The Metamorphosis of Ovid in Retellings of Myth for Children

chapter 10 The Metamorphosis of Ovid in Retellings of Myth for Children

Deborah H. Roberts*

From the middle of the nineteenth century, following the success of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), children have increasingly encountered Greek myth for the first time in anthologies of stories written specifically for the young.1 Myths for which Ovid’s Metamorphoses is our major or sole source are among those most fre- quently chosen for these collections and for single-myth picture books; these include the tales of Arachne, Baucis and Philemon, Daedalus and Icarus, Daphne and Apollo, Echo and Narcissus, Midas, and Pygmalion and Galatea. In many instances, however, Ovid goes unmentioned, and these stories are repre- sented simply as Greek myths or folktales and as unmediated expressions of the Greek spirit. This was not always the case. Many of the educational handbooks written for or used by children in the 18th and early 19th centuries regularly cite and quote from Ovid,2 and Thomas Bulfinch’s 1855 Age of Fable, which seeks to give

* I am grateful to Sheila Murnaghan and to the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions. 1 My focus here is on the English-speaking world, especially Britain and the United States, but analogous developments may be found in other countries. On myth in English for children see Constant, A Critical Study of Selected Greek Myths as Story for Children. Thesis, Columbia University. (Ann Arbor mi: University Microfilms, 1970), Lines, The Faber Book of Greek Legends (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1973) 18–24, 251–61, Brazouski and Klatt, Childrens’ Books on Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, ct.: Greenwood Press, 1994), Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2013) ch. 3, Roberts “From Fairy Tale to Cartoon: Collections of Greek Myth for Children,” Classical Bulletin 84 (2009) 58–73, Murnaghan, “Classics for Cool Kids: Popular and Unpopular Versions of Antiquity for Children,” Classical World 104 (2011) 339–53, Murnaghan and Roberts, “Myth Collections for Children,” forthcoming in Vanda Zajko, ed., Blackwell’s Companion to the Reception of Classical Myth (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell). 2 See for example Tooke, [Pomey, François] The Pantheon, Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods, and Most Illustrious Heroes; in a Short, Plain, and Familiar Method,

234 Roberts mythology “the charm of a story-book” not specifically for children but for readers “of either sex,” declares its reliance primarily on Ovid and Virgil.3 But Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book, which first presented myth purely as pleasure reading for children, mentions no ancient sources at all.4 Eustace Bright, the col- lege sophomore who in Hawthorne’s frame story retells a series of myths to a group of children, calls them “nursery tales that were made for the amusement of our great old grandmother the earth” and speaks with scorn of “musty vol- umes of Greek.”5 The author-narrator of the frame story gives us this glimpse of Bright’s relationship to his sources just before the young man begins his first story, “The Gorgon’s Head:”

Working up his sophomorical erudition with a good deal of tact, and incurring great obligations to Professor Anthon, he, nevertheless, disre- garded all classical authorities, whenever the vagrant audacity of his imagination impelled him to do so.6

Hawthorne thus at one blow, on behalf of his fictional narrator, disowns expert knowledge, acknowledges the use of a handbook (Anthon’s Classical Dictionary) rather than originals, and expresses his freedom from all “classical authorities”.7

by Way of Dialogue (London: Bathurst, Rivington, Law, Keith, Robinson, Baldwin, 1781), Monsigny, Mythology, or, a History of the Fabulous Deities of the Ancients; Designed to Facilitate the Study of History, Poetry, Painting, etc. (London: William Richardson, 1794), and Keightley, The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy: Intended Chiefly for the Use of Students at the Universities and the Higher Classes in Schools (London: Whittaker, Teacher, 1831). On the continuing influence of Ovid in the nineteenth century despite widespread disapproval see Vance, “Ovid and the Nineteenth Century,” in Charles Martindale, ed., Ovid Renewed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 3 On Bulfinch see Cleary, The Bulfinch Solution: Teaching Classics in American Schools (Salem nh: Ayer, 1989), Schein, “Greek Mythology in the Works of Thomas Bulfinch and Gustav Schwab,” Classical Bulletin 84 (2008) 81–89. 4 Charles Kingsley, Hawthorne’s similarly influential British contemporary, speaks with admi- ration of the Greeks but (except for a passing mention of Homer as the source of a story he only alludes to) omits his sources in The Heroes, or, Greek Fairy Tales for my Children (1855). 5 Hawthorne, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (Oxford, 1996) 19–20. 6 Hawthorne (1996) 20. 7 On the purposes of this acknowledgment see Donovan, “‘Very capital reading for children’: Reading as Play in Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys,” Children’s Literature 30 (2002) 19–41; on Hawthorne’s cited source see Anthon, A Classical Dictionary: Containing an Account of the Principal Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors and Intended to Elucidate All the Important Points Connected with the Geography, History, Biography, Mythology, and