Leslie Macfarlane and Dr. Stephen Bay, Classics and Comparative Literature

Main Text

The term “reception” defines the product of referring to or relying upon one work of literature or art within another. Anything from translating a work into a different language, reusing a well known title, quoting directly from a work, or writing in a meter typically associated with a certain work or author can be deemed a reception. In the late 1930’s or early 40’s Theodore Sturgeon, who would later gain recognition for his contributions to the science fiction genre, wrote a short story and gave the antagonist and the story the name “Niobe.” That decision advertises that the story is a reception of the myth that tells of a woman named Niobe who transformed into stone after her children died. Since the most complete telling of Niobe’s myth is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in my honors thesis I studied how the relationship between Sturgeon’s “Niobe” and Ovid’s Metamorphoses contributes to the value and meaning of Sturgeon’s story.

“Niobe” tells the story of a woman who murders two people and then is transformed into stone, urged to that end by the ghost of one of her victims. The two main characters of the story are Harald, the protagonist and narrator, and Niobe, the antagonist. A third character, Iris, is important to the plot, but never present, only discussed. Niobe describes Harald as “the poet. . ., wild as the hairy gorse and filled with laughter that unnerved me.” Niobe is, above all, beautiful and cold. Harald tells us that she is “more beautiful than Iris, though it was Iris [he] loved” (Sturgeon 1994, 265), and although Harald could have loved her for her beauty, “a man with a body and a soul cannot love a woman who is gifted with utter and eternal composure.” On the other hand, Iris, the woman Harald can and does love, is everything Niobe is not. We see through Harald’s eyes that she was “a slender thing, and swayed with the wind like a stalk of golden wheat.” And Harald cherishes the fact that his laughter and passion evoked the same qualities from her in response (267).

The story begins as Niobe escorts Harald out on the moors where she plans his execution-style murder. Along the way Harald reveals to the reader that Niobe was once, about three hundred years earlier, known by the name Mary Sidney. Through Harald, Sturgeon informs us that she had a brother named Sir Philip, that she was the dowager Countess of Pembroke, that on account of Philip’s death she turned to poetry, and that someone named Spenser “told of her.” Mary Sidney Herbert was a poet who lived in the sixteenth century and wrote an elegy for her brother Philip’s death. Edmund Spenser was a friend of them both and also wrote about Herbert’s mourning. Sturgeon indicates in his story that the version of Mary Sidney Herbert that is preserved in those works of literature is what makes up the character Niobe.

Niobe resents Harald for loving Iris and writing beautiful poetry for her, so after killing Iris she shoots one bullet in each of Harald’s eyes and one in his heart before leaving him for dead (267).
Disembodied, what is left of Harald returns to Niobe and bids her to go to Mary Sidney’s tomb. She goes, reads the epitaph she finds hanging there, and then turns into solid stone.

Essential to understanding Sturgeon’s story is the fact that Harald represents poetry as a whole—not poetry as defined by meters and line numbers, but the wild force of poetry that writers must harness if they wish to turn their couplets into something more than merely rhyming words. Just as Harald prefers the lovely and laughing Iris over the more beautiful but colder Niobe, the untamed force of poetry devotes itself to topics of love and laughter, but cannot freely give itself to beauty that is frozen, studied, and soulless. And since Niobe represents a woman who lives in poems, but who lacks what Sturgeon defined as the true essence of poetry, the conflict between Harald and Niobe is really one between poetry and its nemesis.

Thus, Sturgeon aligns his style of writing, characterized by humor and love, with Harald, and demonstrates that writers like Herbert who may seem to treat sorrow more respectfully by emphasizing the weight of pain, anxiety, and suffering do far greater damage than those who make jokes.

All of this is substantiated and deepened by the references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses throughout the story. In my thesis I analyze six previously undocumented parallels between “Niobe” and the Metamorphoses, which play off of Sturgeon’s incarnation of the poet Mary Sidney Herbert. The parallels are the emphasis on Niobe’s lineage, the use of hair to symbolize a character’s state of mind, the components of a jealous tirade, the wind that carries Niobe home in Ovid’s telling, and the themes of metaliterary authorship and authorial immortality. These parallels point to the final similarity: that both Ovid and Sturgeon write with a wit and a separation from their subjects that resist the descent into doleful sentimentality embodied by Mary Herbert and so can work together to assert the superiority of their similar styles. Along the way, Sturgeon transforms Ovid’s image into that of a poet who gave birth to fantasy and science fiction at the height of Rome’s Golden Age, and so claims the distinction of ancient origins for his preferred genres. Because of their preference for humor, one of the defining interests of true poetry according to Sturgeon’s story, Sturgeon and Ovid are both associated with the living Harald of the beginning of “Niobe,” and Sturgeon is associated with Ovid, a writer whose spirited longevity bolsters his claim to a superior way of writing.

References

• Sturgeon, Theodore. 1994. Niobe. In The ultimate egoist, ed. Paul Williams, 265-9. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.