57 pages • 1 hour read
Alex MichaelidesThe Maidens
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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How Myths Make Sense of Human Experience
At the end of the novel, it becomes clear that Mariana has been inhabiting a myth of her own making regarding her relationships with Sebastian and Zoe. She portrays her marriage as happy and loving and herself and Sebastian as surrogate parents to her orphaned niece. As readers only have access to Mariana's account of the marriage, they have no way to determine conclusively whether her portrayal is accurate.
One of the subtler hints that Mariana’s version of her life may not fully reflect its realities lies in the novel’s abundant and varied intertextual references. These self-consciously position The Maidens within both a larger web of stories and the act of story-making generally. They also reflect a feature of Mariana’s characterization: Early in the novel, the narrator describes her as an avid reader who sought refuge from her childhood isolation in books. The many references to art, literature, mythology, philosophy, and more imply that she might never quite have emerged from these stories to confront her real life. Mariana has been hiding in stories, and stories have hidden the truth from her and from readers.
At the same time, these stories do provide important insights into the narrative’s action and meaning. The myth of Demeter and Persephone provides a particular narrative frame for Mariana’s emotional journey in the novel: from a grieving widow trapped in her fantasy past to a survivor who can potentially heal from her personal tragedy and create a new life for herself. Literary and mythical figures frequently provide the basis for similes. Clarissa compares the killer’s violent frenzy to “the menis [“terrifying rage”] of Achilles” in the Iliad (83-84). When Mariana sees Veronica’s untouched face in death, she is “transfixed by this Medusa’s look—eyes that had the power to petrify even after death” (182). Zoe, who blames Mariana for Sebastian’s death, chases her through the woodland “like an avenging Fury,” while Zoe describes herself “like Clytemnestra […] or Medea,” a woman capable of exacting vengeance on those who have wronged her (344, 346). This final reference carries particular weight given the traumatic backstory nearly every major character in the novel possesses. Like the figures in the Greek and Jacobean revenge tragedies The Maidens references, characters like Zoe and Sebastian enact violence due to the violence of their pasts, thus perpetuating the cycle.
Blurred Boundaries and Dualities
The novel’s collapsing boundaries between myth and reality exemplify a broader blurring of lines between apparent opposites—especially life and death, as in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Life and death are mutually dependent. Each exists because of the other and can only be understood via the dynamic between them.
The novel overflows with other boundary crossings and reinforcements, and both plot and structure reinforce the theme. An early example in which a romantic moment transmutes into something grotesque occurs in Chapter 10 of Part 1. Mariana describes a picnic she and Sebastian had at the Temple of Demeter on Naxos. Everything about her description paints an idyllic picture until they begin eating: “They had forgotten to bring a knife—so Sebastian smashed the watermelon against a rock like a skull, breaking it into bits. They ate the sweet flesh, spitting out the bony seeds” (46-47). The theme also extends into descriptions of physical spaces. A statue of Eros simultaneously embodies both youth and old age: “Centuries of rain and rust had aged him considerably, turning him from a cherub into a small, old green man” (55). On successive pages in a single chapter, the college is contradictorily both “a combination of architectural styles […] rebuilt and expanded over the centuries” and “untouched by time or change” (51, 52). Even physical boundaries can be permeable, as with a “rickety wooden fence” that forms a boundary between two fields (183). It is “unsteady and liable to collapse” yet still “better than nothing” (183).
Boundary crossings also appear in how Mariana conceptualizes relationships with others, real and fictional. During her dinner with Edward, she struggles to differentiate whether the anger she feels is coming from him or from within herself. Passing a portrait of Tennyson, she reads questions she has about herself into his expression: “He was in love with a ghost. He had turned his back on life. Had Mariana?” (295). The boundary Edward crosses with his female students reflects the nature of teaching at St Christopher’s: one-to-one, in the fellows’ rooms, often with alcohol involved, which “meant that tutorials took on a more personal flavour, and lines between teacher and pupil became blurred—confidences were given, and intimacies exchanged” (82). While waiting for Fred one day, Mariana imagines she is waiting for Sebastian. Investigating the theater where Veronica was last seen alive, Mariana becomes distracted by the “ghost couple”—meaning her memory of herself and Sebastian—at the bar. A statue of “a male angel” looks “a bit like Sebastian” (245).
Cycles of Abuse, Trauma, and Sacrifice
Many of the myths and literary works The Maidens references revolve around sacrifice—especially of children by their parents, and especially to placate the gods. The psychological interpretation of these stories that Mariana offers during her session with the Maidens is anachronistic (as the very concept of abusing a wife or child largely was in antiquity); she also proves incorrect in her very literal application of the myth to the Maidens’ relationship with Edward, suggesting that they are willingly sacrificing themselves to win his love as a fatherly or godlike figure.
Nevertheless, the ideas of sacrifice, abuse, and trauma appear together throughout the novel. Most of the novel’s major characters grew up in abusive households, often headed by an authoritarian—if not outright violent—father. This is true of Mariana herself, and the novel implies it’s one of the reasons she married a man she “had always known” didn’t love her and wanted to hurt her (338). As she herself explains, children who experience abuse often end up confusing it with love. They will also go to extreme lengths to ingratiate themselves with a parent or parental figure: “[C]hildren will do anything to be loved. When they’re very young, it’s a matter of physical, then psychological survival.” In many cases, “anything” involves self-sacrifice, whether literal (e.g. the myths of Iphigenia and Macaria, who die to please not only a father but a god) or figurative (e.g. distorting one’s character in an attempt to gain approval).
Mariana hypothesizes that the murderer himself must be an example of the latter—someone who, faced with relentless abuse, “[S]acrificed his true self, all that unfelt pain and anger, to the Underworld, to the murky world of the unconscious.” This largely proves true. Sebastian’s violence is hard to disentangle from his trauma. Notably, his early fantasies of hurting his abusive father often merged with fantasies of hurting himself: “I would act out cruel, horribly violent death scenes: agonized poisonings, brutal stabbings—butchery and disembowelment. I would be drawn and quartered, tortured to death. I would bleed.” His anger at his mother and his desire to hurt her also involved feelings of his own worthlessness, since he felt that, in leaving, she had “sacrificed” him to his father in order to save herself. Likewise, the murders Zoe commits incorporate elements of self-harm—particularly the murder of her friend Tara, which she describes as a “sacrifice” she had to make to prove herself worthy of Sebastian. This explains why abuse tends to perpetuate itself, recurring in cyclical fashion; in The Maidens, it’s simply learned self-hatred or self-sacrifice directed outward rather than inward.
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By Alex Michaelides
