The Rape of Femininity

William Butler Yeats
“Leda and the Swan” (1924)

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

_________________Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

William Butler Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan” deals with a well-known Greek myth about a sexual affair between a mortal noble woman named Leda and the immortal king of all gods, Zeus. This myth has been explored by many intellectuals in the past, including such remarkable men as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, who painted magnificently detailed works that capture the risqué nature of the classical myth. The encounter between Leda and Zeus was indeed legendary; being one of the more prophetic events in Greek mythology, what spawns from it is perhaps one of the best-known myths of all time – that of the Trojan War. This and many other myths have been chronicled by Homer in the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, considered to be one of the oldest works in Greek literature much akin to Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony. It is from these works that one can look back in time, so to speak, to ancient times and examine the foundations on which Western Civilization was founded. It is of no surprise that many of the fundamental paradigms dealing with human existence and experience have carried over from ancient times to be observable in today’s world, albeit in subtle ways. In this respect, Eric Puchner does a magnificent job in his short story “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan,” in which he uses Yeats’s interpretation of this particular myth to re-create the event in all its glory, set in modern times. What is especially interesting is the striking resemblance of the more subtle human paradigms – specifically that of gender relations – between the world of the ancient Greeks and the world of modern-day Americans.

According to the myth, Leda was the wife of King Tyndareus of Sparta and the mother of Helen, Clytemnestra, and the inseparable twins Castor and Pollux. One day, Zeus appears to Leda and has sexual intercourse with her by seducing her in the form of a great swan, “engendering there” the seed of his children, who are later borne from an egg laid by Leda. Only two of the children are Zeus’s, but different versions of the myths can’t seem to agree which ones. From Yeats’s poem, one can deduct that Helen of Troy is definitely one of the offspring from the Leda-Zeus affair: “A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.” This particular choice of words seems to refer to Christopher Marlowe’s (1564-1593) famous line in his play Doctor Faustus about Helen and her role in starting the great invasion of Troy by Greece: “Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” (Ilium refers to the city proper in the province of Troy). Additionally, we know that Agamemnon gets murdered by his wife Clytemnestra upon his victorious return from the Trojan War. These are just two of many examples in Greek mythology in which women of great beauty lead otherwise honorable men to commit violent acts against their fellow men or are directly responsible for tragedies which often end in death and despair.

This archetype is abundant in Greek mythology and in the myths and legends of many cultures worldwide, and its presence is a direct reflection of the currently dominant paradigm of patriarchal, or male-dominated, hierarchical society. From Pandora in Hesiod’s poems to Eve in the Garden of Even as described in the Bible’s Genesis, woman is continually depicted in a less-than favorable light. The following excerpt from Laura Knight-Jadczyk’s The Secret History of the World summarizes this point quite well:

In the Theogony [Hesiod’s account of origins of those divine beings who created and preside over the cosmos], the first woman is the “kalon kakon.” Kalon means “beautiful” and kakon means “evil.” In other words, the first woman is a living oxymoron. […] Woman is revealed as unambiguously evil: “Thuderous Zeus made women to be a kakon for mortal men […] he fashioned this kakon for men to make them pay for the theft of fire.” […] Woman is a “lure” and men have no “resistance” and it was designed that way by the gods.

And so it is, the moment of woman’s creation is the moment of man’s destruction. […] The “first woman” in Works and Days, Pandora, is again, bait set by the gods to trap men. She is given the appearance of a goddess, the character of a hyena, and the heart and mind of a jackal. Woman, adorned by the gods, brings to man all that is hideous and devouring. Her name, Pandora, means both “All Giver” and “All Gifted.” Hesiod tells us that she is called Pandora because, “all those who dwell on Olympos gave each one to her a gift, a grief for men who strive and toil.”

The gifts Pandora receives from the gods – the contents of Pandora’s jar – are intended to produce endless torment for man. It is only centuries later that a “box” was substituted for a “jar.” This change of imagery was attributed to the sixteenth century monk Erasmus who mistranslated the original Greek word pithos with the Latin pyxis. A pithos is a jar that is womb-like in shape and is a symbol for the earth, the mother of all.

The implications of pithos to the story of Pandora are obvious. Pandora’s gifts are released from her own womb. Her fault lies not in her curiosity, but in her being. She is constitutionally deceptive and lethal because she draws men into her pithos, and brings forth new men for a life of misery. She further perpetuates the misery of man by bringing forth female babies. The image of Woman as a pithos is extremely ancient. […]

Hesiod presents the view that woman is a disruption to nature. Because of woman, man must be born in suffering, and them man must die in suffering. […] In Genesis, man is created and lives in a deathless, god-like existence, and woman is the “second” creation, the “afterthought.” She soon brings death and destruction on mankind by “eating of the fruit of the tree of good and evil.”

In these accounts, we perceive a common thread of woman as an “interloper” into the original scheme of things, bringing sex, strife, misery and death. Hesiod works with the ancient images of the all-giving mother, twisting and disfiguring them until they reflect only the shame and degradation of the creatress of life. Woman, created from clay according to Hesiod, is not only not semi-divine as is man, she is something less than human. (388-391)

The myths of Leda, Helen, and Clymenestra clearly perpetuate this negative image of women as described by Knight-Jadczyk’s analysis of Western Civilization’s earliest written works. Leda’s inception by Zeus could be seen as yet another divine trap for mortals set by the king of the gods to spark yet another era of death and slaughter that would be initiated by evil and deceptive women so “gifted” by the gods.

Knight-Jadczyk concludes that such myths and legends were popularized for political reasons to establish and, more importantly, to justify a radical shift in paradigm to that of patriarchy:

The Theogony – like the Bible – is not metaphysics; it is, plainly and simply, a political tool. In the Theogony, the regime of Zeus and the reign of Olympian justice are celebrated as achievements of the aeons just as Yahweh is celebrated in the Torah. In the Theogony, Hesiod recounts his new version of the beginnings of Creation, making certain to regularly propagandize in favor of Zeus who is as “just as he is terrible.” Many passages in the Theogony can be compared to the hymns to Yahweh supposedly composed by David, or to the Enuma Elish which sings the praises of the warrior king, Marduk. In each case, there is a fusion of military might with absolute authority, glory and promised justice to the exiled and enslaved. And clearly, in each instance there is a complete subordination of the female to the male, presented as a philosophical achievement, as evolution from the old, savage, order to the new, glorious world of male theriomorphism [ascription of animal characteristics to human beings and deities]. (389)

Taking into account the fact that some of the earliest works of written history show this obvious gender bias, it should not be surprising that the very foundations of Western Civilization, from myths and legends to the tenets of most organized religions, are inherently sexist and patriarchal in nature. Only in relatively recent times has this paradigm been extensively analyzed and questioned by enlightened intellectuals, spawning the Feminist Movement and a myriad of “alternative” looks at and re-evaluations of mankind’s history. Further analysis of Yeats’s poem and Puchner’s short story will show that these literary masters may have identified the gender bias in Greek mythology in particular and the human experience in general and may have seen the hierarchical patriarchy as a destructive force in human society.

Yeats’s interpretation of the encounter between Leda and Zeus is unique; while in the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci Leda is represented as being happy and willing to engage in sexual intercourse with the swan, Yeats makes it seem like Leda was seduced, corrupted, and essentially raped by the great swan. The whole scene is very physical in nature, with multiple close-ups which clearly show the ultimate subordination of Leda, referred to as “the staggering girl,” to Zeus, the “feathered glory”: “…her thighs caressed / By the dark webs, he nape caught in his bill, / He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. […] Being so caught up, / So mastered by the brute blood of the air.” The focus in this poem is not on the mighty Zeus but rather on Leda and the loss of her innocence in the most degrading of ways. Not only is she raped, but by taking on Zeus’s seed she is, in effect, forced to be responsible for the tragedies of her and Zeus’s children. Yeats makes it seem like Leda has no choice but to give in to Zeus – that she has no chance in the face of such relentless evil; for, how can “indifference” on Zeus’s part during such an act of rape not be considered evil on moral terms?

Looking at the myth from this perspective, one can begin to see the intentions of Yeats in writing the poem in this unique way. Could Yeats, having first-hand experience of the evils of the human world after having lived through World War I (the poem was published in 1924), have realized that there is something wrong with the history of man, so replete with wars, death, and suffering? Perhaps what is so wrong with the history of man is the absence of woman: it becomes clear that the patriarchy has not, in essence, made the world a better place, and that the perpetual “rape” of femininity – the creative essence, pure emotions, Mother Nature’s precious resources, women’s rights and respect, etc. – is continually degrading the human experience. Thus, Yeats’s poem is an attack on the patriarchal paradigm; by twisting Greek mythology in this way, he criticizes the foundation of Western Civilization and its hypocritical ideals.

Puchner uses Yeats’s interpretation of the Leda myth and applies it to the modern world, also in a rather unique way. In his short story “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan,” the narrator is a teenage girl named Natalie whose assignment for English class it is to analyze Yeats’s poem. Instead, she ends up narrating her “love” story, which ironically ends up paralleling the events of the poem almost exactly as written by Yeats.

In her drama, Natalie falls in love with a manipulative boy named Colin who’s in a band called Pagan Liver. One of his songs has the following lyrics: “All you mortals, I can and will bend … Cuz I’m the father of gods and men!” which is a direct comparison to Zeus. Colin also gets electrocuted during a concert and is subsequently able to of zap people at will – also very similar to the lighting-wielding Zeus.

At one point, Colin wants to get Natalie to sleep with him and promises her the “Gift” of foresight in return:

That was when he told me about his secret powers. He made me promise not to tell anyone and then explained that he could see into the future before it happened, which is why he could play pinball forever without losing a coin. I was very startled and didn’t speak for a long time. I asked him if he could see into my future like the pinball’s. He said, yes, he could see my whole life and even beyond that, but that knowledge was in his body and the only way to share it was to pass it directly. The Gift, he called it. […]

Colin opened the door. He looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen him, face glowing with confidence and his hair kind of floating around him like a commercial. I was very scared. He walked over to the bed and knelt beside my face. He didn’t say a word, just reached down and touched my lips, which made my eyelids sparkle at a very high frequency. I knew I wouldn’t stop him from transmitting me the Gift. (Puchner)

The narrator has all kinds of clues before surrendering to Colin that he is not loyal and truthful; her own sister tells her that he has been cheating on her. Natalie refuses to accept any of it because she claims that she is “in love.” She is completely seduced by his confidence and his Gifts, and once the deed is done and Natalie is impregnated with his child, Colin skips town with her sister, never to be seen again.

Natalie comes from a typical American broken family. Her mother has been divorced and re-married multiple times, and most of her friends’ parents are also divorced. Her step-father, Franz, is portrayed in a similar light to Colin – he doesn’t care much about the women with whom he’s associated. In fact, it seems that the two men in this particular story share the evil “indifference” of Zeus from Yeats’s poem. The women seem to be disillusioned about the ideal of “love” and the point of relationships, easily falling for the same traps and ending up “raped,” so to speak, every time. We see the same cycle in Greek mythology, except there it is the men falling for the evils of women. Clearly, in reality it is the other way around. In this fundamental way, Yeats’s poem and Puchner’s short story criticize the hypocritical values of materialistic society, one of the perpetual destruction of feminine ideals through false illusions and manipulations by the male-dominated ruling class.

Works Cited

Knight-Jadczyk, Laura. The Secret History of the World and How to Get Out Alive. Canada: Red Pill Press, 2005.