violets

beautiful pawn

Natalie Schliekelman // senior monologue

Abstract: This monologue is based on the story of Ariadne, from the myth of the Labyrinth. She gifts Theseus a ball of thread which allows him to navigate the Labyrinth and kill the minotaur, and then he takes her with her when he leaves Crete. He then leaves her behind on an island. I thought this was a particularly potent description of the reality for Greek women in myths.

ARIADNE:

The first time I saw him, I thought he was a god in disguise. A beautiful boy, muddied and eyes downcast, with an immutable aura of power. Disguised among the spoils of my mother’s lust and my father’s hunger for power — divinity finally coming to purify the corruption in Crete.

I should have known that the gods never care enough to protect the rabble who worship them. Men in fear will pray out of necessity, but those who are content will only ever pray out of obligation. It is a ceaseless fact of humanity that we will always believe we came across our good fortune out of our own skill and goodliness, and so we pray at an altar to our egos in the name of the gods. An unhappy man will throw himself, defenseless, at the feet of those same gods, because to him, it is impossible that he could have ever brought that misfortune down upon himself — it must be some fate greater than he.

The truth of him was worse than a god. I believed he was my fate, come to rescue me from my paper prison. He was simply a harbinger of the cruel twists the Fates decided were to be my providence. I could almost wish that I had forged my cruel fate at all, even a wicked one. That my twisted destiny was in some way deserved, and perhaps in a previous life, I was a cruel villain. Or that my complaints of a litany of paper cuts were the cries of a selfish girl, and my fate was to be a culmination of every pain that I should have considered instead of my own. Painful to consider is that even in my two-faced freedom, I was only a marionette of the Fates, through no agency of my own, with no cause nor effect from my own doing. In my worst moments, I fear that I was to be a pawn even in my finality, and that my misfortune is recompense for my father’s crimes against all that is good.

To call me a pawn would be an overstatement of my worth. Even a pawn can checkmate a king. The culmination of my practicality was simply a plot device, a prize, in someone else’s hero journey. No bildungsroman of my own. Ariadne, the pretty face and heartsick fool, gifting the hero with what he needs because I think he is handsome and I want him to make me his own.

Do you ever consider that maybe I just wanted to end the reign of the monster? That the only way I could think of to escape my insubstantial fetters was to give myself away to another man? I present him with my intimate threads, entwining myself in him in the hopes of pleasing. Girls are merely bedside pawns and those who cannot shape their lives are better dead.

I gave everything to a hero who turned out to be no more virtuous than a monster in a maze. I was nothing more than a scrap to be discarded, once all of my use was done and he believed that every piece of me belonged to him. When did he start seeing my devotion as desperation?

On that island, I dreamed that perhaps I could finally be free of dominators. Long ago, I learned to never give the gift of my soul to a man, and I dreamed that I could finally set her free, like a dove from a cage, a herald of love and freedom.

I should have known better than to weave myself a fantasy. No matter what sentience the imagination creates, a doll is still just that: a beautiful toy.