who Wonder Woman is and isn’t. She is like Hestia and the other goddesses of Themiscyra; she is unlike the destabilizing mythical females Circe and Pandora. She is also unlike the Amazons of Classical myth in that she aims to protect, not attack, humans beyond Amazonian society. The Amazons of Classical myth and DC comics stay on the margins. The one group is antagonistic, the other benevolent, but both renditions retain Amazons as outsiders. Wonder Woman becomes an exception by moving from our margins to center, from our outside to inside. This movement may seem, may even be, a positive affirmation of female power, yet it may also signal the subordination or domestication of female power as it is rendered unstrange and undifficult, a force to be called on rather than reckoned with. I am reminded of Passman’s discussion of “good” Amazon-esque figures in cinema—characters like Sarah Connor in the Terminator series and Ripley in the Alien films—whose fighting is seen as positive because it is undertaken in the service of protecting and mothering. Although Passman’s essay was written before the recent bout of Wonder Woman media, I think of Wonder Woman as a quintessentially “good Amazon” in Passman’s sense. And yet the very phrase makes me ask:  when “good” is defined by patriarchal society’s sense of gender-appropriate behavior, is a “good Amazon” an Amazon at all? Just as Wonder Woman becomes geographically distanced from the island of Themiscyra, she seems exiled—in terms of ideology and identity—from her mythological ancestors.

Bibliography

Anderson, Laurie Halse, Leila del Duca et al.  Wonder Woman:  Tempest Tossed.  DC Comics, 2020.

Cohen, Ivan and Gregg Schigiel.  Wonder Woman and the Pandora Plot.  Stone Arch Books, 2020.

duBois, Page.  Centaurs and Amazons:  Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being.  University of Michigan Press, 1982.

Hale, Shannon, Dean Hale, and Victoria Ying.  Diana:  Princess of the Amazons.  DC Comics, 2020.

Hesiod, Works and Days.  Trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White.  theoi.com

Homer.  The Odyssey.  Trans. A. S. Kline.  poetryintranslation.com

Manning, Matthew K. and Ethen Beavers.  Wonder Woman Wrestles Circe’s Sorcery.  Stone Arch Books, 2017.

Passman, Kristina M.  “The Classical Amazon in Contemporary Cinema.”  Classics and Cinema.  Ed. Martin M. Winkler.  Bucknell University Press, 1991, 81-105.

Stewart, Andrew.  “Imag(in)ing the Other:  Amazons and Ethnicity in Fifth-Century Athens.”  Poetics Today 16 (1995):  571-597.

Tyrrell, William Blake.  Amazons:  A Study in Athenian Mythmaking.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

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For copyright reasons I won’t reproduce any of Sara Fanelli’s images in what follows, but some are available online at:

Amazon (images of the cover, Sirens, Harpies)
Waterstones (images of the cover, Argus, Medusa)
The Guardian (images of the Harpies, Hydra)

Though I hope to write in a way that will make sense even if you haven’t seen any of the actual images, I also hope you’ll look at the ones available at these links, check a copy of Fanelli’s book out of the library, or order a used copy (the book seems to be currently out of print in the US at least).

I first encountered Sara Fanelli’s Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece at a conference focused on the reception of Classics in children’s literature. The presenter who discussed it seemed skeptical, even a bit critical, of the book’s aesthetic and wondered if children would find its distinctive postmodern collages appealing. The talk was a survey and moved to a different book pretty quickly after characterizing Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece mostly as a conundrum or curiosity that may miss its mark. I, however, was taken with the book, and it seems to me that Fanelli’s use of collage is particularly apt. Meditating on the book’s medium, with its inherent hybridity, has been a productive way for me to approach some aspects of Fanelli’s book and its overall project.

Collage lays open its constructedness. One doesn’t only see the final image; one sees the parts that have been assembled to make it. Traces of the process may remain, as, for instance, in Fanelli’s cut-outs of Argus’ eyes (1-2), which often show the not-entirely-curved work of the scissors, or one of the heads of Cerberus, whose outline seems to have been partially achieved by ripping (16). Fanelli’s disparate material sources, including drawings, paintings, photographs, and patterned papers, make viewers ever-aware that they are seeing a creation, a made thing. Fanelli’s use of collage to depict monsters seems fitting, since monsters in general are also made things, human social, cultural constructions (Mittman 1, Felton 103). Fanelli’s form thus fits her content and reminds us that monsters are human concoctions.

In bringing together diverse pieces to make a new whole, collage is inherently hybrid. Fanelli again matches form and content because Greek monsters are often marked by their hybridity (Felton 104), whether the hybridity is the result of the combination of different kinds of beings, of the multiplication of attributes, or both combination and multiplication. Fanelli’s collages relay and in some instances expand the hybridity of the mythological monsters they depict. Argus has human eyes and a furry animal body (1-2). Medusa has snakes for hair, an anthropomorphic body, human eyes, and a hairy face (3-4). Pegasus is a winged horse given a human eye (5-6). The Sirens and Harpies have faces with human female features but birdy bodies (7-8). Scylla has multiple heads with human eyes, an animal body, and feet shod with human shoes (9-10). The Minotaur has a bull’s head with human eyes and a human body with a bull’s tail (13-14). Cerberus has three heads, two canine and one mechanical, and all with human eyes (15-16). The Centaurs combine man and horse (17), while the satyrs combine man and goat (18). The Hydra has multiple snaky heads, some of which are given human eyes (19-20). The Sphinx has a woman’s face and breast, but a lion’s body and tail plus wings (21-22). Echidna also has a woman’s face as well as breasts and arms, but a snaky body (23-24). Her offspring include the Chimaera, part lion, part goat, part snake, each part with human eyes, and Orthus, a two-headed dog with human eyes (23). The only monster featured in Fanelli’s collection that isn’t a hybrid via combination and/or multiplication in Greek mythology is the Cyclops. In myth, his corporeal monstrosity is the result of both subtraction (one eye not two) and addition (anthropomorphic form but more-than-human size). Fanelli, though, makes her Cyclops a hybrid by giving him a painted animal body and single photographic human eye (11-12). Fanelli’s collages convey monsters’ hybrid natures, an ontological condition, in an aesthetic register.

As a practice, collage illustrates the activity of reception. An artist takes pieces from the world, then rearranges and assembles them to make something new. Myth seems to me to work in a similar way, with each teller and adapter reshaping and reusing traditional stories, motifs, and characters in new ways. Collage seems to me to be a good visual analog for myth because both operate on the principle of selective repurposing to express one’s own meaning. For us now, the raw materials for Classical myth are both ancient and modern—and Fanelli too makes this manifest in her hybridizing combination of Classical and contemporary components.

As a picturebook, Fanelli’s Mythological Monsters shows hybridity in other senses. A picturebook’s combination of words and images makes it an “inescapably plural” “generic hybrid” (Lewis in Beckett 2, Beckett 309). The manifold nature of the picturebook makes reading one inherently active, with each reader toggling between words and images to synthesize them and make for themselves a holistic experience. Readers thus participate in the picturebook’s hybridity with their own blending of its visual and verbal modes. Although people often associate picturebooks with the very young, picturebooks have the capacity to reach wide audiences spanning generations (Beckett). The aesthetic and sensibility of Fanelli’s book give it crossover potential—and perhaps its address to a hybrid audience, both child and adult, is part of what puzzled the presenter from whom I first learned about this picturebook.

Collage can be seen as the creative management of the world’s plurality and the challenges of that plurality. It attests multiplicity as well as the possibility of working with that multiplicity to make meaning. We might consider collage both a marker of and response to the “irreducible heterogeneity of the ‘postmodern condition’” (Brockelman 11, emphasis his). Similarly, we might see monsters as both a recognition of and reaction to the potential chaos of existence; indeed, Felton identifies chaos as a hallmark of Greek monsters in particular (103, 111). Fanelli’s book suggests to me that the very creation of monsters is—in a sense—also their taming: in assembling these hybrid creatures we control the chaos they represent and strike at least a temporary peace with a multifarious, unpredictable world. For me, Fanelli’s collaged, hybrid monsters are a concrete manifestation of a multi-faceted world and demonstrate a dynamic way of making meaning with and within its diversity.

Bibliography

Beckett, Sandra L. Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages. Routledge, 2012.

Brockelman, Thomas P. The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern. Northwestern UP, 2001.

Fanelli, Sara. Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece. Candlewick Press, 2002.

Felton, D. “Rejecting and Embracing the Monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome.” Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ed. Asa Simon Mittman with Peter J. Dendle. Ashgate, 2012, 103-131.

Mitmann, Asa Simon. “Introduction:  The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies.” Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Ed. Asa Simon Mittman with Peter J. Dendle. Ashgate, 2012, 1-14.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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