His Mother
When Atropos tied the fate of Meleager to the smoldering end of a burning log, she gave the queen the power to control her son's destiny. The biology and psychology of infancy similarly gives to a mere mortal woman—often a young one—the power of life or death over her child. In the beginning of a newborn's life, its survival depends upon basic maternal care. In the early weeks and months of life, survival can depend upon loving maternal contact. In medical school, I learned that babies separated from their mothers to protect them from the London Blitzkrieg suffered from anaclitic depression and died, even though they got good basic physical care. They were kept warm and fed, and had their diapers changed, but many didn't survive. It seems that infants who are not held and cherished, who do not hear their mother's voice or feel her body or her breath may die for lack of maternal loving care. One could perhaps say that they die of a broken heart.
Failure to thrive is a common diagnosis for older babies and toddlers who are underweight or listless. Many of these children have been neglected by their birth mothers, who are often practically children themselves, or who are suffering from extended post-partum depression, or who have had too many children to look after another. Likewise, there are children (most often girls) who are not vaccinated against common diseases or brought to a doctor when they are sick. Many of these die of readily treated illnesses or suffer from malnutrition, especially in instances where poverty and patriarchy decide who in the family gets the food.
Whatever the circumstances, to a baby, the mother is the environment. Mother either provides or does not. Her size relative to the baby is enormous. She is all-powerful, all-providing, or all-withholding. She is the embodiment of the Great Mother in a pre-verbal world—an archetype in the unconscious of men that helps explain the efforts that men make to control women and their irrational fear of them. Thus, the power over Meleager's life that Atropos gives to his mother has a reality in human infancy and early childhood.
However, as boys grow up, their mothers' life-or-death power becomes metaphoric rather than real, relating primarily to the development of their emotional lives. Alice Miller, in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child (Basic Books, 1981), describes how boys can learn to pay attention to their mothers' emotional needs and to respond in ways that will soothe them, at the expense of their own feelings. They learn to attend to their mothers' moods and needs. A narcissistically wounded mother wants her little man to be her mirror, not to express his own feelings or challenge her. The emotionally absent or distant father who is not available to either his wife or his son may be complicit in fostering an emotionally incestuous relationship that takes on the metaphoric configuration of Great Mother/Son Lover, which was a phase in pre-patriarchal religions and is an archetypal relationship.
It is important that some mothers and some sons recognize this pattern in order to change it. This may not have been necessary for Meleager, who, from the beginning, “hung out” among men and emulated them. Boys like him are outer-oriented, interested in things rather than people, and competitive. If physically coordinated and athletic, they compete in sports. The Apollo archetype fits Meleager—God of the Sun who is the favorite son of Zeus and twin to Artemis; the embodiment of a masculine attitude that observes, favors thinking over feeling, competes with his intelligence, and strives for excellence; a person with an innate discipline to practice at whatever he needs to master to reach a goal or win. While Meleager will not be a “mother's son”—overly close to her and sensitive to her feelings more than his own—he may become an extension of her social ambitions through the plans she makes for him.
By the time Meleager reaches manhood, he has easily met the expectations of his father. But his mother has expectations and needs for him to fulfill as well. He must marry someone appropriate in her eyes, and she expects him to make a choice from among the young women she selects. In a patriarchy, women live through their relationships with men. They have status by virtue of being someone's daughter, until they become wives and then the mothers of sons. When they are widowed, they are immediately diminished in importance, although, at least in ancient Greece, they were not expected to join their dead husbands on the funeral pyre. In a system like this, it is the relationship of a mother to her son that matters. And to this end, it is important that the son's wife be respectful, if not indebted, to her mother-in-law.
Ambition takes many forms. Where women cannot themselves aspire to power or prestige, they live their ambitions out through their sons or husbands. Sons may be molded to become the men their mothers wanted to be. Since the Women's Movement, it is possible for women to succeed in almost any field or profession. This reality recalls Gloria Steinem's famous comment: “We are becoming the men we were supposed to marry.”
That mothers live through their sons is, however, still true. While this happens across the social spectrum, it is often more pronounced in immigrant families and among those at the top of the social ladder. Social class and inherited wealth make it likely that a married woman will be a full-time wife and mother, even if she is brighter and more able than her husband. Such women can be frustrated by thwarted ambitions of their own, especially if their husbands turn out to be failures in contrast to their wives' more successful fathers. Now that women are able to rise to the top of corporations, professions, elected offices, and even the armed services, this is changing. Women no longer have to live through the accomplishments of others. A woman no longer has to be “the woman behind the throne” if she has what it takes herself.
Atalanta and Meleager—Twinning Couple
Of all the versions of the story of Atalanta, I find Bernard Evslin's narrative (Heroes, Gods, and Monsters, 1968) about how Meleager and Atalanta met not only the most vivid, but also the most psychologically true explanation of their attraction. In my own telling, I borrow the situation that brought them together from him and then interpret the story so that it makes internal psychological sense. In classical Greek and Roman versions, the circumstances given differ greatly; but in all of them, Meleager falls in love with Atalanta at first sight. She evokes an image, a yearning for a feminine counterpart—his dream girl or anima figure, in Jung's psychological model. When men talk about attractive women, their first comment usually focuses on their appearance or on particular physical attributes.
Atalanta and Meleager are a standout matched set—a striking couple, both archers and hunters at home in the wilderness. Atalanta evokes Artemis, twin sister to Apollo. She has her silver bow, he his golden one. This twinning is a characteristic of many young relationships that become marriages. In high school, the football captain and the head cheerleader or prom queen are the classic couple. In colleges where “the Greeks” dominate social life, sorority sisters find their match in fraternity brothers—and back in the days before couples lived together, this often led to marriage after graduation.
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