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The Narcissus Myth
Hera and Zeus were in an argument over who has more pleasure
from sex the man or the woman. Zeus said it was the woman and
Hera said it was the man. To settle it they let Tiresias be the judge.
He would be a good judge because he once struck two snakes coiled
in intercourse and he was turned into a woman. Seven years later he
saw the same snakes, struck them again and was turned back into a
man. So he lived as both man and woman and told them from
experience that the woman feels more pleasure from intercourse.
Losing the argument made Hera angry and she struck Tiresias
blind. Zeus felt bad for him so he gave him the power to see the
future. One of the first to ask Tiresias about the future was a water
nymph Liriope who was raped by Cepheus resulting in the birth of
her child Narcissus. She asked how long her child would live.
Tiresias said he would live to old age as long as he never came to
know himself.
As Narcissus grew up he became very beautiful, loved and sought
after by everyone. Echo was particularly obsessed in love with
Narcissus. But Echo too was a victim of Hera’s anger because echo
once kept Hera in conversation for a long time so that she wouldn't
catch Zeus cheating on her. When Hera found out she was so mad
she made echo unable to hold conversation ever again and cursed
her to only be able to repeat the last words spoken to her.
Every time she tried to talk to Narcissus it obviously didn't work out.
She threw herself at him and was desperate for his attention but
could not talk to him properly. Narcissus drew back from her and
said he'd rather die than be trapped in Echo’s love. Rejected she
went into the forest and died there. She mourned and wasted away
to nothing. It is said that you can still hear her there repeating what
people call out.
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Narcissus continued to be unapproachable not interested in offered
love, until someone he rejected placed a curse on him: let him love
only himself and let that love fail.
One day Narcissus went to drink from a pool and when he saw his
reflection he became entranced in the beauty. He tried to kiss and
embrace his own image in the water but of course failed in
frustration every time. He wanted to leave his body and join the
image in the pool but he couldn’t. Narcissus never made it passed
the surface of the water. Like echo he began to waste away. He tore
at his own flesh in frustration and eventually he died by the pool.
His body vanished and the gold and white flower named after him
grew there.
So let’s talk about this Greek myth, what’s going on in it, and where
we still see Greek myths like this one today.
The myth of Narcissus is surrounded by violence and acts of
aggression. It's all the violence and aggression that eventually
pushes Narcissus into self-seclusion into the forest and by a pool.
Sub textually let's recall that Narcissus’ mother is a water nymph so
the pool is a symbol of Narcissus seeking out his mother’s womb or
a pure place away from the violence or conflict. But more than a
symbol for something pure, the pool is something more.
When Narcissus gets to the pool he finds himself. For the hero, in
any story, the pool, or symbolic pool, isn't the end but rather the
beginning. Think of the pool, body of water, or even symbolic pool
of any story as a doorway that will lead them to their true selves. In
literature, and in myth, to resolve inner conflict the way out is the
way back. Let’s hear that again: the way out is the way back. So
what do I mean by that? Characters, heroes, protagonists, etc. must
look inside themselves to become more self-aware and to overcome
obstacles. The pool isn't a place to be, but the way to get
somewhere else. Retreat to the garden, is a retreat to oneself. The
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pool, the water they find, will take them there. So Narcissus found
his pool, found his doorway to his journey toward true selfdiscovery. But he is cursed: “let him love only himself and let that
love fail.” The curse won’t allow Narcissus to take the plunge into
his own reflection, won’t allow him to look inside himself. His
journey is failed before it’s even started. Characters must take the
plunge, must fully immerse or fully embrace that water for their
journey to begin.
Major symbols of the Narcissus myth:
• gardens or garden like things = a retreat from conflict
• Pools or presence of water = an invitation, a doorway to a
journey toward self-discovery.
•
Notice I say “an invitation” though. That’s because it’s not enough
for the water to be there. The character must get in to accept the
journey.
When a hero seeks out or meets these symbols it can mean a retreat
into the self for self-discovery.
Let's look at how these symbols appear in modern stories and how
modern writers use these symbolic literary tools to get their message
across and in part re-tell the Narcissus myth.
Read “The Astronomer’s Wife” by Kay Boyle (provided in the next
content page)
• Look for suggestions of aggression or violence tied in with
notions of love.
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• Look for water or pools and how the people treat it or act
around it. Look for suggestions of a garden.
• Who is Narcissus in Kay Boyle’s story? In other words, who is
self-discovering? Where do they retreat to the self?
After reading Kay Boyle’s short story, answer the following 5
questions in the DB.
1. What are the major symbols of the Narcissus Myth?
2. What do those symbols represent in literature?
3. Is Kay Boyle's short story "The Astronomer's Wife"
comparable to the Narcissus Myth?
4. How do you know? In other words, what symbols are present,
and what do they represent to the hero of the short story?
5. Does it seem like the wife in the story, the hero, is at the end of
her journey or at the beginning when the story ends? Why?
Astronomer's Wife
Kay Boyle
There is an evil moment on awakening when all things seem to pause. But for women,
they only falter and may be set in action by a single move: a lifted hand and the
pendulum will swing, or the voice raised and through every room the pulse takes up its
beating. The astronomer's wife felt the interval gaping and at once filled it to the brim.
She fetched up her gentle voice and sent it warily down the stairs for coffee, swung her
feet out upon the oval mat, and hailed the morning with her bare arms' quivering flesh
drawn taut in rhythmic exercise: left, left, left my wife and fourteen children, right, right,
right in the middle of the dusty road.
The day would proceed from this, beat by beat, without reflection, like every other day.
The astronomer was still asleep, or feigning it, and she, once out of bed, had come into
her own possession. Although scarcely ever out of sight of the impenetrable silence of
his brow, she would be absent from him all the day in being clean, busy, kind. He was a
man of other things, a dreamer. At times he lay still for hours, at others he sat upon the
roof behind his telescope, or wandered down the pathway to the road and out across
the mountains. This day, like any other, would go on from the removal of the spot left
there from dinner on the astronomer's vest to the severe thrashing of the mayonnaise
for lunch. That man might be each time the new arching wave, and woman the
undertow that sucked him back, were things she had been told by his silence were so.
In spite of the earliness of the hour, the girl had heard her mistress's voice and was
coming up the stairs. At the threshold of the bedroom she paused, and said: "Madame,
the plumber is here."
The astronomer's wife put on her white and scarlet smock very quickly and buttoned it
at the neck. Then she stepped carefully around the motionless spread of water in the
hall.
"Tell him to come right up," she said. She laid her hands on the bannisters and stood
looking down the wooden stairway. "Ah, I am Mrs. Ames," she said softly as she saw
him mounting. "I am Mrs. Ames," she said softly, softly down the flight of stairs. "I am
Mrs. Ames," spoken soft as a willow weeping. "The professor is still sleeping. Just step
this way."
The plumber himself looked up and saw Mrs. Ames with her voice hushed, speaking to
him. She was a youngish woman, but this she had forgotten. The mystery and silence
of her husband's mind lay like a chiding finger on her lips. Her eyes were gray, for the
light had been extinguished in them. The strange dim halo of her yellow hair was still
uncombed and sideways on her head.
For all of his heavy boots, the plumber quieted the sound of his feet, and together they
went down the hall, picking their way around the still lake of water that spread as far as
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the landing and lay docile there. The plumber was a tough, hardy man; but he took off
his hat when he spoke to her and looked her fully, almost insolently in the eye.
"Does it come from the wash-basin," he said, "or from the other . . .?"
"Oh, from the other," said Mrs. Ames without hesitation.
In this place the villas were scattered out few and primitive, and although beauty lay
without there was no reflection of her face within. Here all was awkward and unfit; a
sense of wrestling with uncouth forces gave everything an austere countenance. Even
the plumber, dealing as does a woman with matters under hand, was grave and stately.
The mountains round about seemed to have cast them into the shadow of great dignity.
Mrs. Ames began speaking of their arrival that summer in the little villa, mourning each
event as it followed on the other.
"Then, just before going to bed last night," she said, "I noticed something was unusual."
The plumber cast down a folded square of sack-cloth on the brimming floor and laid his
leather apron on it. Then he stepped boldly onto the heart of the island it shaped and
looked long into the overflowing bowl.
"The water should be stopped from the meter in the garden," he said at last.
"Oh, I did that," said Mrs. Ames, "the very first thing last night. I turned it off at once, in
my nightgown, as soon as I saw what was happening. But all this had already run in."
The plumber looked for a moment at her red kid slippers. She was standing just at the
edge of the clear, pure-seeming tide.
"It's no doubt the soil lines," he said severely. "It may be that something has stopped
them, but my opinion is that the water seals aren't working. That's the trouble often
enough in such cases. If you had a valve you wouldn't be caught like this."
Mrs. Ames did not know how to meet this rebuke. She stood, swaying a little, looking
into the plumber's blue relentless eye.
"I'm sorry--I'm sorry that my husband," she said, "is still--resting and cannot go into this
with you. I'm sure it must be very interesting. . . ."
"You'll probably have to have the traps sealed," said the plumber grimly, and at the
sound of this Mrs. Ames' hand flew in dismay to the side of her face. The plumber
made no move, but the set of his mouth as he looked at her seemed to soften.
"Anyway, I'll have a look from the garden end," he said.
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"Oh, do," said the astronomer's wife in relief. Here was a man who spoke of action and
object as simply as women did! But however hushed her voice had been, it carried
clearly to Professor Ames who lay, dreaming and solitary, upon his bed. He heard their
footsteps come down the hall, pause, and skip across the pool of overflow.
"Katherine!" said the astronomer in a ringing tone. "There's a problem worthy of your
mettle!"
Mrs. Ames did not turn her head, but led the plumber swiftly down the stairs. When the
sun in the garden struck her face, he saw there was a wave of color in it, but this may
have been anything but shame.
"You see how it is," said the plumber, as if leading her mind away. "The drains run from
these houses right down the hill, big enough for a man to stand upright in them, and
clean as a whistle, too." There they stood in the garden with the vegetation flowering in
disorder all about. The plumber looked at the astronomer's wife. "They come out at the
torrent on the other side of the forest beyond there," he said.
But the words the astronomer had spoken still sounded in her in despair. The mind of
man, she knew, made steep and sprightly flights, pursued illusion, took foothold in the
nameless things that cannot pass between the thumb and finger. But whenever the
astronomer gave voice to the thoughts that soared within him, she returned in gratitude
to the long expanses of his silence. Desert-like they stretched behind and before the
articulation of his scorn.
Life, life is an open sea, she sought to explain it in sorrow, and to survive women cling
to the floating debris on the tide. But the plumber had suddenly fallen upon his knees in
the grass and had crooked his fingers through the ring of the drains' trap-door. When
she looked down she saw that he was looking up into her face, and she saw too that his
hair was as light as gold.
"Perhaps Mr. Ames," he said rather bitterly, "would like to come down with me and have
a look around?"
"Down?" said Mrs. Ames in wonder.
"Into the drains," said the plumber brutally. "They're a study for a man who likes to
know what's what."
"Oh, Mr. Ames," said Mrs. Ames in confusion. "He's still--still in bed, you see."
The plumber lifted his strong, weathered face and looked curiously at her. Surely it
seemed to him strange for a man to linger in bed, with the sun pouring yellow as wine
all over the place. The astronomer's wife saw his lean cheeks, his high, rugged bones,
and the deep seams in his brow. His flesh was as firm and clean as wood, stained
richly tan with the climate's rigor. His fingers were blunt, but comprehensible to her,
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gripped in the ring and holding the iron door wide. The backs of his hands were bound
round and round with ripe blue veins of blood.
"At any rate," said the astronomer's wife, and the thought of it moved her lips to smile a
little, "Mr. Ames would never go down there alive. He likes going up," she said. And
she, in her turn, pointed, but impudently, towards the heavens. "On the roof. Or on the
mountains. He's been up on the top of them many times."
"It's a matter of habit," said the plumber, and suddenly he went down the trap. Mrs.
Ames saw a bright little piece of his hair still shining, like a star, long after the rest of him
had gone. Out of the depths, his voice, hollow and dark with foreboding, returned to
her. "I think something has stopped the elbow," was what he said.
This was speech that touched her flesh and bone and made her wonder. When her
husband spoke of height, having no sense of it, she could not picture it nor hear. Depth
or magic passed her by unless a name were given. But madness in a daily shape, as
elbow stopped, she saw clearly and well. She sat down on the grasses, bewildered that
it should be a man who had spoken to her so.
She saw the weeds springing up, and she did not move to tear them up from life. She
sat powerless, her sense veiled, with no action taking shape beneath her hands. In this
way some men sat for hours on end, she knew, tracking a single thought back to its
origin. The mind of man could balance and divide, weed out, destroy. She sat on the
full, burdened grasses, seeking to think, and dimly waiting for the plumber to return.
Whereas her husband had always gone up, as the dead go, she knew now that there
were others who went down, like the corporeal being of the dead. That men were then
divided into two bodies now seemed clear to Mrs. Ames. This knowledge stunned her
with its simplicity and took the uneasy motion from her limbs. She could not stir, but sat
facing the mountains' rocky flanks, and harking in silence to lucidity. Her husband was
the mind, this other man the meat, of all mankind.
After a little, the plumber emerged from the earth: first the light top of his head, then the
burnt brow, and then the blue eyes fringed with whitest lash. He braced his thick hands
flat on the pavings of the garden-path and swung himself completely from the pit.
"It's the soil lines," he said pleasantly. "The gases," he said as he looked down upon
her lifted face, "are backing up the drains."
"What in the world are we going to do?" said the astronomer's wife softly.� There was
a young and strange delight in putting questions to which true answers would be given.
Everything the astronomer had ever said to her was a continuous query to which there
could be no response.
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"Ah, come, now," said the plumber, looking down and smiling. "There's a remedy for
every ill, you know. Sometimes it may be that," he said as if speaking to a child, "or
sometimes the other thing. But there's always a help for everything amiss."
Things come out of herbs and make you young again, he might have been saying to
her; or the first good rain will quench any drought; or time of itself will put a broken bone
together.
"I'm going to follow the ground pipe out right to the torrent," the plumber was saying.
"The trouble's between here and there and I'll find it on the way. There's nothing at all
that can't be done over for the caring," he was saying, and his eyes were fastened on
her face in insolence, or gentleness, or love.
The astronomer's wife stood up, fixed a pin in her hair, and turned around towards the
kitchen. Even while she was calling the servant's name, the plumber began speaking
again.
"I once had a cow that lost her cud," the plumber was saying. The girl came out on the
kitchen-step and Mrs. Ames stood smiling at her in the sun.
"The trouble is very serious, very serious," she said across the garden. "When Mr.
Ames gets up, please tell him I've gone down."
She pointed briefly to the open door in the pathway, and the plumber hoisted his kit on
his arm and put out his hand to help her down.
"But I made her another in no time," he was saying, "out of flowers and things and whatnot."
"Oh," said the astronomer's wife in wonder as she stepped into the heart of the earth.
She took his arm, knowing that what he said was true.
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