El Whetham

In the last five years, there has been an exponential increase of books marketed as feminist Greek mythology retellings. While mythology retellings have been popular throughout the Western literary world, the prominence of women writing about female mythological characters is new, with men tending to write adventure-based narratives featuring male heroes. There is no question why these stories are so popular as the genre steals pieces from other genres: a little bit of fantasy, a little bit of history, a little bit of romance, and a little bit of literary fiction. Furthermore, the writing style tends to be extremely accessible, not only for non-classicists, but also for non-readers; the books are usually written in the first person with simple, modern language. 

Ancient Greek literature holds a distinct lack of women, with even less written by women. Feminist retellings are often concerned with the events of the Trojan War and its aftermath, despite the fact that the Homeric epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, feature only a dozen women between them, all of which can be categorised into either the submissive servant or the monstrous adulterer. To add to this, myths about women, particularly mortal women, were often not written down. For example, while we have plenty of visual sources that prove the existence of Medusa dating back to the Mycenaean era, her myth was not transcribed until much later, existing only in oral tradition. In the classical era, women begin to be debated. While much of Greek drama is lost to us, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Sophocles’ Electra, Women of Trachis, and Antigone show that women were able to be the central character in a play, no longer second to a heroic man. Euripides’ plays serve as inspiration for many feminist retellings as his plays are primarily about mythological women, and he, more any ancient playwright, engages with the flexibility of myth, twisting them to create more emotion. His depiction of women is controversial due to their duality. His Medea loves her husband so much that she resorts to killing their children when he remarries. His Phaedra is a perfect, dignified wife until she is cursed to fall in love with her stepson, not by any fault of her own, but as revenge against the said stepson. Euripides portrays women who refuse to conform to the ideals of a Greek woman, and so, they are perfect material for feminist retellings as they are three-dimensional and complex, with flaws comparable to the stubborn Achilles. Although not he was not Greek, feminist Greek mythology retellings also often draw on Ovid for his collection of mythological retellings that concerned women. His Heroides portrays the women in the lives of male heroes, writing letters to express their anguish. Likewise, the women in his Metamorphoses are often trapped, abused, or raped in order to depict the central theme of divine cruelty. Therefore, although women are explored further as time progresses in the ancient world, depictions of them are clearly written by men. 

The Greek women of myth have been explored prior to recent times, however. Augusta Webber, a self-taught classicist, translated Medea in 1868 (though she was not the first person to translate Euripides; Lady Jane Lumley translated Iphigenia at Aulis in the 16^th century), and wrote poetry which considered classical women. In Portraits, she explores the characters of Circe and Medea with considerably more nuance than many of her male contemporaries, portraying her characters as full of both knowing and emotion. Even more recently, Robert Graves’ 1955 novel Homer’s Daughter suggests that Homer was a woman, possibly one of the first modern novels to consider a feminist approach to mythology. 

Meanwhile, with the third wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s, feminist studies in classics have become more common, through voices that identity themselves as explicitly ‘feminist’ remain in the minority. Hélène Cixous’ 1975 essay ‘The Laugh of Medusa’ was particularly influential for feminist retellings of Greek mythology, arguing that only through retelling myth was a scholar able to move outside of the patriarchal system and claim authorship. Christa Wolf’s Cassandra appears shortly afterwards in 1983, translated into English in 1984. This marks the start of female writers exploring the narratives of mythological women coinciding with the growth of women in classics. Sarah Pomeroy’s 1975 Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, Helene Foley’s 1994 Women in the Classical World, and Froma Zeitlin’s 1996 Playing the Other were all extremely influential in shaping the world for feminism in classics. 

Of course, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad in 2005 was nothing short of revolutionary. As an established author, she reached more people than Christa Wolf, and with the help of the Canongate books, which had commissioned authors to write mythological retellings, her work could be nothing short of great. Interestingly, Canongate was also behind Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, which was also well received, though few were aware of the source, the myth of Iphis. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011) must be mentioned, although it is not feminist. This work would proceed to go viral on TikTok due to its emotional value, romance, and fantasy elements. Readers would then pounce on Miller’s 2018 novel, Circe. Unlike The Song of Achilles, Circe is the definition of a feminist Greek mythology retelling, portraying an alternate view of heroes through a previously villainised character. TikTok would go on to discover other books in this vein such as Emily Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful (2016) another feminist retelling by a classicist. Since then, Greek mythology retellings have been distinct in their female leads, instantly recognisable by their one-word titles featuring the name of the lead, as in the vein of Circe. They took over the previous literary sub-genre of fairytale retellings, offering a similar gritty view of idealised stories. Greek mythology retellings are important because they reclaim narratives. The main allure of the ancient world is its distance, familiarity, and flexibility in its mythology. Thus, the retelling of ancient narratives creates a sense of power, actively fighting against the lack of women’s voices in the ancient world.