Eurydice

If you’re unfamiliar with the evolution of vocabulary used by “the youths” (scare quotes mandatory), you might not know what a “hot take” is. It’s not an especially difficult phrase to parse once you break it down -- a “take” is an opinion on something (e.g. “What’s your take?”) and the adjective “hot”, well, that has a couple synonyms ranging from “controversial” to “brand new” or even “poorly thought out”, decided through context clues, but no matter how it modifies the take, it’s always something that will bring energy to a given conversation. The opposite would be a “cold take,” one that people have heard before and/or just doesn’t get the blood boiling anymore.

Anyway, here’s a hot take: Eurydice, feminist icon?

I mean, obviously not according to the text itself. The surviving versions of the Orpheus myth paint his wife as not much more than an object for Orpheus to desire. She dies on her wedding day, having been bitten by a rattlesnake, and a major plot point in the myth is that Orpheus isn’t even allowed to look at her as he rescues her from the underworld. That’s Greco-Roman mythology for you. But as time has marched on, I’ve noticed both a resurgence in tellings of this myth in general and interpretations of Eurydice specifically.

To preface all this, I wouldn’t call myself either a classics expert or a feminism expert. I didn’t even know it was pronounced “you-rid-i-see” until earlier this year. But when you experience two pieces of media like this in relatively quick succession, you kind of have to make note of it.

The first is Hadestown, this year’s Best Musical according to the Tony Awards. On its surface, it’s a retelling of the Orpheus myth replacing ancient Greece for depression-era America, creating a narrative distance between Ovid et al. to justify a couple things: its folk-opera aesthetic, and the ability to reinterpret the characters as it pleases. Hades, for example, is depicted as an oligarch who signs people into his employ permanently in exchange for a pittance while the Fates and Hermes are made into dueling narrators, each trying to influence the story in their own way.

But let’s focus on Eurydice. With the major story beats of the myth still there, it’s not like she’s a main character, but she does get, you know, an actual character. The Hadestown version of Eurydice is a realist who is attracted to Orpheus’ optimism, and instead of being killed unceremoniously, Hades attracts her to his underworld by promising her steady work and food to eat. She’s seduced into it, but it’s still a bit more agency than Eurydice has in the individual myths.

These choices are made at the beginning of the story, though, and from Eurydice’s perspective, the story plays out largely the same way once she arrives in Hadestown. To contrast, let’s look at this other piece of media, a film this time: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (trailer).

Portrait isn’t a myth by any stretch of the imagination -- it’s a romance drama between two women and set in the eighteenth century -- but it does spend a lot of time commenting on the myth. The introductory scene to this theme features its main characters sitting around a table with one of them reading aloud. The question arises: why did Orpheus turn around? To paraphrase using some modern (and not French) parlance, “If it were me, I would just not turn around.” The answer the characters come up with is, “Eurydice told Orpheus to turn around. She wanted him to remember her as she was.”

Already, too, the film has emphasized the two romantic leads’ looks at each other. “How you see me” is a recurring phrase throughout the film, as well as several shots of following someone close behind, so this scene, in essence, serves as the thesis of the film. But an idea like “Eurydice said something to Orpheus” isn’t exactly supported by the text of the myth, so the film then serves to demonstrate its reasoning by itself. There are several more callbacks to the myth, but I’ll skip ahead to its conclusion.

The final scene of Portrait is of its two leads, Marianne and Héloïse, having in the meantime been forced apart, attending the same musical performance by chance. Marianne sees Héloïse, but, as the camera lingers, it becomes apparent that it’s a look they won’t share. Héloïse is distracted by the music. Now it is the audience’s turn to ask for a look.

As a reminder, the film is set in the eighteenth century. The relationship between these two women was doomed from the start. And yet, all we want is a turn of the head and a look of recognition in Héloïse’s eyes. Héloïse chooses otherwise, though. She stays with the memory of Marianne as she was.

The symbology is reversed, but the message is still the same. Portrait of a Lady on Fire presents Eurydice as a woman who recognizes that her relationship with Orpheus will fail -- on a meta level, it almost presents her as someone who realizes she is but an object of inspiration to him -- and chooses to live in Hades with the happy memories of their courtship than to have them ruined by the passage of time.

Bookending Hadestown is a line sung by Hermes: “It’s a sad song, but we’re going to sing it anyway.” This is one of the major themes of the musical: its own commentary on using old stories to make commentary on modern issues (a joke title of Hadestown that gets passed around is “Orpheus Starts a Union”). And I thought that was worth talking about in regards to one figure that these two wildly different pieces of media share.

-F