Free Dinner with Persephone by Patricia Storace

play, I have only so far had encounters with Greek television programs. I am amused by the national soap opera, with its shipping magnates, scandal-making politicians, and the incestuous charge of its love affairs, which seem to occur almost exclusively within the family circle, a brother in love with his brother’s wife, a stepson courting his stepmother persistently in corners of the family mansion. It is startling too, to see the fine work of the actors lavished incongruously on television material—Greek actors make their living largely on TV, supplemented by stage work and the small Greek movie industry, so sitcoms and soap operas are populated with many fine, classically trained actors, and serial adaptations of Greek fiction are finely crafted and eagerly awaited cultural events.
    I have also been painfully stunned by the daily scenes of women being beaten and slapped, in comedies, in dramas, in serials, in movies, from the fifties to segments taped last week. I kept a log for a week, to test whether the shock of seeing these matter-of-course beatings was making me exaggerate their frequency, but “daily”wasn’t even an adequate description. Fistfights between men were much rarer than the episodes of men hitting women, so incessant that they seemed as much a matter of national taste as of dramatic necessity. In one week of casual viewing, I saw a sister beaten by a brother in a lyrical island drama, a daughter in a high-spirited comedy slapped sharply across the face by her father, a wife in a soap opera slapped by a husband for impertinence, a melodrama in which a wife was repeatedly beaten savagely and then raped by her husband’s brother, an episode of a dramatic serial in which a woman’s boyfriend seduces her by slapping her until he reveals to her her desire for him, and a comedy about a dominating mother and a village boy who cannot seem to lose his virginity, even after his marriage. The movie concludes with his mother calling for him downstairs in the night, while his young bride waits upstairs. He asserts to his mother that he is now master of the house, and that it is up to him to command. Upstairs, in his bridal chamber, he slaps his wife, and climbs on top of her, able at last to consummate the marriage. It is hard for me to imagine the effect this incessant imagery has on children—schoolgirls and boys watching movies with their parents after supper, watching twenty minutes of a movie before they start their homework after school. Only a week of this reminds me that one of the most important, if not the most important of nineteenth-century Greek novels, a classic of Greek realism, is called
The Murderess
, about a woman who concludes that the lives of Greek women are intolerable, and begins to murder little girls, to spare them.
    “I had never quite grasped how shocking such violence must seem to an outsider,” says Aura, “almost as if it were a pillar of our culture, even celebrated.” She sips at her coffee. “To idealize and to sublimate. Now that I think of it, I am not aware of anything in our criminal code that defines beating or any kind of physical violence to women as a criminal offense. But for the mutilation or any physical damage done to statues, the penalties are very severe.”

M ETAMORPHOSIS
    T oday is the Feast of the Metamorphosis, known to us as the Transfiguration, when Christ allowed his disciples to glimpse the radiant divinity he had previously withheld from his face. This shimmering alteration is a part of all miraculous tales, even present in one as familiar as Cinderella, in the changing of the pumpkin into a coach and the metamorphosis of an abused, miserable, dirty child into a glowingly beautiful and lovable woman. In Greece, it is one of the commonest subjects for icons, Christ’s face like the sun surrounded with golden rays, and disciples dropping awed to their knees before him, while the word “Metamorphosis” sparkles somewhere in the painted scene, here