Ariadne

“But when I thought of Scylla, I thought of the foolish and all-too-human girl, gasping for breath amid the froth of waves churning in the wake of my father’s boat. I saw her weighed down in the tumultuous water not just by the iron chains in which my father had bound her but also by the terrible truth that she had sacrificed everything she knew for a love as ephemeral and transient as the rainbows that glimmered through the sea spray.”

Ariadne’s reflection on Scylla’s fate foreshadows what will happen to Ariadne herself in the wake of her sacrifice to aid Theseus. Like Scylla, she betrays her father for love and suffers the consequences. More broadly, the passage points to how myth subsumes and distorts the stories and voices of individual women, just as Scylla transforms from an “all-too-human girl” into a seabird. The ocean, which Saint uses to evoke women’s powerlessness, symbolically underscores this double silencing of Scylla: first by Minos and then by legend. The passage thus begins to establish themes of Mythology Versus Reality and the Status and Agency of Women in Ancient Greece.

“What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.”

When Pasiphae tragically suffers for her husband’s offense against Poseidon, Ariadne comes to this bleak realization of her precarious position, developing the theme of women’s status. That she fears she will suffer not for anything she herself does but rather as a result of a man’s actions speaks to how little power she has to act.