Reviving the Voices of Marginalised Women in Greek Myth: Uncovering Feminist Traditions in Literature

 

The women who are currently rewriting female characters in myth on the basis that women have been marginalised and silenced are themselves ignoring the long history of women’s writing.

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[And I remembered] the fate of Minyas’ daughters - Cornina*

Feminist rewritings of women from Greek myth are popular in publishing right now. 

In 1997 I wrote my Master's thesis in Classical Receptions on Christa Wolf’s 1983 novel, Cassandra. Since then, I have maintained a list of popular rewritings of Greek myth from Ovid to now. There were ten published in 2017, nine in 2018, ten in 2019, six in 2020, seventeen in 2021, twelve in 2022, and eight slated for 2023. Among the approximately two hundred I have itemised, the quality is variable. Many of these novels written by women claim to be, or are reviewed as, feminist. But are they? What criteria are we using to judge the success of a rewriting, and whether the result is feminist? These rewritings are reviewed not only in newspapers but in podcasts, on TikTok, at writers’ festivals, and Facebook groups. Readers may say they like these novels, but rarely explain the basis for their judgement. Some of the texts might be described as fan fiction. Many are for YA readers. Some are fantasy or science fiction. Some might be called historical fiction. Some of the more literary ones are written by classicists. The most famous purportedly feminist rewritings which we might call literary fiction are probably Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls (2018), and Natalie Hayne’s A Thousand Ships (2019). In recent years research students have been writing dissertations on these texts applying various frameworks, including proposed alignment with the #MeToo movement.

           Acclaimed modern writers say they owe it to the female characters to tell their story. Some claim that these are the ‘real’ stories of these fictional characters. Reviewers and interviewers say they are giving voice to marginalised characters who were silenced. But is that true? And is this new? Are the women who are currently rewriting female characters in myth on the basis that women have been marginalised and silenced, and claiming this as a new approach, ignoring the long history of women’s writing?

Voices of ancient Greek women in literature: representations and subversions in mythology and poetry

And so I’ve reset our father’s tales,

[reworked their crown with these new jewels]

as I take my lyre for my girls. - Corinna

Not all ancient Greek women or characters were marginalised. In ancient literature, particularly the plays, we hear substantially from the characters Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone, Iphigenia, Lysistrata, and the Trojan Women. Homer’s epics show women, who are minor characters since the stories focus on the male heroes, singing laments and singing while they work and weave. (In ancient Greece, a hero was a man whose glory was immortalised through song.) There are also ancient records of women performing spells and incantations, rituals which include speech acts. Representations of women in Greek myth were variably sympathetic, mouthy, violent, distinctive, and women were not universally regarded as meek or subservient or good. Notably, no-one is presenting the stories of Myrrha (who lusted after her father and tricked him into having sex with her) or Phaedra (who lusted after her celibate stepson and falsely accused him of rape) as worthy role models for modern women. There were various representations of the same stories, since these stories are not sacred but means of exploring ideas according to the writer’s purpose and context. It was a good start. Our ideas about representations of female characters have taken a turn over the milenia.

We know some ancient women lyric poets were acclaimed in their lifetimes with statues in their honour (namely Moero, Erinna, possibly Corrina). Literary innovations were named after Telesilla (Telesillian metre) and Praxilla (Praxillian metre). Antye invented original compound adjectives. Sappho was acclaimed as a poet in her lifetime yet the legacy of Sappho as an eponym is not her poetry but her sexuality (Sapphic).

The ancient Greek women poets wrote back to Homer, applying Homeric devices to domestic situations, subverting the epic into the lyric, and deflating the grand themes of epic. Classicist, Josephine Balmer, in her 1996 book, Classical Women Poets, reports that classical women's poetry subverts masculine literary genres by frequently using revisionist myth-making and memory to build a private as well as a collective mythology. The women wrote lyrics to be sung, both at communal events and privately, including laments, hymns, and epigrams. Some named themselves in their songs.

Balmer shows the artistry of the poets, their agility at wordplay, rhythm, alliteration, and other sound effects and their subversion of Homer's epigrams and imagery, . They apply the devices of Homer, for example, to domestic issues in women’s lives, thereby subverting and deflating the grandiose and revered poetry they reference. Whereas poets like Sappho and Erinna undermine male traditions to create a parallel women's world in their works, Anyte subverts heroic norms throughout her poetry, characterising a barking dog as a Homeric warrior, or a babbling brook as an epic roaring ocean. Hedyle rewrote Homeric women monsters. Balmer’s work shows that women were doing this kind of response to the Homeric myths from the beginning of literature.  

And what about The Heroides by Ovid? His fictional letters from women deserted by Greek heroes are an early example of this text type, written c. 2-16 BCE in Latin. So, this isn’t anything new. Women were given voices in ancient literature written by men. Stories from the female characters’ point of view were represented. 

Uncovering ‘the truth’ about women in Greek myth: The ongoing struggle for representation and narrative justice

Instead of a beautiful bridal bed and sacred wedding hymns,

your mother now offers up this marble tomb, this statue;

it has your measure, the pleasure in your face, your virgin treasure -

O Thersis, we can still celebrate you, even in death. - Anyte

Although these current writers who are rewriting women from Greek myth know that the female characters are fictional, and that various versions of them were written in ancient times, they still ‘feel’ they are real. Classicist, Natalie Haynes, with an illustrator, has produced a jigsaw puzzle entitled The Real Women of Greek Myth, marketed as a means to uncover ‘the truth’ about the women of the classics. What is this ‘truth’ that is revealed?

The motivation, however, is genuine and valid. In ancient artefacts there are examples of how women were valued for being silent, unknown, invisible. There is a quote by Aristotle about the importance of face coverings for women to stop the sound of their unattractive voices. It might be argued that it is the historical privileging of Aristotle’s writings and others like him that has facilitated the ongoing marginalisation of women. According to the men who spoke, the best women went unnoticed. And, of course, traditionally the history of the western world documents the lives of men; it is a history of war and politics, realms from which women were excluded. Women’s domestic lives were not considered by men to be a worthy subject of art or literature, therefore little was recorded or passed down about women’s thoughts, ideas, feelings, aspirations, or strategies. Of the ancient women poets, most of what has survived are fragments. Part of the work of feminism is to uncover, value and reinforce the works of past women, thereby integrating women into history. It seems natural that current writers use women from Greek myth to explore possibilities in women’s lives as a corrective to the canon. Some consider this as an act of narrative justice. It is worth remembering, however, that we don’t tell quiet people to be quiet. Women were not all naturally quiet and submissive; otherwise, why tell them to be quiet? But the story that these characters were marginalised and silenced feels true, perhaps more true than the real stories of history. The consideration of how texts become extant rather than extinct is mostly by chance through accidents of history rather than a long systematic determination of value.

We’ve been through all this before.

Evaluating feminist novels: Rosalind Coward's critique and its relevance today

Lady Hera, come down to us, to your scented shrine

near heaven, look with favour on our fine-stitched fabric;

with her noble daughter Nossis for new apprentice

Theophilis wove it, the daughter of Cleocha -

daughter, mother, grandmother, united in the thread. - Nossis

When second wave writers were composing feminist novels that were women-centric, they were popular, they influenced the culture, but they were not uncritically received. In 1980 Rosalind Coward wrote an article entitled ‘This Novel Changes Lives’: Are Women's Novels Feminist Novels? A Response to Rebecca O'Rourke's Article ‘Summer Reading’ which reviewed The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. She criticised the undiscerning celebration of woman-centred novels, on the basis of several points. 

She observed that the novels were using a quasi-autobiographical structure to message consciousness raising. The novels used the trope of confessing sexual experiences and awakenings. Coward argued that these aspects, or even being women-centric, do not in themselves define the novels as feminist. To expand, women-centric novels can be romance, like Mills & Boon, or pornography; that doesn’t make them feminist. Consciousness raising by itself is never sufficient as a politics. She warns, ‘As feminists we have to be constantly alerted to what reality is being constructed, and how representations are achieving this construction. In this respect, reading a novel can be a political activity, similar to activities which have always been important to feminist politics in general.’ She argues that women do not share a universal experience because women are so diverse. ‘Feminism can never be the product of the identity of women’s experiences and interests - there is no such unity. Feminism must always be the alignment of women in a political movement with particular political aims and objectives. It is a grouping unified by its political interests, not its common experiences.’ So, the novel needs to have a political message in the interest of advancing the rights of women as a sex class rather than report a common female experience or use a women’s voice. Patricia Stubbs, in Women and Fiction (1979), declared that ‘A genuinely feminist novel must surely credit women with more forms of experience than their personal or sexual entanglements.’ 

Coward raises many good questions. To summarise: What does the novel do? How are representations of sexuality, maleness and femaleness used to construct a version of reality? How does the novel typify a class group? What ideologies are presented? Does it chart the experience of women’s oppression? Provide an insight into contemporary feminism? Is the novel propaganda? Is it preaching to an already converted audience? What, beyond sexual experience, prompts the growth of the protagonist towards knowledge, understanding, insight, wisdom? Is sexuality treated as social, historical, political? And, importantly, if these novels are part of a political movement, how do we measure their effectiveness? In O’Rourke’s article she asked if commercial publishers were cashing in on feminism. That question remains current: in a novel set in Ithaca to be published in 2023, the author admits she did not read The Odyssey; she read about the publishing market trends. 

All these questions are pertinent to how we might review the modern rewritings of women in Greek myth. The determination as to whether a novel is feminist might be an individual or shifting one. We might settle on the expectation that feminist novels share a common theme where a woman struggles to reject sex-based stereotypes and defines her life according to her own values.

Mythological poetry and the quest for meaning: examining motivations and interpretations

But I sang the glory of local heroes

hurrahed in our heroines. - Corinna

            Women who have written poems about women in Greek myth include Louise Gluck, Carol Ann Duffy, Edna St Vincent Millay, Margaret Atwood, Dorothy Parker, H.D., Alicia Ostriker, Ann Carson, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, and A.E. Stallings.

In Writing Like a Woman, 1983, Alicia Ostriker published her essay thinking about how women poets make use of Greek myth. The book examines the poetry of H.D.(Hilda Doolittle), Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich. Her essay, I Make my Psyche From my Need, speculates as to the motivation:

When a woman rewrites an ancient myth it is not because she yearns for a heroic past (when men were men etc.)...In all likelihood she has two motives in mind, and the enjoyment of writing mythological poems has to do with the fact that two motives normally oppose each other. 

One is her intent to be taken seriously as a writer. It happens that to deal with ancient myth is to assume intellectual authority…

The other is that she wants to get at something very deep in herself, some set of feelings so intimate and strong that she is ashamed. 

The mythological poems many women are writing derive from a flash of connection. That story, that figure, that pattern of action - I am the woman. I suffered. I was there. I understand

…

In addition to literary ambition and the need to say something intimate about herself which she reads in the myth, the women poet may have a third motive. She intends to release an imprisoned meaning. The poem is a great key she is dangling…To ‘see’ what was present but unseen by others. This last idea is crucial. It defines my sensation, when writing poems involving myths, that I am not inventing or ‘interpreting’ but discovering…

Let’s skip over the first motive, that referring to classics endows the writer with intellectual status (that’s another essay). The sense of connection and the proposed unveiling of a hidden meaning are still relevant. 

Modern writers who rewrite women in myth say they are uncovering a truth, that there is a hidden message they are uncovering. But whose truth? Meaning resides in the one who hears/reads/sees. This claim seems overly earnest and mystical.

Texts are just texts; written stories that present situations, characters, plots and meanings. Anything can be a text—from written texts to music, visual arts, film, performance. The meaning can change according to the readers. Texts are open to various meanings according to our interpretations and cultural experiences. As attributed to Anaïs Nin, ‘We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are.’ Australian expert on ancient memory devices, Lynne Kelly, reads myths as memory devices. She says we use the word ‘mythology’ because we have no better word for ‘vivid stories that encode rational and practical and spiritual information of which the literal truth is impossible to differentiate from the metaphorical, a dichotomy not usually relevant to the traditional owners’. When we consider how a memory palace uses distinctive characters who personify concepts interacting with each other in the most surprising ways in order to make encoded information memorable, this makes perfect sense. In the 2008 podcast BBC In Our Time: The Greek Myths, Mary Beard says that the myths served a purpose for generations; they weren’t silly, so we must assume that myths did an important job. ‘Myth is an economical form of thinking about the world…If you think of it as a process, a verb, to myth, you get the function of it better.’ They help us think about what human existence is like, why it is so difficult and why we do what we do. ‘Myth is a framework for thinking about how we are.’ But there is more to consider. Myth does not just prompt us to think in different directions, it challenges how we think. ‘Myth always has the last laugh.’ She proposes that myth is always playing with you. ‘Myth itself is asking: Do you really believe? How far are you going to go along with this story?’ Again, like a memory device, a text is a tool to think with.

A reading as discovery might be Susan Hawthorne’s reading of Sappho 31, interpreting the description of physical symptoms as being about epilepsy rather than desire. Another example might be the proposal that Saul on the road to Damascus saw a meteor or lightning which blinded him and caused scales to form in his eyes, falling three days later. Or the interpretation of Darcy’s behaviour in Pride and Prejudice as being on the autism spectrum. There is no one truth to discover. These are just readings, and we all bring our various readings. We just apply what we know, and what we know can be informed by our various experiences. While we can justify them with scholarship, however, none can be proven as discovering a hidden message. Interestingly, a rewriting of the atmosphere of The Iliad as a long poem by Alice Oswald, Memorial, has been described as an excavation. Is this supposed to suggest an appropriation, a ransacking, or an archaeological dig that reveals new evidence that reshapes our thinking about something we thought we knew? The poem is like blackout poetry, with repetitions, but it works. It emphasises an aspect of The Iliad to make us consider the epic poem in a new way. Atwood is correct when she says in The Myths Series and Me in Publishers Weekly ‘... myths cannot really be translated with any accuracy from their native soil — from their own place and time. We will never know exactly what they meant to their ancient audiences.’

In 1980 Sandra M. Gilbert, co-author with Susan Gubar of The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, gave a talk entitled Confessional Mythology at the Modern Language Association Seminar on Women and Mythology. She suggested that the position women have been traditionally allocated, that of the outsider, could allow them to ‘own only [their] own vision and therefore [they] can steal into the house of myth, see everything, and say, for the first time (and thus with the dearest freshness) what everything means to [them]’. They can see myths in new ways, which are meaningful to them. Yet this does not suppose a hidden meaning to be discovered. 

We should note that the male heroes of Greek myth were complex and violent. We don’t necessarily want to be like them: Achilles, Odysseus, Hercules, Perseus, Theseus. In fact, the point of these stories might have been to avoid being like them. They were not depicted as models of healthy relationships. Often, these heroes are dangerous to the people closest to them.

How are contemporary writers reclaiming women’s voices?

You met your fate like those great dogs of old

by the curling roots

of a coward’s bush; Loci, of Locri,

swiftest of pups - especially to bark,

into your light paws he sank harsh poison, that speckle-necked snake. - Anyte

 

Let’s look at some presentations of the female characters in novels. 

Ursula Le Guin writes in her Afterword for Lavinia (2008) that she omitted the gods from her version of the story, as the ‘Homeric use of quarrelsome deities to motivate, illuminate and interfere with human choices and emotions doesn’t work well in a novel’. She frames her story as following Virgil, with Lavinia reclaiming her voice, and that her titular character kind of took over the writing, even speaking back to Virgil in the novel. Many writers start in the same vein, with their heroines declaring their intentions to tell their own stories. It makes sense to remove the gods from the stories so you can present the psychological aspects of a character. In the ancient stories the extreme behaviour of the gods is attributed to their pettiness. The extreme behaviour of mortals is attributed to the intervention of the gods. This leaves a gap for modern authors to fill; to present a character with psychological realism. Other writers, like Kerry Greenwood in her 1995 Cassandra, start their stories with the gods interfering with human lives as a game, like an opening scene from the 1963 film Jason and The Argonauts.  

There is some discomfort around the popular rewritings of the story of Hades raping Persephone as a YA romance. Of course, people can write whatever they want. It is up to us as readers, perhaps informed readers and scholars, to critique the success of these stories. Some are disturbingly like Stockholm Syndrome. In her review of the musical, Hadestown, published online in Eidolon, 2020, classicist Miriam Kamil writes ‘What message does it send to deprive Persephone of her trauma? Does a retelling have a responsibility to include the thornier parts of the myth?’ This applies to other retellings that reframe rape as romance.

Let’s look at the approaches of the most acclaimed recent novels.

            Atwood’s Penelopiad uses various text modes to present a theatrical story which champions Penelope and the chorus of maids, but criticises and is disparaging towards Helen, never considering Helen might be caught in the same patriarchal traps that ensnare Penelope and the maids. When Atwood was presented with the suggestion that her Penelopiad was feminist, she disagreed, saying, ‘I wouldn't even call it feminist. Every time you write something from the point of view of a woman, people say that it's feminist.’ Of course, being women-centred does not make a text feminist. 

        In Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, Briseis’ lack of power is the angle that makes her a powerful narrator. She is a rape victim in captivity, but also a whole person. Her heroism is in her survival strategies, which includes being in a community of women, viscerally described, who support each other. Interestingly, in her review for The Guardian, Emily Wilson notes some aspects of the writing as quasi-Homeric. Barker defends her use of anachronism in her Guardian article, referring firstly to Helen: ‘She’s not a historical figure at all, none of them is. Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, Priam, Helen – none of them existed. So the rules for writing historical fiction simply don’t apply. You’re allowed anachronisms, like the English rugby songs that Achilles’s men sing after dinner. And characters from myth can step into our world – history is always then; myth is now.’ Barker also considered the role of the gods in her novel. ‘I’d have liked to leave the gods out altogether, but Thetis was a special case because it’s impossible to understand Achilles without her.’ The novel meets Stubb’s criteria for being a feminist novel; it credits women with more forms of experience than their personal or sexual entanglements. 

            In Miller’s Circe, the narrative ties in with the surrounding circles of myth, focussing on the emotional life of the titular character, which includes her growth of knowledge and her developing skills that result in independence. It shows that even immortals can struggle. It feels contemporary and relevant. As such, it likely meets the criteria proposed by Stubbs. 

            In A Thousand Ships Haynes uses the framing device of Calliope, muse of epic poetry, telling tales from the point of view of a panorama of women involved with the Trojan War, aiming to tell the story of all the women, from the beginning to the aftermath of the war, whilst providing commentary of the device itself. It shows how war impacts women, asking if these women are not equally heroic to men, the number of voices contributing, mosaic-like, to the successful outcome. Again, likely to be categorised as a feminist novel.

            Classicist, Edith Hall, notes in her 2008 book The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer's Odyssey, that the important ideas in the most recent rewritings of the female characters from the Odyssey are ‘private space, weaving and quest’. It would interesting to see how this observation might apply to rewritings of other ancient Greek mythical stories.

            Grace Dowling, in her 2022 review of Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, criticises the work, which Saint declares as feminist, for a story that feels more politically motivated than well told. ‘..it is as though a personal or nuanced character has been traded for one of allegorical significance, so that Ariadne can stand as a typological ‘feminist’ figure, a woman who acts independently in an intensely masculine culture. Saint successfully draws attention to the misogynistic mistreatment of women in Greek myths, but Ariadne offers no new perspectives on what feminism means…’‘ This ties in with historical criticisms of women-centred novels and the dangers of writing forcibly for social justice purposes at the expense of narrative subtlety. 

Again, we’ve done this before

Over and over at this small tomb, Cleina weeps in sorrow,

a mother lamenting her daughter,

the final race which death has won. - Anyte

There is a history of women writing for social justice documented by Ellen Moers in Literary Women (1976). The Victorian women writers who wrote for social justice: Harriet Beecher Stowe (slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin), George Sand (class, women’s rights, Indiana), Elizabeth Gaskell (working class poverty, Mary Barton), Charlotte Bronte (women’s rights, Jane Eyre), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (slavery, women’s rights, child labour), and George Eliot, corresponded with and influenced each other. Moers calls this the epic age. It is a shame the women themselves did not give a name to their common interest: they could have been recorded in textbooks if they had given their movement a name. Before writing fiction George Eliot famously criticised Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, in her 1856 essay. She criticises novels as pompous, pedantic, snobbish, sentimental, and pious; heavy handed to the point of being evangelical. Three years later Eliot published her first novel, Adam Bede, a gritty story of a dairymaid, Hetty Sorrel, and then in 1860, The Mill on the Floss, again demonstrating the unfair sex-based restrictions which prove damaging to women. Eliot, in her fiction, avoided the errors she had criticised in others.

So, where does the authority lie? 

Stranger, if you should sail to Mytilene, city of fair song,

enticed by Sappho’s fragrant garland, its heady bloom,

say only this: that the land of Locri gave me life,

long-treasured by the Muses and by Her.

One more thing: My name is Nossis.

Now go. - Nossis

Myths appeal to something fundamental to human nature. Myths are important to help us process complex, nuanced topics that are difficult to articulate in varying social-cultural contexts: really, they are just tools to think with. Stories with good bones are unbreakable. Oral tradition is for everybody. These stories are refabricated, like scraps of cloth recycled into a quilt or a weaving; they are repurposed. Classics are unbreakable. Like a jazz classic, they can hold various interpretations and restylings; they inspire riffing and scatting. The song can be the voice of the women of Greek myth, as presented by a writer who feels she owes them, or owns them.

            For a 2021 Esquire article about the increased popularity of recent novels, Adrienne Westenfeld asked the writers how they use the ancient texts and why. Saint relates the stories to the #MeToo movement. ‘These attitudes, this particular brand of misogyny—you can see it three thousand years ago. Women were blamed for men’s actions. Women bore the consequences while men and gods got away scot-free. We retell the stories because they’re still so relevant to our lives.’ Haynes says ‘We need more women and more racial diversity. People just have to find the story that sings to them and tell it accordingly.’ And Miller: ‘There are no rules and there should be no rules. I love to see really strongly different adaptations, as well as adaptations that are woven into a version of the story that we already know, but turning the story over like we do embroidery, to show you the back side. Both can be wildly successful. These are such kaleidoscopic characters that you can just keep turning and turning them.’

And there are gaps to be filled because the ancient stories were epics or plays. In the epics, the bard describes or reports what happens to the characters, without reference to their thoughts or feelings. In the plays the characters interact and speak for themselves, and report off stage events. The lyrical poems and laments sung by ancient women can be first person expressions of emotion; desire, friendship, fun, memory, loss, grief. Novels as a form provide different affordances. What novels can provide is the interiority of characters; we can hear the characters' thoughts. This provides a means to show psychological insight into how women strategise or otherwise find ways to cope with their fates. Extending on this, showing these characters in novels can present imagined communities of women; how women work together to support each other and survive, which may have been offstage actions in ancient plays.

Not only do we have permission from ancient writers to continue rewriting ancient texts, because they did, but we have the example of Plato’s dialogues. The Greeks, in their stories and literature, questioned received wisdom and authority. This is the tradition we are continuing. In tracing the classical tradition, it is worth remembering that ‘traditio’ in Latin means a ‘handing over’. This bears a responsibility, but, when using myth, not one of reverent, sacred preservation. We have permission to use these stories as we see fit, and to critique them discerningly.

But there are other traditions these novels are continuing as well; that of feminist literary writings and scholarship. The current popular rewritings of women in Greek myth are continuing the work of early ancient women poets, as well as reinforcing the writings, creativity and thinking within feminist literary theory. These are components of women's history which are at risk of being forgotten, again. We can consider this another imagined community of women that we can join. Who owns the work of these real women? What do we owe them?  We need to sing the old songs by women to keep them alive. 

We’ve come to worship mother Demeter - a circle of nine,

all girls of a certain age, all dressed in our holiday best -

dressed in our best, and wearing our finest ivory jewels,

stars sawn from the shining sky,

a sight that should be seen. - Anonymous

 

*All translations by Josephine Balmer, 1996.