"Parthen" (1962/1973)
- Jon Nelson
- Nov 21, 2025
- 15 min read
Updated: Nov 25, 2025
They were very friendly little girls for about ten years, from the time they were eight or nine years old. — More Than Melchisedech
"Ce premier jour de May, Helene, je vous jure" (“This first day of May, Helen, I swear to you”) — Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène
The effect of Eva was similar — and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) . . . .
This post moves into tricky territory. Signposting might be needed. I’ll begin with the plot of "Parthen" and some straightforward material, and then float several ideas about sexuality that will need future development and qualification. The post will end with the importance of seeing aspects, with a character who pulls aspects of "Parthen" into superimposition, a sexualized midget.
I want to argue that in “Parthen’s” immediate backdrop we find Lafferty’s deep interest in European poetry, something I have recently blogged about. That may sound dry, but I hope to show why we should suspect that its presence is not merely incidental to the story.
Next, I will put some critical pressure on an uncomfortable associative pattern. I always read Lafferty’s short fiction along two axes: a logical axis and an associative one. To read Lafferty closely, one must reconstruct not only the immanent logic that organizes incident but also the networks of association that run alongside, beneath, or over that logic. I have described this elsewhere as the contrast between a didactic reading, fitted to the axis of logic, and a palimphanic dimension, accounting for the axis of association. Awareness of the latter comes from reading a lot of Lafferty and what he read.
The specificity of any story’s logical structure tends to be singular, self-consuming, and non-repeating. The palimphanic elements, however, recur across texts and bring subterranean cohesion to the larger “ghost story” of his oeuvre. It widest expanse is the oceanic mode, and it is why the oceanic section of this blog records thousands of those elements as a short-cut. Hence the vast number of ingenious plots in Lafferty and the pervasive déjà vu that accompanies reading him. This post will move from the first interpretive problem to the second, from the didactic to the palimphanic.
“Parthen” begins with a foggy spring, the kind of spring love poets aren’t associated with. The men of the story-world don’t notice they are living through a male-only apocalypse. Unidentified aliens land and issue a Declaration that “one half of mankind [is] hereby obsoleted,” with the other half to be retained as servants. Despite this, men are “the brightest and happiest ever." They are happy to go along with financial ruin.
Roy Ronsard is our protagonist, a businessman who is losing everything, and he exemplifies the euphoria. He says, “If a man is going to be a bankrupt, then let him be a happy bankrupt.” His attitude is connected to the arrival of beautiful women, such as Eva Ellery, who are somehow behind it all, having convinced men they are now acting according to a “Higher Set of Values.”
Under the influence of what Lafferty calls “celestial curvatures”—a phrase from one of the most important passages in the story—the men seem to have been enchanted into finding physical intimacy boorish. We read that the real goats among the men become lambs; the wolves, puppies. Of course, this frustrates the wives, one of whom is Roy’s: Peggy Ronsard. She really misses the old goat in her husband. As the men drift, the economy is quietly seized by anonymous recipients. “NO MALES WANTED” is on nearly every hiring establishment, and the beautiful newcomers are transferring assets, leaving the men to wander the streets in beatific poverty.
By autumn, the men are destitute. They make rounds of what were once called garbage cans and admire the weather. Though the sun has not appeared in months, they think the sky ais a beautiful murk. Those who die of exposure are “shoveled up by the women on the disposal trucks and carted away.” Roy Ronsard and Sam Pinta come across a scrap of bone-wrapping newspaper. It says the aliens cannot bear sunlight; they have altered the atmosphere and introduced “a general feeling of euphor—” to subdue the population. Roy and Sam dismiss it. They know their happiness comes from the inner light the women provide.
Then the snow covers them like the blanket of heaven. As the cold sets in, Roy has a thought: the beautiful women have daughters but none have husbands, and none have sons. Not that it breaks the spell. Sam calls it a glorious year. Roy wonders whether the girls will remember how much light they brought into the men's lives.
The inspiration for this story draws on Lafferty’s familiarity with French poetry and the La Pléiade poets. Lafferty translated poetry by the Neoplatonist Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560), author of the La Pléiade manifesto, and in this story Lafferty is poking fun at the movement’s classicizing ideology—or at least at its strain of lovesickness, idealized longing, and specious transcendence. Pierre de Ronsard, whom Lafferty’s Catholic Encyclopedia entry describes as “perhaps the greatest French lyrical poet prior to the nineteenth century,” is impossible to ignore in this context. He is the model for the character Roy Ronsard, whose name echoes the historical poet’s epithet, prince des poètes. Lafferty wants the attuned reader to see this.
Because “Parthen” is about the rejection of the earthy, I want to mention that Ronsard famously quarreled with Lafferty’s great favorite Rabelais, who is synonymous with all things earthy. After Rabelais’s death, Ronsard wrote an epitaph on him, part of which includes the lines:
But when the summer came on, Sweltering, dusk to dawn, [Rabelais would] roll up his sleeves until, His arms half-bare, he would spill Flat on the floor in the dirt With the rushes and jugs, inert. Supine in the grease, he would hollow A hole in the ground, where he’d wallow In wine like a frog in mud
Belloc discusses the epitaph—and gives the entire poem in French—in Avril: Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance (1911). Given that Lafferty translated French and read all the Belloc he could find, even making special orders and accidentally ordering duplicate copies of Belloc printed under different titles, it is hard to imagine he did not come across it. Belloc writes:
Seven years after Rabelais died, Ronsard wrote this off-hand. I give it, not for its value, but because it connects these two great names. The man who wrote it had seen that large and honorable mouth worshipping wine: he had reverenced that head of laughter which has corrected all our philosophy. It would be a shame to pass such a name as Ronsard's signed to an epitaph on such a work as that of Rabelais, poetry or no poetry.
In any case, the connection to Ronsard and La Pléiade defines the story’s deep intellectual background. It explains the imagery of light, accounts for the Greek allusions (Ronsard’s specialty), and motivates the parody of the blason, that stylized inventory of the female body, which in the following passage mocks the poetic conventions of La Pléiade and other strains of intellectualizing love poetry:
Let us make you understand just how pretty Eva was! She was a golden girl with hair like honey. Her eyes were blue — or they were green — or they were violet or gold and they held a twinkle that melted a man. The legs of the creature were like Greek poetry and the motion of her hips was something that went out of the world with the old sail ships. Her breastwork had a Gothic upsweep — her neck was passion incarnate and her shoulders were of a glory past describing.
Needless to say, again, this is a parody. What it parodies is poets.
The poetic sublimation of male eros is the setup for the whole “Higher Set of Values,” though the very word values is already a symptom of post-Christendom language. People in Christendom did not speak of “values”; the West caught that virus from the German university system. Lafferty dislikes this shift, so he deploys the phrase “Higher Set of Values” to aim directly at Ronsard’s Neoplatonic belief that contemplating the physical beauty of a woman will elevate a man beyond the physical—will make him ascend the ladder, as it were, to a higher plane.
Value went from having a strictly mathematical meaning to acquiring an axiological one. That’s the humor of placing the word set between “higher” and “values.” Both words pull double duty because of mathematics. The whole construction is sophistic and Platonic (through the Pythorgean line that one finds in the Timaeus), deliberately so.
The Neoplatonic equivalent of the Higher Set of Values appears throughout Ronsard’s work. He longs to burn with desire and fly to heaven—“Je veux brusler pour m’en voler aux cieux.” He imagines his hacked flesh falling away, leaving a naked spirit in its place. Elsewhere, he rejects the material world outright: “Il faut laisser maisons & vergers & jardins”—the muddy hide must be allowed to rot so the soul may go free. More examples can be found in the table at the end of the post.
There is more to say, but by now, it should be fairly clear how French Neoplatonic poetry relates to “Parthen.”
But let’s make it more concrete. What does lovesickness look like in Ronsard? Consider this poem—one of Ronsard’s Sonnets to Hélène—and think of Roy and Peggy, as well as the alien Helens of Troy in “Parthen.” I’ll quote the poem in full because it comes very close to what Lafferty has in mind with his Helen (“Helen—high-voltage sunshine,” as Lafferty says) and with the other alien women in the story.
If to love, Madam, is to dream and long and brood by day and night on means of pleasing you, to be forgetful of all else, to wish to do nothing else but adore and serve the beauty that wounds me, If to love is to pursue a happiness which flies me, to lose myself in loneliness, to suffer much pain, to fear greatly and to hold my tongue, to weep, to beg for pity, and to see myself sent away, If to love is to live in you more than in myself, to hide great weariness under a mask of joy, to feel in the depths of my soul the odds against which I fight, to be hot and cold as the fever of love takes me, To be ashamed, when I speak to you, to confess my pain –if that is to love, then I love you furiously, I love you, knowing full well my pain is deadly. The heart says so often enough; the tongue is silent.
Now Laffery's own 1950s translation of du Bellay:
“The Ideal" If life is but a journey short and lorn In the eternal, if the year that turns Does hunt our days with hope of no returns, If everything must perish that is born, what think you, soul, imprisoned as you mourn? Why should you seek the dark while day-time burns, when there are clearer things that some one earns And you out turn your back as one forsworn? There is the good that spirits all desire, There the repose for which all worlds aspire, There is the love, there pleasures come once more, There, O my soul, upon the highest sky You recognize the glints that never die Of beauties that in this world I adore.
Belloc writes,
A group of men to which allusion will be made in connection with Du Bellay set out with a programme, developed a determined school, and fixed the literary renaissance of France at its highest point. They steeped themselves in antiquity, and they put to the greatest value it has ever received the name of poet; they demanded that the poet should be a kind of king, or seer. Half seriously, half as a product of mere scholarship, the pagan conception of the muse and of inspiration filled them.
It’s the Higher Set of Values without parody:
“Roy, I saw Margaret today. From a distance, of course. Naturally I could not approach such an incandescent creature in my present condition of poverty. But, Roy, do you realize how much we owe to those pretty girls? I really believe that we would have known nothing of the higher plane or the inner light if it had not been for them. How could they have been so pretty?”
Opposed to the men who have become manques, who are reduced to lovesick silence for the Higher Set of Values, is Peggy Ronsard, who does speak up and who, in so doing, “puts her tongue on the crux." It is a Rabelaisian image.
That, at least, is what I take to be the intellectual or didactic axis of “Parthen.” Lafferty read Pierre de Ronsard—because his reading was broad, because Belloc was a poet who thought deeply about French poetry, because Ronsard is a giant of French literature, and because Lafferty had worked on la Pléiade in his Vogelsprachenkund translations.
Now the unpleasant part.
It is a mystery that, given the presence of pedophilia in Argo and In a Green Tree, so little attention has been paid to the nature of precocity in Lafferty’s young female characters. The most important example is Dotty’s early awakening into sexuality in the novel Dotty. It is the fictional blueprint. But Dotty isn’t much read. “The Transcendent Tigers” is read. So the connection never gets made.
If Lafferty were a writer read by more than a small circle of devoted fans, it would be obvious that there are serious questions to be asked. Anyone even half awake—someone not already predisposed to love him—would latch onto the sexual aspects in Argo and In a Green Tree like a piranha. More Than Melchisedech is red meat for the hermeneutics of suspicion. Put one of my sharp feminist friends in the room? Good luck avoiding hard conversations.
I want to be very careful, because I do not for a second believe Lafferty himself was a pedophile. But he did play the funny uncle with the concept of the pedophilic in his work.
What do I mean? Simply this: it is obtuse not to recognize that children are a significant aspect of his canon. It is dishonest to claim that his work contains no instances of adults diddling or ogling children. It is a profoundly challenging combination. Whatever the connection is between young female sexuality and pre-teen intellectual precocity, it exists in his imagination—a secret door, to borrow from Montejo, that readers will inevitably open when they begin to take Lafferty seriously.
I know you’ve seen it, but take another look at Lafferty’s door in this terribly blurry image:
The largest image on that door? A little girl. Renoir’s Girl With a Watering Can (1876):
In “Parthen,” Lafferty writes,
Jeannie was of such a striking appearance as to make a man almost cry out. But the turmoil that she raised in her gentlemen friends was of a cold sort, for all that the white flames seemed to leap up. She was Artemis herself and the men worshipped her on the higher plane. She was wonderful to look at and to talk to. But who would be so boorish as to touch? The effect of Eva was similar — and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) and of Margaret and of Hildegarde [emphasis added]. How could a man not ascend to the higher plane when such wonderful and awesome creatures as these abounded?
Yes, it is strange that Lafferty readers haven’t pointed out the obvious: three of these “things” are not like the others, because three of them are little girls. The game the story plays is that the men, Roy and Sam and the others, have risen above the physical; they have sublimated their sexual drives entirely; they have pseudo-spiritual erections that have killed the fleshy ones.
Here’s the dumb part of the story—or the dumbest part of its joke. The story elbows the reader and says: those female aliens should be sexualized. Where is the male gaze? It has been directed upward, because these apocalyptic sex-goddesses kill real erections that belong in Peggy’s bed. Damn that Higher Set of Values.
As Peggy says,
“I hope they're a bunch of Jack the Rippers. I believe I could go for Jack today. He'd certainly be a healthy contrast to what presently obtains.”
Translation: Jack the Ripper kills whores, but at least Jack sees sex, and Jack knows how to use his instrument to penetrate a gal.
That is crude. What do you think Peggy is saying?
One explanation, the obvious one. Parthen means “virgin” or “maid.” It gives us parthenogenesis. The daughters are parthenogenic offshoots of their mothers. The mothers are maidens. Maidenheads.
We might put it this way: the aliens in “Parthen” have achieved the poet’s dream of eternal female youth through parthenogenesis. The daughters are near-clones, golden apples that fall not far from the tree because they are the tree, reborn. And with them come all the resonances of golden apples in Greek myth, the apple that led to Paris’ rape of Helen, here entwined with the apples of Atalanta, but with a twist. There is also an obvious Marian connection.
But we should not stop there.
The little girls are nearly identical to their mothers, which makes them little future sex goddesses, except that parthenogenetic reproduction means they do not need men at all.
The effect of Eva was similar — and of Roberta and of Helen (who had three little daughters as like her as three golden apples) . . . .
And what about the girls in this story? Lafferty wants us to get it. He says,
And never had the girls been so pretty.
To repeat, never had the girls been so pretty!
Lafferty constructs “Parthen” so that the category of “girls” encompasses both mothers and daughters.
The adult women are depicted as exceptionally attractive, and the daughters are described in similarly aesthetic terms. They function symbolically as three golden apples, evoking the golden apples of the Hesperides given to Hera as a wedding gift, as well as the apples Hippomenes dropped to divert Atalanta, as I said. One might argue that the story does not, in fact, sexualize any of these figures. Its central point is that the men are incapable of sexualizing the very objects that conventionally would invite such attention.
But that is just its strategy. "Parthen" is about the sexual implications that the male characters themselves cannot perceive. The men in the story sublimate all lower forms of eros, and this act of sublimation creates the interpretive space in which the daughters become sexually legible to the reader.
This maneuver is subtle. By referring to both juveniles and adults under the same categorical descriptor, “girls,” Lafferty positions the daughters in a space adjacent to, and almost superimposed upon, the site where sexual objectification would ordinarily occur, despite the absence of any explicit sexual content. All the females are “pretty girls,” and "as like as," which decomposes generational distinctions that would otherwise provide clear sexual boundaries.
In “Parthen,” this doubling dynamic is covert. It is inflected by the classical tradition as mediated through French Renaissance poetry. In In a Green Tree, it becomes overt within the deliberately theatrical register of its Troubadour-inflected stylization, the Troubadours also obviously being love poets, ones comfortable with physical Eros.
Consider, in this light, another figure, Greek-coded, whose daughters are likewise described as exceptionally beautiful, this time in that work's Love Court:
Edith O'Melody Drakos had begun to give rather horny'evenings'. Horney, lutey. Edith played a medieval style lute, and her daughter Catherine played a hunting horn to set the tone ofthe 'evenings.’ The motif of them was Old Provinçal of the troubadour days. Well, it was gotten up with all the trappings of a Languedoc Love Court. Edith presented 'tableaux' along with her two daughters. Irene Drakos the younger daughter did make a striking figure in her little-girl nudity [emphasis added] in an arcaded niche with faint blue and golden lights mixing behind her. Irene was ten years old. The older daughter Catherine Drakos also made a striking figure with her big-girl nudity [emphasis added]. Edith herself made the most striking figure of the three with her forever nudity. She should have been an artists' model. Even Monica hardly had such a figure. "The last time one of my neighbors made such a public display of her bareness, I turned her over my lap and spanked her," BeeBee O'Trassy said. "You do remember when Helen Penandrew did her bare-bottomed hoochy dance on our experimental TV. Ah, she had you beat a little bit, Edith, but she still got it."
The mother-daughter pairs in “Parthen” resemble these mythic sisters more than they do an actual mother and child. They are closer to the configuration of the “big girl” and the “little girl” familiar from elsewhere in Lafferty’s fiction, the one daughter nominally twenty-three (though described as looking younger) and the other approximately ten. Even if the aliens in “Parthen” were unclothed, the men within the story would be incapable of having carnal perception of the fact. A man, the text seems to suggest, ought to ogle in the manner of the men in In a Green Tree, or at least be sufficiently red-blooded to register temptation, danger, or desire. The men in Green Tree ride the bare backs of the girls. It may be morally wrong and spiritually perilous, but it is at least humanly recognizable. The ten year is taken in to cubicles by older “gentlemen.” Roy Ronsard, by contrast, dies of two kinds of frigidity. Is this what Lafferty intends?
I don't know. I think so, but this is another aspect of Lafferty’s work that readers rarely confront. It is difficult to reconcile the nude girls of In a Green Tree with the other prepubescent female figures who appear throughout his oeuvre, such as Carnadine Thompson, Helen Dulanty, and Oread.
I’ll end with one of the strangest passages in Lafferty, the encounter with the uncanny Charlotte Mullens. She appears to be nine years old, yet she is forty or perhaps two hundred. She occupies simultaneously the roles of little girl and big girl, collapsing the categories that usually keep such figures distinct. It is the superimposition of the mother and daughters of "Parthen" in another form, as like as. It is a little girl; it isn’t a little girl. In “Parthen," we move from the adult woman to the child, in Charlotte from the child to the adult woman in the childlike body:
Out and about, a little girl was skipping circles around him on the sidewalk with a skipping rope. No, he was wrong. It wasn't a little girl [emphasis added]. It was Charlotte Mullens. “Are you finding the butterfly nest for me, Duffey?” she asked him, and they went over and sat on a bench where one waited for streetcars. “Yes, yes, my little creature, we will find this thing for you right away,” Duffey said, and he popped his hands together. “About your creatures, my dear,” Charlotte said. “Oh yes, I know about your creatures. They are almost the most interesting things that I find in your mind . . . .”
