Further Thoughts on Hadestown

(Spoilers for Hadestown.)

As I said in my review of Hadestown, the original Greek myth of Orpheus features Eurydice getting fridged many centuries before fridges existed. She dies to make the lovesick Orpheus desperate and determined, and Hades then ties her ultimate fate, not to anything she does, but what Orpheus does. Eurydice doesn’t escape the underworld because Orpheus can’t stop himself from turning to look back before they make it out. Eurydice is lost to Orpheus – twice! – for maximum manpain.

As such, it’s difficult to take a myth like that and write a new spin on it in the 21^st century. How can you tell that story in such a way that Eurydice is anything but a vehicle for Orpheus’s emotional torment? Despite being very interested in Hadestown, I’ll admit I braced myself a little the first time I listened to it, because I didn’t know how they were going to play Eurydice.

I won’t deny that she’s still fridged. That’s integral to the entire crux of the story – you can’t tell it without it. However, for me, the way the show fleshes out and characterizes Eurydice goes a long way toward putting her in a different context, even if the story still ends the way we all know it will.

Right from her introduction, what Hermes tells us about Eurydice is that she’s “a hungry young girl.” He means that in a figurative sense, in that Eurydice is looking for, yearning for something. It’s something she seems to find in Orpheus and his pure, uncomplicated belief that he can fix what’s wrong with the world if he can only find the right song. Orpheus has faith in things, and when Eurydice looks at him, she longs to have that faith too. It’s tempting, the idea of living only for hope and love, finding all sustenance in one another.

But Eurydice is also hungry in a literal sense. Eurydice has been blown from place to place by the winds, at the mercy of the unforgiving seasons and constantly followed by the Fates. Wherever she goes, she ends up running away in the hopes of escaping her hunger: “Sometimes you think,” she says, “You would do anything / Just to fill your belly full of food, / Find a bed that you could fall into, / Where the weather wouldn’t follow you.” When the storm hits, while Orpheus moons over his song, Eurydice is the one who goes out searching for food to keep them both alive, and though she “[tries] to trust that the song he’s working on is gonna / Shelter us,” an unfinished song can’t fill her belly, and it won’t protect them from the wind. She may look at Orpheus and want to be a dreamer like him, but she’s been tossed around too many times not to fear the pain of hunger.

In light of this, when Hades comes around, he paints her a picture of an underworld that’s free from poverty. While Orpheus would just “write [her] a poem when the power is out,” Hades offers her the chance to never go hungry again. This is of course because the dead don’t need to eat, but for Eurydice, who knows what it’s like to scrounge and suffer and go without, that kind of satiated oblivion is an attractive prospect. She finds it seductive, saying, “Strange is the call of this strange man. / I wanna fly down and feed at his hand. / I want a nice, soft place to land. / I wanna lie down forever.” And so, rather than being bitten by a viper in a tragic accident that robs Orpheus of her, Hades is the viper – he offers her a ticket to the underworld, and she accepts.

This is a complicated thing. Her choice is ill-conceived, of course, and she’s manipulated into it by Hades, but I find it so much more satisfying than Eurydice simply dying. It doesn’t make her into a Strong Female Character, but it gives her at least one shred of control over her fate. While it’s a bad decision that she quickly comes to regret, it’s still a decision she makes, and that’s crucial. For a character whose original existence is entirely wrapped up in what she means to Orpheus, it matters that here, at this critical moment, the plot proceeds because of something Eurydice does rather than something that merely happens to her.