{ she came over the hills from the East. }

[delga]

So apparently Supernatural decided to endorse the age-old misogynist myth that Lilith (aka, the first wife of Adam, aka, she who would not submit) is the mother of all evil [although, it's a child in SPN? I don't know. I'm pretty irritated, and I'm not even watching the show]. To me the idea of Lilith is the first woman for equality, but whatever. (You know the earliest form of god was the Triple Goddess? Because: yes.) ANYWAY. SOMEONE WROTE FIC. And it's the kind of story that the Canongate Myth series is doing. It's the kind of mythical re-write that Margaret Atwood tosses about in Orpheus and The Penelopiad. But it's compelling. AND YOU SHOULD ALL READ IT AND SEE ITS INNATE GENIUS.

And Find for Herself a Place of Rest by meyerlemon

“Your life is easy,” Lilith said. Adam had never known a woman and did not hear her condescension. In Lilith’s homeland, the earth shook and moved when the moon was full. Lilith caught silvery fingerlong fish in the mountain brooks with her bare hands. She ran with the wolves, squatting on her heels to howl with them before a hunt.

And it's not just feminist crankiness, as labelled by the author. Firstly, it's just wonderful writing, not as didactic as you might think. There's a sense of Lilith's being a part of the cosmos in its entirety, for her own sake, not Adam's. Secondly, it's about understanding stories, and about the voice of the other. I love this a lot, and I think anyone annoyed by this story - this touching story - who thinks that people take ideas of equality too seriously, or that feminism is claptrap, needs to de-friend me, because you're more than missing the point, I think.

Related: Sue Hubbard's Eurydice, and Atwood's Orpheus, both of which I still love.

Orpheus.
by Margaret Atwood

You walked in front of me,
pulling me back out
to the green light that had once
grown fangs and killed me.
I was obedient, but
numb, like an arm
gone to sleep; the return
to time was not my choice.
By then I was used to silence.
Though something stretched between us
like a whisper, like a rope:
my former name,
drawn tight.
You had your old leash
with you, love you might call it,
and your flesh voice.
Before your eyes you held steady
the image of what you wanted
me to become: living again.
It was this hope of yours that kept me following.
I was your hallucination, listening
and floral, and you were singing me:
already new skin was forming on me
within the luminous misty shroud
of my other body; already
there was dirt on my hands and I was thirsty.
I could see only the outline
of your head and shoulders,
black against the cave mouth,
and so could not see your face
at all, when you turned
and called to me because you had
already lost me. The last
I saw of you was a dark oval.
Though I knew how this failure
would hurt you, I had to
fold like a gray moth and let go.
You could not believe I was more than your echo.

Also, Ursula LeGuin's She Unnames Them, in which Eve takes back the power of nomenclature.

Comments

[twincy.livejournal.com]

(True, but yes, frustrating. re:re: Frankenstein: Adam/Eve/forbidden fruit shenans, and also: fallen angels, i.e. Lucifer, which the monster refers to himself several times. Makes a fair bit of sense.)

Yes, but then, those people probably wouldn't write fic like this.

Probably, yes.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

(Ah, okay. Yeah, I guess so. Which is ironic, considering M. Shelley's abstract religious position.)

Sigh. Am reading Auster's Moon Palace. Is oddly good. In an odd... way. Hmm.