The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature by Kathleen Wall (review)

HUMANITIES III translation impossible, rewriting that extends the life of the text by defamiliarizing it, making it foreign. And, since the rewriting is historically and discursively bound, the translatoris condemned to do it all over again tomorrow. Humanities Kathleen Wall. The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature McGill-Queen's University Press 240. $29.95 Kathleen Wall's The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood is exemplary myth criticism fulfilling several important functions simultaneously. By recovering the story of Callisto from relative obscurity and establishing it as a principal myth about woman's experience, the book installs itself firmly in the recently evolved feminist school of myth criticism. It notices not only the recurrence of the myth in literature but also the variations it undergoes. Wall is an accomplished comparatist. Through her analyses of the myth according to Hesiod, Apollodorus, Hyginus, Ovid, and Pausanias, she summarizes the aspects dominating the interpretations by male scholars of the classical versions of Callisto and redefines them in terms of woman's experience. She builds her re-definition from the basic myth: . A nymph in Diana's following, nature was [Callisto's] 'nunnery' and her refuge from the patriarchal society that had defeated her father. The greenworld villain is Zeus, who rapes her as she rests in the forest, tired from the hunt. Diana's band of virgins exiles her; Hera in her anger transforms her into a bear. Hence the forest now becomes the place of involuntary exile and her metamorphosis makes her part of that landscape. Because she is a bear, she cannot raise a human child; thus her motherhood is dramatically wrenched from her. The final element in her story combines both death and apotheosis: she is nearly killed, but Zeus rescues her at the last moment and enshrines her in the sky as the Great Bear constellation. Acknowledging her indebtedness to Annis Pratt, Wall builds her study on the premise that rape is a masculine expression of power and possession and a feminine experience of initiation. The nine main chapters determine how the Callisto myth in one or in a combination of the five models informs selected narratives from the Middle Ages to the present and from British, American, and Canadian literature. Wall concludes by comparing woman's experience in literature to her experience in life and demonstrates the relevance of the Callisto myth to 112 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 sociological observations by Judith Rowland, Margaret Mead, and others. Wall first sets forth an analysis of motifs of the various versions of the myth. Paradigms set forth by Jung, Campbell, and Frye, the study determines, focus on man's experience. Like her sisters, Annis Pratt, M. Esther Harding, and Nina Auerbach, Wall searches traditional myths for downplayed or perhaps obscured myths about feminine experience which might parallel myths and motifs describing male experience: for example, the journey motif. Her examination reveals that Callisto contains motifs common in literature by and about women, the motifs of rape, troubled motherhood, forest exile, and metamorphosis. After summarizing the Callisto myth according to five major classical writers, she examines the links between Artemis, Callisto, and Ursel according to W.K.C. Guthrie, J.G. Frazer, and others. Having carefully scrutinized sources, she proceeds to examine the metamorphoses of the myth in literature from the Middle Ages to the present. The conclusions of Wall's analyses of medieval and Renaissance literature and of works by Milton, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Margaret Atwood differ, but each analysis follows a similar pattern of exploration. Comparisons are made between the use of the Callisto myth in the particular work under study and in works already analysed. Wall considers the preservation and dismissal of aspects in the different versions of the myth. For example, she notes that in The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne's focus on Hester's punishment 'places the emphasis ... on the public dimensions of the Callisto-figure's career,' in compliance with Sir Charles Acton's version of the myth in the Classical Dictionary. Hester's punishment resembles Callisto's condemnation and transformation. The Boston women treat Hester in the same inhumane manner that...