MYTHOLOGY LIVES! ANCIENT STORIES AND MODERN LITERATURE • Program Objectives This program is designed to help students understand that the immortality and popularity of many myths and legends arise from the basic human experiences they embody, and the basic human feelings they reflect. Students will also learn, through selected examples, how stories and characters in myths and legends are revived and reinterpreted in literature and popular culture. • Summary of Content Part One The traditional fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood is juxtaposed with James Thurber’s modern reinterpretation in Fables for Our Time, together with other examples from art and literature, to demonstrate the lasting popularity of one of the basic themes in myths and legends—the theme of innocence in danger. Another such immortal theme—that of human defiance of fate and the gods, is then illustrated with examples from classical mythology, with the medieval Faust legend, and with a modern version of this legend, Stephen Vincent Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. Part Two Still another enduring theme in myths and legends is love, and there is one love story that appears over and over, in various forms—the tragic story of love that is doomed by death. This part features the best-known classical version: the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Other examples, such as the legend of Tristan and Isolde, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are noted, and the part concludes with a modern retelling of the Orpheus legend—the film Black Orpheus. • Part Three Just as there are many immortal plots that come from myths and legends, there are also many immortal characters, which keep turning up in a number of guises. One of these is called the “trickster.” He may take an animal form: a sly fox in Aesop’s Fables, a conniving spider in West African folktales, or the fairy tale character Puss in Boots. In classical mythology, he is the tricky messenger of the Gods, Hermes, or the mischievous god of love, Eros. In Norse mythology, he is Loki, god of fire. Modern reincarnations include clowns such as Punch, cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny, and wisecracking comedians such as Groucho Marx. The trickster appeals to the rebel in all of us; another immortal character reflects our deepest fears. This is the monster—the fiend, the dragon, or the grotesque hybrid of nightmare. One famous example is the flesh-eating ogre in Beowulf. In our time the character has been humanized, with chilling wit, by John Gardner, in his novel Grendel. • Part Four Perhaps the most appealing characters in myths and legends are heroes and heroines. One typical hero might be labeled the “Knight in Shining Armor,” such as Parzifal, or Sir Galahad. Often the goodness of the hero becomes corrupted by the temptations of the world—often in the form of a fatal, forbidden love. Sir Lancelot’s disastrous relationship with Queen Guenevere is a well-known example. Modern novelist Bernard Malamud has quite consciously revived the character, and his tragic fate, in The Natural, a story in which the baseball diamond replaces the round table, and the hero is a star player. Unfortunately, the leading women characters in myths and legends don’t generally come off so well as the men. Examples include the “fatal beauty,” such as Barbara Allen or Helen of Troy, or the mischief-making sorceress, such as Circe or Morgana le Fay, or the passive princess, waiting for some man to rescue her and carry her off. But there are few exceptions that embody the more modern ideal of a woman who is her own person. In myths and legends, such women must often assume roles ordinarily taken only by men. Examples include Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons in the legend of Troy, and the historical, yet legendary heroine Joan of Arc, memorably dramatized by George Bernard Shaw in Saint Joan. • Warm-up Activities 1. Have your students try a little collaborative myth-making of their own. Arrange the class in a semi-circle sot that they can see one another and a projection screen. Project a slide that has some potential mythic or ritual aura (Stonehenge silhouetted by the sun, a Navajo sand painting, a Rorschach inkblot, and a cathedral rose window) and ask each class member to orally contribute a strand to the story. After the entire class has woven the story, conduct a discussion in which the class describes what happened during this myth-making session. What kind of environment was created in the story? Were there any heroes? Heroines? Any gods or other supernatural beings? Monsters? Was there confrontation? Reconciliation? 2. Ask students to reach into their memories for the first stories they can recall hearing. Have them share these stories. Are there any duplications within the class? Any unusual stories? Can the circumstances of their first hearings be recollected? What common elements can be identified? Are there any special feelings attached to these stories? 3. Inventory students’ knowledge of mythology: record on the chalkboard or on large sheets of paper what the class knows about the subject. How might the information be classified; (culture, interpretation, gods, heroes, monsters, etc.) 4. Have students construct a time line of their lives, marking significant points to date. After discussing these, have them extrapolate the line, identifying future significant points. (This exercise might be helpful in relating life stages to myths and legends.) • Questions for Discussion and Review Part One 1. Thurber’s humorous update of Little Red Riding Hood suggests that the innocent may no longer be so innocent. Do you agree? 2. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim asserts that myths are basically pessimistic, and that fairytales are basically optimistic. For example, innocents in fairy tales usually find salvation; in classic mythology they are more often destroyed. Can you think of stories or characters to support this theory? To refute it? 3. In “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” what argument was used by Webster to save Jabez Stone? Do you think that Stone should have been let off? 4. What does this story tell us about damnation and salvation? Based on your knowledge of Greek mythology, how would the story have ended were it based in mythology rather than upon folklore? Part Two 1. How can you explain the powers of music as illustrated in Orpheus? Can you think of any modern parallels—musicians who are adored heroes to youngsters and post-teens? 2. A myth is often presented through the use of symbols. In the original myth, a snake kills Eurydice. What might that symbolize? How as she killed in the film? Is there any symbolic difference? Darkness and light are universal symbols. How do they operate in this myth? 3. Classical myth often shows the power of love to be destructive. Was Orpheus and Eurydice’s love destructive? Romeo and Juliet’s? How is romantic love presented in the literature of our culture? Who are typical lovers, and how are they expected to behave? 4. Wendell Johnson, in his book People in Quandries, hypothesizes what he calls the “IFD disease.”: Idealization leads to Frustration, which leads to Demoralization. How might our concept of ideal love, as mirrored in popular literature, lead to IFD disease? Part Three 1. Can you remember any stories about tricksters? Many cartoon characters are tricksters—which ones? What kind of tricks do they pull? Why? 2. Why do you think such trickster characters are popular, especially with children? 3. Groups of parents and educators have found television cartoons to be more violent than adult fare. Do you think the violence performed by cartoon characters is harmless tricks, or cruel ones? How do these tricksters differ from those in myth and legend? 4. What was John Gardner’s point in retelling the old epic of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view? Why does the monster act as it does? What is implied about human nature? 5. There is an irony to Grendel’s line; “Poor Grendel’s had an accident. So may you all!” What is the irony? Part Four 1. Why is it appropriate that Malamud’s modern knight is an athlete? How are athletes modern-day heroes, in terms of society’s treatment of them? 2. What parallels can you draw between Roy Hobbs and Sir Lancelot? What differences? 3. Several literary Femmes Fatales (Barbara Allen, Helen of Troy, Circe) were mentioned in the program. What attitudes toward women do these characters reflect? 4. Penthesileia, the Amazon Queen, is a warrior, one of the few female warriors in mythology and folklore. Does our culture see her as an ideal? Give a brief analysis of her character, and state whether each trait is an asset or a shortcoming. 5. Shaw’s epilogue to Saint Joan is rich in wry irony. What is so ironic about it? Does Shaw see more heroines of Joan’s ilk in our future? • Essay Questions and Related Activities Part One 1. Have the class read a collection of fairytales, searching for stories in which the innocent is imperiled, yet rescued in the end. Have them speculate on the reason for such endings. 2. A major project may entail a comparative study of the devil as a literary character. Besides “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” two other American treatments of consorting with the devil are Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman’s Brown.” The devil of The Garden of Eden in “Genesis,” and that in Heine’s poem “I Called the Devil and He Came” should be comprehensible to most students. More advanced readers may pursue Goethe’s Faust, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, Milton’ Paradise Lost, Book IX, and Dante’s Inferno, Canto 34, with its ice-bound King of Hell. Part Two 1. Soap operas enjoy a wide audience. Almost all of them tell one or more love stories. Have your students analyze the love relationships on these shows. What is the quality of these relationships? Do they offer ideal love? Are there any symptoms of IFD disease? (See question 4 above.) Why do you think these shows are so popular? What characteristics do they appear to derive from myths and legends? 2. Have students review love affairs in classical myths. Is there much romantic love? Look at non-Greek mythology: Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and Roland. What is the role of romantic love in these tales? (It seems that heroism and loyalty are valued far more than romantic love.) 3. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim asserts that fairytales in some cases echo rites of passage from adolescence to adulthood; they contain the message that “falling in love is something that happens; being in love demands much more.” Have your students read the Brothers Grimm versions of “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” and “Sleeping Beauty”; then interpret these tales in light of Bettelheim’s assertion. 4. Romeo and Juliet is probably the best-known story of doomed love in English literature. It has been retold in various forms; one of the more recent is “West Side Story.” The stories of Tristan and Isolde, and of Lancelot and Guenevere appear in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. These, too, have been retold in many forms. Thomas Mann parodied the Tristan and Isolde story in his novella Tristan. The story of Lancelot and Guenevere forms a central part of T.S. White’s The Once and Future King. Comparative essays could be developed from these readings. Part Three 1. Read Gerhart Hauptmann’s Till Eulenspiegel and compare it to the Richard Strauss musical composition Till Eulenspigel’s Merry Pranks. What specific qualities of the music capture the trickster’s spirit and character? 2. Find an edition of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s The Frog King and Other Tales of the Brothers Grimm and read the collection of trickster tales. These might be compared to similar tales by Hans Christian Anderson. 3. Make a list of monsters in literature and the popular arts, and then develop a classification scheme for them. Some potential sorting factors might include: giants, animals, laboratory creations, plants, aliens, level of intelligence, modus operandi, symbolic meaning, etc. 4. Literature movies, comic books, television—all have provided a wide variety of monsters for our entertainment, ranging from Polyphemus and Grendel to Frankentein’s monster and the Hulk. What do all of these monsters have in common? How do they differ? Are any of them sympathetic? How do the literary monsters differ from movie and television monsters? What does Frankenstein’s monster (named Prometheus in Mary Shelley’s novel) symbolize? King Kong? Godzilla? Part Four 1. Have your students do an in-depth study of the athlete as a modern mythic hero. What kinds of ritual surround an athletic event? What is the relationship of ritual to myth? What ritual elements can be found in a World Series or Superbowl. How does the football uniform enhance the heroic mythic image? What role do the media play in perpetuating athletic myths and rituals? How were myths perpetuated in ancient times? In what ways is athletics a metaphor for life? In what ways does the analogy fall short? 2. In Transformations, the poet Anne Sexton has reinterpreted seventeen of Grimm’s fairy tales, most of them dealing with the winning of the passive fair maiden by a clever, handsome prince. But Sexton’s heroines are imbued with feelings of their own. They confront their own sexuality. They reach high levels of assertion and self-awareness. Mature students may find it illuminating to compare Sexton’s transformations with the Grimm originals. 3. The Maid of the North is a collection of feminist folk tales from around the world. The heroines are mainly in the Penthesileia/Joan of Arc molds, in that they are courageous, resourceful, and active—the opposite of the passive, subordinate women of most myths and legends. Some students might be interested in exploring these stories, comparing their heroines with more traditional ones. If these stories were as well-known as Grimm’s or Anderson’s, would the perception of the role of women be different? Are the men in these stories emasculated? What are the relationships between men and women? MYTHOLOGY LIVES! mythologylives Download