Ingrid E. HOLMBERG Hephaistos and the Spider's Web

"Fiction is like a spider's web" writes Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. In Homeric poetry, there exists a provocative reference to a spider's web: at Odyssey 8.280, the desmata in which Hephaistos captures the illicit lovers Ares and Aphrodite are called arachnia lepta, a delicate spider's web.

A metaphorical connection between the spider's web, a fictional narrative, and a woven fabric which is implicit in Woolf's statement has provided the impetus for literary criticism concerned with the production of a text (Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, New York, 1975; J. Hillis Miller, "Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line," in Interpretation of Narrative, ed. Valdes and Miller, Toronto, 1976, 148-166) and the role of gender in the production of a text (Nancy Miller, "Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic," in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Miller, New York, 1986, 270-295 ; Patricia Joplin, "The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours," Stanford Literature Review 1.1 [1984]: 25-53). Most of these studies begin with the ancient model of Arachne in Ovid's Metamorphoses, a narrative which efficiently compresses the images of female weaver, weaving as a potential form of narrative, and spiders and their webs. The general tenor of the studies involves a recognition of the role of a strong female who constructs her own web (either real or narrative) and whose construction of the web is destroyed or appropriated by masculinized figures of authority. These stories of fiction and webs are part of a lengthy tradition in ancient Greek literature which compares and juxtaposes the female art of weaving webs and the male skill of weaving narratives.

My interest is in the appearance of the male Hephaistos as a weaver (albeit of chains) and as a metaphorical spider who assumes what in other contexts has been the feminine role. It would seem that Hephaistos and his spider's web disrupt this pattern. His intrusion into this set of images, however, is not only appropriate for his own mythic character, but ultimately reflects and reinforces the ideology of the Odyssey and other texts concerning gender and narrative fiction. The narrative of Hephaistos and his spider's web of chains, which appears to be a subversive version of the relationship between gender and weaving, upon examination reveals itself deeply imbricated in the patriarchal web of the narrative that is the Odyssey.