Dear Diary,
It has always been clear that Psyche is the favorite
daughter. Her beauty is talked about all over our town and surrounding
countries. She has even been named the Venus of the mortal world. Everyone
loves Psyche and her gentle naivety but I find her arrogant and ungrateful! I
am older than she is and just as beautiful but I am praised and worshiped? No!
One day, my parents and all of the country will see that I am the sister to be
praised!
Dear Diary,
My sister Psyche has suffered an ill fate. Her beauty and
sweet naivety has made her unwanted by every man near and far. They have
compared her to a beautiful statue; to be looked at and admired but not to be
touched. Our sister and I have married fine men while poor Psyche sits at home
still a virgin. Father has consulted the oracle of Apollo. He has told my dear
father that he and mother must take Psyche high on a mountain crag and let her
meet her doom. Although my sister does annoy me at times, the news of my sweet sister‘s
fate has deeply hurt and saddened me.
Dear Diary,
My sister and I have seen our dear baby sister Psyche! She
is not dead as we had been lead to believe but instead, is living a life of
grand luxury and comfort with a mysterious young husband who I am sure is
handsome. While my older sister and I are torn away and separated from our home
country and bound to wretched men, our youngest sister lives like a Goddess! A
Goddess with more clothes and riches than she can possibly need! She even has the
wind, Zephyr, at her command! I know in my heart of hearts that she is longing
for this mysterious husband of hers to make her a deity! Then, her beauty will
truly be of the Gods’. She does not deserve this high honor and must be
stripped of it and of her riches! We, as the eldest sister deserve this good
fortune for I know that we would make better Goddesses. Because of this fact,
we have devised a plan to ruin our undeserving little sister by stripping her
of these clothes and riches. We will show her that we are her older sisters and
not her slaves or servants! She will be punished for her arrogance!
Author's Note: This retelling was based on Apuleius's Cupid and Psyche, specifically part 7 The Jealousy of Psyche's Sisters. I took inspiration from a storytelling that I read from a classmate last week. He wrote about Cupid's mischief in the form of diary entries and I thought it worked really well with this unit.
Bibliography: The story of Cupid and Psyche is contained in a Roman novel entitled The Golden Ass, written by Apuleius and translated into English by Tony Kline.
Terrica: I really enjoyed the way you used diary entries to tell the story in first person; I thought that was useful for moving the narrative along at a nice pace, and was excellent for showing what the protagonist was feeling.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I thought that this retelling was more of a "Reader's Digest" version of the story, in which you simply summarized the plot by spinning it into a condensed form of the tale. Perhaps on the next storytelling, if you go for the diary entry or another type of narrative style, you could retell it with new characters and a parallel (rather than identical) story line? Just a thought.
You have a unique approach to retelling this story. I haven't read any diary entries yet. Several people have written about Psyche, so it must be a good read. I noticed a couple of grammatical fixes. The sentence that begins with "A Goddess" in the third diary entry is a fragment. It seems that you intentionally added the fragment for effect. I do this too. Sometimes including verbs subtracts from the overall emphasis of the statement. Later on in this paragraph, the pronoun "we" is used in conjunction with the singular "sister". Since the plural form is used from that point on, I would suggest changing "sister" to "sisters". The photo that you picked fits the story very well. The diary entries are focused on the women of the story, so of course the photo displayed would also focus on these same women. The spacing was also good. I have problems with leaving enough space between paragraphs, but your layout was very easy to follow. Good story!
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