WEAVING THE TANGLED WEB: ARACHNE AS FEMINIST
“Live on then, and yet hang, condemned one, but, lest you are careless in future, this same condition is declared, in punishment, against your descendants, to the last generation!” Ovid, Metamorphoses.
The myth of Arachne, a skilled weaver who according to Ovid challenged the goddess Athena to a weaving contest, provides an opportunity to explore the complexities of gender dynamics and power imbalances in ancient mythology. While it can be seen as a story of female defiance and talent, a feminist critique reveals underlying patriarchal themes and class distinction and a punishment that perpetuates the suppression of women's voices and social injustice.
From the outset, it is noteworthy that Arachne exists on the fringes of the Greek world. She is a maiden from Hypaepa, a city in non-Greek Lydia, whose women were reputed to have received from the mythological Aphrodite, the gift of beauty of form and dancing, highlighting the irony of her ultimate fate. As such, despite her skill, she is an outsider, occupying the lowest social rung that could possibly be conceived: If Athena as the Great White Goddess represents the highest echelon of power, Arachne, as a woman and a foreigner, is the closest that we get for the period, to a woman of colour. Viewed from this perspective, the myth of Arachne is not so much a cautionary tale of hubris, this being the reading privileged by western postcolonial perspectives, but rather a discourse on the structural differences of gender, class, race, and aptitude among women. Given the subversion, or rather attempted subversion of the ordinary power narrative, when considering the myth, we need to constantly ask ourselves: who is weaving what story, why and to whose benefit?
Arachne's story begins with her exceptional weaving abilities, which she honed partly through her own talent and hard work and partly through her family background, her father being Idmon, a famed dyer in purple, whereas her son, introduced the use of spindle in the manufacture of wool. When she dares to challenge Athena, a goddess associated with wisdom and craftsmanship, it initially appears as an act of rebellion and assertion of her own prowess. She is after all, according to myth, considered to be inventor of linen cloth and nets. This aspect of the myth may be seen as empowering, highlighting a woman's ability to excel in traditionally male-dominated domains or to aspire to enter domains customarily the preserve of the elite.
However, the narrative takes a troubling turn when Athena, rather than appreciating Arachne's talent and engaging in a fair competition, reacts with anger and jealousy. Instead, Athena resorts to a power play and uses her divine authority to assert dominance over the mortal weaver. This reflects a pattern seen throughout Greek mythology, where women who challenge male or divine authority are punished and silenced.
Athena’s first reaction is thus to transform herself into an old crone, warning Arachne against challenging the gods and enjoining her to repent. The transformation is a significant one. By assuming the guise of an old woman, Athena is mirroring the liminal space occupied by Arachne herself as an outsider. An old matriarchal-type figure can either command respect and authority because of her acquired wisdom and experience or can be an object of derision because she is a post-sexual being with declining physical powers, just as Arachne can either be considered a person that commands respect because of her dexterity and skill or a candidate for excoriation because occupying the low social position that does, she is an upstart for aspiring to a position that within the hierarchy, is closed to her.
The Athena/crone’s message to Arachne, is not one of humility. Rather, it is one of female submission, considering that Athena is the goddess who identifies with the law of her father and ensures that its primacy is never challenged. Her injunction thus sends a clear message that women should not aspire to surpass or challenge the achievements of male or divine figures. Arachne's act of challenging Athena is portrayed as an act of arrogance, implying that women should not strive for recognition or equality. It reinforces the notion that women should submit to male or divine authority, further perpetuating patriarchal power constructs.
The actual contest itself is rich in symbolism with the two competing tapestries conveying markedly opposed perspectives as to the immortals, as dominant class. In Athena’s tapestry, power and might are the prevalent discourse. She portrays herself in all her resplendent armour defeating Poseidon in the contest over the possession of Athens with the offer of a fruiting olive tree to the city. Her narrative is fashioned expressly in order to intimate Arachne and to cower her into submission. It is for this reason that she weaves into her work, the fates of four arrogant mortals who not knowing their place, were punitively metamorphosised: These are the stories of Rhodope and Haemus, who having the effrontery to compare themselves to Zeus and Hera, were transformed into the Balkan and Rhodope mountains, Cinyras, the king of Cyprus who was killed a a result of challenging Apollo to a signing contest, the Pygmy Queen Gerana who offended the goddess Hera with her boasts of superior beauty, and was transformed into a crane and Antigone of Troy who claimed that her hair was more beautiful than that of the goddess Hera, causing Hera, who was angered by that claim, to turned Antigone's hair into snakes. Athena’s tapestry depicts the immortals with absolute power and justifies their actions by showing the mortals whom they punish as worthy of denigration and suppression.
Conversely, Arachne’s tapestry display challenges the power and authority of the gods as ruling class, calling out misogynistic behaviour and hypocrisy. By depicting their misdeeds, Arachne defies the dominant narrative and exposes the flaws of the divine masculine. Accordingly, she depicts eighteen scenes of the gods transforming themselves to approach mortals for the sole purpose of taking sexual advantage of them, such as Zeus turning into a swan to rape the Spartan queen Leda, a bull to entice Europa, an eagle to abduct Aegina, as a shower of gold to seduce Danae and as a satyr to seduce Antiope. Arachne enters into disputation with Athena’s work and challenges its narrative. As a result, she must be silenced. To reassert the legitimacy of the Olympian gods, the revelation of their misdeeds must be punished.
The very act of Arachne's weaving is a bold act of self-expression, where she asserts her voice and serves as a vehicle for telling stories from a female perspective, showcasing women's experiences, struggles, and triumphs. It is for this reason that it is the first object of Athena’s wrath and a tangible testament to Arachne’s exercise of her creative agency and her ability to become empowered and liberated through her craft. As the medium for that process, the tapestry must be destroyed and Athena promptly tears it up, ensuring that its message is lost, an extreme form of censorship.
It is not enough however for the offending article to be consigned to oblivion. The propagator of its subversive narrative must also be silenced. Athena promptly sets about beating Arachne so savagely with the shuttle of her loom, that her only means of escape is to seek to hang herself. This too, on the part of Arachne is an act of rebellion: In ancient Greece suicide was considered a disgraceful act as life was considered a gift bestowed by the Gods, and life and death were subjected to the will of the gods. In trying to take her own life, Arachne is transgressing into the realm of the ruling class and abrogating for herself, privileges they have reserved only for themselves. This assertion too cannot go unpunished.
Athena's final punishment of Arachne is ironically the mirror image of that prefigured in Arachne’s now non-existent tapestry: rather than transforming herself so as to dominate the mortal, she will transform Arachne into a spider, a marginalized creature and maligned creature who must hang from a thread, continuously weaving her webs outside of human language and representation forever. Arachne may still be weaving a counternarrative to Athena’s theocratic order but now it will be unintelligible to all and thus rendered innocuous. The fate Athena has reserved for Arachne thus suggests that women who challenge the established order will ultimately be confined to a limited and marginalized role, perpetuating the narrative that women's ambitions and talents should be suppressed and controlled.
A final insult is reserved for Arachne. Not only is her ambition thwarted and her body transfigured, her sexual identity must also be denigrated. In one variant of the myth, Arachne was not from Lydia but from Attica and was taught by Athena the art of weaving, while her brother Phalanx was taught martial arts by the goddess. The two siblings supposedly engaged in incestuous intercourse, causing Athena, strangely disgusted considering that incest was par the course for Olympians, to change them both into spiders, animals doomed to be devoured by their own young. It is not enough to impugn the skilful woman’s talents. They must be neutralised by the intimation that those talents are not earned but rather gifted, making her ungrateful and presenting her as sexually depraved, a figure to be held forever contempt.
Spinning and weaving have served as symbols of women’s creativity and political agency since antiquity. The story of Arachne weaves counternarratives to patriarchal history and theology, celebrating and reversing women’s marginality, highlighting the differential positions and contexts of dominance and dispossession. Within the warp and weft of its unfolding, a microcosm of the human condition is revealed.
DEAN KALIMNIOU
posted by PANEPIROTIC FEDERATION OF AUSTRALIA at Saturday, June 17, 2023
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