Memoirs of a Geisha: Aphrodite or Athena?

A student once said that all poetry was about sex and death--and rightly so for Aphrodite is rightly the goddess of sex and death, rather than love. Z. Budapest in Grandmother of Time, says of Aphrodite, "I am that which makes your life worth living. Pay me respect." ( 1989, p. 70)

Memoirs of a Geisha shows us an Aphrodite industry, one whose business is to create desire and then to deny it. Only in a patriarchal culture is the desirability of something increased because it is not available. While the Chairman was a good man at heart, as shown by his kindness to a street child, it is not his goodness that keeps her going but her desire to replace her parents, to have a life protected from the harshness of being along, to be recognized as a worthy human being.

The women in the geisha industry are not sentimental, but cruel in the name of being realistic. They are initiating the young girls in the ways that they were initiated, and while they are glad that they were chosen to be geisha, and not prostitutes, the threat of falling into prostitution is always there. When there is no love, there is only sex, or the allure of the possibility of sex. But then Aphrodite is the goddess of prostitutes as well, those "who gather in the loveless and undesirable men from the streets." (Budapest, p. 69).

In the patriarchy, it is the man's fantasy that keeps the geisha world operating. The geisha is a walking work of art, a watercolor in clogs. Most of the geisha world is not Aphrodite but Athena--craft, skill, calculation, suppression of love in exchange for power in the man's world. What makes the girl alluring is first her eyes, and then her intelligence, her ability to speak demurely and properly and still cut through the older geisha's harsh sarcasm.

The constant imagery of her being water, that which washes away stone, rusts metal, and clears the air is also of Aphrodite, sea goddess, whose name means "foam born."

The ending of the movie is sentimental, the American mythos of "if you love him enough, long enough, he will change, he will come--a knight on something shiny, even if it is a panama suit." The girl is not looking for a lover but for a patron, a father to replace the protection of her dead parents. Perhaps that too is of Aphrodite who has no parents at all, being born of the sea fertilized by the genitals of Saturn/Chronus. And she finally gets him when she has given up, when she has grown up, after she has come to grips with the Athene within--after all, she has certainly paid enough for him to be his half-a-wife. But Aphrodite does not stay around for happily ever after. She brings us into the world, and she takes us out. It is up to us to make what we will of being alive in the meantime.