Lilian and Athena

About the Book

The novel LILIAN AND ATHENA and the play of the same title within the novel, which Lilian is writing and in which she has the leading role, juxtapose the heroine´s everyday and creative life. She is writing the play with the aid of insights that come to her from seeing a psychiatrist, and the characters in it help her overcome the destructive forces that are marring her marriage, have alientated her daughter and son, and are destroying her joy in life. From childood on, to safeguard her mother´s love, Lilian became her slave, allowing her wishes to supplant her own. Now, a woman past fifty, she is still grappling with lack of a self-identity, a sense of failure, and a debilitating jealousy.

Before she can rid herself of these afflictions she must deal with, through their mythological counterparts, not only her mother, and her father´s first wife, whose short-lived existence is shrouded in mystery and was a thorn in her mother´s side, but with Athena´s mother. In the play Athena, goddess of wisdom, represents Lilian´s supportive alter ego, and other characters from mythology embody the people and emotions she is obsessed with and is trying to exorcise.

As one by one the characters emerge on stage to plead their cause and seek to erase the maligned roles in which they´ve been cast as women who have failed in marriage, the play´s Lilian begins to regain her self-esteem and autonomy. And what transpires on-stage, in the play she is writing, we see, begins to affect Lilian´s life off-stage. Scenes of the play appear throughout the novel as they are being conceived by Lilian, counterpoint to her sessions with the psychiatrist.

The novel begins with Lilian at her dying mother´s bedside, where a mostly silent dialogue conveys their misgivings over their unhappy relationship. Overlapping Lilian´s distress at her mother´s dying, is her concern over her troubled marriage. Her husband has gone off to Tokyo to conduct a concert. As we enter the mother´s and daughter´s innermost thoughts we see what is at the root of the turmoil that led Lilian into analysis and the writing of the play. Her mother´s love, Lilian discovered as a child, was contingent on her distancing herself from her jealous father.

Jealousy, deception, the struggle for self-esteem and autonomy, are central themes of the novel, as well as of Lilian´s play. As the jealousies of the gods and goddesses come to light, their denials expose deceptions and passions—bringing Lilian understanding of this universal malady that is plaguing her and ruining her marriage. Her husband, a music professor, is also its victim, jealous of her growing musical talents.

Chimera, in Greek mythology beast of incongruous mating, of Echidna and raging Typhon, is the name Lilian gives the turmoil that led her to a psychiatrist. Echidna is counterpart to Lilian´s mother Edna and speaks the lines she could not when Lilian was at her bedside as she was dying. Lilith, in Hebrew mythology Adam´s first wife who refused to lie under him, represents the short-lived first wife of Adam, Lilian´s father. Not to let Athena off scot-free of entanglements of relationship the goddess´s mighty mother Metis is also given free reign to speak of the injustices come her way through being a woman. Swallowed whole by mighty Zeus who feared she might give birth to a male rival, she was denied woman´s sublime birthing experience, her daughter Athena springing full-grown from her father´s head.

Hephaestus the lame god of fire and metallurgy, whose seed the virgin goddess Athena wiped from her thighs with a rag that she threw to the earth and gave rise to her child Erichthoneus, is first in line of all the males by whom these females felt raped.

Bellerophon, hero who slays Chimera, is counterpart of Lilian´s psychiatrist, Raphael Belon. While he never appears bodily on stage, reference to him is made throughout it (ever-present in Lilian

About the Author

Bella Briansky Kalter, born in Poland, lived in northern Canada from eight to eighteen, when she came to Montreal and became a Registered Nurse. Wife, mother, and grandmother, living in Cincinnati longer than anywhere else, she has been writing and having works published all her life.