For the Love of Aphrodite
Tamara Dolgner
FLCL 271-3
5 November 2013

With only three goddesses she cannot sway, few love matches are too challenging for Aphrodite. However, by fleeting about and abusing her power to make gods and goddesses fall in love with mortals and then bragging about it, she has become a little bit unpopular. Her tricks become crimes worthy of Zeus’ punishment, and he gives her a taste of her ruses. When she falls for and deceives war hero Anchises, she is no longer able to claim immunity to love between goddess and mortal. Of course, this fall of Aphrodite does not go unnoticed by mythological interpretation, and there is a lot to explore. The story of Aphrodite may fall under many stereotypical interpretations, such as structuralism, social charter, and gender analysis, but she sometimes challenges them just as well. A look at structuralism using motifemes has a curious twist when it comes to the goddess of love. The main example of a motifeme pattern is as follows: the girl leaves home, the girl is secluded, the girl becomes pregnant by a god, she suffers, and finally she is rescued and gives birth to a son. After reading about Aphrodite and Anchises, this pattern is almost familiar, except for one very interesting turn of events— the gender roles are switched. This is where Aphrodite challenges the interpretations of myth just a little. When Aphrodite finds Anchises, he is secluded at home. When he realizes that it was in fact a goddess who he impregnated, he suffered in his panic. Aphrodite calmed his worries, rescuing him, and gives him a son, Aeneas. In this way, her story has followed many other popular ones with similar patterns, only in her own way. Vladimir Propp argues that the presence of these motifemes makes it easier to organize and therefore appreciate the story. When we as readers can find similarities to