The Thread of a Story, the Story of a Thread

As myth would have it, women who wait literally hang by a thread: Penelope wove and unraveled a shroud while waiting for Odysseus; Ariadne gave Theseus a spool of thread to follow and waited for him to emerge from the Minotaur’s Labyrinth. In mythology, things also tend to happen twice. The Ariadne who waits on the island of Crete at the threshold of the Minotaur’s prison/palace has her double in the Ariadne who waits, abandoned, on Naxos until Dionysus, the new god, arrives to take her away with him. It is a dreary legacy of the culture of antiquity that the heroine of that story – the mastermind behind the brilliant ploy of the spool of thread – should nonetheless be confined to the traditionally feminine role of waiting for a husband to set her free. In his libretto for Strauss, Hofmannsthal reverses the situation: the queen’s love deifies and legitimizes the youth who has come from the East. Yet the whole myth of Ariadne, as Gloria Fossi explains to us in this article, lies in what comes before: the waiting, with searching gaze fixed on threshold and horizon. The words of Madame Butterfly come to mind: after all, she too waits for a thread of smoke from across the sea; she too is betrayed by – spoiler alert! – the man she awaits: “But, no, I will stand right at the edge of the hill, and wait as long as it takes for him to get here, and not grow weary...”