Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(57)

Black Orpheus received huge acclaim on its release: it won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1959 and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film the following year. The bossa nova soundtrack alone can banish any thoughts of gloom: the merging of Greek myth with Brazilian music works perfectly. It is full of witty references and allegory (Orfeu’s friend is called Hermes: he’s the one who guides Eurydice to her cousin’s house, like his Greek namesake, who is both messenger god and psychopomp – a deity who escorts souls down to the Underworld). And it allows Eurydice to take up as much narrative space as Orpheus, which is rare in any telling of their story before this point. The early parts of the film alternate between her and Orfeu: we follow her off the boat, watch as she helps a blind man to find his bearings, see the way her cousin and the whole neighbourhood take her in. This is intercut with Orfeu and his girlfriend, Mira, who is determined that he should buy her a wedding ring, even though his eyes are on reclaiming his guitar from the pawn shop: the one love he does successfully retrieve. Orpheus and Eurydice’s story has more dramatic weight because we see both of them as characters, rather than one character and his muse (which is how they are portrayed so frequently in opera). Because we encounter the idea that they are destined to be lovers, destined to die – they might be this generation’s Orpheus and Eurydice, but there have been many more before them and there are countless more to come – we need a sense of them as individuals if we are not to see them as cogs in a sad machine. The vibrancy and complexity of the music, costumes and dance which accompany the familiar tale turn it into something more than a tragedy.

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Composers and librettists of staged versions of Eurydice and Orpheus have almost always begun from the same premise: what if I were Orpheus? What if I were the world’s great artist, great lover, great persuader, flawed hero? It’s easy to see why so many have been drawn to his perspective: this is a story which lends itself to music, and Orpheus is the musician. And it’s hardly surprising that this fascination continues when the story is told in paint rather than music: that crucial turning point of the story is literally about the power of the male gaze.

The nineteenth-century German artist Emil Neide painted Orpheus striding out of darkness, towards the light.30 He carries a highly ornate golden lyre in his right hand and a mighty walking stick in his left. His chest is puffed up and a dark cloak billows around him. Half-crouching behind him in the shadows is Eurydice. She wears a gold armlet of a snake curled around her left bicep, to remind us how she died. The light catches her face just under her eyes: is there the faintest suggestion of impatience there? Her preening husband looks enormously pleased with himself, almost as though he has engaged in this whole rescue mission for appearances’ sake. She is ostensibly hiding from the light so that if he does turn around he might not see her. Yet I can never quite shake the idea that she’s wondering if she could just slink into the shadows and go back down to Hades in peace.

And the image of a man strutting forward so confidently when we know he is about to fail raises an important question about Orpheus too. Does he want to fail? Would he prefer to have Eurydice back in his arms, or to have glory for all time as the great musician with the tragic lost muse? In other words, does he prefer losing the real Eurydice if it means he can create his own version of her without reality sullying his art? Think back to that early version of the story in Virgil, where Eurydice speaks but Orpheus does not. Until his disembodied head is floating down the river, and then he only says her name. Orpheus doesn’t have words – only music and song – while Eurydice can speak. But once she is gone, he gets to call the tune.

Readers had to wait a long time for Eurydice to tell the story for herself. But some of the most memorable modern versions of this myth are ones which have done precisely that. The American poet Hilda Doolittle – who used the pen name H.D. – wrote ‘Eurydice’ in the early twentieth century: it was published in her Collected Poems in 1925.31 This Eurydice is not going quietly. The poem begins with a chilly anger: ‘So you have swept me back/ I who could have walked with the live souls above the earth’. The cause of her tragedy is twofold: ‘your arrogance and your ruthlessness’. Ovid cheerily told us that Eurydice had nothing to complain of except that Orpheus loved her a bit too much. But while this romantic elision works very well in the context of his telling of the myth, it does always leave me at least thinking: Really? Nothing at all? Eurydice gets bitten by a snake, she is dragged down to the Underworld, she is wrenched out of the darkness and she is still walking with a limp, she is handed back to Orpheus under a strict proviso, she is given the closest breath of freedom, and then she is hauled back down to Hades, dying all over again. Nothing to complain about? She has quite a lot to complain about if you stop thinking about Orpheus and just think about her for a moment. She just doesn’t get to complain because no one ever asks her how she feels.

When H.D. takes on the story, she gives Eurydice her voice back: it’s telling that the poem – written in the first person – doesn’t ever name Orpheus. This really is all about Eurydice. And it’s her second death which really hurts: ‘I had grown from listlessness into peace,/ if you had let me rest with the dead, I had forgot you/ and the past’. By focusing on Orpheus’ perspective at the moment where he loses his love (as virtually every version of their story does), we run the risk of overlooking it from the other side: salvation promised and then cruelly snatched away. Orpheus is left with nothing but his grief and his lyre. Eurydice is left with nothing at all. Although, as H.D. tells it, that’s not necessarily a bad thing: ‘hell is no worse than your earth’. This poem throbs with rage, as though Eurydice has waited a couple of millennia to get all this off her chest. But it does not end in anger; it ends with a declaration: ‘hell must break before I am lost,’ she says, in the final stanza. Eurydice may be dead, but she is still triumphantly herself.