Free East to the Dawn by Susan Butler Page A

Its images are beautiful, but its message had a special appeal to Amelia. Atalanta was a role model Amelia could relate to. She had no patience with the passive princesses of mythology; Those heroines she read about in the fairy tales who could have had everything but managed only to get themselves into distress bored her. Like Ariadne marking her way in the labyrinth, Atalanta found a path to Amelia’s soul.
    Atalanta is a virgin huntress—ueet of foot, deadly with bow and arrow, and very courageous. She joins the Greek warriors hunting a boar that the gods have sent down to menace the kingdom. Meleager, leader of the hunt, adores Atalanta; he is “beyond measure enamoured of her” and calls her to his side:
    â€œCome with bows bent and with emptying of quivers Maiden most perfect, lady of light.”
    All the great warriors of Greece are hunting the boar, but it is Atalanta whose arrow first finds the beast, and Meleager who deals it a mortal blow. When Meleager awards her the slain boar as spoils, the warriors become furious. Meleager slays his uncles, who are in the forefront of those who would destroy Atalanta. In the ensuing struggle, Meleager dies.
    The poem is both a celebration of Atalanta and a warning of the dangers to such females who compete in the male world. Swinburne makes
plain that men and women feel equally threatened by her. Thus Meleager’s mother:
    â€œA woman armed makes war upon herself.”
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    And Meleager’s father:
    â€œNot fire nor iron and the widemouthed wars
Are deadlier than her lips or braided hair.”
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    And Meleager’s uncle, who rails that it is against the natural order of things,
    â€œand the bride overbear the groom.”
    Atalanta tries to blunt the censorious attitude, telling of her sacrifice, that she has given up so much. That too is an integral message of the poem—that she shall have
    â€œno man’s love
    Forever, and no face of children born
nor being dead shall kings my sons
Mourn me and bury,
and tears on daughters’ cheeks burn.”
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    She asks them to understand her.
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    â€œyet in my body is throned
As great a heart, and in my spirit, O men,
I have not less of godlike.”
    In the end Atalanta is shunned by all except the dying Meleager. No literary work could more eloquently or plainly spell out the dangers that exist for the woman who competes in male pursuits.

    From first grade on Amelia attended the private College Preparatory School along with Ginger and Ann Parks; the Fox sisters, Marjorie and Virginia; Mary Campbell, a neighbor whose mother had been a friend of Amelia’s mother; and Balie Waggener, whom she had known forever—her grandfather had given Balie’s father his first job. The coeducational school was just a short walk for all of them. It had been founded by Helen Schofield in 1896, in what had been a stable. Sarah Walton, the headmistress, a gifted educator and an active member of Trinity Church, assisted by Yale graduate Charlie Gaylord prepared “her” children so well that most went on to top colleges.

    The College Preparatory School was tiny, having between thirty and forty students spread out in the twelve grades. The stable had become two large rooms, one upstairs and one down. The lower forms—through the eighth grade—studied upstairs, grades nine through twelve studied downstairs. Classes in the various subjects for the diverse grades were taught in one corner of each floor, while the children studied in the other part. It worked because the grades were so small—Annie Park remembers days when she was the only one in her class.
    It was comfortable and intimate and friendly. The desks were the kind with chairs attached, so that as the children slid in and out, there was a minimum of disruption. When their class was over, students would take their belongings off to a corner to read and study, and the next class would slide into place. At the