Isis T. answered • 10/16/21
Adaptable Essay Writing Instruction: Elementary to Graduate Level
I would want you to first tell me the story of Arachne and Athena. I’d give you the hint that the end of the myth gives very straightforward answers to the question about origins.
I’d ask you to go through the reading you were given to learn the myth, and underline anything where it talks about punishment, about consequences, about what sorts of mysteries seem to show up in the individual words.
For the second question, I’d ask you to think of your favorite fairy tale, a story that you know inside out and backwards. Maybe you’d choose the Tortoise and the Hare, or the Three Little Pigs, or Cinderella, or Little Red Riding Hood. So for the idea of cultural values, I’d ask you, what lessons do these stories teach? The oldest myths and fairy tales like these stuck around because they often have some element of keeping people alive to them, an element of survival. Sometimes they’re less about keeping an individual person alive, and more about keeping society going. What benefit does a story like the Tortoise and the Hare have to a culture? What kinds of people are we trying to cultivate by teaching our kids about the Three Little Pigs? Whom are we helping to survive by telling the story of Little Red Riding Hood? How do people who model themselves after Cinderella maintain the status quo of society going?
So now, what kinds of values do you see in the story of Arachne and Athena? For a culture that believes so strongly in the imminence of the gods, the immediacy of the divine, the potential for one’s behavior to be instantly rewarded or punished by the whims and caprices of these all-powerful beings, how does this story help keep that society alive? Whom does it protect? Whom does it condemn? Where are the warnings?
And so then, as far as the last question goes, I don’t have your text so I can’t show you exactly, but I’d want you to talk to me about anthropomorphism. What it is, why it matters, why it shows up so much in stories -- even nowadays, children’s books are written with anthropomorphic animals, why is that?
And then I’d ask you to go through the reading you were given to learn the myth, and underline anything where someone is described with animal or nature-related language. We’d talk about the relationship in ancient Greece between humans and gods and animals and nature, and where humans fall in terms of their importance, and what kinds of divinities the gods of ancient Greece were. We’d also circle back to those cultural values we discussed in the second question, and talk about what animals represent those values you thought were being praised or condemned in this myth.
I think if you work through my questions as I've listed them off here, you'll find yourself in a good place from which to write your essay. Good luck!
