Women Who Betray Their Fathers
Scylla, Ariadne and the US Abortion Landscape
As a new father myself, what better way to celebrate a belated Father’s Day than with a special entry on parricide? Long understood as a male-dominated trope, this time we will examine the rarer, more exquisite subject of women who betray their fathers.
From the castration of Uranus to the conception of Achilles, I have long argued that Greek mythology boils down to an intergenerational power struggle of gods and men who seek to displace their fathers while avoiding being displaced by their sons. Despite being the exception to this rule, women sometimes stand out as fairly competent performers of filial betrayal.
The two most noted cases coincidentally involve king Minos of Crete. The first is that of Scylla, the daughter of king Nisus of Megara—not to be confused with her monstrous namesake of Scylla-and-Charybdis fame. While under Minos’ siege, Scylla betrayed her city by snipping the lock of purple hair that rendered her father invulnerable. Once victorious, Minos rejected Scylla on account of her being a lousy daughter, and she drowned in despair trying to swim towards his departing ship, chased down by her dead father’s soul transformed into a sea eagle.
The situation would repeat itself with uncanny symmetry one generation later, when Minos’ own daughter, Ariadne, betrayed him by helping the Athenian prince Theseus defeat the Minotaur and flee Crete. Following Scylla’s unfortunate precedent, Ariadne was almost immediately abandoned by Theseus and left heartbroken on the shores of Naxos, where she either hanged herself or was picked up and spirited away by a godly new lover, Dionysus.
Scylla and Ariadne are two variations of the same tale of infatuation and betrayal. Scylla’s model is more common and iterates repeatedly throughout Greek mythology: Pisidice, Comaetho and Leucophrye all betray their king-fathers for the love of their conquerors (Achilles, Amphitryon and Leucippus respectively). These are all stories that unequivocally—and unforgivingly—end in deserved punishment.
The Ariadne variation is more interesting in that it concludes in undeserved displacement. She is deracinated1, left in a limbo of in-between homes, with a shattered sense of belonging.
While both Scylla and Ariadne betray their fathers for unrequited love, Scylla’s rebellion against her paternal king is outstripped by her rebellion against her maternal city. She doesn’t merely turn against her father by cutting his purple hair: she sells out the entire people of Megara over a teenage crush. In contrast, Ariadne’s actions leave her kingdom of Crete unaffected, which is why her punishment isn’t a violent death (vengeance), but rather ostracism (justice).
May 7, 2023
Filial betrayal takes place in the South Carolina Senate. Three self-proclaimed “sister senators” rebel against their party by breaking rank to stand against the banning of abortion beginning at conception.
The father figure is their political establishment: the male-dominated Republican Party in South Carolina, that ranks 47/50 in female representation. This is not a kind, kingly father—in 2015, a male Senator had to apologize for calling women a “lesser cut of meat”2—and the legislative defeat their betrayal has caused is not being taken well: their constituents have lambasted these female Senators as “baby killers”, sending them replicas of fetal spines to urge them to “grow one” themselves.
Their story follows the mythological script: The women have turned against their political father, and the antagonist they are unwittingly supporting—the Democratic party—will not reciprocate their love.
But their story bifurcates between those who see three Ariadnes turning against their father, and whose destiny it is to abandon and to be abandoned; and those who perceive an additional betrayal of their kingdom—South Carolina, like Megara, has been sold out by three Scyllas and will now fall—warranting the vitriol they receive, and manifesting a harrowing ending where the three treacherous daughters drown in despair, pecked by the souls of those whom they’ve betrayed.
For a worthwhile take on Ariadne’s deracination, see Covidian Æsthetics’s “Ariadne auf Naxos: A Study in Nymphification”.
The ensuing apology and explanation that the “lesser cut of meat” was a biblical reference just makes it so much worse.
Fascinating. And horrific! 😰