Womanhood

Throughout the novel, the author uses both Ariadne’s and Phaedra’s first person points of view in order to give credence to the female experience. In the early chapters of the novel, the author also embeds a series of parallel women’s stories into Ariadne’s narration. Such stories create a precedent for the woman’s role in a patriarchal society, one which excludes stories such as those of Ariadne and Phaedra. The author introduces this notion at the end of the prologue. After recounting the way her father, King Minos, drowned his lover, Scylla, for having “betrayed her father and her kingdom,” Ariadne subsequently wonders, “And what possible use could my father, King Minos of Crete, ever have for a treacherous daughter” (2)? King Minos is fabled to have drowned Scylla for giving him the secret to Nisus’s power. Although the secret let Minos...