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 Contemporary Feminist Adaptations of Greek
Myth

Shelby Elizabeth Helen Judge

B.A. (Hons.), M.A. (Hons.)

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy (Arts)

Department of English Literature

School of Critical Studies
College of Arts
University of Glasgow
March 2022
© Shelby Judge, 2022
 Abstract

This project primarily addresses why there has been such expansion of interest among women
writers in adapting and retelling classical mythology, and what this work reveals about current
issues and priorities within feminism and feminist theory. It is my contention that the recent
literary vogue for women’s revisionist myth writing reveals much about current concerns within
feminism as well as trends within contemporary women’s writing. The scope of this thesis is as
follows: it begins with the publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) for the
Canongate Myth Series, which I propose to be the mainspring of the current trend in women’s
writing to adapt myth, and ends with relevant novels published in 2021. Notable authors within
this study include Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, Madeline Miller,
and Ursula Le Guin. This thesis utilises a methodology of feminist literary criticism, while also
incorporating feminist work in classical studies and, where relevant, in the disciplines of
Sociology and Women’s Studies. The ‘Literature Review’ takes as its starting point foundational
work within feminist classical scholarship, before moving on to argue that non-traditional
literature (mainly women’s myth writing for general audiences, podcasts, and online articles) are
essential in order to contextualise the current critical climate of women in Classics. The
subsequent five chapters are ‘Women in the Texts’, ‘Antigone’s Afterlives’, ‘Mythic
Masculinities’, ‘Queering Myth’, and ‘“I want to tell the story again”: Palimpsests: Paratexts, and
Intertexts’. Each chapter organises texts around specific concerns in contemporary feminism
while also noting the variety of writing styles and techniques which reflect wider contemporary
women’s writing practices.

2
 Table of Contents

Abstract 2

Table of Contents 3

Acknowledgements 4

Author’s declaration 5

Introduction 6

Methodology 11

Literature Review 30

Chapter 1: Women in the Texts 58

Penelope 63
Briseis 78
Helen 94

Chapter 2: Antigone's Afterlives 112

Chapter 3: Mythic Masculinities 140

Chapter 4: Queering Myth 166

Chapter 5: ‘I want to tell the story again’: Palimpsests: Paratexts and Intertexts 195

Conclusion 221

Bibliography 228

3
 Acknowledgements

I would like to extend thanks to the following people for their support.
First and foremost, thank you to my excellent supervisor Dr. Helen Stoddart, who has
always motivated me and pushed me to make this thesis as good as it could be. I would also like
to thank the other brilliant academics in the School of English at the University of Glasgow, who
were always enthusiastic about my project. Particular thanks go to Dr. Laura Rattray – you are
kind and encouraging, and the Transatlantic Literary Women meetings truly got me through the
first lockdown. Thanks, too, to my students in English Literature and Comparative Literature
throughout the years. I must also acknowledge the wonderful community I have found over on
#ClassicsTwitter.
I would like to thank my family. Particularly my mum, Caroline Judge, who will
undoubtedly say “I hope you’re proud of yourself, because I am proud of you” upon the
completion of this PhD. She says it when I get degrees, when I bake something that looks nice,
or when I find a moderately good deal in the supermarket. To my cousins: I’m sorry that I never
grew out of being the weird one, and I will never stop bringing books to family events. I want to
thank those who are closest to me, especially Jemma, Tyler & Eshvari, Chiara, and Ben. I love
you all. I couldn’t have done it without you all and, more than that, I wouldn’t want to.
In loving memory of Dr. Katherine Heavey, my PhD supervisor, teaching mentor, and
friend. You were always so generous with your time and books, and unerringly kind and patient.
You had a truly brilliant mind and a real zest for teaching, the latter of which you passed on to
me.
To my late nan. You were my best friend, from the day I was born until the day we said
goodbye. I genuinely do not know how I get through a single day without you, but I do know that
I carry you with me in everything I do, and I am infinitely better for having known you.

In terms of dedication… this one’s for me. And my dog, Kim.

4
 Author’s declaration

I am aware of and understand the University’s policy on plagiarism and I certify that this
thesis is my own work, except where indicated by referencing, and that I have followed
the good academic practices.

Signed: S.Judge

Date: 31st March 2022

5
 Contemporary Feminist Adaptations of Greek Myth
Introduction

In the Iliad, one encounters Helen for the first time in book III, weaving the events of the Trojan
War as they unfold around her. In ancient Greece, producing texts may have been a storytelling
method reserved for men, but producing textiles was women’s work, and woven into these
textiles were elaborate renderings of the same myths, reshaped by women. One need look no
further than the myth of Philomela – who weaves her testimony against her brother-in-law after
he has kidnapped and assaulted her, and cut out her tongue (Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.438-674) –
to comprehend the revolutionary power of women weaving their own tales. The English words
text and textile derive from the same Latin verb texere, meaning to weave or compose. ‘In the old
myths,’ states Carolyn Heilbrun in ‘What Was Penelope Unweaving?’, ‘weaving was women’s
speech, women’s language, women’s story’ (1985; in Higgins 2021: 9). From the moment Helen
is introduced in the Iliad, she challenges the narrative imposed on her by carving out a space for
her own story, even within the confines of Achilles’ epic poem. It is this desire to tell women’s
stories — to excavate, liberate and, at times, exculpate these female mythical figures from the
male narratives in which they were encased, on which this thesis is focused.
More specifically, this thesis is concerned with the recent proliferation of women writers
adapting Greek myth with explicitly feminist aims. It is my contention that the recent literary
vogue for feminist revisionist myth writing reveals much about current concerns within feminism
as well as trends within contemporary women’s writing. The scope of this thesis is as follows: it
begins with the publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) in the Canongate Myth
Series, which I propose as the mainspring of the current trend in women’s writing to adapt myth,
and ends with relevant novels published in 2021, including Claire Heywood’s Daughters of
Sparta, Pat Barker’s Women of Troy, and Charlotte Higgins’ Greek Myths: A New Retelling.
Relevant literature published at the beginning of 2022 (such as Susan Stokes-Chapman’s
Pandora and Jennifer Saint’s Elektra) have been omitted to facilitate submission, but nonetheless
illustrate the continuing force of the genre.

6
 This thesis opens with a ‘Methodology’ chapter that outlines the feminist literary
criticism and critical classical reception methods utilised within this project and is followed by a
‘Literature Review’. The ‘Literature Review’ takes as its starting point foundational work within
feminist classicist scholarship, before moving on to argue that non-traditional literature (mainly
women’s myth writing for general audiences, podcasts, and online articles) are essential in order
to investigate the current critical context of women in Classics. The subsequent five chapters are
‘Women in the Texts’, ‘Antigone’s Afterlives’, ‘Mythic Masculinities’, ‘Queering Myth’, and ‘“I
want to tell the story again”: Palimpsests: Paratexts, and Intertexts’. Each chapter organises texts
around specific concerns in contemporary feminism while also noting the variety of writing
styles and techniques which reflect wider contemporary women’s writing practices.
‘Women in the Texts’ analyses adaptations of three women from the Homeric Epics –
Penelope, Briseis, and Helen – in contemporary women’s literature. The chapter opens with a
contextualisation of feminist Classics discourse and goes on to analyse adaptations of these
female mythical figures, and how these women’s retellings of Greek myth can be understood to
speak to contemporary feminist concerns. The first section, ‘Penelope’, focuses primarily on The
Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (2005), a novella that is characterised by Penelope’s discovery
of her own voice, one which is at once whiny and snide in its vociferous complaining at her
mistreatment in her lifetime and in her reputation ever since. The novella also features interludes
by the hanged maids that challenge Penelope’s version of the story. The ‘Penelope’ section also
draws on Penelope’s characterisation in Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships (2019) – a
polyphonous retelling of all the women of the Trojan War – and Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018)
– the Women’s Prize-winning novel that retells some of the most significant Greek myths
(including the Minotaur, Medea, and the Odyssey) from the perspective of the
increasingly-powerful eponymous Titan witch. Ultimately the first section of the chapter
demonstrates that Penelope’s myth has been utilised to speak to concerns about female domestic
labour and the double-discrimination of class and gender. The second section of ‘Women in the
Texts’ focuses on Briseis, a relatively underrepresented figure in Greek myth, though one that has
become the focus of many feminist adaptations. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (2018) is
an unflinchingly harsh novel that retells the Trojan War with a particular focus on the brutalities
that women face in wartime; For the Most Beautiful by Emily Hauser (2016) retells Briseis and

7
Achilles’ relationship as a romance; and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2011) is
focused on the romance between Achilles and Patroclus, often omitting Briseis’ experiences as a
result. The central question of the Briseis section is whether Briseis could be capable of consent.
It analyses whether Briseis could ever consent to a relationship with Achilles since he literally
owns her, and if she does not consent, what further questions are generated by that narrative. The
‘Briseis’ section also suggests that Briseis’ sparsity in the myths leaves plenty of room for
adapting authors to construct new meanings for, and directions within, her myth. This obscurity
contrasts to Helen’s very extensive literary afterlife inhabited by many misogynistic ideals about
female beauty. The ‘Helen’ section of ‘Women in the Texts’ looks at reproductions of Helen in
feminist theory, poetry, and drama – at how she has been used both as a symbol of sex work and
of the dangers of being beautiful – and contrasts this to the relative paucity of adaptations of
Helen in contemporary women’s prose. There have, however, been more recent novelistic
projects that adapt Helen, including Haynes’ A Thousand Ships and The Daughters of Sparta by
Claire Heywood (2021), which tells the Trojan War through the framework of a relationship: the
sisterhood between Helen and Clytemnestra. This tripartite chapter ultimately demonstrates that
excavating and reinterpreting the women of the Greek epics is one of the most significant ways
that contemporary female authors are adapting ancient myth to stage and discuss contemporary
concerns within feminism.
‘Antigone’s Afterlives’ is a case study that considers how one myth can be re-read and
developed for a variety of feminist purposes. The chapter opens with Ali Smith’s The Story of
Antigone (2013), a children’s story that invites young readers to realise the political power of
their voices through its self-conscious discussion of the act of adaptation as a method of story
survival. Salley Vickers’ Where Three Roads Meet (2007) is a Socratic dialogue between Freud
and Tiresias, discussing the myth of Oedipus, which stages Vickers’ contention that Freud
fundamentally misread the myth. It opens up discussions of Antigone’s potentiality for
post-Freudian psychoanalysis, where she has variously been read as a symbolic representation of
Até (ruin), as well as a rejection of heterosexuality. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) mirrors
the characters and events of Sophocles’ Antigone but reframes them within the context of
British-Muslim identity politics and radicalisation in order to critique the increasingly
xenophobic attitudes towards citizenship in modern Britain. Finally, Natalie Haynes’

8
dual-bildungsroman The Children of Jocasta (2017) decentralises Sophocles’ version of the myth
to suggest that there is more than one potential feminist hero in the Theban Cycle, looking
instead to Ismene and Jocasta. By exploring the significant and wide-ranging differences in the
approaches to adapting Antigone demonstrated by these authors, paying particular attention to
the question of Antigone’s age, this chapter ultimately argues that the eternal return to
Antigone’s mythos demonstrates the infinite adaptive, imaginative, and activist potential for
Greek myths, and that to adapt Antigone is in itself a political act.
Throughout the thesis I refer to the contemporary interventions aimed at diversifying
Classics: to de-centre the upper-class white man as the subject of classical studies. This means
that the current moment is particularly exciting when considering the reception and
reinterpretation of male mythical figures. ‘Mythic Masculinities’ firstly analyses hegemonic and
toxic Atlas and Heracles in Jeanette Winterson’s Canongate text Weight (2005). Weight is a
surreal novella, set against the backdrop of space, that satirises Heracles’ hegemony and liberates
Atlas from his eponymous and symbolic weight. It is interspersed with autobiographical
interludes from the author who posits her own Atlas Complex as the springboard for the
adaptation. Heroic masculinities are revisited in Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) and Miller’s
The Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018). Additionally, this chapter investigates Theseus’
character in Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne (2021) –– a novel that is similar to Circe in its empowering
tone, though it is a narrative that is shared between the sisters Ariadne and Phaedra. ‘Mythic
Masculinities’ functions as a parallel to ‘Women in the Texts’, analysing how mythical heroes
such as Achilles, Theseus, and Odysseus have been scrutinised, as well as transformed, satirised,
humiliated, and exposed in contemporary literature, generating narratives that, while set in the
ancient world, stage and interrogate many feminist concerns about modern masculinity. These
concerns include the emotional toll that patriarchy takes on men, the gender-based violence that
women suffer at the hands of men, and the inexorable connection between normalised rape
culture and misogynistic violence.
‘Queering Myth’ begins by outlining the shared history of queerness and ancient Greek
myths, before moving on to contemporary queer myth writing. First, the chapter studies if not,
winter (2002), Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments, where the translator’s formal
and linguistic choices amplify the enduring significance of Sappho’s work for queer women. The

9
chapter then offers an in-depth study of Madeline Miller’s immensely popular The Song of
Achilles, wherein the Trojan War is a gruesome backdrop against which the love story of Achilles
and Patroclus is staged. My analysis considers how ancient and modern understandings of
homoeroticism are portrayed in the novel. Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy (2007) is an adaptation of
Iphis and Ianthe, whose myth has fallen into obscurity since the medieval and early modern eras,
but which Smith has reinvigorated into a lesbian, genderqueer, and ecoactivist narrative. This
chapter concludes that these novels are two literary exercises in queering myth and, in doing so,
they reveal not only a method of reinstigating queer history, but also how queering myth can be
radically politicised in this process.
Finally, ‘“I want to tell the story again”: Palimpsests: Paratexts, and Intertexts’ argues that
mythic adaptations can be understood as palimpsests, since the newer meanings inscribed by
contemporary adapting authors are layered on top of the meanings ascribed to myth throughout
history. The chapter argues that the layer of para- and intertextual awareness demonstrated by
contemporary mythic adapters adds further layers to the myth’s meaning. The chapter begins by
proving that the contemporary authors within the scope of this thesis write with an awareness of
the current literary phenomenon of women’s revisionist myth writing; it goes on to identify the
moments when this paratextual awareness becomes intertextual — references within the novels
to the work of the authors’ contemporaries, to the novels that further contribute to the present
popularity of female authors adapting Greek myth. This has led to a phenomenon within this
genre of women writing about their current literary circumstances or, more specifically, women
writing about women writing about myths.
Ultimately, the goal of this project is to critically examine the ongoing trend within
women’s writing of mythic adaptation. It seeks to demonstrate that this phenomenon is not only
popular, but illustrates how contemporary feminism has shaped both the fields of Classics and
literature, as well as fuelling a mode of writing that is essentially interdisciplinary. The genre of
contemporary feminist myth writing instigates a creative and political interrogation of the
institution of Classics and the patriarchal cultures it has supported.

10
 Methodology

Since at least Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), women writers have adapted figures from
Greek myth, but in recent years there has been a more intense level of activity in this field. This
project primarily addresses why there has been such an expansion of interest among women
writers in adapting and retelling classical mythology, and what this work reveals about current
issues and priorities within feminism and feminist theory. The investigation of these questions
also involves the careful consideration of an appropriate methodology which both selects the
most useful strands of feminist literary theory and is also sufficiently agile to incorporate feminist
work in classical studies and, where relevant, other disciplines. This chapter outlines how
feminist literary criticism is employed as a methodology, as well as key methodologies from
Women’s Studies. It goes on to pay particular attention to gynocriticism, Angela Carter’s
feminist writing praxis, writing as re-vision, feminist myth criticism, recent feminist scholarship
on intersectionality and the internet, and radical reception theories.
First, I will briefly outline the work of second-wave1 feminist thinkers that were
instrumental in determining and critiquing the violence of Western literature. In Sexual Politics,
Kate Millett argues that ‘sex has a frequently neglected political aspect’ (1970: xix). She goes on
to analyse the violent influence of patriarchy in sexual relations as it is portrayed in literature,
looking particularly at the work of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer. The text
opens with a close analysis of a passage from Miller’s Sexus (1965) with a particular focus on the
motif of the male hero overcoming or outwitting the woman in his sexual quest. In Millett’s
interpretation, the passage not only evokes a sense of empowerment and ‘excitations of sexual
intercourse’ for male readers, it is also ‘a male assertion of dominance over a weak, compliant,
and rather unintelligent female’ (Millett 1970: 6). It is therefore emblematic of what Millett
terms ‘sexual politics’ at the fundamental level of sexual intercourse. The literature reflects
sexual violence inflicted upon women by men, and this, on a sexual level, reflects the wider
social oppression of women under patriarchy. Of course, this theory falls into the same
essentialist pitfall as much second-wave feminist thought. Essentialism propounds that there are
1
There has been much debate in the last decade on the relative usefulness of the wave metaphor for feminism. See
Nicholson (2015) for a comprehensive summary of the debate, and Hewitt (2012) for the potential for regenerating
the wave metaphor.

11
unique male and female essences: broadly, men are defined by their sexual violence and
subjugation of women, while women are defined by their pacifism and caregiving. There is also a
biological component to this, that men and women’s social roles are determined by their
physiological differences. Essentialist stances are criticised for perpetuating outdated sex-based
stereotypes, as well as being trans-exclusionary, and unhelpful for people ranging from
cisgendered women who cannot have children to masculine-presenting non-binary people.2
Nevertheless, Millett’s theory remains useful as a theoretical underpinning for the feminist
response to literary misogyny and its relationship to patriarchy in society.
Andrea Dworkin’s study of pornography also holds relevance, since she uses
pornography as a vehicle to analyse male power. For Dworkin, pornography reinforces several
strains of patriarchal control, including ‘the power of the self, physical power over and against
others, the power of terror, [...] the power of owning, the power of money, and the power of sex’
(Dworkin 1981; 2013: 83). Pornography reflects the ideology of male domination, which posits
that men are superior to women and ‘physical possession of the female is a natural right of the
male’ (Ibid., 85). Pornography is a prism through which to view male sexual violence against
women, which is a facet of patriarchal control and systemic misogyny. While Millett’s theory
pertained primarily to sexual intercourse in male-authored literature and Dworkin’s theory is
focused on pornography in its most visual and literal sense, these theories do have important
implications for the Western literary canon more broadly. They both lay bare the violence
inherent in the Western canon, and how it is used to normalise and enforce systemic misogyny.
They also provide a framework for feminist responses to canonical gender-based violence,
particularly Millett’s methodology of close textual analysis to demonstrate how art is used to
maintain patriarchal hegemony. This study, by its nature of being about women’s novelistic
responses to a core facet of the Western canon, benefits from these early feminist theories on
gender-based violence in literature.
For the purposes of this study, I combine close textual analysis with a variety of
predominantly feminist approaches to literary criticism and classical studies. In Humm’s model
(1994: 7-8), feminist criticism addresses four issues in literary criticism. Firstly, by re-examining

2
See Hines (2019) for the epistemological and political tensions between feminism and transness in the twenty-first
century, and current debates on biological and social essentialism.

12
male texts, androcentric literary history is addressed, and patriarchal portrayals of women are
confronted. Secondly, the invisibility of women writers is highlighted, and a new literary history
is charted with neglected women’s writing and oral history being recovered. Third, feminist
criticism constructs a “feminist reader”, by offering new methods and theory. This encourages
texts to be read in the context of feminist teaching and wider political practice, thus equipping
readers with new knowledge and wider critical questions (see Beetham & Beetham 1992:
168-173). Fourth, we are encouraged to act as feminist readers by creating new writing and
discourse. In researching contemporary feminist adaptations of Greek myth, the patriarchal
domination of the field – from mythographers in antiquity to the historic androcentrism in
classical studies – is addressed, and redressed through feminist scholarship and creative writing
that has excavated the forgotten, or reductively portrayed women of Greek myth. If feminist
criticism addresses ideologies and practices of gender-based inequality, feminist literary criticism
attends to how these have shaped literary texts; both, notably, are concerned with feminist
discourse and praxis (ibid., viii). Feminist (literary) criticism lacks a unifying ideology, with
Humm going as far as to assert that it is ‘impossible to write feminist literary criticism […]
untouched by feminist thinking in other disciplines and feminist thinking outside the academy’
and that although ‘it has no party line’ it ‘brings together any ways of looking which in turn draw
on different disciplines and debates’ (Humm 1994: viii; Humm 1995: xi). This interdisciplinarity
informs my analysis as I draw upon feminist discourse from across disciplines. Of course,
feminist classical scholarship – for example by Sarah B. Pomeroy, Mary Lefkowitz, Marta
Weigle, Vanda Zajko, and Katie Fleming – is indispensable to any critical approach to
contemporary feminist adaptations of Greek myth. Their specific analyses of mythical figures
through feminist questions about – for example – agency and oppression, and their
considerations of the relationship between Greek myth and modern feminisms are strongly
aligned with the aims of this thesis. Clearly, however, such feminist scholarship in classical
studies must needs be qualified and adapted when deployed in feminist literary studies of the
contemporary novel.
Humm’s specific reference to ‘feminist thinking outside the academy’ is also central to
my analysis. By drawing on popular feminist writers (such as Laura Bates); classical writing for
general audiences (such as Helen Morales’ Antigone Rising and Natalie Haynes’ Pandora’s Jar);

13
and relevant journalism, I have selected work that specifically speaks to the adaptations I have
selected, but which I hope also provides a model of a more comprehensive set of critical contexts
and reference points for feminist analysis of classical literature. To consider contemporary
conceptions of Antigone without Morales’ exploration of the subversive power of ancient myths
for modern society would be, for example, to overlook her interpretation of Antigone as an
enduring figure of young female activism. Similarly, Natalie Haynes is an adapter of Greek myth
herself, as well as being one of the most vocal advocates for the importance of Classics in
contemporary education and culture. Therefore, Haynes’ popular discourse – in Pandora’s Jar,
as well as her Guardian column and BBC Radio 4 series Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the
Classics – are vital to this research because she exemplifies the way popular discourses on the
Classics in the media can provide immediate and innovative insights. Moreover, such work helps
to break down the ‘ivory tower’ prejudice about the Classics –– a term used throughout this
thesis to refer to the manner in which working-class people have historically been excluded from
classical scholarship and pedagogy.3 In terms of second-wave feminism, Classics has been
upheld as the epitome of exclusionary institutional and pedagogical practices. Watkins evokes the
image of a ‘straw person classicist, revealing in the arcane delights of Greek principals,’ who has

3
Important work on the diversification of Classics include Bernal’s Black Athena (1987) which argues that the Greek
mythic tradition can be traced back to African and Asiatic myths (for discussions of this controversial study, see
Lefkowitz and MacLean [1996]; Daniels [2017]; McCoskey [2018]) and Greenwood’s work on Black traditions of
classical reception (such as Afro-Greeks [2010]). Also relevant is Stray’s work on the construction of the relationship
between Classics and class in Britain, including the monograph Classics Transformed (1998) which provides an
account of Classics as a discipline throughout British educational reforms, and the edited collection Classics in
Britain (2018) which is organised around the study of Classics at elite higher education institutions, the role of
publishing history and societies, and pedagogical approaches to the Classics. Influenced by Stray, Hall and Stead’s A
People’s History of Classics (2020) explores the influence of the classical tradition on the lives of working class
people, whose voices have traditionally been overlooked in classical scholarship and pedagogy. ‘Classics has long
functioned to exclude working-class people from educational privileges’ and ‘Classics was uniquely instrumental in
the intellectual and cultural reproduction of class hierarchies in Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian society’, but this
does not necessarily mean that lower-class culture was a ‘Classics-Free Zone’ (Hall & Stead 2020: 10). Their work
excavates the cultural past at the intersection of classical culture and working-class identities, drawing upon
resources as wide-ranging as memoirs, Trade Union collections, poetry, factory archives, and artefacts and
documents in regional museums (Ibid., 12). Moreover, their study investigates what less privileged people did with
their ‘hard-won’ classical knowledge, including using it as a springboard for social advancement; career progression
in higher education, politics, or other industries; working on the excavation of alternative cannons or providing them
with their own radical poetry; or the burlesquing of the classics in creative class warfare (Ibid., 12). In the present,
Classics can be used in curriculums as a class equaliser rather than an indicator and isolator: ‘it has been the
curriculum of empire, but it can be the curriculum of liberation’ (Ibid., 18). A People’s History of Classics
demonstrates that the relationship between the working classes and classical antiquity have been varied, and it
typifies one of the ways in which Classics and classical reception studies can be diversified: by analysing the historic
intersections of class and Classics and advocating for equal education opportunities.

14
‘dug their own cultural grave by denying the immediate, political importance of their work’ ––
that is, the opposite of explicitly radical disciplines such as Women’s Studies (Watkins 1979;
1983: 84). More recent feminist concerns include misogyny in online spaces, recent statistics of
violence against women in domestic and professional settings, intersections of oppression, and
subconscious, systemic gender-based oppression. Such concerns are narrated in recent women’s
myth writing, and they are clearly expounded in popular feminist writing, such as in the work of
Laura Bates and her contemporaries. Hence, the interdisciplinary and, at times, extra-academic,
approach employed in this study is informed by current feminist literary criticism and provides
an extensive critical framework for the research undertaken.
Various key methodologies in Women’s Studies inform feminist critical praxis in literary
studies.4 Tracing the emergence of feminist scholarship in the academy in the 1970s-80s,
Watkins recalls that, before the establishment of Women’s Studies, ‘a woman with explicit,
political goals in, say, philosophy, literature, or the classics, [was] more quickly labelled an
outsider and “unprofessional” than her counterpart in the less culturally powerful […] fields’
such as social policy (Watkins 1979; 1983: 85). Thus, feminist scholars issued an ‘institutional
challenge’ to conservatism in the academy, offering revolutionary scholarship that Watkins
specifically contrasts to the ‘straw person classicist’ (Ibid., 84-6). Feminist scholars are
distinguished by ‘their commitment to a movement for social change, and their conviction that
women have been excluded, devalued, and injured by many aspects of human society,’ (Ibid.,
81). Feminist methodology, in this context, is necessarily defined by its revolutionary goal,
irrespective of its discipline-specific context within the humanities. Maria Mies builds on this in
‘Towards a Methodology for Feminist Research’, where she asserts – as a response to Angela
Carter – that ‘New wine must not be poured into old bottles’ (Mies 1978; 1983: 117). In other
4
Juliet Mitchell’s work was used as a blueprint for the new field of Women’s Studies, and her pioneering of the
feminist revision of Freudian psychoanalysis is central to the reweaponising of myth. Psychoanalysis and Feminism
(1974) was novel in its reconciliation of feminism and psychoanalysis at a time when most feminists were more
focused on criticising Freud’s chauvanism. For Mitchell, abandoning Freudian theory was detrimental to feminism,
since it offers analyses and critiques of patriarchal society that can be utilised by feminists. Moreover, as expounded
in Mad Men and Medusas (2000), Freud utilises myth and literature – most notably the myth of Oedipus and
Shakespeare’s Hamlet – as explanatory devices to illustrate theories of psychoanalysis (2000: 251). Mitchell uses
Don Juan and Iago in Othello as examples of male hysteria, to demonstrate that both men and women suffer from
hysteria. This is despite the fact that hysteria has become gendered in light of centuries of misogyny, while male
hysteria has been otherwise pathologised, for instance as shell shock in the First World War. It is this same method
of myth utilisation (moreover, utilisation written in the knowledge of psychoanalysis’ own myth utilisation), which
later feminist theorists and novelists necesarily draw upon.

15
words, androcentric research methods are fundamentally incompatible with feminist research
praxes, because activist research demands innovative methodologies. Of course Carter’s
implication was that ‘the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode’ (1983; 26) – so
she in fact endorses the concept that new feminist research methodologies will ‘explode’ the
conservative aspects of the academy. Mies rejects androcentric research methods as ‘elitist
narrow-mindedness, abstract thinking, political and ethical impotence and arrogance of the
established academician’ (Mies 1978; 1983: 126) and, like Watkins, defines feminist
methodologies as a site of resistance and activism, within the academy and beyond.
Gynocriticism – the study of women, women writers and female readerships – is a field
within feminist literary criticism that is particularly useful here for the way that it focuses on
female literary tradition, allowing me to address myth revisitation in women’s writing as an
expanding literary tradition. Elaine Showalter defines gynocriticism as ‘the feminist study of
women’s writing, including readings of women’s texts and analyses of the intertextual relations
[...] between women writers (a female literary tradition)’ (Showalter 1990: 189; in Allen 2000:
141). She proposes gynocriticism as an alternative ‘to this angry or loving fixation on male
literature,’ in previous literary criticism (Showalter 1979; 2011: 224). Rather, its goal is to
‘construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, to develop new models
based on the study of female experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories’ (Ibid.,
224). Gynocriticism as a feminist literary method is built upon the foundational methodologies of
Women’s Studies, that were revolutionary in their departure from androcentrism, as well as
French feminist literary criticism, including Écriture féminine. My textual analysis is gynocritical
in that it is focused on the female literary tradition of rewriting Greek myth, particularly in
contemporary women’s writing, and I am situating myself as a specifically feminist reader of
women’s literature. For Nancy K. Miller gynocriticism evokes a desire for change; gynocriticism
is a call to ‘change the subject (this is boring), let’s talk about something else (women writers,
feminist criticism), let’s make the subject different (refigure the universal, change the canon)’
(Miller 1988: 18). Miller’s framework for identifying literature as feminist is valuable for the
way she characterises feminist writing as ‘a resistance to dominant ideologies; for the feminist
critic, the signature is the site of a possible political disruption’ (Ibid., 17). This claim from
Miller is important because there have been some instances in the writing of this thesis when I

16
have questioned whether the text I am working with, or the approach I have taken, can
necessarily be considered feminist. In Miller’s gynocritical model, resistance to dominant
ideologies (particularly the ideologies that speak to gender) is the mark of a feminist text – each
text within the scope of this thesis is a response to a Greek myth and, often, an act of resistance
against the patriarchal domination of the classical field, as well as a space to narrate modern
gender-based issues in a mythical framework.
Angela Carter’s praxis of women’s writing is also methodologically relevant. In ‘Notes From
the Front Line’, Carter acknowledges that the lived experiences of women in certain periods of
history have hampered their creative production, most notably the dangers of childbirth and the
demanding nature of child-rearing. Although this is not to say that women have not engaged in
creative practices: Carter mentions specifically women writers in mediaeval Japan, female
musicians and actors throughout history, and writers in any period since the seventeenth century
in Britain and France, especially childless authors like George Eliot (Carter 1998: 28). Crucial to
to theoretical underpinning of this thesis is Carter’s assertion that ‘most intellectual development
depends upon new readings of old texts’, and that she is ‘all for putting new wine in old bottles,
especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode’ (Ibid., 26). This is to
say that revisiting, rewriting, parodying, or otherwise responding to traditional stories (be they
canonical texts, myths, or – most relevantly in the case of Carter – folklore and fairytales), is at
once a preservation of the old texts and a disruption or destruction of them. Such works are a new
contribution to knowledge using familiar frameworks. Carter describes a writing praxis wherein
she ‘feel[s] free to loot and rummage in an official past, specifically a literary past,’ in the
creation of new, specifically feminist, literature (Ibid., 29). She calls these stories ‘old lies’, the
revisitation of which facilitates an interrogation of the social, political, and literary ‘lies’ that
have their roots in those stories. The Passion of New Eve (1977) is described by the author as an
‘anti-mythic novel’, and she describes her work more broadly as a ‘demythologising business’,
since she posits myths as products of the human mind and reflections of material human practice,
while her own work is about defamiliarising material reality and social constructs (Ibid., 27).
Feminist literary adaptations of Greek myth are evidently ‘new readings of old texts’, and their
relationship with the adapted text is once one of preservation and disruption. There is also, within

17
the tradition of women’s writing practices, a dual acknowledgement of women’s creative
traditions and the gendered imbalances that have hindered them.
The idea of writing as re-vision is vital to the methodology of this project for the way that it
considers the tradition of women writers interrogating and revising literature that has come
before. In ‘When We Dead Awaken’, Adrienne Rich conceptualises re-vision as ‘the act of
looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering a text from a new critical direction’ (Rich
1972: 18). She categorises this method of literary criticism as specifically radical and feminist, an
act of looking back at women’s portrayals in literary history – as two-dimensional symbols in the
service of men’s writing – and revising them in celebration of women’s real, lived and written,
experiences (Ibid., 18-20). Feminist adaptations of Greek myth are acts of re-vision, revisiting
portrayals of women from myth and revising them with fresh perspectives. Moreover,
contemporary feminist myth writers are not only revising the portrayals of mythical women from
antiquity, but also how they have been used in the service of patriarchy throughout the
intervening centuries. For example, Penelope has been employed throughout men’s literature as a
symbol of the good and faithful wife, while Clytemnestra and Helen have continued as
Penelope’s foils, the absolute worst wives – and women – imaginable. In women’s re-visions,
these female figures are afforded richer characterisations that liberate them from the sphere of the
abstract. For Rich, re-visionary reading is essential, because women writers ‘need to know the
writing of the past and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition
but to break its hold over us’ (Ibid., 19). Rich’s use of ‘tradition’ is particularly fruitful to
consider within the context of this thesis, because it is my contention that, since adaptation has
been a part of the classical mythical tradition since the work of Euripides, Plato, and Ovid,
contemporary women’s myth writing is the latest iteration of this mythical tradition. Here,
though, ‘tradition’ is a reference to masculine tradition, the male domination of the textual field
and thus the rendering of women in literature. Feminist revisionist myth writing, then, is at once
a continuation of the mythical tradition, and a breaking of the androcentric traditions in literary
history.
Annette Kolodny and Monique Wittig have also considered writing as re-vision in ways that
inform this thesis. Kolodny asserts that ‘re-vision constitutes the key to an ongoing literary
history’ (1980: 464) which effectively communicates the argument that adaptation and

18
innovation are integral to the continuation of literary tradition. Due to the focus on adaptation in
this study, re-vision is an aspect of feminist literary criticism that is essential to the methodology
employed. Its importance is underlined by Kolodny’s conclusion that ‘not only would […]
revisionary rereading open new avenues for comprehending male texts but […] it would, as well,
allow us to appreciate the variety of women's literary expression,’ (Ibid., 465). Analysing
contemporary feminist adaptations of myth as revisionary rereading considers how they are at
once a new reading of “male” myths and a distinct genre within current women’s writing. On a
linguistic level, Monique Wittig’s call to reclaim oppressive language also applies to analysing
feminist myth writing as re-vision. Wittig asks, ‘Can we redeem slave? […] How is woman
different? Will we continue to write white, master, man? […] We must produce a political
transformation of the key concepts, that is of the concepts which are strategic for us’ (1980;
2011: 373). In rewriting myths, women are reclaiming the stories of gender-based oppression,
such as abduction, rape and lack of agency. Moreover, feminist revisionist myth-making needs to
be understood as a response to what Wittig calls ‘over-mythified’ myths (Ibid., 374). For Wittig,
thinkers such as Freud and Lacan typify how myths have been used, altered, and heterosexualised
in the service of maintaining patriarchal hegemony. Her manifesto of linguistic reclamation is a
useful approach for analysing feminist revisionist myth, because it can be applied to the manners
by which adapting authors deal with the misogyny ingrained in myth, and how those myths have
been used in the service of patriarchy throughout history.
Myth is a critical genre within feminist literary criticism; indeed, the work done by feminist
myth critics is foundational to my theoretical framework. As Humm explains (1994: 54-60),
myths represent the masculine psyche and, while women are represented in mythology, they are
typically rendered by male writers. Feminist myth criticism is therefore a rejection of the
essentialism rooted in mythologised women, with a goal to move beyond androcentrism in
mythic gender representation. Humm suggests that feminist myth criticism is more acceptable to
the literary establishment than other avenues of feminist criticism due to the canonisation of male
myth critics, such as Northrop Frye,5 and the long-running academic tradition of myth criticism.
For feminist critics, myths provide ‘familiar frames which can be reshaped and remade to give a
truer picture of women’s experience’ (Humm 1995: 24). Although myths have a history of being

5
Incidentally, Northrop Frye was Margaret Atwood’s academic mentor.

19
utilised in the service of misogyny, they can be ‘reshaped and remade’ by feminist writers. In
‘Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction’, Susan Sellers highlights the dualism
that is inherent in feminist myth criticism, that it is at once ‘an act of demolition, exposing and
detonating the stories that have hampered women,’ as well as ‘a task of construction – of
bringing into being enabling alternatives’ (2001; 2011: 189). In Sellers’ model, the familiarity of
the myth provides compass points from which to communicate innovative and dissident theories
(Ibid., 189). Altering (augmenting; re-contextualising; intervening in) the myth is necessary for
the act of creation, and to move away from reductive portrayals of women in myth. Yet she also
cautions that, ‘if we make too many holes we are in danger of writing something other than
myth’ (Ibid., 188). YA fantasy literature that uses Greek gods and mythology in their otherwise
original plot and worldbuilding – such as Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series (2005-2009),
Alexandra Bracken’s Lore (2021), and Kalynn Bayron’s This Poison Heart (2021) – exemplify
this theory of making holes in the myth, in that they have written something other than myth
using myths, rather than writing an altered myth. On the other hand, Sellers points to ironic
mimicry and clever twists as examples of how feminists can ‘open the myth’, leaving in place
enough of the myth that is still recognisable while still incorporating new possibilities (Ibid.,
188). Luce Irigaray, for instance, reflects on mother/daughter bonds using the myth of Demeter
and Persephone; both Irigaray and Julia Kristeva incorporate the myth of Antigone in their
criticism. Each of these feminist critics have twisted their respective myths to encompass new
possibilities, speaking to the generative potential of myth for feminist theory.
Much early feminist classical scholarship was focussed on appropriating goddesses as
symbols of feminine power (Caputi 1992: 426), and ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ by Hélène
Cixous is perhaps the most famous use of myth within feminist literary criticism. Cixous
epitomises the use of monstrous women for feminist purposes. She asserts that men’s literature,
from antiquity to present (for her, 1976), ‘riveted us [women] between two horrifying myths:
between the Medusa and the abyss’ (Cixous, trans. Cohen & Cohen, 1976: 885), because women
are either presented as monstrous or not at all. This suggests that women writers have had to
navigate the strait between these two ‘horrifying myths’ in an Odyssean manner, to represent
women in literature. As an alternative, Cixous proposes rewriting these monstrous women, in
order to challenge and frighten men: 

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 […] isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop
listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You
only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's
beautiful and she's laughing. (Ibid., 885) 

Here, the ‘Sirens were men’ as they used their (literary) voices to lure women to their own
destruction, through their monstrous representations of femininity. To ‘look at the Medusa
straight on’ is a call for re-analysis of Medusa outside of patriarchal prejudice. In doing this,
Medusa is liberated from her monstrous reputation and we are reminded that it is only men that
were petrified by looking at Medusa. The male address is confirmed when Cixous invites us to
‘Look at the trembling Perseuses moving backward toward us, clad in apotropes’ (Ibid., 885).
Here the plural ‘Perseuses’ refers to the men who previously considered themselves (literary and
social) heroes, yet now ‘tremble’ when faced with women re-writing themselves. Apotropes were
Ancient Greek objects intended to ward off evil; here they demonstrate how men demonise
women who oppose patriarchal rule. Ultimately, Cixous is advocating for the revolutionary
power – both in terms of literature and society – of revising previously oppressed mythical – or,
more broadly, literary – women for female empowerment. The work done by feminist myth
critics will be drawn upon throughout this study, and the methods by which these critics
approach myth – as a space that has previously served patriarchal purposes but which has
generative potential for women’s writing – provide a methodological base for the research
undertaken.
Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology is a seminal work of feminist myth criticism, in which she
introduces her theory of the hag-ocracy. Her primary concern is to expose the ways in which
male critics manipulate myth to maintain patriarchal hegemony by concealing aspects of Greek
myth that challenge their ideologies (such as Apollo’s homosexuality and Dionysus’ androgyny)
and proffer myths that consolidate male power. She points to Athena as an example of a woman
who is emblematic of male aims, due to her patronage of war and male heroism and her repeated
lack of support for the mortal women of myth. Another example in-line with Daly’s theory is
Penelope, who has been lauded as the perfect model of wifeliness against which other women

21
will inevitably fall short, therefore maintaining female subjugation in the domestic sphere. She
rejects the ‘male myth-masters, [that] fashion prominent and eminently forgettable images of
women in their art, literature, and mass media – images intended to mould women for male
purpose’ – that is, dominant narratives about women – and seeks instead models of womanhood
from the ‘Background’, the ‘wild realm of Hags and Crones’ (Daly 1978: 2). Women’s writing is
an essential part of Daly’s metaethical theory, because ‘As we write/live our own story, we are
uncovering their history, creating Hag-ography and Hag-ology. […] Women traveling into
feminist time/space are creating Hag-ocracy, the place where we govern’ (Ibid., 9). Women, she
claims, must create a new literary (and social) ecology, to redress the male domination of myth
that has been used to cement patriarchal order.
While this is an interesting example of feminist myth criticism, Daly’s work has been
criticised for its essentialism, particularly in her reductive portrayal of men as compulsively
violent and her idealised view of women. Her conception of gender relies on outdated binaries
and stereotypes, but perhaps the most striking critique of Gyn/Ecology is posed by Audre Lorde
in ‘An Open Letter to Mary Daly’ (1979) where she particularly objects to Daly’s eurocentric
focus and reductive, racist portrayals of African women. While Lorde makes clear that she would
have been more sympathetic had Daly chosen only to investigate only European goddesses, but
her choice to draw upon African women only as victims of FGM ghettoises non-white herstories.
Lorde points to Afrekete, Y emanje, Oyo, Mawulisa, the warrior goddesses of the Vodun and
Dan, and the Dahomeian Amazons as examples that Daly could have discussed, and expounds
the importance of looking beyond the Eurocentric vision in Daly’s apparently universal theory. In
her letter, Lorde writes that Daly’s oversight is ‘another instance of the knowledge, crone—ology
and work of women of Color being ghettoized by a white woman dealing only out of a
patriarchal western european frame of reference’. Moreover, she points to the wider implications
of Daly’s oversight in terms of both feminist myth criticism and Western society more broadly.
She explains how racism intersects with sexism (a phenomenon more recently labelled
misogynoir), an issue which white feminists have a tendency to overlook in their quest for
universalities. In terms of myth criticism, Daly’s oversight is emblematic of ‘the assumption that
the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women
to call upon for power and background,’ while ‘nonwhite women and our herstories are

22
noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimization’. Indeed, in feminist literary
criticism and beyond, ‘The history of white women who are unable to hear Black women's
words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging’, and it is particularly the case
in feminist myth criticism, that either focuses only on European myths, or that looks to African
mythos only insofar as it serves their purposes. I will further address this issue in the ‘Literature
Review’ below, with regard to Beyoncé’s more recent contribution to this dialogue.
There is a problem more broadly with whitewashing in Classics as a discipline (see
Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996; McCoskey 2018; Umachandran 2019). Often, unfortunately, this
issue falls beyond the scope of this thesis, because my focus is not on classical scholarship, but
on literature that adapts classical myths. Hence, if the authors are not focused on race in their
retellings, it is not an issue that I can address. That being said, it is a relevant issue when
considering works like Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones
(2011), which both revisit Greek mythical women (Antigone and Medea, respectively) while
foregrounding modern issues of race (in Britain and southern USA, respectively). Indeed,
contemporary adaptations of Greek myth where the authors have specifically written race into
their retellings are doing much of the work in decolonising and re-politicising the Classics. This
occurs outside of the academy, for general audiences, though it can and should be utilised within
the academy in efforts to decolonise Classics and redirect the use of classical imagery and
iconography for more radical, less oppressive political standpoints.
Humm notes that ‘In the long run, myth criticism may be more important not to feminist
criticism but to creative writing’ (1994: 70). This prediction suggests that women’s creative
writing may be the more productive site of generative feminist myth-making towards which this
study certainly points. Indeed, contemporary adaptations of myth in women’s fiction are the most
recent instances of feminist revisionist myth writing that also began in feminist myth criticism.
This blurring between critical and creative writing is true of feminist writing more generally.
Humm attests to this, because she argues that literary criticism (‘the activity of textual analysis’)
and literary creativity (‘the expression of female experience’) come together; ‘critical practice
and experiential testimony’ also come together in feminist literary criticism, thus erasing
previously-held distinctions between fiction and criticism (Ibid., 296). Methodologically, then, in
analysing the creative prose adaptations of Greek myth, I am also dealing with the most

23
contemporary feminist engagement with myth criticism, and the ways in which these creative
works impact on the study of Classics shall be revisited throughout the project.
Before moving onto the methodological relevance of radical reception theories, it would be
useful to draw upon more recent feminist scholarship that proffers an intersectional approach of
the sort adopted in this thesis. Intersectionality offers a method to understand how structures such
as capitalism, heterosexism, patriarchy, white supremacy, abled supremacy and others work
together to harm people. Intersectionality is a way for marginalised women to communicate how
a combination of oppressive structures impact their lives, and cause them to experience multiple
forms of discrimination at once. The term was originally coined by feminist legal scholar
Kimberlé Crenshaw to make ‘feminism, anti-racist activism, and anti-discrimination law do what
[she] thought they should—highlight the multiple avenues through which racial and gender
oppression were experienced’ (Crenshaw 1989 in Eric-Udorie 2018: 21). The theory draws upon
the work of earlier Black feminists and womanists, notably Sojourner Truth’s ‘Ain’t I A
Woman?’ speech (1851); Audre Lorde’s ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s
House’ (1984) which calls to prioritise difference in activist communities; and bell hooks’
definition of feminism as ‘a movement to end sexist oppression [which] directs our attention to
systems of domination and the inter-relatedness of sex, race, and class oppression’ (hooks 1984:
33). Although the theory started with a focus on the double-discrimination faced by Black
women, it has become a framework applicable to other intersections of oppression, including, but
not limited to, the oppressions faced by people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, fat people,
disabled people, poor people, and other marginalised groups (Eric-Udorie 2018: 13). Moreover,
intersectionality opens up a space to critique key feminist writers for their exclusionary practices
without undermining feminism as a movement or said writer’s contribution to it. Examples of
this include Betty Friedan’s lesbophobia in 1969 or Germaine Greer’s transphobia in 1999 (Ibid.,
23-4). Can We All Be Feminists (ed. Eric-Udorie 2018) is a recent edited collection on the theme
of intersectional feminism, which features chapters written by people whose feminism intersects
with their other identifiers, such as faith, transness, fatness, poverty, diaspora, and imperialism.
This indicates a rejection of a feminist community, or sisterhood, that is blind to intersections of
oppression, and caters exclusively to privileged and affluent women –– often condensed to the
moniker ‘white feminism’. It is necessary to contextualise intersectionality here, since this thesis

24
takes an intersectional approach to its feminist analysis, and the texts within its scope are
published within third-wave feminism, which includes within its purview intersectionality.6
Eric-Udorie comments on the frivolity of current mainstream feminism, where unspecific
#GirlPower is prioritised over the #SayHerName movement (Ibid., 29-30). However, both
#GirlPower and #SayHerName – while on opposite ends of the scale of import – indicate that
much contemporary feminism is happening online. In 1994, Sadie Plant coined the term
‘cyberfeminism’, building upon Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1984), to refer to online space
as a means of worldbuilding, and to challenge the patriarchal normativity of an offline
mainstream (Russell 2020: 55). Cyberfeminism introduced modern technology to mainstream
feminism, and offered online spaces as sites of feminist networking, theorising, and critiquing,
immediately and whilst transcending geographical limitations (Ibid., 57). Early cyberfeminism
also suffered from privileging white, affluent women –– it ‘marginalized queer people, trans
people, and people of color aiming to decolonize digital space by their production via similar
channels and networks’ (Ibid., 57). Nevertheless, it laid the groundwork for online feminism and
negotiations of power, embodied by #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Both are movements
‘defined and driven by technology, harbingers of a promising and potentially more inclusive
“fourth wave” unfolding on the horizon’ (Ibid., 59). Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism is a
manifesto advocating for the activist potential of glitches: in technology, glitches are errors and
failures to function, and this same form can be applied to nonconforming bodies, especially
non-white, queer, gender non-conforming bodies. Within glitch feminism, glitches are a strategy
of nonperformance, particularly for people coming of age on the internet (Ibid., 23-4). The
mediatisation of texts and the inextricability of current feminism and the internet are threads that
run throughout this thesis, particularly in the analysis of #MeToo’s impact on consent in
literature and the online fandom surrounding certain texts, as well as in my use of online
criticism that occurs on Twitter and Medium.
Although feminist literary criticism is my primary methodology in this thesis, reception
theory, classical reception, and feminist reception are also methodologically important.
Reception theory is the shift in focus from the author and their work to the reader and their
6
For more on the many aspects of third-wave feminism, see The Politics of Third Wave Feminisms, where confusion
surrounding what constitutes third-wave feminism is suggested as a defining characteristic of the epoch (Evans
2015: np).

25
response to the text and treating literature as a dialectical process of production and reception, or
writing and reading (Holub 1984: xii; 57). Classical reception is the study of the ways in which
classical mythology has survived from antiquity to the present day. It is an enormous subject that
includes mythological handbooks in the Hellenistic Age; the work of Roman poets such as Ovid
and Virgil; the treatment of myths in Middle Ages manuscripts; their rediscovery in the art and
literature of the Renaissance; their treatment by Shakespeare and Milton; how myths have been
used in literature from the eighteenth century to present; their use in philosophy and psychology;
and the manifestations of myth in recent music and films (Morford et al., 2011: 693; 732). The
‘traditional reception template’ can be thought of as ‘X author/artist’s use of Y ancient
text/idea/motif’ (Hanink 2017: np.). Of course, much of this thesis is dedicated to how and why
contemporary authors are using ancient materials and thus falls within the scope of classical
reception.
There has been an increased level of interest in reception in the past twenty-five years of
Classics scholarship. In his monograph Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception,
Martindale expounds that ‘Meaning [...] is always realized at the point of reception’ and ‘a
writer can never control the reception of [their] own work’ (1997: 3-4), which are the
foundations of reception studies. It has not always been a readily accepted discipline, however,
with Martindale citing a 1989 journal article that offers the image of Virgilian poetry becoming
‘encrusted by the barnacles of later tradition and interpretation’ that need to be scraped away to
see the ‘true shape’ of the ancient work (Jenkyns 1989 in Martindale 1997: 4). For Martindale,
this is a familiar rhetoric among classical scholars – philologists in particular – for whom the text
comes fully armed with the intentions of its creator, and is read correctly by its contemporaries,
then it later ‘suffers depredations from the follies, incompetences and sheer ignorance and
naïvety of our nearer ancestors’ (Martindale 1997: 4). This is flawed, since all readers approach a
text with their own backgrounds, prejudices, and aims. Moreover, texts do not exist in a vacuum:
Martindale provides the example that Homer is forever changed by Virgil and Milton, who have
both left their traces on Homeric texts and therefore enable new possibilities of meaning (Ibid.,
6). For Martindale, this leads to two theses: that numerous insights into ancient texts are locked
up in later imitations, translations, and such, and that our current interpretations of texts are
constructed by the chain of receptions (Ibid., 7). Hence, we cannot get back to any original

26
meaning free from subsequent interventions into the literature. To continue with the above
example, the first thesis would conclude that Virgil gives us insights into Homer, while the
second would conclude that, since Virgil, no reading of Homer could be wholly free from
Virgilian presence, even if the interpreter is not directly familiar with Virgil’s work (Ibid., 8). In
terms of this thesis, an example would be that adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone, such as
Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, give us insight into the Sophoclean drama, and they alter how the
drama will henceforth be received. This is to say that ‘each work becomes an intervention into a
textual field’ (Ibid., 17). Moreover, such adaptations exist in a tradition that also includes all
subsequent interventions into the tradition, such as psychoanalytical and philosophical responses
to Antigone, even if the adapting author herself has not read those writings.
More recent scholarship has been focused on the future prospects and political potential of
classical reception. Porter proposes that ‘reception studies have shown immense promise as a
way of deepening the dialogue between modernity and classical antiquity’ (Porter 2007: 470). He
specifies that reception of the ancient world is something that occurred in the ancient world itself,
with earlier Greek writers adapting an oral tradition into a written one, and later Greek and
Roman writers responding to their predecessors. In light of this internal reception, we can
understand that the past ‘was at no time clear-cut, but was always only layered, cluttered, and
palimpsestic’ (Ibid., 472). Porter outlines that reception studies tend to cluster around particular
research areas, such as time periods (Early Modern, Enlightenment, Victorian, Modernist) and
themes (literary transpositions, translations, gender politics), with literature and performance arts
taking precedence (theatre, cinema, and opera) (Ibid., 474-5). I would also add to the latter
novelistic and philosophical reception and video games, such as Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
(2018) and Hades (2018). Porter encourages as future paths for reception the study of Classics as
a discipline as ongoing reception; methodologies of reception; the comparative study of Western
and non-Western classical traditions; and the ‘reception of reception’ itself –– that is, a reflexive
study of the discipline of classical reception (Ibid., 475-8). Most methodologically relevant here
is Porter’s consideration of the interdisciplinarity of classical reception, since non-Classicists can
conduct studies of classical reception. Knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin languages is
therefore not necessary for some research within classical reception. As Porter puts it, ‘why
should someone studying the connections between Byron, Keats, or Goethe and Greco-Roman

27
antiquity trouble herself with the philology of Aeschylus and Livy?’ (Ibid., 479). Ultimately,
‘excellent work in reception should [not] always require specialist philological expertise or
detailed knowledge of the [...] production of the source work’ (Ibid., 479). This opens up a more
diverse and interdisciplinary field, and more novel approaches to the classics and their reception.
It is relevant to this thesis, where I position myself as a researcher with a background in literary
studies and Women’s Studies, rather than a background in Classics, accounting for my
methodology of close textual analysis and feminist theory in this study of a particular facet of
classical reception.
Notably, there has been a trend in more recent classical reception scholarship towards
including an openly activist agenda. As Leonard and Prins observe in their foreword to Classical
Reception and the Political, classical reception can become contemporary political activism
(2010: 3). Classical reception is ‘engaged not only with the past but also with the present’ and, as
well as establishing a connection between the two, the field can open the way to alternative
futures (Ibid., 4-5). Classical reception has activist potential. Critical classical reception
acknowledges, often explicitly but sometimes implicitly, that Greco-Roman antiquity has ‘played
a major role in constructing and authorizing racism, colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy,
Western-centrism, body normativity, and other entrenched, violent societal structures’ (Hanink
2017: np.). In my analyses of how Greek myth is being used to narrate racism, hegemony, and
gender-based violence, I will be employing a methodology aligned with critical classical
reception. The most useful facet of critical classical reception to the research undertaken in this
thesis is feminist classical reception. The current vogue of feminist revisionist myth writing has
been utilised as evidence for the increasing popularity of feminist reception in Classics (Hinds
2019: np.). Such retellings are works of feminist classical reception because they reject ‘the
misogynistic model presented in the ancient source material and refreshing myths through the
lens of otherwise voiceless characters,’ (Ibid., np.). Indeed, Zajko opens ‘Feminist Models of
Reception’, with a consideration of Margaret Atwood’s Penelope in The Penelopiad, who
‘complains vociferously about the cultural authority of her husband’s versions of the events that
shaped both their lives’ (Zajko 2011: 195). Moreover, there are examples outside of the scope of
this thesis that also demonstrate the current popularity of feminist reception in Classics. As
feminist scholars Kennerly and Woods note, the movie Wonder Woman (dir. Patty Jenkins, 2017)

28
was an occasion of classical reception, related to the work already underway on classical
reception in comics and how classics survive in modern fantasy (2017: np.). Evidently, this is a
particularly fertile moment for feminist classical reception. Zakjo considers ‘how richly
feminism at one time irrigated even the most dryly canonical of classical landscapes’, though she
firmly states that ‘new brands of feminism’ – that is, more recent, intersectional models of
feminism – have been slow to present themselves in the field of Classics (Zajko 2011: 200; 202).
This is a sentiment shared more recently by Hinds, who asks in her consideration of consent in
mythical retellings, ‘If we can’t get cis, white feminism right in reception, then how can we ever
hope to get intersectional feminism right? I want to see intersectional feminist reception of
classical myths bloom,’ (Hinds 2019: np). Hence, there is a theoretical foundation for
considering contemporary works by women utilising the methodology of classical reception and,
more specifically, feminist classical reception that aspires to intersectionality. Wonder Woman
was described by Kennerly and Woods as having ‘one well-greaved leg in the ancient world and
one in ours’ (2017: np.): ultimately, a research project with one leg in Classics and one in
contemporary literary studies requires an equally interdisciplinary methodology.

29
 Literature Review

The chapters of this thesis organise contemporary mythic adaptations thematically. Each chapter
therefore begins with its own theoretical framework that provides a critical context for the
selected texts. For example, the first chapter ‘Women in the Texts’, opens with relevant feminist
classicist scholarship that makes the case for excavating the side-lined women of Greek myth. I
draw upon Sarah Pomeroy for an introduction to the role of women in Greek antiquity to
contextualise their role in myth, as well as to introduce the importance of studying ancient and
mythical women in the modern day – because it illuminates contemporary gender issues
(Pomeroy 1975; 2015: xii). I go on to consider the treatment of Medusa by Natalie Haynes (as
well as Haynes’ takes on Clytemnestra and the Amazons) in order to evidence the wealth of
theory that has been produced by feminist myth criticism, as well as to establish the theoretical
approach for feminist revisionist myth writing. The chapter is thereafter divided into three parts,
focusing on three women from Homeric epics: Penelope, Briseis, and Helen. Each of these
sections also opens by outlining relevant arguments regarding the female mythical figure in
question. For example, the final section on Helen opens with Bettany Hughes’ contention that
Helen is an implacable figure throughout history because Helen has a trinity of guises (goddess,
princess, and whore), and then Laurie Maguire’s insistence on the need to establish a literary
biography - rather than a historical account - of Helen’s reception. The next chapter, ‘Antigone’s
Afterlives’, functions as a case study in the adaptation of female mythical figures and therefore
begins with a pivotal exploration of her treatment by feminist and psychoanalytic theorists
interested in her potential as a revolutionary figure. Since the next chapter, ‘Mythic
Masculinities’, is focused on how modern conceptions of masculinity are staged and interrogated
in mythical retellings, it opens with a useful framework of masculinity as outlined by R.W.
Connell and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who posit masculinity as a set of practices to maintain
patriarchal hegemony and as something that can be explored through male homosocial desire,
respectively. The penultimate chapter, ‘Queering Myth’, opens with an overview of queerness in
ancient myth and history, followed by an exploration of how ancient queerness has been
theorised in queer classical reception. To do this, I draw particularly on research by Jennifer
Ingleheart and Hannah Clarke. The final chapter of this thesis, ‘Palimpsests: Paratexts and

30
Intertexts’ necessarily begins with the outlining of a number of theories of paratexts because they
establish how ‘paratexts’ and ‘intertexts’ will be understood for the purposes of my research, as
well as providing the theoretical underpinning for the ‘literary ecosystem’ that the chapter seeks
to demonstrate.
Rather than take a chapter by chapter approach, this literature review will provide a
critical context for the project as a whole, since all the chapters are connected by a common set
of questions which apply various questions in feminist and classical theory to literary adaptation
of myth. Firstly, I will acknowledge that the texts within the scope of this thesis are, in one sense,
doing nothing new, since redeploying myth has been a part of the literary tradition from the
Renaissance’s deployment of ancient knowledge, to the 18th–19th centuries’ adoption of
classical tropes, to Modernism’s transformative encounter with antiquity. Particularly relevant to
this thesis is the refashioning of mythical templates and characters in Anglophone Modernism. I
will then explore foundational feminist classical theories, mainly the work of Sarah Pomeroy,
Mary Lefkowitz, Marina Warner, and Amy Richlin and Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, paying
particular attention to how they inform more recent feminist classicist scholarship. The core part
of this literature review will focus on the published work within feminist Classics that is crucial
to the formation of this thesis. Non-traditional sources – namely women’s myth writing for
general audiences, podcasts, and articles published on Eidolon – are essential both for sketching
out the current critical climate of women’s contributions to Classics, and to provide the
framework for this thesis specifically. This chapter will close with a consideration of how one
studies adaptations more broadly.
First, I shall briefly elucidate the manner in which I engage with ancient sources. Working
with translations involves choices informed by politics and aesthetics – striving to select
translations that best fit the goals of your current project, your political goals, and to maintain
consistency insofar as possible in the project. My animating principle in selecting translations is
accessibility, achieved by plain diction and omission of anachronistic prejudices. This theory is
summarised by Emily Wilson when she cautions that translation ‘always, necessarily, involves
interpretation; there is no such thing as a translation that provides anything like a transparent
window through which the reader can see the original’ (2018: 86). Such a claim to absolute or
direct transparency in translation is a misconception, a ‘gendered metaphor’ (Ibid., 86),

31
suggesting that the translation’s worth will always be secondary to the original, male-authored
text. As well as accepting that translation is an act of creation, Wilson’s translating philosophy
also includes a rejection of the ‘notion that Homeric epic must be rendered in grand, ornate,
rhetorically elevated English’, popularised by Alexander Pope and his contemporaries; instead,
translations should be ‘rhythmical’ but ‘not difficult or ostentatious’ (Ibid., 83). I favour less
florid translations, informed in large part by Wilson’s translating ethos; my preferred translations
are more accessible because they choose more simplistic, modern-day diction. This choice is a
vital aspect of destabilising the ‘ivory tower’ in Classics and of disseminating literature from
antiquity beyond the academy and social elites. Wilson specifies that she ‘avoid[s] importing
contemporary types of sexism into this ancient poem,’ (Ibid., 89) . Though she does not overlook
the sexism and patriarchy that exist in the Odyssey, she rejects anachronistic misogyny that has a
long tradition in translation. For example, most translations of the Odyssey into English have
Telemachus call the slaves ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’, implying that their sexual history justifies their
murders, whereas the original Greek does not include these misogynistic insults (Ibid., 89).
Similarly, Emily Wilson departs from the long tradition of calling the twelve hanged girls
‘maids’, calling them ‘slaves’ instead, which is a more accurate rendering of their position as
well as an indication of their lack of agency in the crimes that they are hanged for. On the topic
of Helen, Wilson reflects that ‘Many contemporary translators render Helen’s “dog-face” as if it
were equivalent to “shameless Helen” (or “Helen the bitch”)’ (Ibid., 89). In using ‘hounded’,
Wilson maintains the metaphor and loses the misogyny, evidencing the way that translation
always includes (political and aesthetic) choices.
Emily Wilson is ostensibly the first woman to translate the Odyssey, although Wilson herself
refutes this claim on the basis that the Odyssey has been translated into non-Anglophone
languages by women and for the reason that marketing her work as such contributes to the
othering of female academics and maintains the male default (@EmilyRCWilson 2 October
2019). Nevertheless, as Myers (2019) notes, Wilson’s translation is part of a growing trend in the
past decade of female classicists translating ancient epics, citing Sarah Ruden’s Aeneid (2008)
and Caroline Alexander’s Iliad (2015) as two such examples. Myers makes clear that male
translators ‘are permitted and even encouraged to add to and embellish in their translations
because often, their voices are understood to be similar to that of the (masculine) classical

32
author’, while translations by women are heavily critiqued for any presence of the translator
herself (Myers 2019: np.). Indeed, Wilson’s translation has been considered by some critics as
akin to Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls and Madeline Miller’s Circe as a Homeric adaptation, or
even a ‘piratic feminist manifesto’ (Ibid., np.), implicitly undermining Wilson’s work as an
academic translation and clearly refusing to consider it in relation to its comparators, such as
Robert Fagles’ Odyssey translation.
Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf (2020) translation, though not strictly in the purview of
Classics, figures as a key example of recent work in women’s translation studies. Headley’s
translation also renders the ancient text in accessible English, and she makes revolutionary
linguistic choices – the first, and perhaps most exciting of which, is her choice for the first word,
hwæt. This somewhat untranslatable exclamation has previously been rendered as ‘Listen’,
‘Hark’, ‘Lo’, or, by Seamus Heaney seeking to replicate Irish conversation, ‘So’; Headley
translates hwæt as ‘Bro.’ (Headley 2020: xx; l.1). For Headley, ‘Bro’ can equally make you
family or foe, and it can be used ‘as a means of satirising a certain form of inflated,
overconfident, aggressive male behaviour’ (Ibid., xxi). Indeed, though Beowulf is, in some ways,
‘a manual for how to live as a man’, Headley rejects the idea that it is a masculine text because,
although it is not structured around women, it does contain ‘extensive portrayals of motherhood
and peace-weaving marital compromise’ (Ibid., xxi; xxiii). Her translation aims to ‘shine a light
on the motivations, actions, and desires of the poem’s female characters’ (Ibid., xxiii).
Translations by women should not be treated as the ‘smurfette’ (@EmilyRCWilson 2 October
2019), that is, the trivialised female variation of the male original. Nevertheless, it remains worth
noting that there is current academic momentum for women translating ‘big books by blokes
about battles’ (Beard 2016; in Hanink 2017, np.) in new and exciting ways. Myers favours
women’s translations on her curriculums ‘both for their aesthetic value and, unapologetically, for
the identities of their translators,’ as well as to open up discussions about the gendered act of
translation and to demystify the labour of the translator (Myers 2019: np.). In this thesis I also
favour translations by women, partly for the gynocentric appeal, as well as for the typically more
accessible style as outlined above.
Before delving into feminist Classics, I will comment on the role of myth in Modernist
literature to illustrate that, firstly, the texts within this thesis are the latest in a long line of

33
Anglophone literary responses to the Classics and, secondly, that the authors are directly
influenced by their Modernist progenitors. Enlightenment thinkers viewed myth as an apparatus
of superstition, credulity, and ignorance, in opposition to which they were defining themselves;7
then the Romantics regarded myths as a vital resource for poets, offering idealised records of the
divine in nature; and in the nineteenth century there was some value placed on the natural
divinity in myth, while the dangers of myth for leading the mind astray also played a role
(Connor 2005: 251-3). Modernism had a complex relationship with myth and mythopoesis:
though Modernists sought absolute newness, they also retained some Romantic sensibility
regarding the potential for myths, so they sought to transform myth for the modern world, to
create a ‘modern myth’ (Ibid., 253). Connor locates Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) as the
seed from which Modernist myth-making grew, with his juxtaposing, cross-mythological,
pseudo-archaeological approach providing ‘a model for the similar historical syncopations and
jump-cut structures evolved in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Finnegans Wake and The
Anathemata’ (Ibid., 257). Indeed, in his review of Ulysses, T.S. Eliot lists The Golden Bough as
part of the ‘mythical method’ employed by Joyce, a method which Eliot believed was a vital
‘step towards making the modern world possible for art’ (Eliot 1922; 1975 in Connor 2005: 257).
This Modernist ‘mythical method’ is not typically characterised by straightforward adaptations,
but rather the cultivation of discontinuous and jagged parallels.8 Mythopoeia encompasses
7
In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer propose that myth and Enlightenment are not polar
opposites, but rather intricately linked: ‘myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology’
(Adorno & Horkheimer 1944; 1997: 20). The Odyssey is demonstrative of the dialectic of enlightenment,
particularly when the Sirens lure sailors with the appeal of losing oneself in the past (Ibid., 54). The misguided
rejection of our mythical past by Enlightenment thinkers is also visible in the Iliad, in Achilles’ anger against
Agamemnon, which can be read as a mythical figure’s anger against a rational king (Ibid., 69).
8
In Ulysses the decade-long journey of the epic hero becomes one day in Dublin, and the connections between the
mythic chapter titles and the text itself are largely symbolic. For example, in the ‘Cyclops’ episode, Polyphemus’
one eye symbolises the narrowmindedness of a bigoted nationalist, and in the Aeolus chapter, the winds become
‘journalistic windbaggery’ (Connor 2005: 257). T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land uses pan-historical mythical and
religious symbolism –– including Psalms, the Fisher King and recasting Tiresias as the fluid protagonist – in its
lamentation of the crises of the modern world (see Haas 2003: 31-3). Virginia Woolf’s work, on the other hand, has
been analysed in light of a mythic form. This is particularly evident in To The Lighthouse (see Guth 1984: 233-249),
as well as analyses of the character of Mrs. Ramsay as a modern Demeter (see Blotner 1956; Love 1970). Some
Modernists, such as H.D. and Yeats, were particularly influenced by the psychoanalytical use of myths: while Freud
used myths to support his insights regarding the individual mind, Jung viewed the collective unconscious as
operating within mythical archetypes. Jean Cocteau’s body of work was intensely influenced by Greek myth,
particularly his Orphic film trilogy and Orphic play; his illustrated poetry in Mythologie (1934); and the libretto he
composed for Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex. Cocteau’s work resonates with the work within this thesis since it is an
earlier iteration of queering myth and it was immensely popular; the tradition of the former is explored further in
Chapter 4, and the latter is a characteristic of the present genre, which is referred to throughout this project.

34
Modernism’s power to revive myth and transform it for its own purposes, and it is partly defined
by intense self-consciousness (Connor 2005: 262). This self-reflexive adaptation of myth and the
specific reform of it to reflect the author’s contemporary society is identifiable with the current
trend of feminist myth writing, indicating that contemporary authors are contributing to a long
literary tradition of adapting myth in line with current aesthetic and political aims.
As Hoberman surveys in Gendering Classicism (1997), twentieth century women’s historical
fiction featured an intense interest in Ancient Greece and Rome, particularly in the work of
Naomi Mitchison, Mary Butts, Bryher, Phyllis Bentley, Laura Riding, and Mary Renault. In
response to the mythopoetic work of Frazer, Freud, and Graves, these authors borrowed the
cultural cache of the Classics to work through gender-based issues and to engage with voguish
discussions surrounding pre-patriarchal goddess-based matrilineal religions. In particular,
Riding’s A Trojan Ending (1937) – which follows Cressida as Troy falls and as she chooses to
embody the survival of Troy – is a response to Graves’ oversimplified thinking about gender. In
The White Goddess (1948), Graves draws upon the fashionable idea that poetry grew out of
worship of a moon-goddess, so this matriarchal goddess functions as a muse for later male
writers (Hoberman 1997: 62). For Riding, this was an oversimplified understanding of gender
(Riding’s theory that gender is a construct of language paves the way for Judith Butler’s theories
of gender construction and performativity); moreover, The White Goddess is plagiarised from
Riding’s essay ‘The Word Woman’, and it misrepresents her view on the relationship between
cerebral womanhood and god(desses) (Ibid., 60-1). Hoberman’s monograph also interprets
homosexuality in Mary Renault’s novels as a masquerade to trespass on the male-dominated
spaces of the classical world and the British Empire, meanwhile the phalluses in her work
undermine sexual difference rather than enforce it (Ibid., 74). Hoberman argues that the twentieth
century women who wrote historical novels about the ancient world were entering into a
dialogue about their culture’s sense of the past. This is evinced by the tensions between the
male-authored texts used as source material and the integration of female scholarship, whilst
undermining traditional scholarship, to walk the line between historical plausibility and
subversion (Ibid., 4). She calls this the ‘tension between reinscription and resistance’, in
reference to the process of juxtaposition, emphasis, and selection that allowed the authors to
unsettle their culture’s construction of their history and the claim to their cultural inheritance

35
(Ibid., 179). These tensions are continued in the texts within this thesis, where the conservative
traditions of myth scholarship are alluded to, alongside the feminist literary traditions of myth
writing.
For Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz ‘Classics has, with very few exceptions, been anti-theory in
general and anti-feminist in particular’ (1993: 1), yet there is an ongoing attempt to rectify this,
beginning with the foundational works of feminist classicists such as Sarah B. Pomeroy and
Mary Lefkowitz. Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives & Slaves (1975) was inspired by the
author’s awareness that ‘most of the standard references in the field of Classics did not include
women in their purview’ (1975; 2015: xii). Moreover, the study of women in myth and antiquity
has more immediate implications, since, as Pomeroy expounds, ‘the past illuminates
contemporary problems in relationships between men and women’: Pomeroy’s research notes the
consistency with which some reductive attitudes towards women have been maintained from
antiquity to the present (Ibid., xii). Goddesses, Whores, Wives & Slaves provides valuable
interpretations of the women of Greek myth, as well as real women’s roles in Ancient Greek city
states and Ancient Rome – it is the former of these that is the more important to the direction of
this thesis. Pomeroy also observes that goddesses are ‘archetypal images of human females, as
envisioned by males’ (Athena is the asexual figure of internalised misogyny, Aphrodite is a
sex-object, and Hera is a wife-mother), separated into stereotypes rather than ‘a whole being with
unlimited potential for development’ like Zeus or Apollo, speaking to the patriarchy that the
mythographers and scribes were anxiously seeking to uphold (Ibid., 2-9). Moving to the mortal
women of Greek myth, she argues that Zeus and Apollo, as the two most powerful gods in the
pantheon, targeting mortals epitomises the powerful man against the powerless woman,
providing some of the earliest narratives of ‘the destruction of the powerless by the powerful’
(Ibid., 11-2). The mortal women’s vulnerabilities were also, specifically, feminine, such as ‘the
wretched helplessness of the unwed mother; […] and the passivity of the woman in that she
never enticed or seduced the god but instead was the victim of his spontaneous lust’ (Ibid., 11-2).
Goddesses, Whores, Wives & Slaves was the first study of its kind, examining the role of women
in classical myth and antiquity and considering the ramifications of these ancient oppressions on
modern Western cultures.

36
 Due to the proliferation of retellings of the Trojan War from contemporary female authors, it
is these women of the Bronze Age and Homeric epics who are the particular focus of this thesis.
I contend that the Trojan Cycle is of particular interest to contemporary women writers because
their narratives are pervaded by powerful women, including Hecuba, Andromache, Helen and her
sister Clytemnestra, and Penelope. I draw upon Pomeroy’s analyses of Homeric women
particularly in the chapters ‘Women in the Texts’ and ‘Men in the Texts’, where the most recent
adaptations of the figures from the Bronze Age legends are analysed. In particular, Pomeroy’s
ground-breaking analysis of Helen, Clytemnestra, and Penelope as women whose myths are
thematically similar (each woman is married, separated from her husband by the war, and their
reunions are necessarily fraught [Ibid., 17]) is particularly useful to my comparative
consideration of each of these women in the most recent interpretations of their myths. For
Pomeroy, ‘Homer’s attitude toward women as wives is obvious in his regard for Penelope and
Clytemnestra’ because, while Penelope is lauded for her chastity, Clytemnestra is reproached for
her infidelity, and all women ‘are to be forever sullied by Clytemnestra’s sin. This generalization
is the first in a long history of hostility toward women in Western literature’ (Ibid., 21-2). The
condemnation of Clytemnestra versus Penelope’s praise, and Helen’s sheer implacability, mark
the beginnings of a Western literary tradition that treats women as sexualised symbols rather than
fully realised characters. In addition, the prevalence of these women’s myths over the perspective
of disadvantaged women in the same narratives – slaves such as Chryseis, Briseis, and Eurycleia,
who are central to the plots of the Homeric epics but whose perspectives are even more shadowy
than their royal counterparts – also marks an early example of privileging the perspectives of
those higher up in the social hierarchy. It is these traditions, first expounded in formative feminist
classical scholarship, against which contemporary feminist adaptations are writing back,
refocusing on underprivileged perspectives – both the royal women that have been treated as
symbols throughout literature, and the slaves who have been long overlooked.
In Heroines & Hysterics (1981) and Women in Greek Myth (1985), Mary Lefkowitz also
contributed to the field of feminist classical scholarship as it emerged. In the former, Lefkowitz
provides this useful introduction to the pattern of women’s lives in myth:

37
 When considered from a feminist perspective, the plots of Greek mythology present a
frightening view of female experience. A woman can keep her identity only by remaining
a virgin, like the goddesses Athena or Artemis, or by destroying or abandoning her male
partner, like Aphrodite, or Clytemnestra, or Medea. Marriage is death, either literally, or
figuratively, as for Semele or Io, whose stories end with the birth of their sons. One could
regard Penelope as yet another example of a woman who is important only while her
husband is absent, since the moment he returns, she disappears from view.

But when one reflects on what women say and do within the confines of the traditional
plots, positive values emerge. The poets, particularly Homer and Euripides, seem to have
used the female experience as a foil to […] essentially destructive heroism (Lefkowitz
1981: 1).

This statement is central to the critical context of this thesis. Here, Lefkowitz is introducing the
dual nature of women in myth, in that they are at once essentialised, reductive figures that are
consistently punished for deviating from patriarchal rule, but they have been adapted in
sympathetic and empowering manners since antiquity. Contemporary feminist myth writers are
not only continuing the traditions of women’s myth writing that begins with the works of Luce
Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, H.D., and Sylvia Plath; they are continuing traditions of adapting
mythical women that began with Homer, Euripides, and Ovid.
This nuanced thought is continued in Women in Greek Myth, where Lefkowitz rejects the
criticism that the Ancient Greeks were misogynists because their women were not afforded equal
rights. Instead she proposes that ‘they be regarded as pioneers in recognising and describing with
sympathy’ the lived experiences and social importance of women (1985: 39). Lefkowitz explores
the depiction of this experience with rhetorical questions such as ‘If Greek men wished to repress
Greek women through their mythology, why do their two most important epics, the Iliad and the
Odyssey, describe a war fought on behalf of a woman?’ (Ibid., 135). As we shall see in my
analysis of Helen’s reception, this is a wilful oversimplification of Helen’s role as the cause of the
Trojan War. For Hallett, Lefkowitz makes a ‘controversial claim’ in need of refuting, a process
she proposes should be done via multitextual readings of each myth and broaden our horizons

38
by including non-canonical authors and texts so that constructions of women by male authors can
be properly interrogated (1993: 105-6). For example, tragedies such as Sophocles’ Oedipus
Tyrannos and Euripides’ Trojan Women should be read alongside earlier and later treatments of
the same myth. A relevant example occurs in the chapter ‘Antigone’s Afterlives’, where Natalie
Haynes’ comparison of Homer’s ‘“beautiful Epicaste, mother of Oedipus”’ (Haynes 2017: 327)
in Book 11 of the Odyssey, is compared to Jocasta’s characterisation in Sophoclean tragedy.
Haynes points out that ‘Homer’s version of the Oedipus myth is sketched out in just ten lines of
verse, but it’s subtly different from that of Sophocles’ (Ibid., 327). In the Odyssey, the myth is
centred on Epicaste and, though it refers to her suicide, there is no mention of the
auto-enucleation and, as Haynes asks, ‘when did Epicaste become Jocasta?’ (Ibid., 327).
Admittedly, Lefkowitz’s feminist legacy in the field is uneasy, such as when she lambasts
feminist theory for apparently demanding that women with inferior qualifications to men be hired
and published simply to further the feminist political agenda, which Sorkin Rabinowitz cites as
an example of the hostility that feminism and Women’s Studies has faced in the discipline of
Classics (1993: 22-3). In a rather Penelope-esque manner, Lefkowitz has been praised by men in
the discipline for having written on women and sex roles only after establishing her credentials in
more established subjects within Classics (Ibid., 23). Foundational contributions to feminist
classical scholarship, such as by Pomeroy and Lefkowitz, are useful to the theoretical framework
of this research insofar as their analyses of specific female mythical figures, although (and this is
particularly the case with Lefkowitz rather than Pomeroy) their broader understanding of the
relationship between feminist theory and the Classics is outdated and underdeveloped.
Marina Warner’s interpretive analysis of myths in Monuments and Maidens (1985) and
Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (1994) lay important groundwork for the following
feminist classical work for general audiences, as well as a useful framework for the feminist
semiotics of myth.9 In Monuments and Maidens, Warner studies allegories of the female form
that inform and animate myths which have reinforced, maintained and reshaped present personal
and societal identities (Warner 1985: xxii-xxiii). For example, she traces the influence of Athena
as a judicious, armoured, and virginal goddess into the later female personifications of the

9
For a related study of the semiotics and traditions of fairy tales, see Warner’s From The Beast to The Blonde
(1994).

39
abstract concepts of Justice, Britannia, and Virtue (Ibid., 70-84). For Warner, Athena is the
‘original standard measure’ to which these later personifications are compared against and
conforming to; moreover, if we are to understand the roots and continuing significance of these
feminised signs, it is essential to look at Athena’s nature and character in Greek myths, primarily
in her role as a ‘dominating force and the arbiter of an ideal order’ (Ibid., 87). This is important
since we are still surrounded by these personifications. Athena’s armour is of particular
significance for Warner, because it is worn by so many imaginary women to project ideal values,
namely ‘law-abiding chastity, [...] virtuous consent to patriarchal monogamy [and] the desirable
subordination of women to men over children’s lineage’ (Ibid., 124). The latter is symbolised in
Zeus’ overpowering of Metis and Medusa’s defeat by Athena.
Below is a survey of Haynes’ interpretation of Pandora as an agent of change (to illustrate
the interpretive methodologies and feminist implications at play in recent classical studies for
non-academic audiences), but here I will preface it with Warner’s Pandoran analogues. In
Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, Pandora traps a man into marriage using her beauty,
desirability, and cunning speech. She was made by Zeus to punish the human race and, in this,
she lays the groundwork for Biblical Eve, who is also fashioned for man and destined to doom
him. Both women are made, do not name themselves, and they inspire desire rather than
experience it; moreover, deities take on a maternal role in creating them and they, in turn,
become the first mothers of the ensuing human race (Ibid., 222). Of course, Warner is not the first
to make this comparison, as Milton famously compares the two women in Paradise Lost (1667:
IV:708). Warner, however, also notes a Pandoran element to Helen, who is ‘another beauty who
brings about tragedy’ (Warner 1985: 222). Also, if we follow the Euripidean tradition in Helen,
where the gods created an eidolon for the warriors to fight over, that Helen is also fashioned for
the dual purposes of beauty and destruction (Ibid., 224). These early constructed women, from
whom all women are supposedly descended, indicate that ‘the female was perceived to be a
vehicle of attributed meaning [from] the very beginning of the world,’ (Ibid., 225) which men
could shape into misogynistic control. A built-for-purpose woman also features in the myth of
Pygmalion, a misogynist that repudiated all women because he was disgusted by the behaviour
of prostitutes, so he sculpts himself a woman out of ivory –– notably the same material used to
depict the flesh of goddesses in ancient sculptures. Venus, pleased at his departure from purity,

40
sends a soul to the sculpture, Galatea, and brings her to life.10 The creation of these women
becomes ‘a paradigmatic metaphor for the act of artistic creation’ (Ibid., 239) – the artist “gives
birth” to their works – and the confusion of women and art subsumes women into the abstract
and allows for the projection of men’s rhetoric onto the female form.
In Managing Monsters, a publication of the 1994 Reith Lectures, Warner enacts her own
paradigmatic metaphors: she takes contemporary concerns – such as single motherhood, male
violence, and the latter’s ostensible relationship to video games – and relates them to myths and
fairy tales. Her central thesis is that myths are not delusions or untruths, but rather
representations of universal matters such as sexuality or family relations, and that they exert more
of an influence over our social psyche than we may think (Warner 1994: xiii) She is
methodologically influenced by Nicole Loraux11 and Roland Barthes.12 She specifies that
‘deconstructing [myths] does not necessarily mean wiping them’ (Ibid., xiii), which is to say that
myths retain all of their previous meanings when new ones are applied to them. In the first
lecture, ‘Monstrous Mothers: Women Over the Top’, the focus is on she-monsters that reject
acceptable femininity and must be leashed, lest they wreak havoc. Perhaps the most pressing
mythical example is Medea, who ‘embodies extreme female aberration’ (Ibid., 6) because she
uses her magic, not only to enable Jason, but also to enable herself when she cheats her father,
boils an enemy in oil, dissects her brother, and, eventually, murders her children. Warner, in a
sympathetic reading of the Euripidean Medea, recognises that she perverts motherhood because
that is the only power remaining to her, and it remains the area in which Jason is weakest. She
also relates Medea’s actions to the demonisation of single mothers in more recent society, which

10
This myth has been retold in a short story, ‘Galatea’ by Madeline Miller (2013). In the retelling, Galatea is
assaulted and gaslighted by her creator in a manner reminiscent of the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The
Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892); Miller’s story concludes with Galatea drowning Pygmalion.
11
In Born of the Earth (1996; 2000), Loraux analyses myth through the framework of Athenian civic ideology. For
Loraux, Greek city-states were anxious to edify themselves using their mythological history: ‘no city, however
miniscule, [...] does not boast of once having sent an army to the Trojan War’ (Loraux 1996; 2000: 13). This study is
relevant in the modern day, argues Loraux, because it is the root of all rhetoric developed by groups of people
intending to idealise their values using the cultural cache of the past (Ibid., 13).
12
Drawing upon Saussure’s theory of semiology, Barthes argues in Mythologies (1957) that myths are signs that are,
in turn, used as signifiers when a new meaning is added, which then become the signified. Modern myths (examples
of which include red wine, astrology, and detergent) are created to maintain the control of the ruling classes. For
Warner, this is a ‘pessimistic’ view, as she believes that the Barthesian model of understanding and clarification can
give rise to newly-told stories, affording different patterns to the social fabric, and that this act of reworking myths is
a social enterprise that everyone can participate in (Warner 1994: xiv).

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she recognises as a wilful exoneration of absent fathers. She locates Medea in the protagonist of
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where a daughter is killed as it is a preferable fate to slavery (Ibid., 10).
The tradition of retelling Medea with a specific focus on racial inequality in America is
continued in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), in which ​Medea’s myth is reframed as
the experience of impoverished Black people in the Southern states of America in the time
surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Warner contrasts the brutality of the actions of Medea in
Euripides’ and Morrison’s texts to Pizan’s version in Book of the City of Ladies (1405), where
Medea’s infanticide is overlooked. This touches on a discussion that remains central to feminist
mythopoeia: should we exonerate women of crimes in favour of focusing on the injustices done
to them? Warner suggests that when it comes to historical events, women’s actions and the
actions inflicted upon them should be equally considered, but when it comes to myths, one is
dealing not with a single figure but with an entire tradition (Ibid., 8-9). Hence, Pizan’s Medea is
as canonical as Euripides’, and the Medeas of Morrison and Ward also become part of the same
textual field. Warner’s work thus provides theory and practice of the feminist semiotics and
hermeneutics of myth.
Feminist Theory and the Classics (eds. Amy Richlin & Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, 1993) is an
example of scholarship that aims to redress the anti-feminism in Classics. Sorkin Rabinowitz
asserts that ‘there is more to the politics of classics than […] inherited bias’ because, in the study
of Classics, there is more than the biases of the Ancient Greek and Roman authors, such as
misogyny and racism (1993: 19): there are also the biases of the discipline itself. The edited
collection is founded on the revolutionary premise that ‘classics actually enacts a conservative
politics’ (Ibid., 19; 21). This is because the scholars in the discipline have been, until relatively
recently, upper class males that were, moreover, white, therefore othering non-men, non-whites,
and non-gentlemen. Feminist theory and radical pedagogy are central to redressing these biases
according to Sorkin Rabinowitz (Ibid., 24-5), and edited collections such as this, where the work
of feminist classicists are compiled, challenge this systemic bias. For Richlin, classicists distance
themselves from the politically contentious issues in ancient literature such as rape and slavery
by ‘muffling the meaning with layers of grammar, commentary, and previous scholarship’,
whereas feminist theory encourages the classicist to re-centre themselves in their research (1993:
449). ‘As a woman, a feminist, and a scholar,’ writes Richlin, ‘I want to know what relation

42
scholarship can have to social change’ and goes on that ‘I write in anger, and I write so that
oppression is not forgotten or left in silence’ (Ibid., 448-9). Indeed, Richlin’s opening translation
of the Songs of Priapus followed by the account of her friend’s brutal rape and murder on
campus truly demonstrates the need to no longer distance oneself from the violent content in
ancient literature. Feminist theories and Women’s Studies methodologies are vital for redressing
this because they foreground social change and challenge oppression.
Laughing With Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (eds. Vanda Zajko & Miriam
Leonard, 2008) continues in this vein, though rather than focusing on how feminist thought can
inform Classics, it looks at how myth has been central to the development of feminist thought.
While the collection acknowledges a central tenet of this thesis, that ‘many feminist have chosen
to revivify ancient narratives to arm contemporary struggles’, the editors remark upon the
‘strangeness of this choice’ due to these myths being products of androcentrism and patriarchy
(Zajko & Leonard 2008: 2-3). Rather than being a feminist guide to Classical myth (such as The
Feminist Companion to the Classics [ed. Carolyne Larrington, 1992]), or an analysis of
receptions of specific myths (an example being Laurie Maguire’s Helen of Troy: From Homer to
Hollywood [2009]), Laughing with Medusa focuses on the importance of myth in the formulation
of a broad range of feminisms. The title of the edited collection refers directly to Cixous’ ‘Laugh
of the Medusa’, but it also alludes to The Medusa Reader (eds. Marjorie Garber & Nancy
Vickers, 2003), and the long history of Medusa acting as a feminist muse (Zajko & Leonard
2006: 13). This volume is drawn upon in a number of my chapters; in particular, the attention
afforded to Antigone by Pollock, Goldhill, and Fleming, all of whom support my argument in
‘Antigone’s Afterlives’ that she is an enduring figure of political dissent, particularly for
feminists. In addition, Ellen O’Gorman’s ‘A Woman’s History of Warfare’ provides a useful
contextual basis for my continued analysis of the women of the Trojan War, and ‘Reclaiming the
Muse’ by Penny Murray, a critical exploration of the gendered labour in the relationship between
poet and muse is central to my analysis of Calliope, the muse in Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand
Ships. There are, evidently, many approaches available to feminist classicism, an academic
discipline that has evolved immeasurably since Pomeroy’s polemic in 1975; only an approach
that draws dynamically upon these academic contributions will provide a firm theoretical
foundation for the research herein undertaken. Foundational work in feminist classical

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scholarship evinces the point that there is a history of critically combining classical mythology
and feminist theory from the standpoint of feminist classicists, as well as the feminist (literary
and sociological) theorists who have utilised myth in their work. My research is focused on the
increased activity in the last two decades of female authors adapting Greek myth in novelistic
retellings. My research asks how feminist work in classical studies can be adapted to feminist
literary studies of the contemporary novel.
It is my contention, however, that much of the relevant work occurring in contemporary
feminist Classics is not happening within the academy but is materialising in content created for
more general audiences. Porter locates a ‘new kind of classicist-academic’: the public intellectual
who can not only create new audiences for the field, but also enter into debates in the larger
public sphere, examples of whom include Mary Beard, Anne Carson, and Daniel Mendelsohn
(Porter 2007: 479-480). For Porter, their work exemplifies how Classics can intersect with wider
publishing markets and media outlets, bringing established discourses and ongoing research into
public awareness (Ibid., 480-1). This is not without its issues: the occasional sound-bite in media
outlets can give visibility to Classics, but it can also tokenise the discipline (Ibid., 481). Porter
ultimately concludes that making connections between the academy and the general public is the
true mark of interdisciplinarity, and ought to be encouraged by higher education institutions. To
borrow from Johanna Hanink who, in turn, was echoing Mary Beard, there is a rising trend of
female academics writing ‘big books’, that is, working on the major epics and key events from
ancient history rather than being relegated to obscure research interests. There is also an
increasing popularity in ‘writing big about the classics’, by which she means writing ‘big books
[for] big audiences’ (Hanink 2017: np.). Beard’s SPQR (2015) and Hall’s Introducing the
Ancient Greeks (2014) are both key examples of female classicists ‘writing big about the
classics’ for wider audiences. Crucially, this is not to say that these works do not contribute to the
academy. On the contrary, such works make the classics more accessible to wider audiences, thus
encouraging more engagement with classics within the academy (Hanink 2017: np.). These texts
are often able to engage with topics more directly and quickly, due to there being less demand for
academically distancing language and a generally quicker publication process. Though Hanink
cites Helen Morales’ Pilgrimage to Dollywood (2014) as an example of this phenomenon, it is
Morales’ more recent text for wider audiences, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the

44
Ancient Myths (2020) and Natalie Haynes’ Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths (2020) that
have been particularly useful in the critical construction of this thesis.
I draw predominantly upon Helen Morales’ Antigone Rising (2020) in the chapter
‘Antigone’s Afterlives’, when addressing the question of why Antigone is a continued figure of
interest and interpretation. For Morales, Antigone’s myth has become ‘one of the most
meaningful for feminism and for revolutionary politics. She has become an icon of resistance. Of
pitting personal conviction against state law. Of speaking truth to power’ (Morales 2020: x). She
draws a parallel between Antigone’s courage and endurance in her girlhood, and real-world
activism by young women, such as Greta Thunberg, who share the ‘glamorous appeal’ of a ‘“girl
against the world”’ (Ibid., xiii). Her text includes further examples of how contemporary
feminists are creating innovative interpretations and analyses in Classics presently, which are
particularly useful to my theoretical framework. Morales finds the mythic heroic tradition of
killing Amazons symbolic; as disobedient and foreign women she claims that ‘there is a
relationship between the ancient fantasy of killing women and the modern reality’ (Ibid., 3).
Morales’ stance is that we have inherited some beliefs about women from antiquity and that
those beliefs ‘form the imaginative scaffolding that underpins our beliefs about women today’
(Ibid., 5). She evidences this by drawing a parallel between Greek heroes killing Amazons and
the Isla Vista killings. Tracing misogyny propagated online by toxic men’s rights groups back to
the Greeks punishing Amazons in their myths for their sexual, social, and martial freedoms —
since they are both ‘punishment[s] of sexually renegade women’ (Ibid., 6-7) — is a useful
example of how an Ancient Greek mythological framework is useful for shedding light on
contemporary misogyny. Moreover, it is in this analysis that Morales makes the point that she has
‘worried about whether it is a crass move to make: too academic, too contrived’, to compare
trauma that is real and recent to ancient myths (Ibid., 14). She counters that by turning to ancient
material that helps to illustrate how long-standing such cultural narratives are and how classical
antiquity plays a role in legitimising violent misogyny today (Ibid., 14). This justification is at the
heart of many authors’ ethos when adapting Greek myth, such as when Pat Barker cites #MeToo,
the Rohingya women and the rape capital of the world, the Democratic Republic of Congo, when
writing of ‘rape as an instrument of war’ as influences on The Silence of the Girls (Barker &
Brand 2018: np.).

45
 Sexual assault is a recurrent point of inquiry in this thesis, due to its omnipresence in Greek
myth and its revisitation by contemporary authors. It has been a continued source of inquiry for
feminist classicists who have asked how we contend with the sexual violence of Greek myth as
well as how we address the centuries of fetishised depictions of sexual violence from Greek
myth. ‘Go into any art museum’, directs Morales, and you will see Daphne metamorphosing into
a tree, The Rape of Europa, The Rape of the Sabine Women, The Rape of Proserpina, ‘Lucretia,
Leda, Polyxena, Cassandra, Deianeira…’ (Morales 2020: 66) – raped women have been the
artists’ muses throughout the centuries. Furthermore, she argues that myths provide ‘a repertoire
of rape narratives’ (Ibid., 66), including Phaedra who lied about being raped, Cassandra who was
punished for revoking consent, and Medusa who was punished for being raped. For Morales,
‘predatory men still silence women; the removal of Philomela’s tongue is the original
nondisclosure agreement’ and ‘the myth of Helen is perhaps the most dangerous of all the rape
myths’ because it has been told and retold in so many different ways that it is impossible to
discern whether she consents (Ibid., 72; 67). She continues that these rape myths13 are ‘firmly
entrenched in our culture’ and they certainly contribute to the normalising of sexual violence and
rape culture in the West. As much as these myths concerning sexual violence provide the
framework for rape culture, they also contain the seeds for #MeToo, which Morales reads in the
sisterhood of Philomela and Procne, and the determination of Ceres/Demeter in her search for
Proserpina/Persephone (Ibid., 72-4). Yet because such myths focus on the trauma, strength, and
survival of victims, these myths can still resonate ‘even in our post-#MeToo world’ (Ibid., 74). It
is these threads that are often pulled by contemporary feminist adapters, who can draw upon
nuanced portrayals of women in myth or, alternatively, they can weave in new narrative threads
where the women have not previously been given voices.
One striking reading in Antigone Rising is Morales’ analysis of Beyoncé with reference to
entrenched ideas about whiteness in the Classics. Much like Audre Lorde’s open letter to Mary
Daly, criticising her white, Eurocentric bias in Gyn/Ecology, Morales argues that ‘Beyoncé, a
generation later, is having the same argument with, and through, popular culture,’ (Ibid., 107). It
is an argument which demands an acknowledgement that ‘Greek and Roman antiquity have
played a major role in constructing and authorizing racism, colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy,

13
That is, myths depicting rape, rather than untruths about rape itself.

46
Western-centrism, body normativity, and other entrenched, violent societal structures’ (Hanink
2017: np.). As Brill acknowledges, ‘Classical scholars have traditionally defined Greco-Roman
antiquity as the origin of a Western civilization defined in Eurocentric, ethnocentric, and
androcentric terms’ (Brill 1994: 400). Beyoncé has issued a challenge to this entrenched racism,
firstly by adapting the iconography of Venus in her pregnancy photoshoots that ‘escape the
common trap for black Venuses: denigration and hypersexualisation’ (Morales 2020: 105).
Beyoncé’s challenge continues in the Carters’ music video filmed in the Louvre in which she
becomes Nike and Venus when she performs in front of their marble statues and, more than that,
‘the juxtaposition of her black body with the white marble challenges long-held assumptions
about whiteness, antiquity, and beauty’ (Ibid., 113). White marble “skin” has become idealised
and romanticised, due in large part to the existing statues we have from antiquity. In fact, this is a
misapprehension, since the statues were originally polychromous, though time has removed these
details. In Beyoncé’s rendering, the kneeling statue of Hermes becomes Kaepernick taking the
knee, lending the cultural capital of the ancients to the Black Lives Matter movement (Ibid.,
115-6). Thus, Beyoncé’s performance becomes ‘a visual intervention in this controversy and a
gorgeous and artistic dismissal of the old lies that conflate whiteness of marble with ideal beauty’
(Ibid., 114). Morales calls this ‘Beyoncé’s feminist mythmaking’ (Ibid., 118), evidencing the
importance of this analysis in providing critical context for this thesis, since it is evidently not
only authors, and white feminists who are performing subversive recreations of antiquity for
activist purposes since Beyoncé functions as a compelling example of the current vogue for
feminist mythmaking.
Ultimately, Morales concludes that ‘the creative adaptations of myth – the stories, videos,
images, and novels that present radically different perspectives – are more than individual
contestations: they amount to a formidable cultural change’ and that ‘subversive myth making is
a process – one that involves the past and present and all of the versions in between’ (Ibid., 148).
This is crucial to this thesis, where it is my dual argument that there is current literary
momentum for feminist mythmaking and that current adaptations of myth function as part of a
long tradition beginning with writers like Ovid and Plato. Charlotte Higgins — whose own text
Greek Myths: A New Retelling was published in 2021 — reviewed Antigone Rising as ‘not your
usual “why the classics are crucial” book’ and a departure from ‘lazy parallel-making’ (Higgins

47
2020: np.). Higgins’ insights into the mythical tradition also inform my critical context. She
propounds that ‘creative readings, even misreadings, of classical texts and stories can be
immensely generative’ and that ‘Creative misreadings and deliberate subversions are in fact
central to the classical tradition’ because the Greeks and Romans themselves adapted and
misread the myths (Ibid., np.). This idea that classical mythology is defined by its mutability, and
that they have always existed to be reread and repurposed by creators is central to my research:
there is no one “correct” version of a myth, and therefore mythic adaptations in contemporary
women’s myth writing are as much an act of mythmaking as the work of Aeschylus and James
Joyce. The originality of my research lies in its contemporaneity, in that I focus on the recent
vogue in women’s writing to adapt myth, and what these works reveal about current priorities
within feminism. Indeed, Higgins perfectly summarises the activist potential in reclaiming myth,
because ‘for all that myths have often been used as a means of repression, they are only waiting
to be repurposed as forces for liberation’ (Ibid., np.). This what we are seeing in feminist
novelistic and non-fiction retellings that repurpose myths that have previously been used in the
service of patriarchy and colonialism, as well as in artistic renderings, such as in Beyoncé’s
performances.
Likewise, in Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths (2020), Natalie Haynes argues that in
the contemporary era, we have ‘made space in our storytelling to rediscover women who have
been lost or forgotten. They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people’
(Haynes 2020: 3). The text itself is dedicated to revisiting the women from Greek myth beyond
their symbolic, essentialised roles (Penelope is the good wife; Clytemnestra is the bad wife;
Medea is the bad mother; Helen is the untrustworthy lover; Eurydice is the worthy lover…).
Pandora’s Jar is referred to throughout this thesis because Haynes’ analysis of mythic women is
particularly useful when I consider both how specific female figures have been utilised in myth
and their potential for feminist repurposing. Phaedra is an interesting example, as her myth
arguably resists adaptation through a feminist lens since it ‘can be used to legitimise the myth
that many women lie about being raped’ (Ibid., 210). Haynes suggests that Phaedra is an
important figure to consider in terms of women’s agency in myth, since her actions are guided by
Aphrodite. Conversely, Jennifer Saint chooses a different route in adapting Phaedra for Ariadne,
where she is specifically exonerated from the crime of falsely accusing Hippolytus of rape and

48
therefore does not contribute to the legitimising of false rape allegations. In ‘Women in the
Texts’, Haynes’ insights into Penelope, in particular, inform my argument because she points to
two literary instances where Penelope is characterised beyond her virtue: Ovid’s Heroides I and
Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Moreover, Pandora’s Jar often provides analysis that speaks to
Haynes’ novelistic retellings. A key example of this insight lies in Haynes’ interpretation of
Clytemnestra as ‘the mother of a daughter who has been slaughtered like an animal. Is it any
wonder she nurses an unquenchable rage against the man who committed this crime?’ (Ibid.,
151). This echoes Clytemnestra’s characterisation in A Thousand Ships where her perspective is
introduced in the following manner: ‘Ten years was a long time to bear a grudge, but
Clytemnestra never wavered. Her fury neither waxed nor waned, but burned at a constant heat.’
(Haynes 2019: 286). Thus, Pandora’s Jar not only provides a contemporary feminist classical
interpretation of some of the most significant women from Greek myth, but it also works in
conversation with Haynes’ novels that feature heavily in this thesis.
As well as contributing to my broader critical context, Pandora’s Jar provides specific areas
of analysis which inform this thesis. For Haynes, there is ‘a strange assumption’ that ‘the myths
have always focused on men and that women have only ever been minor figures’. While the
‘stories centred on men have been taken more seriously by scholars’ and have thus gained more
cultural capital, it is also true that women have always featured in mythic texts (Haynes 2020:
285-6). Euripides wrote about the Trojan War with plays centred on the female characters, and
Ovid’s Heroides retold many of the most familiar heroic myths from the perspectives of the
women implicated in their stories. Hence, Haynes asks ‘What on earth makes us believe that the
Iliad, where Helen is a relatively minor player, is somehow more authentic than Euripides’
Helen?’ and, more broadly, if Ovid and Euripides knew that ‘the stories of Greek myth could be
told just as well from women’s perspectives as men’s, how did we forget?’ (Ibid., 286). Though
Haynes’ sweeping statement that ‘she’s in the damn story. Why wouldn’t we want to hear from
her?’ is colloquial, it does perfectly elucidate both the reason for myths being revisited from
women’s perspectives and the academic value of analysing these retellings. Haynes’ defence of
Ovid and Euripides as empathetic writers of women’s perspectives – indeed, she goes as far as to
state that ‘Euripides is one of the greatest writers of female voices in antiquity and, frankly, in the
history of theatre’ (Ibid., 189) – has greatly informed my research. I have referred throughout to

49
the Ovidian and Euripidean renderings of mythic women, particularly when finding the Homeric
or Apollodorian writings insufficient. Ultimately, Helen Morales’ Antigone Rising and Natalie
Haynes’ Pandora’s Jar, both of which were written for audiences outside of the academy, are
pertinent for academics in the field of contemporary feminist work in Classics.
Texts written for general audiences by trained classicists contribute to breaking down the
ivory tower of Classics by making it more accessible and this is also the case with podcasts.
Natalie Haynes was awarded the Classical Association Prize in 2015 in acknowledgement of her
work bringing Classics to a wider audience for her BBC Radio 4 series Natalie Haynes Stands
Up for the Classics. On this show, she acts in equal parts as a stand-up comic, lecturer, and
interviewer as she explores and explains various figures from the classical world, ranging from
playwrights and philosophers to mythical characters. Like the ‘big books [for] big audiences’,
podcasts for general audiences on the women from Greek myth are also key contributions to
current feminist classical discourse. Haynes’ reinterpretation of Pandora’s myth is a key example
of how Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics contributes to the critical context of this
thesis. Haynes expounds that ‘in the version of Pandora that we all know, she is always the only
one responsible, for letting all these nasties out into the world. We never blame anyone else. […]
We just blame the beautiful woman’ (Haynes, 25 May 2021: 19:15-30), though it has not always
been so clear-cut. In Theognis’ Elegies, there are good things in the jar, and in Aesop’s fables,
the jar is opened by a greedy man, ‘but all these versions slip away’ (Ibid., 20:30) in favour of
blaming a beautiful woman.
The reception of Pandora’s myth, for Haynes, ‘is all a matter of mistranslation’ because the
Dutch scholar Erasmus mistranslated the Greek word pithos, jar, into the Latin word pixis, box,
which is important because ‘the box makes Pandora more malevolent’; Greek jars are terracotta
and top-heavy, easily breakable, and therefore an unsafe place to store all the world’s evils (Ibid.,
23:30-25:00). Moreover, in artistic renderings of Pandora, ‘it takes almost no time after Erasmus
has mistranslated this word, from jar to box, for Pandora to be shown in art with a box, and really
quickly it becomes a strongbox,’ such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1871 painting of Pandora. This
inevitably makes Pandora’s act purposeful and malicious. As Edith Hall notes in her conversation
with Haynes, ‘Pandora’s main function certainly until the 19th Century was to appear stark
naked, especially in the quasi-pornographic paintings of the pre-Raphaelites’, highlighting her

50
hyper-sexualised portrayal in art. That is, until ‘the late 20th Century when a few brave feminist
scholars start to say: hey actually this is interesting’, particularly to anthropologically compare
Pandora and her receptacle to Eve and her apple. In addition, Hesiod calls Pandora kalos kakon:
this is an oxymoron, because Kalos means fine, beautiful, or good, and kakon means shoddy,
ugly, or bad. Although, if both words can be either something visual or something moral, it is
noteworthy that ‘the positive quality is always turned into something visual and the negative
quality is always translated as something moral’ (Ibid., 25:45-26:40). If, in the Ancient Greek,
Pandora is a beautiful-ugly and a good-bad, translator’s choices to make the first word aesthetic
and second word moral (in the Oxford World’s Classics, Pandora is rendered a ‘pretty bane’),
speaks to a long-held misogynistic villification of beautiful woman, therefore making Pandora
‘the original femme fatale’ (Ibid., 26:40). It is Haynes’ contention that Pandora is not bad, ‘she is
both good and bad, beautiful and ugly, she is an agent of change’ (Ibid., 27:00), and she is a
victim of misogynistic translations and artistic renderings. Natalie Haynes standing up for
Pandora evinces a core tenet of this thesis, that female figures of myth have been victims of
anachronistic patriarchy throughout their reception, but creative revisitations by contemporary
scholars and authors create innovative interpretations of the mythical figures. Considering
Pandora as ‘the original femme fatale’ and that ‘we always expect a beautiful woman to be bad’
also informs the critical context of this thesis in that it provides insight into longstanding
misogynistic portrayals of women which have their their roots in antiquity.
In a conversation with Liv Albert for the podcast Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!, Haynes
opines that with translations you are ‘getting someone else’s whole interpretation, and it’s only
recently that women have been publishing, or been able to publish, translations’ (Albert 19
January 2021: 10:30). Representations of women from Greek myth, then, are mediated through
further levels of misogyny. Albert, much like Myers, reports that she tries ‘if I can, to get my
hands on translations by women’ (Ibid., 10:50). In this conversation, we can see a key discussion
in contemporary feminist Classics being revisited, and the gynocentric appeal of choosing
women’s translations being reiterated. Albert’s Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! is an immensely
popular podcast in the ever-increasing genre of myth podcasts, and its inclusion in this literature
review is due in part to its cultural capital, as well as its identifiable goals to the research herein
undertaken. In the podcast, ‘Myths of the ancient world are examined through a modern

51
intersectional feminist lens, focusing where possible on amplifying the voices of women, trans,
and non-binary people’ (Albert, 2021: np.). In her conversation with Natalie Haynes, Albert
states that her goal with the podcast is to try ‘to take back the women of mythology’, reclaiming
them from ‘the men who wrote things down’ who chose to focus instead on the men in myth. For
Albert, ‘it is important to examine how they [women] could be interpreted if you are constantly
aware of [the patriarchy in mythic tradition]’ (Albert 19 January 2021: 17:15-50). This study also
seeks to examine Greek myth through an intersectional feminist lens, although specifically
concentrating on adaptations of myth in contemporary women’s writing. Moreover, Albert’s
stated goal of reclaiming mythic women from their patriarchal portrayals in ancient texts and
their subsequent reception clearly comes under the purview of this study. Albert, unlike Haynes,
deals predominantly with ancient sources in translation, providing innovative analyses of the
myths, although she does also produce episodes dedicated to contemporary retellings, such as
Madeline Miller’s Circe; in the cases of Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne and, as we have seen, Natalie
Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, Albert engages in critical conversations with the authors themselves.
There are two episodes in the ‘Conversations’ series of Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! that
are particularly useful for this thesis. Firstly, ‘A conversation on Medusa and Fragility’
conceptualises how feminist critiques of myth are received in contemporary, online culture. In
this episode, Albert is in conversation with Anwen Kya Hayward, author of Here, the World
Entire, a novella that retells Medusa’s myth. Albert is fascinated with the reception of Medusa on
the internet because it is ‘unlike any other character in Greek mythology and [it] centres around
deeply toxic masculinity and fragility’ (Albert 5 January 2021: 1:55-2:20). Their decision to
produce this episode was informed by their personal experiences online, having ‘encountered a
lot of angry men on the internet, with regards to Medusa specifically’ (Ibid., 7:40). These
cisgender men, in Albert and Hayward’s opinion, are particularly offended by Medusa’s feminist
reception because it epitomises how ‘women have carved a space into this typically male,
patriarchal field of study’. Feminist thinkers have found this recognisable myth to be ‘ripe for
really great, productive feminist reception’, using it as a means of talking about internalised
misogyny, stigma, sexual abuse, and the #MeToo movement (Ibid., 8:00-9:15). In response to
Garbati’s Medusa with the Head of Perseus (2008), one Twitter user misguidedly argued that ‘the
statue was wrong because it wasn’t how the myth actually went, and interpreting myth differently

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to the “original version” is “millennial narcissism”’ (Ibid., 15:20). Hence, the Twitter user fell
into the common pitfall that the oldest extant version of a myth (in this case, Hesiod’s account) is
the original when it is widely accepted that there is no one “correct” or original version of any
myth. Haywood expounds that myths can be interpreted in any way, that ‘you can read whatever
you want into it because myth is such a good paradigm for you to make sense of the world as you
experience it,’ but, crucially, ‘you have to be very aware of why you choose to interpret a myth a
certain way, you need to interrogate your internal biases’ (Ibid., 27:10-50). For instance, if you
reject Medusa’s myth as a story of sexual assault and victim blaming because you wish to
preserve the heroism of Poseidon and Perseus, then this is evidently a case of misogynistic bias.
This is a valuable conversation for the theoretical framework of this thesis, because it illustrates
the misogynistic resistance to reclaiming myths for feminist purposes.
In ‘Conversations: The Many Faces of Myth, Classical Reception’, Albert and Victoria
Austen discuss classical reception specifically in contemporary women’s novels. This episode of
Albert’s podcast is important for introducing some of the key discourses surrounding feminist
reception in contemporary novelistic retellings. Austen agrees that adapting myth is a matter of
‘creative licence’, and changing elements of myths is a key part of reception (Albert 9 July 2021:
15:20). Indeed, it is an argument voiced throughout this thesis that the instances where the
authors have diverged from the myths, and particularly where they have introduced
anachronisms, are some of the most interesting in terms of feminist adaptation. Austen specifies
that adaptations using first person perspectives should be considered particularly ‘valid’ because
they are cases of imagining how the (often previously side-lined) character feels during the
well-documented events of the myth. It is particularly fruitful to compare the subjectivity of first
person perspectives in ancient texts versus modern first person retellings, such as Odysseus’
account to the Phaeacians in the Odyssey compared to Circe’s first person narration in Miller’s
Circe. Such a comparison raises questions like ‘if they are both inherently biased in some way,
which one do we trust more, and why? Why do we feel empathy for one character, or not, and
how does that change our interpretation?’ (Ibid., 16:20). When dealing with contemporary
adaptations, we should ask ‘why was this reception made, at this time?’ (Ibid., 37:00). This
question recurs throughout this study, considering, for instance, retellings that centre on sexual
violence in the context of the #MeToo reckoning and retellings that queer myths with current

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attitudes to LGBTQ+ communities in mind. The question is again raised in this conversation of
the validity or originality of recent reinterpretations of myth. Albert and Austen utilise Bernini’s
sculpture of Apollo and Daphne (1622) as a metaphor because, depending on what perspective
from which you view it, it is a different piece of art (Ibid., 49:55). From one angle, it is Apollo
pursuing Daphne, and from another angle she has already metamorphosed into a tree. To call
Daphne a nymph or a tree would both be correct, depending on one’s perspective, and neither
interpretation delegitimises the other. This is an astute metaphor, addressing the criticism that all
adaptations are vampiric in some way, sucking the life, or relevance, from long-held
interpretations. Contemporary receptions make the classics more accessible – there is, in effect,
‘more Classics for everyone, more mythology for everyone’ (Ibid., 27:50) – and this means that
there is inevitably more diverse representation in retellings. For Austen, Miller’s The Song of
Achilles (2011) tells the LGBTQ+ community that there is space for us in Classics, and Circe
(2018) makes it clear that there is space for women, particularly in the study of the Homeric
epics. Ultimately, podcasts can be a site of conversation, documenting the most current and
immediate discourse occurring in the field of feminist Classics, Most importantly, podcasts
platform discussions of contending with myths of sexual violence in this post-#MeToo era, how
we can challenge the exclusionary traditions in Classics, and how modern retellings are the latest
in a long tradition of mythical reception.
In ‘Rape or Romance? Bad Feminism in Mythical Retellings’ Aimee Hinds acknowledges
that feminist reception of ancient sources ‘refreshes myth through the lens of otherwise voiceless
characters’ and aids in decolonising the Classics by questioning both ancient literature and the
exclusionary nature of the discipline (Hinds 2019: np.). Hinds’ article is particularly useful for
my research because she stipulates that a ‘reception isn’t automatically feminist just because
you’ve made women narrate the story, especially not if the story stays the same’ (Ibid., np.),
taking issue with retellings that unwrite mythic women’s trauma under the guise of
empowerment. Retellings that lean towards the ‘suppression of themes that have the potential to
be problematic today’ in favour of sanitised, unspecific, and often romantic interpretations are
valid instances of malleable mythic interpretation, although they are ultimately misguided in
terms of feminism. Some relevant examples include Hades’ abduction and assault of young
Persephone, Achilles enslaving and raping Briseis, and Penelope’s twelve slaves being hanged

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for a crime that they had no agency to consent to. Hinds’ examples of the titular bad feminism in
mythical retellings are Nikita Gill’s poetic retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth, in which
Persephone calls Hades ‘the kindest thing / that ever happened to me’ (@nikita_gill 15 February
2019) rather than a paedophilic abductor, and Atwood’s unsympathetic rendering of Helen in The
Penelopiad. In my study, Emily Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful (2016) and Madeline Miller’s
The Song of Achilles (2011) are also considered in this light. I argue that retelling the stories of
previously silenced or sidelined women in myth is an act of the restoration of their agency. Yet,
as Hinds clarifies, this is not achieved by ‘denying them their trauma, or by removing the label of
victim’, agency is instead restored when the women can ‘rise above their victimhood and become
survivors’ (Hinds 2019: np.). Therefore, ‘true feminist retellings’ are distinguished by the
recognition and refusal to repress characters’ liminality and suffering. Madeline Miller’s Circe
(2018), Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and Anwen Kya Hayward’s Here, the World
Entire (2018) are all celebrated by Hinds as contemporary women’s narratives that, rather than
unwriting mythical women’s traumas, engage with them in meaningful, and variously feminist,
ways.14 Hinds’ call for more intersectionality and nuance in feminist receptions provides a useful
foundation from which to analyse these adaptations.
I also wish to draw attention to the platform on which Hinds published her article. Eidolon,
run by classicist Donna Zuckerberg, is an open-access article repository characterised by
accessibility, both in terms of writing style by contributors, as well as in its rejection of
exclusionary publishing practises – anyone, regardless of educational level or institutional
affiliation, can write for Eidolon. Moreover, Eidolon is a challenge to the ‘fragility’ of Classics,
inviting articles that are revolutionary or reactionary, or aim in some way to destabilise the ivory
tower of Classics. It is a resource that I draw upon throughout this thesis, due to its intersectional,
activist content that has been useful in various sections of this thesis. For instance, in the chapter
‘Queering Myth’, I utilise Clarke’s survey of LGBTQ+ classicists (2019), Haselswerdt’s call to
re-queer Sappho (2016), and Lee-Chin’s account of reading the Iliad as a victim of sexual assault
(2020) in my engagement with queer reception in contemporary Classics.
14
As Austen notes, Barker’s adaptation is different to its contemporaries because the author comes from the
background of writing war narratives, rather than a Classics background, so The Silence of the Girls ‘feels so real, it
is actually describing a war […] gruesome and brutal’, rather than interpretations that include ‘a romantic element’
(Albert 9 July 2021: 51:20; 52:30). On the other hand, Austen finds classicist Emily Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful
‘less gritty’ and ‘more romanticised’, or at least ‘slightly lighter in tone’ (Ibid., 58:30).

55
 Much of this literature review has been dedicated to discourses surrounding contemporary
feminist adaptations of Greek myth, though it is also important to consider theories of adaptation
more broadly. Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and Julie Sanders’ Adaptation
and Appropriation (2006) have both been valuable to the formulation of this thesis. Indeed, my
above discussion of adaptations as vampiric is drawn from Hutcheon’s assertion that ‘An
adaptation is not vampiric’ because ‘it does not draw the life-blood from its source and leave it
dying’ and it is in no way ‘paler’ than the adapted work (Hutcheon 2006: 176). Instead,
adaptations can ‘keep that prior work alive’ by giving it an ‘afterlife’. The understanding of
adaptations as a textual ‘afterlife’, as well as Hutcheon’s proposition that adaptations are
‘palimpsestuous’ – because of their overt relationship to the adapted text (Ibid., 6) – is
particularly useful in the final chapter of this thesis, in which I argue that contemporary feminist
myth writing is inherently palimpsestuous due to its layers of classical reception. More broadly,
Hutcheon’s understanding of adaptations as ‘a process of creation’ is particularly significant
because she acknowledges that adaptation always includes ‘both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)
creation’ (Ibid., 8). Of course, understanding translation and adaptation as acts of creation as
much as they are recreations is central to my theoretical framework. In addition, the generative
potential in revisiting and reinterpreting ancient source texts can hardly be overstated,
particularly within the context of my research.
It is in broader theories of adaptation that we find new understanding of the value of story
adaptation over original narration. As Hutcheon notes, ‘the appeal of adaptations for audiences
lies in their mixture of repetition and difference, of familiarity and novelty’ (Ibid., 114) – the
value of an adaptation is in the promise of a familiar story as well as the uncanny variations that
new creators provide. Sanders agrees that the rewrite ‘transcends mere imitation […] adding,
supplementing, improvising, innovating. The aim is not replication as such, but rather
complication, expansion rather than contraction’ (Sanders 2006: 12), again confirming the idea
that adaptations are a site of innovation and creation. For Sanders, dealing with adaptation
requires ‘reading alongside’, dealing at once with the predecessor and its adaptation. Hence,
adaptations require and perpetuate a ‘canon’ of literature, although they ‘may in turn contribute
to [the canon’s] ongoing reformulation and expansion’ (Ibid., 8-9). In her study of mythic
adaptation in Cherrie Moranga’s and Liz Lochhead’s drama, Tekin expounds that ‘any rewriting

56
of any text may be viewed as a metatext’, since rewriting involves a deliberate dialogue with
another text, bringing with it an implicit acknowledgement of its own textuality (Tekin 2012: 42).
Mythic adaptation, then, at once creates a canon of mythic literature and expands upon it; as
Albert and Austen note, classical reception includes works produced in the ancient world, such
as by the tragedians and Virgil (Albert 9 July 2021: 41:30), meaning that the texts studied are
‘expansions’ of a canon of classical reception that can be traced back to antiquity. Sanders’ study
of adaptation specifically considers how mythic templates have been adopted, noting that ‘myth
is never transported wholesale into its new context; it undergoes its own metamorphoses in the
process. Myth is continually evoked, altered, and reworked, across cultures, and across
generations’ (Sanders 2006: 64). In this study, I am concerned with how classical myths have
been metamorphosed in contemporary women’s literature, paying particular attention to how
they have been ‘evoked, altered, and reworked,’ in the service of feminist politics.
In summation, the literature indicates that, although myth has a long history of being
rewritten, the current moment is especially fertile for mythic adaptation by women. In feminist
classicist scholarship, there are some recurrent issues that are particularly important in the
context of this study, including how female figures from myth have been used as archetypes in
the service of patriarchies throughout the centuries. More recent analysis by feminists has
provided multiple questions to revisit in the consideration of these figures. In the study of any
literature, the social and cultural context in which it is produced is vital to understanding the text:
#MeToo, intersectionality, and racial, sexual, and gendered diversity all inform the authors in
their feminist adaptations. My research is ultimately defined by the current publishing
momentum for women rewriting myth as fiction, as well as the critical work being undertaken by
classicists to rebuild Classics as a more inclusive and radical space. This study is therefore placed
in the midst of this impetus, and its originality lies in its contemporaneity – novels included
within the scope of this thesis have been published as recently as 2021. Conventionally, space is
also afforded in a literature review to suggestions for further research, though I would propose
that this research must continue with the same spurring momentum as the current vogue for
publishing feminist revisionist myth writing.

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 Chapter 1: Women in the Texts

The story of the women of antiquity should be told now, not only because it is a
legitimate aspect of social history, but because the past illuminates contemporary
problems in relationships between men and women.

Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives & Slaves

Feminist revisionist mythmaking works, as Larrington indicates, to redress the fact that,
historically, female figures within myths and mythology – the study of myths – have been
‘viewed reductively, purely in terms of their sexual function[s]’ (Larrington 1992: ix). They were
defined in terms of virginity, sexual activity, and motherhood, and therefore relegated to the
‘catch-all category labelled fertility’ (Ibid., ix). A large part of feminist classical discourse has
been thus dedicated to ‘expos[ing] the patriarchal bias of mythographers (past and present)’ and
subsequently ‘feminist thinkers [within Classics have] actively reinterpret[ed] ancient myth,
focussing attention on female divinities’ (Caputi 1992: 425). Of course, goddesses are not the
only women who populate Greek myth, as the Bronze Age legends contain prolific instances of
powerful female figures, including Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra in the Trojan royal
family, Clytemnestra and Penelope in Greek ones, and Helen who was once queen of Sparta and
then a princess of Troy. Feminist classicist Sue Blundell asserts that there are three models of
femininity in classical myth: Goddesses, Monsters, and Mortals (Blundell 1995: 17). This
chapter will focus on the third feminine iteration in Blundell’s model: mortal women.
Specifically, I will analyse the adapted characterisations of Penelope, Briseis, and Helen in
contemporary women’s literature. These women of the Homeric epics have been the particular
focus in contemporary adaptations of myths by female authors. Penelope is the eponymous
protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and a minor character in Madeline Miller’s
Circe. Though Briseis, as Blundell points out, ‘remains by and large a shadowy figure [in the
Iliad], whose own responses to her treatment at the hands of her male masters are not recorded
by [Homer]’ (Blundell 1995: 48), she has become a key figure in contemporary feminist

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adaptations. This is evidenced by the many adaptations of her, specifically in Emily Hauser’s For
the Most Beautiful, Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the
Girls. Helen has been the focus of much reproduction and re-framing throughout history, in
literature, drama, art, and theory, yet she is not a significantly adapted mythological woman in
contemporary novels, by which I mean that she is only just beginning to be afforded the same
adaptive focus in women’s myth writing. On the other hand, feminist theory, poetry, and drama
provide many interpretations of Helen in modern contexts. I will analyse Penelope, Briseis, and
Helen as female perspectives within the prominent, male heroic epics, and consider how these
ancient, mythological women can be read in terms of modern feminist theories. Specifically, this
chapter will demonstrate how Penelope can be read in terms of domestic labour and class
intersections; Briseis is a particularly useful figure when considering consent, especially as it is
represented in romance literature; and Helen remains a key figure as a symbol of societal
expectations of female beauty standards as well as to open up discussions around agency.

First, it is necessary to contextualise the landscape of feminist classical discourse as it

pertains to the research herein undertaken. Sarah B. Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives &
Slaves was a groundbreaking piece of classical scholarship because it aimed to redress the fact
‘that most of the standard references in the field of Classics did not include women in their
purview’ (Pomeroy 1975; 2015: xii). She does this by critically exploring the roles of women in
Ancient Greek religion, in the Bronze Age and Homeric Epic, and their standing in the societies
and literatures throughout Athenian and Roman ancient history. She opens with the gods and
goddesses of Olympus, because classical mythology provides the earliest recorded demonstration
of male-female relationships in Greek civilisation and, more pertinently, ‘the myths of the past
moulded the attitudes of successive, more sophisticated generations and preserved the continuity
of the social order. Hence, we begin with myths about women both mortal and divine.’ (Ibid., 1).
Pomeory analyses the goddesses as archetypal images of human women, as envisioned by men,
arguing that the distribution of valued skills and characteristics among a number of goddesses
(rather than their concentration in one goddess) is indicative of patriarchy (Ibid., 8). Since ‘A
fully realized female tends to engender anxiety in the insecure male’ (Ibid., 8), desirable
characteristics are shared out between the goddesses, to avoid the Olympian women posing a

59
threat to gods such as Apollo or Zeus, or to the male authors and mythographers of antiquity.
‘The fact that modern women are frustrated by being forced to choose between being an Athena
– an intellectual, asexual career woman – or an Aphrodite – a frivolous sex object – or a
respectable wife-mother like Hera shows that the Greek goddesses continue to be archetypes of
female existence’ (Ibid., 9). Before the Olympians – Zeus’ patriarchal government – Gaia, Ge,
and earlier, prehistoric and unnamed mother goddesses were rulers. Pomeroy opines that
second-wave feminists find the theory of female dominance in religion attractive because they
seek to replicate that power; moreover, if women were not subordinate in the past, it proves that
women are not subordinate by nature (Ibid., 15). Hence, the role of women in prehistory and
antiquity is not only a topic of scholarly debate, but also a modern political issue. In her
introduction, Pomeroy opines that the ‘story of the women of antiquity should be told now, not
only because it is a legitimate aspect of social history, but because the past illuminates
contemporary problems in relationships between men and women’, primary among these
problems is the consistency with which misogynistic attitudes and the roles enforced upon
women in Western society have endured from antiquity to present (Ibid., xii). This speaks to the
core thesis of this chapter, that the role of women in Greek myth has shaped gender relations
throughout Western history, both in terms of men’s attempts to impose symbolic patriarchal order
upon societies and in later feminism, where the women from Greek myth are revisited and
excavated to parse out feminist thought.

Since Cixous’ transformational reinterpretation of Medusa, much feminist attention has

been paid to this monstrous mythical figure. As Natalie Haynes notes, there is an interesting
feminist reading of Medusa’s story wherein ‘Athene’s transformation of Medusa as an act of
sisterly solidarity’ (Haynes 2020: 89) in which Athena’s transformation makes Medusa
undesirable to the male gods who could rape her, thus saving her from further sexual assault.
Medusa’s ability to turn men to stone also arms her against future attackers. However, as
Pomeroy puts it, ‘Athena is the archetype of the masculine woman who finds success in what is
essentially a man’s world by denying her own femininity and sexuality’ (1975; 2015: 4); Haynes
agrees, ‘anyone who spends time with Athene in almost any story told about her will struggle to
see her as a cheerleader for other women’ (Haynes 2020: 89). Since Athena is the archetype of

60
internalised misogyny, this interpretation of ‘sisterly solidarity’ lacks plausibility, yet it does
speak to the generative potential for feminist re-readings of women in mythology. For Cixous,
Medusa is laughing; for some feminists, she is protected by a powerful sisterhood; in Luciano
Garbati’s statue, Medusa beheads Perseus as a deliberate subversion of Benvenuto Cellini’s
famous sculpture. Haynes claims that Garbati’s sculpture epitomises women’s feelings about
gender-based violence because women experience violence in their everyday lives, and then they
see it normalised ‘everywhere from newspaper headlines to the walls of art galleries and
museums’ (Ibid., 106). This mythical monstrous woman has been used to speak to a wide range
of issues for feminists throughout the decades, epitomising how women from myth continue to
be a fertile source for feminist thought.

Haynes examines Medusa in her text Pandora’s Jar, which considers women from Greek
myth in their portrayals from ancient source texts, through their translations and receptions
throughout history, up to contemporary pop culture. Pandora’s Jar is a literary project that aims
to redress the reductive portrayals of mythical women, since we have made space in our
storytelling to rediscover sidelined women’s narratives, looking at them beyond one-dimensional
portrayals throughout the mythological tradition to consider these female figures as fully realised
people: ‘They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people’ (Ibid., 3). The
benefit of this is that the misogynistic tradition of reducing women in storytelling to archetypes is
highlighted and destabilised. An example from Haynes’ work is her reinterpretation of
Clytemnestra: ‘Clytemnestra is a byword in the ancient world, and ever since, for a bad wife, the
worst wife even. But for wronged, silenced, unvalued daughters, she is something of a hero: a
woman who refuses to be quiet when her child is killed, who disdains to accept things and move
on,’ (Ibid., 171). Under Haynes’ treatment, Clytemnestra is no longer the archetypally bad wife,
but the epitome of the good mother. The chapter on the Amazons in Pandora’s Jar is also
particularly relevant, as she explains their incredible popularity in the ancient world, and how
they differed significantly from male heroes. ‘[O]ne of the most important things about these
women is their collective nature [...] It’s a stark contrast to the winner-takes-all mentality that
pervades the male hero ethos in, for example, the Trojan War.’ (Ibid., 116). For Haynes, the
Amazons are an interesting example in their (mis)treatment in classical reception, as they

61
exemplify instances where ‘an accurate translation has been sacrificed in the pursuit of making
women less alarming (and less impressive) in English than they were in Greek’ (Ibid., 118).
Robert Graves’ poem Penthesilea epitomises this, where he has Achilles commit necrophilia on
the eponymous Amazon’s body, something that is not present in the mythic source texts where
Achilles honours the Amazon as a worthy warrior. Haynes writes that Graves’ Penthesilea is a
‘succinct illustration of the way female characters in Greek myth have been marginalised by
writers in the (relatively) modern world’ because ancient writers and artists had no issue with a
warrior queen whose battle prowess was superior to most men’s, whereas Graves has to diminish
the woman and alter the story into one of sexual degradation (Ibid., 142). Graves’ anxious
humiliation of the Amazons to belittle their prowess contrasts to their treatment in more recent
popular culture. Haynes proposes that Wonder Woman, as played by Gal Gadot in the Patty
Jenkins film, is the ‘ultimate warrior’, whose philosophy also reflects society’s altered attitudes
towards war because they actively try to avoid wars (Ibid., 138-9). Moreover, Haynes makes a
case for interpreting Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a modern-day, Californian Amazon
narrative, since she is a peerless warrior and ‘The Chosen One [becomes] the Chosen Many’
(Ibid., 142-4) when women across the world are imbued with Slayer powers in the finale,
speaking to the collective that is central to the Amazonian legend.

Layers of misogyny have been added into Greek myth by later writers, to lend a sense of
history to their sexism, which was not there in the originals; a large part of Pandora’s Jar is
focused on the ways in which female figures in Greek myth have been marginalised by modern
writers. Haynes specifies that women have taken centre stage in the works of Euripides and Ovid,
the latter of whom did the same thing as the authors within this chapter — addressing the male
heroes from the perspective of the women that people their epics (Ibid, 285-6). Though, as
Pomeroy cautions, ‘the dramatic importance and emotional influence of women should not at all
be mistaken for evidence of their equality’ (Pomeroy 1975; 2015: 18). Though ‘the significance
of Helen and the other royal women of the Bronze Age [...] is undeniable’, the political and
social power of even the queens was a fleeting, often double-edged, blessing (Ibid., 18). Haynes
provides evidence for the significance of women’s perspectives in Ancient Greek literature, but

62
this does not equate to equal social standing for the women of myth, or for women in Bronze
Age Greece. Haynes concludes:

If Ovid could see the stories of Greek myth could be told just as well from women’s
perspectives as men’s, how did we forget? When people ask why tell the stories that we
know best from the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective, or Circe’s perspective, they
presuppose that the story “should” be told from Odysseus’ point of view. Which means
the answer to this question should always be: because she’s in the damn story. Why
wouldn’t we want to hear from her? (Haynes 2020: 286)

Penelope, Circe, Briseis, Helen — they are all in the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath, it
is their story as much as it is Agamemnon’s, Achilles’, Odysseus’. Thus, in Pandora’s Jar,
Haynes advocates for the potential in excavating the systematically side-lined female
perspectives present in Greek myth, to gain a greater understanding of both the myths themselves
and women’s roles in literary tradition. This approach to Classics has much insight to give
regarding the misogynistic archetypes applied to women in Western literature throughout the
centuries, and how these traditions can be subverted for radical reappropriation by women
writers.

***

Penelope:

Penelope is a key figure in feminist classicist discourse because, beyond being the ‘epitome of
the good and faithful wife’ (Larrington 1992: 74), she symbolises the uncertainty and
uncanniness of an oikos (the home, the society) without the patriarch. As Felson and Slatkin
point out, the domestic plot of the Odyssey asks ‘How will the patriarchal domestic economy
work, or not work, when the patriarch is gone, perhaps never to return? Will it survive? What are
the obligations of the wife?’ (Felson & Slatkin 2004: 104). Penelope’s personality and plot
provide illuminating parallels with both her husband and Helen. Odysseus and Penelope are

63
unified by scheming, and Penelope – in the domestic sphere, rather than the adventurous one –
‘[keeps] everyone guessing about her innermost feelings and intentions’ (Wilson 2018: 4) in a
way that is distinctly comparable to Odysseus. Like Helen, Penelope is ‘Much-courted’ by the
suitors, despite being a married woman, which mirrors Helen’s marriage to Menelaus and her
later theft by Paris; moreover, Ithaca, besieged with suitors, inexorably mirrors Troy (Ibid., 4). If
Helen is one of Penelope’s narrative foils, so too is Clytemnestra; Penelope is the archetypally
good wife, and Clytemnestra is the epitome of the bad wife. This is supported by Pomeroy’s
interpretation of the women of the Bronze Age epics, wherein ‘Penelope wins the highest
admiration for her chastity, while [...] the ghost of Agamemnon [...] describes Clytemnestra’s
infidelity in reproachful terms’ (Pomeroy 1975; 2015: 21). For Pomeroy, ‘Homer’s attitude
toward women as wives is obvious in his regard for Penelope and Clytemnestra’, and this has
modern implications because ‘[e]ven the virtuous members of the sex are to be forever sullied by
Clytemnestra’s sin. This generalization is the first in a long history of hostility toward women in
Western literature.’ (Ibid., 21-2). Indeed, in Pandora’s Jar, Haynes writes that, when we read the
idealised account of Penelope as a wife, ‘We are witnessing a misogynist tradition which dates
back millennia: praise one woman in order to criticise another. Penelope is a model of virtue
against which other women fall short’ (Haynes 2020: 284). Indeed, in Atwood’s The Penelopiad,
Penelope laments that her story has become ‘A stick used to beat other women with’ (Atwood
2005: 2). While Helen’s weaving is a testament to all of the men dying for her infidelity, and
‘Clytemnestra [uses] her weaving prowess to create a trap for her husband,’ Penelope’s weaving
is a plot to remain faithful, to ensure ‘her freedom from unwanted entanglements with the
suitors: the literal saves her from the metaphorical’ (Haynes 2020: 276, 274). It is this reputation
of the idealised wife that is weaponised to denigrate other women that authors must contend with
when adapting Penelope.

Before analysing Atwood’s interpretation of Penelope in The Penelopiad, it is important to

note that her rewriting owes a debt to Ovid’s. Acknowledgment of an ancient author who also
wrote from Penelope’s perspective establishes the influences on Atwood’s characterisation of
Penelope, as well as traces the literary tradition of rewriting myths from sidelined female
perspectives back to its roots in antiquity. Ovid’s Heroides I is addressed from ‘Penelope to the

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tardy Ulysses:’ and opens with a very clear intent ‘do not answer these lines, but come,’ (trans.
Isbell 1990; 2004). ‘I am here / alone while you loiter in some foreign place’ (Ibid): Ovid’s
Penelope is in Ithaca, impatiently awaiting her husband’s return, struggling with the suitors while
Odysseus lives through the events of the Odyssey. Moreover, as Isbell claims, Ovid’s Penelope is
not naïve, ‘Penelope writes this letter out of a deep suspicion that Ulysses is detained not merely
by adverse winds and seas but also by his own dalliance with other women’ (Isbell 1990; 2004:
1), such as when she writes ‘perhaps / it is only love that detains you: / be sure that I know how
fickle men can be’. It is noteworthy that ‘while Penelope can be seen as a veritable paradigm of
virtue, [...] Ovid also takes pains to show another side to her’ (Isbell 1990; 2004: 2), namely her
knowing impatience. Haynes concurs that Ovid portrays a highly nuanced character, ‘as women
imagined by Ovid so often are’: in Ovid’s rewriting, ‘she is not merely a cypher of good wifely
behaviour, but a woman with complicated feelings and demands of her own’ (Haynes 2020:
284-5). Atwood’s modern novella shares with Ovid’s ancient poem a ‘similar instinct – to create
a three-dimensional Penelope we can see clearly,’ rather than the unplaceable figure we find in
the Homeric epic (Ibid., 285).15 Like Ovid’s poem, Atwood’s novella is in first person, to give
Penelope a chance to speak in her own words, against her insufficient portrayal in Homer’s epic
and the misogynistic tradition of using her myth to oppress other women.

In The Penelopiad, Atwood adapts mythology into a space for women’s stories, in spite of
its typically patriarchal roots. This is in line with Weigle’s assertion that mythology is dominated
‘by male scribes, scholars, artists, and “informants” and thus concerns men’s myths and rituals.
Far more is known about women in mythology, about the female figures who people male
narratives, enactments, philosophies, theologies, and analyses, than about women and mythology
or women’s mythologies’ (Weigle 1999: 969). Penelope becomes the ‘scribe [or] scholar’ of this
new, feminine mythology, as demonstrated when she says ‘Now that the others have run out of
air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making. […] So I’ll spin a thread of my own’ (Atwood 2005:
3-4). The woman is no longer the other, the male mythographers and mythic protagonists of the
past are ‘the others’; this is a gendered subversion wherein the men are silenced in the process of

15
Natalie Haynes also adapts Penelope in an epistolary form in A Thousand Ships which is directly influenced by
Ovid’s Heroides and Atwood’s The Penelopiad. For further analysis, see below and Chapter 5: ‘Palimpsests:
Paratexts and Intertexts’.

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othering. Stating that the men – and the male traditions of myth – ‘have run out of air’ indicates
silence in a number of ways. This ‘air’ refers to the breath of life that the dead poets lack and the
dead languages that these masculine myths were spoken and written in. Moreover, the ‘air’ refers
to the inflation of ‘male scribes, scholars, artists, and “informants”’ over their female
counterparts, suggesting that they were previously “full of [hot] air”. ‘Atwood’s Penelope is fully
aware that she is telling her story after, and in response to Odyssean receptions — but also, in a
more basic sense, to the Odyssey itself’ (Hauser 2018: 114). The image of Penelope ‘spin[ning] a
thread’ also has a double meaning in that it refers to her creating her feminised myth, but also
refers to her most famous act in the Odyssey, wherein she weaved Laertes’ funeral shroud by day,
promising the suitors that she would choose one to marry when it was completed, and undid her
weaving by night (Homer, Odyssey 2:100). The title of the novella imitates the formation of the
Odyssey after Odysseus, ‘stating quite unambiguously that this is the story of Penelope. It is, in
other words, the “herstory” of the Odyssey’ (Hauser 2018: 116). Penelope becomes the hero with
her own epic, much like Odysseus’ Odyssey or Achilles’ Achilliad. The title of the novel and its
opening lines immediately establish Atwood’s vision of Penelope ‘as both revisionist feminist
and revisionist narratologist [who] is determined to redress the wrongs done to her in the
subsequent retellings of her story’ (Ibid., 116). The Penelopiad, then, is established as women’s
revisionist mythology from the start, and the novella uses its position as the “herstory” of the
Odyssey to engage with the contemporary feminist concerns of power balances, domestic labour
and empowerment, and the double discrimination of class and gender in its adaptation of the
Maids.

The power balance within the novel is constantly in flux and speaks to the focus on
women’s experience. At the start, Penelope is oppressed by Sparta and Ithaca’s patriarchal
cultures. When Odysseus wins Penelope’s hand in marriage, she is passed over to him as a prize.
Her awareness of her own commodification is clear in her use of the simile, ‘I was handed over
to Odysseus, like a package of meat’ albeit one ‘in a wrapping of gold.’ (Atwood 2005: 39). The
language here clearly communicates Penelope’s commodification within patriarchy. The
‘wrapping of gold’ refers to her dowry, the fiscal prize that Odysseus won when he won her. She
is a commodity of her father’s to be auctioned off, and henceforth a commodity of her husband’s,

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who is rewarded for winning the competition with a number of valuable things, including gold
and Penelope. She also describes herself as ‘meat’, suggesting the dehumanised way that she is
viewed in this patriarchal society; ‘meat’ also has a sexual overtone, suggesting that she is valued
for her flesh, her body. Penelope goes on to describe the value placed on meat in antiquity: ‘meat
was highly valued among us – the aristocracy ate lots of it, meat, meat, meat, […] bread, bread,
bread, and wine, wine, wine.’ (Ibid., 39). The repetition of ‘meat’, ‘bread’, and ‘wine’ has an
offhand tone, indicating that although she is a thing of value, value is something that the
aristocracy has an abundance of. Zajko claims that Penelope ‘complains vociferously about the
cultural authority of her husband’s version of the events that shaped both their lives’ (Zajko
2011: 195), and the patriarchal authority within the context of the novella becomes symbolic of
the powerful ‘cultural authority’ that Odysseus’ version of the myth has.

Penelope’s patriarchal oppression is not her only problem within The Penelopiad; she also
has to compete with the other female characters and their internalised misogyny. Penelope’s
mother-in-law, Anticleia, is described as ‘circumspect’ (Atwood 2005: 60), suggesting that she is
wary and disapproving; the description of her as ‘prune-mouthed’ (Ibid., 60) both furthers this
image (because it suggests an expression of disapproval) and indicates that the feeling is mutual
from Penelope, who dislikes her mother-in-law’s spiteful tone. This mutual dislike between the
two women indicates internalised misogyny, which refers to women’s assimilation of sexist
ideologies and practices, and the replication of those practices even in the absence of men (see
Bearman et al. 2009: 11). Though patriarchy is notably absent since Odysseus has taken all
eligible men to war, the women still judge each other by inherited harsh, patriarchal standards.
Moreover, Odysseus’ maid Eurycleia also takes issue with Penelope: ‘She left me with nothing to
do, no little office I might perform for my husband, for if I tried to carry out any small, wifely
task she would be right there to tell me that wasn’t how Odysseus liked things done’ (Atwood
2005: 63). The language of servitude here – ‘little office I might perform […] small, wifely task’
– exemplifies the hyper-patriarchal cultural context of the narrative. This passive-aggressive
power struggle leaves Eurycleia with the (relative) power in the dynamic, as she is able to serve
Odysseus which, within this context, is the only form of power the women can attain. The class
divide between Penelope and Eurycleia is made evident when one contrasts Penelope’s

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significant dowry to Eurycleia’s value. ‘Odysseus’s father had bought her, and so highly had he
valued her that he hadn’t even slept with her.’ (Atwood 2005: 60) – while Penelope is pleased
with her valuation as a ‘sort of gilded blood pudding’ (Ibid., 36), which combines the gold and
meat metaphors discussed above, Eurycleia is ‘delighted with herself’ (Ibid., 61) for not being
raped repeatedly at her owner’s discretion. As Pomeroy notes, ‘[t]he availability of slave women
facilitated a sexual double standard in epic society. Kings were heads of patriarchal households
which included slave concubines’ (1975; 2015: 26). Sexual double standards are central to the
Odyssey, where Odysseus has multiple affairs while Penelope’s fidelity is necessary (Wilson
2018: 40). More broadly, ‘there is a marked absence of close female relationships,’ in ancient
literature, which tend to ‘promote female rivalry over female friendship’ (Morales 2008: 49-50).
Thus, in reproducing the hyper-patriarchal culture and subsequent internalised misogyny, The
Penelopiad shines a light not only on patriarchal authority in Bronze Age Greece, but also how
relationships between men and women, and amongst women, are negatively affected by
patriarchy.

The power balance within the novel shifts when Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War.
Penelope takes on the typically masculine role of kingdom upkeep in his absence. This is
empowering since Penelope is portrayed as successful, and she ‘soon had a reputation as a smart
bargainer’ (Atwood 2005: 88). Here, the use of ‘smart’ forces a comparison between Penelope
and Odysseus, as Odysseus is characterised by his wit and wiliness in myth, with Odysseus being
widely held as the wisest of the Greek heroes (Morford et al. 2011: 523). The description of
Penelope as ‘smart’ implies that her intellect is equal to Odysseus’. Furthermore, Penelope
enjoys this office and flourishes in a masculine environment. For example, she ‘[makes] a point
of learning about such things as lambing and calving, and how to keep a sow from eating her
farrow’ (Atwood 2005: 88). There is an indication of improvement here because she ‘learns’, but
there is also a gendered nuance in the professional language she uses to describe a pig eating her
young. She sees this as an economic loss, as demonstrated by the professional language of ‘sow’
and ‘farrow’, as opposed to a more emotive focus on the mother/child bond between the pigs.
This is what Marshment calls the ‘signifying codes of power’, in which women’s power is
assessed and validated within a patriarchal framework, and a woman is considered “strong”

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within patriarchal terms –– namely, rich, ruthless and invulnerable (Marshment 1993; 1997:
133). Nevertheless, Penelope has developed an understanding of Ithaca’s agricultural economy,
and successfully works within those economies for profit. Penelope is thus emancipated from her
gendered oppression when there are no patriarchs present, and is thriving without her husband to
oppress her. This recalls Felson and Slatkin’s questions about how the patriarchal domestic
economy will operate in the absence of the patriarch, and the obligations of the wife (2004: 104).
In the Odyssey, Penelope – ever the obedient wife – excels beyond expectations to build up
Odysseus’ estate for his return. Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, compares her to ‘a virtuous and
godlike king’ for ‘[ruling] a mighty people with good laws’ as well as her efforts in making the
‘earth bear forth wheat and barley’ and the ‘sheep have lambs’ –– that is, maintaining the
domestic economy in his stead (Homer, trans. Wilson, 2018: 19:111-115). In The Penelopiad,
Penelope’s motivations are more nuanced, since the portrayal of Penelope as simply obedient is
subverted, and she thrives in the absence of a patriarch.

Feminist research on housewives is uniquely valuable when considering Penelope’s myths

in modern contexts. Ann Oakley’s sociological research on women and housework are pertinent
to Penelope’s emancipation. She argues that ‘Women’s domesticity is a circle of learnt
deprivation and induced subjugation: a circle decisively centred on family life’ (Oakley 1974:
233). Oakley’s focus on the domestic sphere relates to the fact that, in Atwood’s text, Penelope
thrives in the agricultural industry of Ithaca, where she escapes her previous domestic
oppression. The unsympathetic language Penelope uses to describe the separation of a mother
pig and her child echoes Oakley’s theory that ‘Male-dominated culture has designated as female
all labours of emotional connectedness’ (Oakley 1984: 201). Penelope has linguistically stripped
away the potential ‘emotional connectedness’ between herself as a mother and the sow, and this
is possible because her culture is no longer male-dominated, since her husband has taken all of
the patriarchal force to war. Oakley claims that ‘The principal mode of developing this sensitivity
in women is the gender-differentiated nuclear family. Women mother. Daughters are transformed
into mothers. An autonomous sense of self […] does not need to develop.’ (Ibid., 201) and this is
identifiable in Penelope’s relationship with her son. Telemachus reaches maturity, and we see
Penelope’s characterisation as a shrewd, empowered businesswoman falter. She reflects that

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‘Once they're taller than you are, you have only your moral authority: a weak weapon at best’
(Atwood 2005: 131). The word ‘weapon’ shows Penelope challenging the patriarchal demand on
women for sensitivity implying that Penelope is aware that the power balance between her and
her son is in flux, as the violent imagery presents them as both vying for, or battling over, power.
Her description of Telemachus as ‘taller’ shows explicitly that he has grown to manhood, but it
also gives him an oppressive, looming quality, as though he is towering over her. Furthermore,
her use of the second person (‘you only have your’) extends the relevance of her assertion to all
women whose sons transition from children to participating patriarchs. As Angela Davis
expounds in Women, Race & Class, ‘Just as a woman’s maternal duties are always taken for
granted, her never-ending toil as a housewife rarely occasions expressions of appreciation’
(Davis 1981: 200): the feminist concern with the devaluing of women’s (domestic and maternal)
labour is elucidated in Atwood’s novella, using a familiar mythological framework. For centuries,
Penelope has been cast as the epitome of the good wife and mother, yet modern discourses
focused on housewives and domestic labour enable her to be recast as an industrious character,
independent from her relationships with her husband and son.

As well as her talent for industry, Penelope is also empowered by a scheming nature. She
plots against the suitors by weaving a funeral shroud by day and unravelling it by night to
postpone the day she would have to answer their proposals. As Jasmine Richards explains in
‘Rereading Penelope’s Shroud’, Penelope’s act was central to the domestic plot of the Odyssey,
yet it has been largely ‘overlooked in dominant critical approaches to the text’, though more
recent feminist classical scholarship ‘has convincingly argued for the centrality of Penelope and
her weaving to the plot of the Odyssey.’ (Richards 2019: 125). When recalling the plot, Penelope
says ‘Finally, a scheme occurred to me.’ (Atwood 2005: 112). The word choice ‘scheme’
exemplifies her strategic nature, again comparing her to Odysseus, who is characterised as a
schemer in the Odyssey, where he is called ‘polytropos’ (Homer Odyssey 1.11), which means ‘of
many ways’ –– a reference to his scheming and well-travelled nature (Morford et al. 2011: 543).
Felson and Slatkin interpret Penelope’s shroud ‘scheme’ as putting her on-par with her husband,
viewing ‘Odysseus and Penelope, in particular, as consummate schemers’ (Felson & Slatkin
2004: 103). By using the word ‘consummate’ here, Felson and Slatkin indicate that Odysseus

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and Penelope’s marriage is completed by their similarities as schemers. Haynes also agrees that
Penelope and Odysseus are ‘well-matched’ and that ‘deceit is their underlying characteristic’
(2020: 265; 276). It is my contention that the interpretation of Penelope as equal in scheming to
Odysseus is empowering, as it puts her on a par with a figure that remains famous for his
intellect. Moreover, it is indicative of one way in which feminist work in classical studies can be
adapted to feminist literary studies of the contemporary novel, since feminist classicist analysis
of Penelope can illuminate the treatment of her in contemporary women’s writing.

Atwood’s characterisation of Penelope as an intellectual equal – or indeed superior – to

Odysseus is later paralleled in Madeline Miller’s Circe, in which the eponymous goddess meets
Penelope after Odysseus’ death, as well as in Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, which includes
epistolary chapters from Penelope. Miller, like Atwood, problematises the previously
two-dimensional portrayal of Penelope, ‘Loyal, songs called her later. Faithful and true and
prudent. Such passive, pale words for what she was’ (Miller 2018: 292). Here, there is an explicit
critique of the patriarchal literature, or ‘songs’, that characterised her as ‘passive, [and] pale’ and
Miller, like Atwood, presents an adaptation of Penelope that refuses to conform to this. As well
as the explicit comparisons between Odysseus and Penelope that the narrator notes, such as the
observation that ‘There were none like him, yet there was one who had matched him’ (Ibid.,
271), there are also more veiled references to their similarities. For example, Penelope’s
scheming nature is alluded to when Circe observes that ‘I can spot the spider in her web.’ (Ibid,
281) which, like Atwood’s text, draws a parallel between Penelope’s skill in weaving a loom and
weaving deception. This is made more explicit when Circe ‘realised how little she [Penelope]
had said’ (Ibid., 275) after a long conversation between them, again indicating Penelope’s
quick-wittedness and ability to deceive. Penelope and Odysseus are also equalised in Circe’s
estimation when she narrates ‘She would have made an archer, I thought. That cold-eyed
precision.’ (Ibid., 282) — since Odysseus was a famously skilled archer, she is equating their
potentially equal skill in archery to further highlight their intellectual equality. This adaptation of
Penelope by Miller echoes Atwood’s through the destabilisation of Penelope’s silence and
passivity, an attribute so highly praised in the Odyssey but considered insufficient and a
by-product of patriarchal mythmaking in these retellings. Instead, she is intelligent and

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accomplished. Equally, in Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships Penelope’s epistolary interludes
where she writes to the journeying Odysseus also portray Penelope’s intellect as equal to, or
perhaps greater than, Odysseus’. She judges that her errant husband is ‘not quite as clever as me’
(Haynes 2019: 59) and goes on to critique some of his most famous deceptions, particularly his
failed attempt to avoid going to war by sowing the fields with salt. Haynes’ Penelope
condescendingly, disappointedly concludes the letter with ‘You did the best you could [...] And it
was nearly enough’ (Ibid., 60). Again, then, Penelope is reimagined not only as a ‘consummate
schemer’, but a potentially greater one. These identifiable interpretations point towards a feminist
Penelope that is being (re)constructed in contemporary novelistic retellings, characterised by
being at least equally matched to Odysseus in terms of intellect, and one that objects to her
modest portrayal in earlier literature. This interpretation is supported by recent feminist
scholarship, that has advocated for the centrality of Penelope’s plot to the Odyssey, despite it
being overlooked in earlier classical scholarship.

However, there is a danger that this feminist Penelope emerges as a patriarch in female
clothing, which is to say that she gains her emancipation at the cost of subjugating women less
fortunate than herself. This is most evident in the case of the twelve Maids; in the Odyssey the
Maids slept with the suitors, and Odysseus and Telemachus hang them upon the former’s
re-entry to Ithaca. In Wilson’s translation, the events are portrayed thus: ‘Sobbing desperately /
the girls came, weeping, [...] the girls, their heads all in a row, / were strung up with the noose
around their necks / to make their death an agony. They gasped, / feet twitching for a while, but
not for long.’ (Homer, trans. Wilson 2018: 22:446-474). Wilson’s choices as a translator speak to
the increasing pathos afforded to the Maids in more recent readings of the Odyssey. For one, she
calls them ‘girls’ and centres their ‘weeping’ and ‘agony’. By contrast, Fagles (1990) calls them
‘women’ and has Telemachus call them ‘you sluts—the suitors’ whores!’. Wilson’s translation
marks a departure from the tradition of including anachronistic, modern sexist terms that are
unrepresentative of the original text (Wilson 2018: 43-4). Wilson’s choice is particularly
important because she calls them ‘slaves’ rather than ‘maids’. As Madeline Miller explains,
‘those women have been called the maids traditionally in translations, the word in Greek is
female slave, […] when we acknowledge that they are slaves, we have to acknowledge that these

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women would have had no choice, and Odysseus – theoretically the hero – kills them anyway’
(Miller & Guru-Murthy 2012: 36:00). In calling them ‘Slaves’, Wilson underlines their absolute
lack of agency in the crime that they are hanged for. As Pomeroy notes, ‘slave concubines [were]
available for [a King’s] own use or to be offered to itinerant warriors to earn their support’ (1975;
2015: 26), so the suitors, from a Bronze Age perspective, exploited Odysseus’ property, which is
of course to discount the experiences of the women. This is encapsulated in the courtroom scene
in The Penelopiad:

Penelope: [...] they were raped without permission.

Judge (chuckles): Excuse me, Madam, but isn’t that what rape is?

Without permission?

Attorney for the Defence: Without permission of their master, (Atwood 2005: 181-2)

The court interlude of The Penelopiad thus spells out the issue that Odysseus and Telemachus
have with the suitors’ assaults, which is a far cry from the problem of the maids’ lack of agency
and consent. This is a key example of what Morford et al. note as ‘the work of feminist scholars
[that] has led to greater flexibility and often […] greater sensitivity in modern readings of
classical literature’ (2011: 17), as we are seeing an increased sensitivity and pathos afforded to
the underprivileged women in myth.

In The Penelopiad, the Maids are used to navigate the intersection between class and
gender-based oppression. The structure of the novel is one way in which the class difference
between the eponymous Penelope and the nameless maids (except Melantho of the Pretty
Cheeks, who is named merely to give some personalisation to the maids). The maids’ narrative
comes in the form of “Chorus Lines” and, in classical Greek drama, the choruses were comprised
of groups of actors who would comment upon the happenings in the play and pass judgement, as
though they were a jury consisting of common everymen, and were distinguished from the
characters by the passivity of the chorus and the activity of the actors (EB 1998). This establishes
a class distinction between Penelope and the Maids before their perspective is even given
because – in being placed in a Chorus – they are framed in advance as average citizens. The

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chorus line gives the Maids a platform to interrupt and disrupt Penelope’s narrative, which allows
her privilege to be highlighted and interrogated.

This class intersection within the Chorus Lines is particularly evident in the first
interruption, entitled ‘The Chorus Line: A Rope Jumping Line’ (Atwood 2005: 5). This follows
directly after Penelope’s introduction, where she expresses her desire to tell her own story: ‘Now
that all the others have ran out of air, it’s my turn to do a little story-making’ (Atwood 2005: 3).
However, this previously empowering metaphor of asphyxiation is darkened by the Maids’ first
Chorus Line, where they introduce themselves:

we are the maids

the ones you killed
the ones you failed

we danced in the air

our feet twitched
it was not fair (Atwood 2005: 5)

The air that Penelope previously found liberating is now oppressive and asphyxiating to the
Maids, thus setting in motion a metaphor which describes upper-class women profiting while
lower-class women not only continue to struggle, but are further oppressed by their richer
counterparts. The poignancy of ‘air’ is further accentuated by its rhyme with ‘fair’, which
highlights the socioeconomic disparity between the women — while Penelope gains the air to
speak, they are suffocated, because of their double discrimination as poor women. This scene
draws attention to double discrimination, a term used to describe ‘sexism intermingled with other
forms of prejudice’, including racism, homophobia, ablism, or – in this case – classism (Bates
2018: 157). Many prominent feminists are privileged (able bodied, white, and financially stable)
and, as a result, feminist discourse has often been blind to the class intersection with feminism,
such as the facts that women’s work is undervalued and underpaid and women from different

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socioeconomic backgrounds typically have very different access to education (McKelle 2014:
np.). Therefore, class-blind feminism can lead to furthering hegemonic capitalist patriarchy
rather than dismantling it (Ibid., np.), which is identifiable in the dynamic between Penelope and
the Maids because she socially and financially profits while they are ‘failed’.

Penelope’s privilege is exemplified in “The Chorus Line: If I Was A Princess, A Popular

Tune”. When she marries Odysseus, she reflects that she ‘could hardly wait to get away from the
Spartan court’ because she ‘hadn’t been very happy there,’ (Atwood 2005: 49); she remembers
that her father tried to kill her, and her cousin Helen mocked her. Initially, this invokes pity for
Penelope, but this reflection is immediately followed by “The Chorus Line: If I Was A Princess,
A Popular Tune”, where Penelope’s suffering is put into perspective by addressing her privilege.
The Chorus Line opens with the lines ‘If I was a princess, with silver and gold, / And loved by a
hero, I’d never grow old’ (Ibid., 51). Here, we are reminded of Penelope’s privilege in terms of
her social standing, wealth, and immortalisation in history, which starkly contrasts to the Maids
who ‘make the soft beds in which others do lie’ (Ibid., 52). Princesses such as Penelope have the
socioeconomic privilege, here symbolised by the ‘soft beds’, while the maids only have
servitude. In both the Chorus lines “A Rope Jumping Line” and “If I Was A Princess, A Popular
Tune”, Penelope’s privilege is highlighted, as her problems of being silenced and bullied are
contextualised with a class lens, in which we are reminded that she is a princess, while the Maids
are dually oppressed by gender and class, and their ending is far more tragic as a result.

However, there are a number of ways in which the class divide between Penelope and the
Maids is breached. Hilde Staels argues that the incongruity in Penelope’s language complicates
the class divide between the eponymous character and the Maids. Staels recognises a comparison
between ‘Atwood’s “noble” Penelope incongruously […] us[ing] vulgar speech’ and ‘the
maidservants who use vulgar speech in the chorus lines’ (Staels 2009: 107) — this shared
linguistic technique points towards the shared experiences of the women in The Penelopiad,
regardless of class distinction. Staels further argues that this use of vulgar language not only
indicates an equalising kinship between the female characters that remedies ancient class
distinctions between Penelope and her maids, but also serves to dethrone the Homeric epic (Ibid.,
107). In Staels’ interpretation, ‘Atwood’s burlesque first-person narrators undermine high

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Homeric style by using a trivialising transgressive speech’ (Ibid., 107). Penelope and the Maids
are seen not as opponents in class warfare, but united in their challenge to exclusionary traditions
in Classics. Penelope’s vulgarity – such as when she calls her cousin Helen a ‘septic bitch’
(Atwood 2005: 131) – and the Maids’ vulgarity – for instance, when they recall their rapes by the
suitors, ‘hoist our skirts at their command / For every prick and knave’ (Ibid., 126) – work
alongside one another to ‘[create] a discordance between a noble and low register’ (Staels 2009:
107). The women’s vulgarity not only unites them, but works to dethrone the elevation of the
Homeric epic, and patriarchal traditions within Classics as a whole.

While Staels argues that the vulgar language unifies the women within The Penelopiad
beyond class restrictions, vulgar language cannot in itself level the class divide between Penelope
and the women she owns. The vulgarity is an act of parody, and an allusion to the literary
tradition of parodying epic poetry. This tradition arguably began with Homer himself, who was
originally attributed to writing the Batrachomyomachia, or “The Battle of the Frogs and Mice”
–– a parody of the Iliad and the Trojan War. As Rose indicates, although the mock-epic may have
been written instead by Pigres, it can still be categorised as Homeric by the era in which it was
written and its form as an epic poem. The poem is distinguished as parody by its ‘imitation of
form with a change to content’ (Rose 1993: 15) which is, broadly speaking, the definition of
ancient parody. Rose goes on to trace traditions of parody from ancient to modern
(post-Renaissance) to postmodern literature and concludes that the techniques and devices of
parody may have changed, but parodying epics is a literary tradition that can be traced through
the ages (Ibid., 278). The Penelopiad’s vulgar language can therefore be understood as parodic
because, despite the fact that it does not conform to the form of the epic, the novel’s mirroring of
the Odyssey and debasement of its characters (the mockery of Odysseus by Penelope and the
Maids; the mockery of Penelope by the maids; and Penelope’s debasement by her vulgarity)
establishes the novel as parodic. Yet, ‘unambiguously comic works such as Aristophanes’ Frogs
[show that] the use of parody may aim both at a comic effect and at the transmission of both
complex and serious messages,’ (Ibid., 29). Therefore, this parodic reading of The Penelopiad
does not diminish its political impact, but rather can be understood as a tool deployed to denote
‘complex and serious messages,’ particularly in terms of gender and class. Evidently, parody is

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part of a long-held tradition when it comes to the classical epics and, further to this, ‘parody is a
witty translation’ (Schlegel 1957: 118, fr. 1108 in Maguire 2009: 174) that ‘transforms a host text
without obliterating it’ (Maguire 2009: 174). Thus, reading The Penelopiad in terms of parody
makes the novella an active participant in the classical tradition, the most recent in a tradition of
parodying epic that begins with the works of Aristophanes and Ovid.

The Maids’ intellectual growth constitutes another way that the class divide between
Penelope and the maids is breached. Staels views the twenty-first century courtroom Chorus Line
as an example of the anachronisms within the novel which dethrone the Homeric epic, arguing
that the ‘boundary between the time of the ancient epic and that of the contemporary novel is
[…] crossed when the maids summon twelve angry Furies to take revenge on Odysseus during
the twenty-first-century trial’ (Staels 2009: 106). The court scene in “The Chorus Line: The Trial
of Odysseus, as Videotaped by the Maids” is also an example of the Maids’ intellectual
progression from bawdy songs to lectures and courtrooms, which is how the maids ascend
beyond their class subjugation within the novel. The Maids’ Chorus Lines begin with quite
simple forms, such as “A Rope-Jumping Rhyme” where the recurring chorus of ‘we danced in
the air / our bare feet twitched / it was not fair’ (Atwood 2005: 5) is a key example of this
simplicity. The ABA rhyme scheme, the single syllable words, and the lack of capital letters and
punctuation all exemplify this simplicity. By contrast, towards the end of the novel, the Chorus
Lines progress from simple, often bawdy, songs to “The Chorus Line: An Anthropology Lecture”
and “The Chorus Line: The Trial of Odysseus, as Videotaped by the Maids”.
In “The Chorus Line: An Anthropology Lecture”, the Maids present a nuanced
interpretation of themselves as ‘twelve moon-maidens, companions of Artemis, virginal but
deadly goddess of the moon’, making their hangings ‘ritual sacrifices, devoted priestesses doing
[their] part’ (Ibid., 164). Rather than being murdered by the oppressive patriarch who was
reclaiming his kingdom, the Maids’ deaths become ritual sacrifice for a goddess cult. The Maids
reinforce this by interpreting Penelope as ‘our High Priestess’ (Ibid., 165) so that their number
grows from twelve – as in ‘twelve months, […] month comes from moon’ (Ibid., 163) – to
thirteen, to match the number of lunar months, furthering their interpretation of the Maids as the
members of a Moon Cult dedicated to Artemis. This lecture becomes a metatextual analysis of

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the novel itself, and the Maids ‘deny that this theory is merely unfounded feminist claptrap’
(Ibid., 166). This colloquial language, reminiscent of modern anti-feminist arguments, or
‘trolling’ (see Bates 2018: 1-24), relates back to the discourse surrounding parody. The Maids’
use of this phrase is ironic, as it stands starkly in juxtaposition with their otherwise academic
language; here parody is used to discredit anti-feminist criticism by making it seem uneducated
in comparison to the Maids’ erudition. The Maids become academics reading the myth of
Penelope – and The Penelopiad – through an intersectional feminist lens, in the same way that
Margaret Atwood herself has rewritten Penelope’s myth as a feminist re-imagining.
To sum up, Penelope is a renewed source of interest for feminists, who advocate for the
importance of the domestic plot of the Odyssey and the significance of her weaving. Moreover,
Atwood’s novella is the foundation, not only of rewriting Penelope as a schemer equal to
Odysseus and a character who objects to her modest reputation, but also the starting point of this
current trend of feminist adaptations of Greek myth. Adapting Penelope also affords an
opportunity to meaningfully engage with the double discrimination of class and gender, as her
myth is inextricable from the Maids who were murdered under her care. In The Penelopiad, the
Maids’ intellectual progression allows them not only to ascend past their class restrictions, but
also to actively shape their own distinct critical discourse to highlight their oppression.

***
Briseis:

While Penelope remains a famous figure of Greek mythology, recognisable as Odysseus’ loyal
and patient wife, Briseis has fallen into comparative obscurity. As Isbell indicates, in the Iliad,
Briseis is ‘scarcely developed and she is little more than a pivot around which the fabled wrath of
Achilles is developed’ (Isbell 1990; 2004: 19). The fact that Briseis is relatively forgotten in
contemporary culture makes her a prime candidate for feminist reimaginings. In ‘Myth and Fairy
Tale in Contemporary Women’s Fiction’, Susan Sellers theorises that ‘Feminist rewriting can [...]
be thought of in two categories: as an act of demolition, exposing and detonating the stories that
have hampered women, and a task of construction - of bringing into being enabling alternatives’
(2001; 2011: 189). Sellers stresses the importance of finding a balance in retellings that involves

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‘keeping and benefitting from those elements which are still potent for us, while discarding or
revitalising those which are dead, deadly, or simply no longer appropriate’ (Ibid., 188). Briseis’
myth falls into the latter category, as her comparative obscurity (when considered in relation to,
for instance, Penelope, Helen, or Clytemnestra) means that her myth is ripe for ‘revitalising’, and
adapting her is ‘a task of construction’ more than one of exposition or revisitation. The obscurity
of Briseis accounts for the divergences in her reinterpretations. While Atwood and Miller’s
Penelopes were clearly comparable, Emily Hauser, Madeline Miller, and Pat Barker all interpret
Briseis in very different ways, in terms of her background, her relationship with Achilles, and her
ending. The key questions that arise when adapting Briseis include what background to give her
when there is so little offered in ancient texts, whether she could ever consent to a sexual
relationship with Achilles, and how to end her story since her fate is also a matter left unresolved
by Homer.
In the Iliad, Briseis’ background is only mentioned once, and it is focused on the
experiences of ‘The brilliant runner Achilles’ who ‘ lay among his ships, / raging over Briseis,
the girl with lustrous hair, / The prize he seized from Lyrnessus— / After he had fought to
exhaustion at Lyrnessus,’ (Homer, Iliad, trans. Fagles, 2:784-787). This scene is dedicated to
Achilles’ present heartbreak at losing Briseis to Agamemnon and his previous victory. In the
Iliad, Achilles recalls that he ‘toppled the vaunting spearmen Epistrophus and Mynes, / […] All
for Briseis’ (2:789-790). Pat Barker’s Briseis in The Silence of the Girls has the backstory that is
the most faithful to the Iliad, as she is the Princess of Lyrnessus, married to Prince Mynes
(Barker 2018: 6-7). This early adherence to Homer’s text highlights that later parts of her story –
particularly what happens to her after she is returned to Achilles – are left unwritten in Homer.
Similarly, in For the Most Beautiful, Hauser presents Briseis as the princess of Lyrnessus, wife of
Prince Mynes (Hauser 2016: 43, 64) and, further to this, makes her the princess of Pedasus
before her marriage. Though this is not in the Homeric version, Hauser explains in the endnotes
that ‘Lyrnessus clearly lay between Pedasus and Thebe in Homer’s description of the geography
of the Troad [the peninsula on which Troy was built]’ (Ibid., 469). This provides a backstory for
Briseis before her marriage, which makes geographical and socio-economical sense. Therefore,
as well as providing the perspective of Briseis during the events of the Iliad, since ‘despite their

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vital role in setting up the plot, Briseis and Krisayis [Chryseis]16 are subsequently rarely
mentioned’ (Ibid., 455 [endnote]), Hauser also provides a convincing backstory for Briseis,
which Homer overlooked. This excavation of the woman’s narrative of the Trojan War is in-line
with the aims of feminist revision in which the previously overlooked woman’s stories are
explored. As Morford et al. explain, ‘Feminist critical theories have led to many new [...]
interpretations of classical myths. They approach mythology from the perspective of women and
interpret the myths by focusing especially on the [...] situation of their female characters’ (2011:
16-7). Overall, the amount of detail afforded to Briseis’ personal (pre-Achilles) history in Barker
and Hauser’s novels speaks to the foregrounding of women’s stories from Greek myth in
contemporary feminist adaptations.
By contrast, in The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s Briseis has a different heritage:
Patroclus narrates that ‘she was an Anatolian farm girl’ (Miller 2011: 215). This characterisation
of Briseis as a farm girl, as opposed to a princess, is reinforced by her physical appearance, as
Patroclus ‘saw how dark her eyes were, brown as the richest earth,’ and describes her skin as ‘a
deep brown’ (Ibid., 214-5). While Achilles and Patroclus are coded as caucasian, Briseis is not;
the repetition of ‘brown’ and ‘dark’ in her physical description establishes her as a woman of
colour. In framing Briseis explicitly in racial terms, Miller’s text provokes a parallel between
antiquity and more modern examples of slavery. It is true that much less detail is afforded to
Briseis in The Song of Achilles, indicating that retelling the narratives of the female characters
that Homer overlooked is not the primary motivation for Miller’s text.17
Since there is only one line that refers to Briseis’ background, and her character is so
underrepresented in the Iliad, this makes her a rich resource for contemporary adapting authors.
The gaps in Briseis’ story leave plentiful space to create a new narrative for her –– this is what
Maguire, in relation to Helen’s appearance, calls ‘the blank space of nonrepresentation’, that is, a
blank to be filled in by later thinkers who revisit her (2009: 40). Briseis’ blank narrative is
extreme in comparison to the other women within the scope of this chapter, Penelope and Helen,
whose myths are more complete in the Homeric epics. Briseis is a slave and a foreigner,
16
Hauser chose this translation of the character’s name, rather than the more anglicised Chryseis, to avoid confusion
for the reader, for whom this spelling may render it too similar to Briseis; she maintains that ‘the translation Krisayis
is, in fact, equally true to the Greek’ (Hauser 2016: 455 [endnote]). Hauser’s literature can therefore be categorised
as general or romance fiction, but it is evidently informed by her academic research.
17
This will be further explored in Chapter 3: ‘Mythic Masculinities’ and Chapter 4: ‘Queering Myth’.

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potentially also a woman of colour, compared to Penelope and Helen, who are Greek and royalty,
therefore accounting for her narrative being overlooked in ancient sources. The adapting
potential for Briseis’ story is particularly prevalent in her divergent relationships with Achilles in
these different texts.
In For the Most Beautiful, Emily Hauser presents the most dissimilar iteration of Briseis
and Achilles’ relationship, as she portrays it as a romantic, consensual one. The story opens with
a prophecy that ‘“He who seeks Briseis’ bed shall then her brothers three behead.”’ (Hauser
2016: 45). This causes trouble when her family is trying to find the princess an appropriate
husband, and causes more problems still when Achilles raids the land and, true to the prophecy,
kills her three brothers, as well as her father and her husband. Yet, when Briseis sees Achilles kill
her entire family, she focuses on ‘His eyes glitter[ing] in the dark, the skin of his arms and chest
tight over smooth muscles, […] His strangeness [that] was painfully gorgeous, [and] his slim
height’ (Ibid., 133). Here, the focus on Achilles’ sexually alluring physical features, such as his
eyes, muscles, and height, demonstrates Briseis’ attraction to him upon first sight, covered as he
is in the blood of his victims, namely her family and the people of Lyrnessus. The portrayal of
Achilles and Briseis’ relationship as mutually passionate has its roots in ancient literature. In
Heroides III, Ovid has Briseis recount their mutual passion, ‘You will remember when my arms
touch your neck; / the sight of my breasts will stir your heart’ (Ovid, trans. Isbell 1990; 2004).
Although, Isbell notes that, for Ovid’s Briseis, ‘the attraction identified as love is dangerously
close to the fear of abandonment’ and that their relationship is notably not ‘that of two lovers
made equal by the intensity of their affection’ (Isbell 1990; 2004: 19-20). For Ovid, Briseis’
feelings for Achilles are necessarily informed by her uncertain future as Achilles’ prize in
Agamemnon’s camp and her subjugation under a man who killed her family and is at once her
‘lover and lord’ (Ovid Her. III). Hauser’s choice to have Briseis consent, to portray their
relationship as a romance, is perhaps a response to what Pomeroy calls the ‘grim picture’ of the
‘endless catalogue of rape in Greek myth’ (1975; 2015: 12). A consenting Briseis does not
become one of the ‘endless catalogue’ of victims of sexual violence in Greek myth.

Further to the above, Pomeroy offers ‘the erotic fantasies of modern women’ as another
perspective from which to view myths about rape (Ibid., 12). She suggests that ‘women

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frequently enjoy the fantasy of being overpowered, carried away, and forced to submit to an
ardent lover’ so perhaps ‘Greek women dreamed of being Leda enfolded by the soft, warm caress
of Zeus,’ (Ibid., 12). Under this interpretation, Briseis consenting to the conquering Achilles
becomes a sexual fantasy, though one that admittedly is ‘a symptom of masochism, [and] the
result of women’s repression by society’ (Ibid., 12). This jarring theory from Pomeroy is perhaps
accounted for because the misapprehension that violence was welcome in sexual initiation was
still ingrained in law until the 1970s (Sanyal 2019: 11). It is therefore evident that Hauser’s
choice to portray Briseis and Achilles’ relationship as a romance recalls troubling and outdated
perspectives on sexual violence, namely that it can be explained away by women’s sexual
fantasies. This discussion gestures towards a significant contention in classical scholarship, that
which Morford et al. in their introduction to feminist classicist scholarship call the ‘fertile and
seminal topic’ of the theme of rape (2011: 19). ‘What are we today to make of the many classical
myths of ardent pursuit as well as those of amorous conquest? Are they religious stories, are they
love stories, or are they in the end all fundamentally horrifying tales of victimisation?’ (Ibid.,
19-20). Put simply: how do we contend with the prevalence of rape in Greek myth and literature?
In the case of For the Most Beautiful, the omnipresence of rape in Greek myth is apparently
rectified by changing the central relationship to one shaped by mutual lust and affection.

Hauser also perpetuates troubling traditions in romance literature when it comes to consent.
Brownstein points out that ‘The heroine [in the romantic tradition] may say or even think she is
of no importance; people may try to use her as a pawn, a mere means to their ends’ (1982: 35).
Romance heroines often lack agency beyond choosing who to marry and, despite often being the
protagonists, their (sexual and social) desires are secondary to what society and the male
characters demand. The trope of problematic consent in romance literature is particularly
prevalent in contemporary contexts, because the ‘#MeToo movement has sparked a reckoning
about power, sex, and consent that has already reached deep into the entertainment industry,
inspiring conversations about how to build a better popular culture’ (Faircloth 2018: np.).
Although romantic and erotic fiction was initially ‘marked by consent that was questionable at
best and totally absent at worst’, the genre has progressed to the point where ‘Navigating consent
[must be] an essential element of the romance novelist’s craft’ (Ibid., np.). Because of

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contemporary cultural discourses surrounding consent and power dynamics, romance novels
ought to reflect the increasing demand for informed consent. As Sanyal explains in Rape: From
Lucretia to #MeToo, ‘#MeToo isn’t just about sexual crimes but about a much wider discussion
of sexual ethics’ (Sanyal 2019: 181). Can Briseis consent in a way that encompasses the sexual
ethics of this, a post #MeToo, era? In For the Most Beautiful, Briseis consents to sex with
Achilles ‘Because nothing else made sense, except the closeness of his body against [hers…] and
that [they] were together’ (Hauser 2016: 253). The typically romantic language is intended to
suggest a modern romance, and it is arguable that this portrays a sex-positive feminist message in
which Briseis is making her own choice. However, when Achilles takes Briseis as his war prize
and sex slave, he says ‘“I shall not force you, […] No one should make love because they have
to. […] But remember this, Briseis, […] You will come to my bed. I shall not wait forever.”’
(Ibid., 187-8). Achilles tells Briseis that he won’t rape her, but that she ‘will’ – in which the ‘will’
is italicised for emphasis – have sex with him, and that his patience has limits. This is the man
who killed her entire family, razed her city, and has taken her as a bed slave. While the language
of romance is an attempt to recast Achilles and Briseis’ mythic relationship in terms of modern
romance literature, the coercive consent suggests that this is an outdated model of romantic
literature, ‘marked by consent that was questionable at best’. In summation, Briseis’ consent
‘doesn’t break with gender scripts of women as passive recipients of men’s violent desires’
(Sanyal 2019: 105), and therefore fails to redress the litany of sexual violence in classical and
romance literature.

In terms of power dynamics, Achilles is literally Briseis’ owner, and therefore she could
not truly consent, since she does not have the power to withhold consent. The National Sexual
Violence Resource Centre (NSVRC) clarifies that ‘consent can be complicated when one partner
holds more power than the other’ (NSVRC Online 2019: 1) and lists a number of examples of
power imbalances. Relevant to Briseis and Achilles, the NSVRC specifies that ‘Someone may
have more social privilege than their partner – […] White privilege, male privilege, and other
unearned advantages are part of the power some of us bring to relationships’ (Ibid., 1). Achilles
has an excess of privilege, because not only is he a man in a society where women had no
agency, but he is also the leader of the Myrmidon army and a key hero of the Greek army, while

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Briseis is a prisoner of war. In terms of modern conceptions of consensual relationships, Briseis
and Achilles’ relationship in For the Most Beautiful is problematic, in terms of the social
understanding of sexual violence as well as in regard to its categorisation in the romance genre.
As Hinds argues, a reception is not automatically feminist because it has a female narrator; if
motifs of sexual violence and systemic oppression are ignored or glossed over in the retelling,
misogynistic tropes that can lead to actual violence are perpetrated, rather than remedied (Hinds
2019: np.). Hauser’s novel cannot therefore be categorised as a feminist adaptation of Greek
myth simply because Briseis is a narrator. The choice to have Briseis consent to Achilles is
indicative that the novel chooses romance over redressing the recurrent themes of coercion to
violent rape that have persisted throughout the centuries.

However, the genre identification of Hauser’s novel as a romance is complicated by the

academic endnotes. It concludes with an “Author’s Note”, in which she comments on the
silencing of Briseis and Chryseis despite their necessity in the opening of the Iliad, considers
whether the Iliad is solely mythological considering the archaeological evidence that confirms
Troy’s existence and Homer’s accuracy in locating it, and asks how faithful her own text is to
Homer’s. Hauser notes that ‘all the main events and facts come from the Iliad’ (Ibid., 457
[endnote]) but she has created the backstories, characteristics, and endings for Briseis and
Chryseis due to their lack thereof in the Iliad. Further to this, Hauser provides an explanation of
the Bronze Age Calendar that she deploys in the novel, and a Glossary of Characters, in which
she justifies her use of the Trojan names for the gods by referencing the Hittite texts and the
Mycenaean Linear B tablets (Ibid., 461 [endnote]). Hauser herself has a doctorate in Classics
from Yale University, and is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of
Exeter18 (Emily Hauser Online 2019: np). Her academic background accounts for the
geographical and social accuracy of Briseis’ backstory, and her research into women’s literature
and classical reception led to her writing For the Most Beautiful to complete the unfinished
stories of Briseis and Chryseis (Hauser 2016: 455 [endnote]). There is a fundamental tension
between the novel’s problematic romance tropes and Hauser’s academic background and erudite

18
Hauser’s PhD thesis investigates women in classical literature and contemporary women’s writing in English. For
further analysis, see Chapter 5: ‘Palimpsests: Paratexts and Intertexts’, where I consider her treatment of Margaret
Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia.

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endnotes which indicates that, although Hauser’s interpretation of Achilles and Briseis’
relationship is problematic, her work is valuable to this research due to its historical accuracy
over feminist concerns –– a marked contrast to other texts within the scope of this chapter, that
sacrifice accuracy to prioritise feminist interpretations.

In the “Authors Note”, Emily Hauser states that Briseis and Chryseis’ experiences as
women in wartime can be generalised to ‘female prisoners of war’ throughout history which
‘makes us reflect on the experience of war for everyone’ (Ibid., 456 [endnote]). Similarly, Pat
Barker’s intention in The Silence of the Girls was to use the ancient story to bring awareness of
‘issues such as the Rohingya women and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is rightly
called the rape capital of the world. I was very much aware of rape as an instrument of war’
(Barker & Brand 2018: np.). Briseis’ experience as a rape victim and slave during the Trojan War
therefore can be used to narrate women’s experiences in wartime throughout history. Barker’s
novel does engage specifically with the classical tradition, because the novel opens with ‘Great
Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … how the epitaphs pile up. We
never called him any of those things; we called him “the Butcher”’ (Barker 2018: 3). This
opening specifically engages with the classical tradition by quoting Achilles’ epithets from the
Iliad, therefore asserting that Barker’s novel is not interested in preserving Achilles’ legend — it
is focused on women’s experiences in wartime. Yet Barker also recounts that ‘the #MeToo
movement was happening when I was in the very final stages of editing the book, and I had this
extraordinary thing where I had written a book about the Bronze Age and suddenly it sounds
more and more topical, every day,’ (Barker & Brand 2018: np.). As Morford et al. note on the
phenomenon of feminist revisionist myth more generally, ‘Feminist authors too are creating new
versions of traditional tales designed to illuminate their point of view about political, social, and
sexual conflict between men and women in our world today’ (2011: 17). In the case of Barker’s
treatment of Briseis, Briseis’ experiences not only relate to women who are sexually abused
during wartime, but the sexual exploitation of women in contemporary society more generally.
The following analysis of Briseis’ experiences in Barker’s novel as unflinchingly brutal is not
only Barker’s interpretation of Briseis’ myth, but also a generalisation, confronting the long
history of women’s violent sexual oppression within patriarchy.

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 The candid portrayal of ‘rape as an instrument of war’ in The Silence of the Girls is
illustrated when Achilles chooses Briseis as his ‘prize of honour’ (Barker 2018: 28). Briseis
remarks ‘What can I say? He wasn’t cruel […] He fucked as quickly as he killed, and for me it
was the same thing. Something in me died that night’ (Ibid., 28). The idiom ‘What can I say?’
asserts the inescapable fact of the matter; unlike Hauser and Miller, who attempt to rewrite
Briseis’ rape to preserve Achilles’ honour, Barker is showing the brutal reality of captured
women in wartime, that they will be dehumanised, raped, and brutalised. This bleak reality is
initially supplemented by the matter-of-fact tone, but the equating of rape and death, and the
short clauses, shows the emotional and physical horror of rape. Briseis continually refers to
herself as a slave – a sex slave, a bed slave, an enslaved symbol of Achilles’ honour – as well as
comparing herself to the kings’ assets and dogs, because she is aware of how she is valued and
commodified. This is exemplified in Briseis’ reflection that ‘A slave isn’t a person who’s being
treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else’s’ (Ibid.,
38). This demonstrates the recurrent theme of dehumanisation in the novel, and the use of the
female pronoun asserts Barker’s intention to focus on the lived experiences of enslaved women in
war encampments. She also compares her relative luck at being Achilles’ prize to the fortunes of
‘the common women around the campfires’ (Ibid., 48), who are repeatedly brutalised and then
have to fight the stray dogs for scraps and sleeping spaces. In a related manner, Barker’s
adaptation does not forswear the grotesque realities of life in war encampments, as we see in
gruesome detail the filth of the living conditions: ‘I noticed a rat running between piles of rotting
food. […] Blood erupted from its mouth; […] maggots [were] busy underneath its skin.’ (Ibid.,
66-7). The visceral imagery not only foreshadows the plague that infects the Greek war camps,
but also reveals the disgusting realities of war encampments, both literally – in terms of the filth –
and ideologically in terms of the abuse of women.

Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force provides a useful framework for the analysis
of The Silence of the Girls. Weil wrote the essay in 1940 after the fall of France, and she uses her
analysis of the Iliad to comment on the trauma and brutality of martial violence. The core thesis
of the essay is that:

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 The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man,
force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all
times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force (Weil 1940; 1965:
6).

For Weil, force converts men into things in two principal ways, either literally (they are made
into corpses), or emotionally (they become pitiless monsters). The Iliad lays bare this ‘last secret
of war’ in its similes, since men are either likened to fire, flood, wild beasts, or other blind causes
of disaster, or they become frightened animals, trees, water, sand, or anything else in nature that
is subject to violent external forces (Ibid., 22). In her close analysis of the epic poem, Weil notes
that ‘there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force’
(Ibid., 11). The poem opens with Achilles weeping with humiliation and grief for losing Briseis
to his commander, and a few days later that same commander is weeping, and he must humble
himself in vain (Ibid., 12). She also insinuates the pointlessness of war by tracing the daily
progress of the Trojan War, calling it ‘a continual game of seesaw’ –– moment to moment, the
victor and the defeated change posts, seeming to forget their previous feelings of invincibility or
hopelessness (Ibid., 15-6). In the Iliad, ‘the death of Hector would be but a brief joy to Achilles,
and the death of Achilles but a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy
to the Achaeans’: this illustrates the futility of war, and that violence obliterates anybody with
whom it has contact, both its employer and victim (Ibid., 17). To return to Briseis, Weil asks
‘what does it take to make the slave weep?’ (Ibid., 10) since they have already lost everything,
and answers that the slave can only feel and express their own loss when their master feels loss,
hence why Briseis mourns Patroclus. ‘To lose more than the slave does is impossible,’ writes
Weil, which resonates with Briseis’ first person account in The Silence of the Girls. While Barker
utilises the Iliad to speak to gender-based violence in wartime, Weil previously used the Iliad to
capture the feelings of futility and desperation in occupied France during the Second World War.
Barker’s novel is therefore continuing the tradition of Weil’s essay –– that of using the epic poem
to negotiate power and violence in light of contemporary issues.
In the Iliad, Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles, and when he later returns her, he
swears he has not touched her, ‘he never mounted her bed, never once made love with her,’

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(Homer Iliad, 19:210). In both Hauser and Miller’s adaptations, that remains true. Again, Pat
Barker departs from this: her Agamemnon ‘prefers the back door’ (Barker 2018: 48). This
euphemism undermines his ultimate power, since the enslaved women mock him with this when
they are alone. In an interview, Barker remarked that the conversations between women are
significant because they reflect the ubiquitous ways that ‘women have always gotten together to
speak about men in a kind of ribald, passive-aggressive way, because they have no actual power’
(Barker & Brand 2018: np.). Agamemnon’s proclivity for anal sex demonstrates that the women
view him as a sadistic sexual deviant, which is furthered by the identity of his favourite prize,
who is ‘the youngest of us, Chryseis, [who] was fifteen years old; the [sweet] daughter of a
priest,’ (Ibid., 48). The youth and sweetness of Chryseis is emphasised to portray Agamemnon as
the most sadistic rapist in the Greek army. Indeed, when Briseis remembers being seized by
Agamemnon, she narrates that ‘Achilles cried when I was taken away. He cried; I didn’t. […] /
But I cried that night.’ (Ibid., 110), which serves to simultaneously demean Achilles’ legend as a
hyper-masculine hero, show that she does not love Achilles, and show her inarticulable trauma.
Perhaps the most demeaning action we see in the novel is carried out by Agamemnon, as Briseis
describes: ‘inserting a finger between my teeth to prise my jaws apart, he worked up a big gob of
phlegm – leisurely, taking his time about it – and spat it into my open mouth’ (Ibid., 119). This is
an unthinkable act of ownership, domination, and dehumanisation — it is never more clear than
in this moment how much privilege he has versus how little agency she has. It is a common trope
amongst these adaptations that Agamemnon is the most irredeemable. While Achilles is cast as a
‘Butcher’ or, more often, a tragic hero, Agamemnon is a politician, a warmonger, a sexual
deviant, and a monster. This depiction is quite a departure from Agamemnon’s characterisation in
the Iliad, where he is chosen by the gods to lead the Greeks. Instead, the recurring trope that
portrays Agamemnon as irredeemable owes more to his portrayal in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon,
where he has earned dikē (punishment) for sacrificing Iphigenia; the sack of Troy with its
attendant atrocities; and the inherited crimes of his father (Ruden 2016: 49). Clytemnestra calls
him ‘that polluted criminal’ (Aeschylus, trans. Ruden: l.1419), and it is this iteration and
condemnation of Agamemnon that survives in contemporary retellings. I propose that the
familiarity of the figure of a corrupt, profiteering politician to modern readers, and more recent
anti-war sentiments, account for this condemning interpretation. Overall, although Barker’s

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portrayal of Briseis’ experience is the most upsetting to read in terms of women’s experiences of
brutalisation, rape, and dehumanisation, it is also the account which affords Briseis the most
opportunity to tell her own story, without focusing on Achilles’ legend and reputation.
Barker’s novel prioritises women’s abuse, and in this it sharply contrasts to Hauser’s novel
that presents a romanticisation of Achilles and Briseis’ relationship, regardless of the fact that he
literally owns her. In The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s adaptation of Briseis is also
dubious in that it completely desexualises and sanitises the relationship between Achilles and
Briseis in order to further accentuate the romance between Achilles and Patroclus. Achilles and
Patroclus rescue Briseis from the soldiers who seek to brutalise her which starkly contrasts to the
other women in the Greek camps who are dressed in rags and have to serve the people who
murdered their families, then ‘At night they served in other ways, and I [Patroclus] cringed at the
cries that reached even our corner of the camp’ (Miller, 2011: 218). This is challenging because
it completely sanitises Briseis’ story to keep Achilles’ legend untarnished — it places more value
on his character than on her suffering. Briseis’ captivity is told through the lens of Achilles’ and
Patroclus’ heroism in saving her, and the women’s experiences of being raped and brutalised
instead focuses on Patroclus’ discomfort at this. In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny,
philosopher Kate Manne coins the term ‘Himpathy’ to refer to ‘the flow of sympathy away from
female victims towards their male victimizers’ (2018: 23). Manne points to the ‘“golden boy”’
narrative that surrounded Brock Turner as evidence of ‘the excessive sympathy sometimes shown
toward male perpetrators of sexual violence’ (Ibid., 197). This is a useful framework when
considering Miller’s treatment of Briseis, because Achilles is specifically exonerated from the
crime of rape, to present a more sympathetic romantic lead. Briseis’ victimhood is completely
unwritten to further highlight the romantic relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Of
course, adaptations can be selective, choosing which elements of the stories to include to fit their
aims; they do not have to incorporate all the original stories. Both Sanders and Hutcheon
emphasise this in their texts on adaptation. Sanders states that ‘the rewrite […] invariably
transcends mere imitation, serving instead in the capacity of incremental literature’ (Sanders
2006: 12), demonstrating this idea of adapting authors selectively rewriting in order to meet the
aims of ‘not replication as such, but rather complication, expansion rather than contraction’
(Ibid., 12). Hutcheon also asserts that this selective nature is a successful part of adaptations, in

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that ‘the appeal of adaptations for audiences lies in their mixture of repetition and difference, of
familiarity and novelty’ (Hutcheon 2006: 114). This emphasises the concept that, though
adapting authors benefit from the familiar mythic templates, their divergences from the originals
are an essential part of the adaptation.

In the Iliad, Briseis’ story has no ending: she is returned to Achilles by Agamemnon after
the death of Patroclus, but after she is recorded mourning for Patroclus she is forgotten by
Homer. Before the adaptations analysed here, ‘Briseis remain[ed] by and large a shadowy figure,’
(Blundell 1995: 48); she had fallen into relative obscurity in classical reception, because her
backstory and emotional reactions to the plot of the Iliad were not recorded by Homer. Her
ambiguity and marginality contrasts to the focus that Homer affords to his male heroes, as well as
to the more socially privileged female figures such as Penelope, who ‘occupies very often the
centre of the stage’ (Ibid., 51) in the Odyssey. Penelope is rewarded for her twenty years of
patience with her husband’s return, whereas Briseis’ suffering is never rewarded or finished
because her narrative is never completed. The open-endedness of Briseis’ myth has led to
divergent endings for Briseis in modern adaptations, raising the question of whether Briseis is
finally afforded any agency in these novelistic retellings.

In For the Most Beautiful, Briseis gains some agency at the end of the narrative. Briseis
mourns Achilles, thinking ‘Mynes. / Patroclus. / Achilles. / […] husband, friend, lover.’ (Hauser
2016: 419), wherein she is mourning all of the men she has lost, regardless of the fact that the
third man killed the first, and then enslaved her, abetted by the second. After this, Briseis sees
Aeneas’ exodus from Troy with ‘A river of people’ (Ibid., 430). Here, Briseis is making use of
the only power that she has as an enslaved woman, by observing the escape and electing not to
inform the Greeks. Her empowerment is exemplified by her bold statement to Agamemnon: ‘You
will never have the Troy you think to gain. And, Agamemnon, […] you will never have me’
(Ibid., 443). This exclamation is empowering because Briseis is an enslaved woman who is
challenging her owner and engaging in political discourse. She also regains her bodily autonomy
by denying Agamemnon the ability to ‘have’ her, to claim her in the same way he seeks to claim
Troy; she is refusing to allow her ‘rape [to be used] as an instrument of war’. She does this by
throwing herself onto Achilles’ funeral pyre (Hauser 2016: 444), an act of reclaiming her body

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and future from her oppressors as she ‘would make [her] own fate.’ (Ibid., 444). This act
acknowledges the brutal patriarchal tradition of throwing alive women onto their husband or
owner’s funeral pyres, and Briseis reclaims this as her power over herself.

Similarly, in The Song of Achilles, Briseis dies at the end. Briseis tries to swim away from
Achilles’ brutal son, Pyrrhus, who has hit her and threatens to rape her:

she pulls further and further from the shore. The only man whose spear could have
reached her is dead. She is free.

The only man but that man’s son.

The spear flies from the top of the beach, soundless and precise. Its point hits her back
(Miller 2011: 344)

Briseis’ fate is consistent with Miller’s previous depiction of her as a conduit to show Achilles’
greatness. The brutality of Pyrrhus contrasts with their aforementioned desexualised rescue of
her, and Pyrrhus’ skill with the javelin is attributed to Achilles. Rather than focusing on Briseis’
plight, her murder is narrated through the lens of Patroclus’ shade, whose love for Achilles
overshadows her suffering, and thus her murder is used as a way to highlight Achilles’ skills.
Once again, Miller’s aim to focus on the legend of Achilles: his romance with Patroclus sidelines
Briseis’ narrative, placing more importance on the men’s reputations than the women’s chance to
tell their stories. Yet, Pyrrhus’ most famous victim is the Trojan king Priam, as told in the
Aeneid: ‘Neoptolemus [...] drags the old man / straight to the altar, quaking [...] sweeping forth
his sword’ (Virgil trans. Fagles: 2:679-684). If the same Greek warrior kills Briseis, then it is
instead arguable that she is afforded new prominence, equal to that of the Trojan King. Pyrrhus
kills Briseis and Priam with the same ease and casual brutality; in killing Priam ‘Neoptolemus /
degrades his father’s name’ (Ibid., 1:679-680). Thus killing Briseis becomes an act which brings
equal shame and Briseis becomes as central as Priam to the legacies of the Trojan War.

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 By contrast, in The Silence of the Girls, Briseis survives in a number of ways. Literally, she
outlives Achilles, marries Achilles’ charioteer, and leaves Troy with him. Moreover, she is
afforded a sequel in Barker’s recent The Women of Troy (2021).19 She also survives in terms of
her pregnancy and her story. Before Achilles dies, he impregnates her, and she views this as a
way that she has reclaimed her body, concluding that ‘this flesh, this intricate mesh of bone and
nerve and muscle, belonged to me. In spite of Achilles, in spite of my aching hips and thighs’
(Barker 2018: 279). Raping local women is considered a typical aspect of warfare in the same
way that pillaging property is; men’s possessions – gold and women – are claimed like their
land. However, Briseis asserts that her body ‘belong[s] to me’ and therefore, despite the physical
atrocities that she has experienced, she cannot be conquered in the same way that Troy has been.
This is particularly poignant because Briseis is pregnant at this point, a fact alluded to when she
cradles her belly and her ‘aching hips and thighs’. Ophardt argues that the commodification of
reproduction strips women of their body autonomy during their pregnancies and, throughout
history, women have been valued for predominantly reproductive purposes (Ophardt 2016: 79).
Yet this concept is subverted in Briseis’ narrative because she had no bodily autonomy to begin
with, due to her status as a war prize and sex slave, and therefore her pregnancy re-establishes
her body autonomy.

Additionally, Briseis considers her literary afterlife as a form of survival, which is evident
when she contemplates the vital role women play in oral history:

We’re going to survive — our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us.
Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the
songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. (Barker 2018: 296)

While the Greeks can “claim” these women, marry them and impregnate them, they are still
‘Trojan’, which is to say, they still have their identities separate to the ones that the invading
armies prescribed them. Also, despite the Greeks conquering Troy, Trojan heritage will continue
– not only with Aeneas – but with the Trojan women who have been taken, and in the Greeks’
future lineage because of the children that they have with the captured Trojan women. However,

19
See ‘Conclusion’ for further details on this text’s relevance to this thesis.

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Barker’s Briseis does not romanticise the masculine domination of literature as she bitterly
reflects that the surviving narrative will be ‘His story. His, not mine.’ (Ibid., 324), here referring
to the fact that the surviving stories of the Trojan War will be remembered by men and about
men. Indeed, in the sequel The Women of Troy (2021), both Briseis and Neoptolemus struggle to
contend with Achilles’ looming, posthumous legend. Furthermore, the phrasing ‘His story’ orally
becomes “history” which, when followed by the italicised ‘His’, suggests a reference to
“Herstory”. Herstory was first coined over 50 years ago by feminist activist Robin Morgan in her
creative writing anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970) and refers to women’s often overlooked
positions in history. Herstory is particularly significant here, because Briseis’ role in this ancient
story and in later receptions was minimised and relatively forgotten. Also, when considering the
erasure of women in history, Briseis criticises the sanitisation of the epics in order to preserve the
heroic reputations of the men: ‘They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp’ (Barker
2018: 324). Briseis’ ending in The Silence of the Girls overcomes the historic oppression of
women’s voices and thus counters the patriarchal notion that ‘“Silence becomes a woman.”’
(Ibid., 294) while also giving Briseis a narrative where she survives and reclaims her body
autonomy.
The variations in Briseis’ adaptations are particularly illuminating when considering the
range of different approaches to reimagining mythic women. Sue Blundell states that Briseis is
featured in the Iliad as ‘a piece of property – as stolen goods – rather than a human being’ (1995:
48). Though Blundell disparages Homer's oversight, the ‘shadowy’ obscurity and overall lack of
detail afforded to Briseis in the Iliad makes her a prime candidate for retelling, since she plays
such a central role in furthering the plot, yet is not fleshed out as a character. Novelistic character
is therefore a transformative element, as it allows for a more detailed reconstruction of the figure
from myth. Ultimately, the disparities between the representations of Briseis in For the Most
Beautiful, The Silence of the Girls, and The Song of Achilles suggests that it is the more
underdeveloped female characters that are most fertile for feminist adaptation.

***

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Helen:

While Penelope and Briseis have different degrees of fame in modern reception, they are both
evidently key figures in contemporary feminist adaptations of classical myths. Helen (of
Sparta/Troy), remains perhaps the most famous woman of Greek mythology, surviving in men’s
writing throughout history. As Hughes reminds us:

Dante, Fra Angelico, Chaucer, Leonardo, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, Dryden,

Goethe, Jacques-Louis David, Rossetti, Gladstone, Yeats, Berlioz, Strauss, Rupert
Brooke, Camus, Tippett and Ezra Pound: all have kept the idea of Helen alive. Cultures
have created their own Helens, consistent with their own ideals of beauty. She is
irresistible because she is recondite. […] Because Helen is elusive, her appeal endures.
She is prodigious, part of the cultural, and the political, make-up of the West. (Hughes
2005: 7)

Helen’s beauty and elusiveness that allures male writers has become a thorny issue for female
writers, as there is a danger of perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes, particularly pertaining to
beauty ideals and vilifying women. Although Helen is a source of adaptive interest in
contemporary feminist drama and poetry, she has been less attractive to contemporary female
novelists, since poetry allows for more enigmas while novelistic narrative demands more
comprehensive realism.
Before analysing Helen as potentially unadaptable in contemporary feminist novels, it is
important to consider the theoretical focus afforded to Helen in feminist classical scholarship. In
Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore, Bettany Hughes provides a study of Helen as a real
character from history, which was a heretofore neglected angle (Hughes 2005: xxxv). She
summarises Helen’s legend: the woman who has persevered for millennia as a symbol of beauty,
as well as a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield, responsible for a double enmity
between East and West, and put on the earth by Zeus to rid the world of its superfluous
population (Ibid., 2). This is how Helen is remembered: as a household name for physical
perfection and the cost that such beauty demands. Hughes’ methodology is particularly

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interesting; she combines ancient literary sources with archaeology, ‘piecing together Helen’s
life-story from her conception to her grave [...] follow[ing] in her footsteps across the Eastern
Mediterranean’ (Ibid., 6). Hughes explores the praxis of Helen, imagining how she was
experienced in antiquity and later, as people observed the priestesses of her cult, scratched lewd
graffiti about her onto walls, and as she was enshrined into the rhetoric of politicians and
philosophers (Ibid., 9). Helen’s implacability is acknowledged and accounted for: ‘She is difficult
to categorise for good reason; a pursuit of Helen across the ages throws up three distinct, yet
intertwined guises. When we talk about her, we are in fact describing a trinity’ (Ibid., 10). The
titular trinity – Goddess, Princess, Whore – accounts for the lack of consensus in attitudes
towards her throughout the nearly three millennia of her legend. For Hughes, the ‘most familiar’
Helen is the regal one, the Spartan princess with divine paternity who was fought over by heroes
(Ibid., 10). Helen was not, however, ‘just a “sex-goddess” in literary terms. She was also a
demi-god,’ who was worshipped across the spiritual landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean
(Ibid., 11). The third Helen is the whore, ‘the beautiful, libidinous creature irresistible to men;
the pin-up, golden-haired, phantom Helen, [...] an erotic eidolon [...] an idol of female beauty and
sexuality, both lusted after and despised’ (Ibid., 11). Hughes cites the Odyssey calling her a
‘shameless whore’ (4:145), although in Emily Wilson’s translation Helen states that ‘They made
my face the cause that hounded them.’ (4:148) — rather than have Helen lambast herself as a
‘whore’ or ‘bitch’, Wilson places the onus back on the men that chose to go to war. This is a
rejection of the anachronistic ‘bitch’ that, in our culture, is ‘used as an insult term only for
women, and it implies a kind of malice that is imagined specifically for women’ (Wilson 2018:
44). Even in translating Helen, there are palimpsestuous layers of rhetoric which speak to, and
engage with, what Bettany Hughes would call her trinity of guises.
Laurie Maguire’s Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood also provides an innovative
critical approach to Helen, because it positions itself as ‘a literary biography of Helen of Troy’
(Maguire 2009: ix). Maguire deliberately separates her work from Hughes’ by specifying that it
is not a biography of Helen in the Bronze Age or an exploration of whether she had a historical
existence or was a mythical figure (Ibid., ix). Instead it is focused on the literary afterlife of
Helen, on the ‘28 centuries of poetry, drama, novels, opera, and film’ (Ibid., ix). Maguire’s
specific interest is not in Helen’s “real” life, but in literary depictions of her, ‘how literature deals

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with her beauty, her personality, how it blames her or tries to rescue her from blame, how it
deifies her or burlesques her; in short, how it represents her’ (Ibid., ix). Maguire takes a thematic
approach to Helen’s biography, or literary afterlife, considering how the following issues, that are
central to her legend, have presented themselves in representations of Helen throughout history:
the narrative nature of myth; beauty; Helen’s abduction; blame; Helen and the Faust tradition;
and parodic tradition.
On the topic of her beauty, Maguire considers the dual difficulties of narrating and staging
absolute beauty. ‘One of literature’s recurrent tactics when faced with extremes is omission’
(Ibid., 39): throughout the history of narrating Helen, authors have baulked at the challenge of
describing her beauty, such as Thomas Heywood, who declines to describe Helen’s beauty
because it would demand ‘a world of paper and an age to write’ (Heywood canto 10.32, sig. Z2v
in Maguire 2009: 39). When authors do attempt description, they displace the description,
describing ‘not the object, but another object,’ such as the flower to which they compare her
(Ibid., 39). There is also ‘the blank space of nonrepresentation’, which Maguire considers
‘narrative’s most innovative tactic’, acknowledging Helen’s irrepresentability with blank space
(Ibid., 40). Similarly, when staging Helen, productions face the problem of literally having to
choose a face that could feasibly launch a thousand ships. Some productions choose to rely on
familiar archetypes of beauty, such as the 1995 National Theatre production of The Women of
Troy that had Helen as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, or they choose not to give her a face at all,
showing only her back or body, relying on the same ‘blank space’ as authors (Ibid., 43). In
Hughes’ words, ‘of course, the wonderful irony about the most beautiful woman in the world is
that she is faceless’ (2005: 3); there is a consensus, then, amongst Helen theorists, that it is
impossible to provide a literal face to fit the legend of Helen’s face. Due to the subjectivity of
beauty, audiences will necessarily be disappointed when Helen, who is supposed to be an
absolute beauty, does not match their personal preferences. For example, a review of the 1990
RSC production of Troilus and Cressida reported ‘the spectators’ disappointment was audible . . .
it wasn’t that she wasn’t beautiful. It was simply that she wasn’t enough’, or the New York Times
film critic’s reaction to Diane Kruger’s portrayal of Helen in the Hollywood film Troy: ‘she isn’t
sufficiently fabulous-looking to be convincing as the face that launched a thousand ships’ (Rutter
2000: 233; McGrath, in Maguire 2009: 36). ‘Helen is beyond language [...]: as the paradigm of

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beauty she is absolute’ (Maguire 2009: 65) –– it is an impossible task for mythical adapters to
present Helen’s absolute beauty, although of course the indirectness of literature means it is an
easier task than in the visual arts.
Hughes and Maguire agree that writing Helen is a complicated matter, due in part to the
centuries of debate surrounding her agency. Put simply, either Helen is an evil seductress entirely
to blame for the thousands of deaths in a decade-long war, or she completely lacks agency
because she was stolen and then used as an excuse for a war about trade. In the chapter on
‘Blame’ in From Homer to Hollywood, Maguire expounds that Helen is always either held
accountable for the Trojan War, or her accountability is reduced at the cost of her agency (Ibid.,
109). Her story is therefore either one of elopement or abduction, so Helen is either a guilty
adulteress, almost entirely to blame for the Trojan War, or she is an innocent victim, unable to be
held accountable for any of her actions (Ibid., 109). Hughes agrees that ‘For two and half
millennia [...] tradition recognised a feistier heroine. Not just a woman of straw, but a dynamic
protagonist, a rich queen. A political player who [...] controlled the men around her’, though in
relatively recent history she has morphed into a vacuous, submissive, passive prize, as
exemplified by Kruger’s Helen in Troy (Hughes 2005: 140). This ‘feistier’ Helen does not
necessarily engender respect — once Helen is the active agent of her fate, rather than the passive
partner, men rush to label her a whore (Ibid., 143). Hughes credits this slut-shaming to the
increasingly Christianised world from the 2nd century AD onward, where ‘Helen has become
just another nail in the coffin of womankind’ as the Church used Helen as part of their systematic
‘demonising [of] women and their sexual power’ (Ibid., 144). When considering Helen’s agency,
it is important that it is not equated to liberation, because ‘Helen, as an active partner in her own
abduction, is not Helen the empowered woman but Helen the dangerous slut’ (Ibid., 144).
Maguire agrees that ‘A tactic used in both defences and accusations of Helen is the granting of
sexual agency’ (2009: 124) — Helen’s consent rescues her from victimhood, but it does not
necessarily rescue her from blame. Maguire traces literary instances where (1) Helen is an active
participant in her own abduction, such as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Euripides’ Women of Troy,
and the anonymous Excidium Troiae; (2) Helen is defended by blaming someone else, such as in
the cases of Hesiod’s Cypria that blames Aphrodite, or Quintus of Smyrna’s War at Troy that
blames Paris, or the Ars Amatoria in which Ovid mockingly blames Menelaus for being too dull,

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thus encouraging his wife’s adultery; (3) there is joint culpability — Helen sometimes shares the
blame with Aphrodite, and in later writers such as Euripides, Herodotus, and Isocrates, there is a
felix culpa, as they admit that Helen’s adultery had military and trade benefits (Ibid., 110-12). In
Homer, Helen’s morality is presented ambiguously: no one is a harsher critic than herself, yet
‘Paris says he “carried [her] away” (3.444) and Hector accuses him of taking Menelaus’ wife
(3.53) (both of which could imply abduction)’ (Ibid., 114). Homer is less interested in blame
than in emotional crises, and his Helen ‘is willing and passive, to blame and not to blame’ (Ibid.,
114-5). For O’Gorman, Helen’s myth is an obvious choice when considering the women’s
history in warfare, since women’s position as the implicit cause of wars (“this is all for you”) is
explicit in the case of Helen: she is at once the reviled cause of war and the sanctified object of
military protection (O’Gorman 2008: 196; 208). Helen’s contentious blame has been an
inextricable part of her myth since its conception, and it is within this tradition that contemporary
adaptations of Helen necessarily operate.
There is another tradition that places the blame with Aphrodite. Although depictions of
Helen as a rape victim or a scheming seductress have become the more favoured interpretations
for writers and artists, there is also the literary tradition that begins with Sappho, which renders
Helen a woman helpless against the powers of Aphrodite, whose divine will is abetted by Paris
(Hughes 2005: 139). It is this tradition that Jennifer Pullen draws upon in her short story ‘A Bead
of Amber on her Tongue’, that follows the dual narratives of Aphrodite and Helen; Pullen’s
Helen narrates that ‘The gods will have their way; her existence is a testament to that’ and the
Sapphic tradition is specifically alluded to in the line ‘Sappho is my favourite poet’ (Pullen 2019:
42-3). She ‘forgives’ Paris for winning her in the Judgement of Paris, and she finds emancipation
in the machinations of gods and men, concluding that ‘perhaps the gods can move humans like
goblets on a table, but they can’t control the way the wine sloshes, spills. The small things, like
her thoughts, her feelings,’ (Ibid., 43). This poses a question about the problem of adapting
Helen in 21st century women’s writing: is it better, more feminist, to write a Helen who has
agency but therefore shoulders the blame for the Trojan War, or a Helen who is blameless, but a
disempowered victim of her own beauty? Further questions include: Did she love Paris? Did she
choose to go to Troy? Did she want the war? What side did she want to win? Did she want to
return to Menelaus, Sparta, and her daughter, Hermione? Did she have any autonomy? These are

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some of the many questions that adapting authors must consider when rewriting Helen. Helen’s
mythology is in some ways too big to adapt, and the questions of her agency and blame have
concerned authors throughout the nearly three millennia of her mythos.
This fame is explored in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, when Achilles and
Patroclus discuss Helen. Patroclus’ numerous questions, ‘Do you think she went with Paris
willingly? […] So you think she did it on purpose? To cause the war?’ (Miller 2011: 222) aligns
with this idea that there are perhaps too many questions about Helen’s agency to adapt her.
Additionally, Achilles and Patroclus theorise what could have motivated her to go to Troy in a
distinctly Socratic method:

“Maybe she really fell in love with Paris.”

“Maybe she was bored. After ten years shut up in Sparta, I’d want to leave too.”
“Maybe Aphrodite made her.”
“Maybe they’ll bring her back with them.” (Ibid., 223)

The repetition of ‘Maybe’ shows the polyphony that surrounds Helen’s myths; each of these
hypotheticals refers to specific versions of the Helen story. When discussing Helen, Miller’s
Achilles ‘put[s] on his best singer’s falsetto. “A thousand ships have sailed for her.”’ (Miller
2011: 222), which alludes to the sheer volume of myths that surround her, as demonstrated by his
imitation of a bard telling her story.
Achilles’ comment paraphrases the playwright Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical
History of Doctor Faustus, in which the eponymous Faustus says of Helen ‘the face that launch'd
a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium— / Sweet Helen, make me immortal
with a kiss’ (Marlowe 1604: l.163-4). Interestingly, this line is again paraphrased by Carol Ann
Duffy in her poem ‘Mrs. Faust’, in which the modernised Faust remarks ‘The face that launched
a thousand ships. / I kissed its lips.’ (Duffy 1999: l.93-4). In ‘Helen and the Faust Tradition’,
Maguire states that it is apparently ‘impossible to write about Helen of Troy without invoking
Marlowe’s lines’ but Marlowe’s lines are, crucially, not addressed to Helen herself, but to a
demonic eidolon (Maguire 2009: 175). The most famous quotation about Helen is not about
Helen, showing again her recondite nature. Yet this image, repeated throughout history, also

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speaks to the volume of mythology surrounding Helen. In Margaret George’s novel Helen of Troy
(2006), the eponymous protagonist is haunted by these words from her future, which is to say
that she is haunted by her future legacy:

. . . And burnt the topless towers of Ilium. The words twined themselves around my mind.
Topless towers of Ilium . . . someone else framed those words, and whispered them to me
then, someone who lived so long afterward that he saw Troy only in his dreams, but he
saw it clearer than anyone […] . . . or perhaps Troy was always only a dream. (George
2006: 283) 

Here, Helen is afforded insight into her future reputation; much like Le Guin’s Lavinia being
haunted by the future ghost of Virgil, George’s Helen is haunted by Marlowe’s famous lines
about her.20 This is not to say that Helen meekly accepts her legend: in a direct subversion of
Marlowe’s lines, spoken by Dr. Faustus and echoed in Helen narratives ever since, George’s
Helen narrates: ‘Paris. I kissed his lips,’ (Ibid., 229). Helen thus becomes the active agent in her
fate, rather than an object to be stolen or kissed or described through ekphrasis. George’s novel is
distinctive from its contemporaries because it retells Helen’s myth as a love story between Helen
and Paris, and while Helen is made aware of the Faustian tradition that will become inextricable
from her mythos, she rejects any retelling that strips her of her agency.
These questions, by their very nature of being about Helen, cannot be answered because
‘Helen’s essence is her unknowability’ (Maguire 2009: 175) and, indeed, Helen is present by her
absence in the texts previously explored in this chapter. In Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls,
Briseis compares her situation to Helen’s because Helen’s ‘fate was decided without her
knowledge’ (Barker 2018: 131) when Paris and Menelaus duelled for her, and Briseis ‘sat there
like a tethered goat, knowing my fate was being decided on the other side of that door’ (Ibid.,
150) when Agamemnon and Achilles both fight to claim her after Chryseis leaves. Here, the
parallel language demonstrates the similarities of their situations, but while Helen is in the royal
court of Troy, Briseis is enslaved (‘tethered’) and dehumanised (‘goat’). Similarly, after Briseis is
blamed for the rift between Agamemnon and Achilles, she reflects on ‘a legend – it tells you

20
See Chapter 5: ‘Palimpsests: Paratexts and Intertexts’

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everything, really – that whenever Helen cut a thread in her weaving, a man died on the
battlefield. She was responsible for every death.’ (Ibid., 129). 21 Once again, the actions of men
are blamed on a woman, despite the woman’s complete lack of agency. Briseis is a slave in the
Greek camps, and she is blamed for being the thing that the King of the Greeks and the Best of
the Greeks are fighting over; Helen cannot participate in the war, despite the fact that it will
decide her fate, and the only thing she can do is weave to document the events.
In the same way that Helen is used in Barker’s novel to accentuate Briseis’ suffering, she is
presented as a bully and oppressor of Penelope in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. In the
chapter title ‘Helen Ruins My Life’ (Atwood 2005: xi), Penelope intends to show how she has
been negatively affected by Helen’s actions, but instead it shows the childish, whiny
characterisation of Penelope, which the handmaids mock in their choral interludes. Furthermore,
when Penelope calls her ‘Helen the lovely, Helen the septic bitch, root cause of all my
misfortunes’ (Ibid., 131), this presents Penelope as unsympathetic, unwilling to consider the
possibility that Helen was not a consenting captive, because it suits her own purposes better. In
both Barker and Atwood’s novels, Helen is merely used to accentuate the narratives of the
women they are adapting, thus exemplifying how Helen’s story has been exploited to blame her
for others’ sufferings. With the shift to female perspectives in mythic literature, the focus is no
longer on how men blame her for the atrocities of war, but how women blame her for their
experiences in the war.
Atwood’s representation of Helen in The Penelopiad significantly contrasts to her role in
Atwood’s earlier poem ‘Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing’. In the poem, Helen is
reimagined as a stripper, who monetises her exploitation: ‘Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way /
you cut it, but I've a choice / of how, and I'll take the money.’ (Atwood 1995: l.17-19). Here,
Helen is aware that she will be sexualised and objectified regardless of her profession, which is a
sex-positive empowerment of the mythical woman. This sex-positivity can be weaponised as
well as monetised, as demonstrated by the final lines of the poem: ‘You think I'm not a goddess?
/ Try me. / This is a torch song. / Touch me and you'll burn.’ (Ibid., l.81-84). The ‘You’ that

21
Maguire interprets Helen’s weaving in the Iliad as ‘her refusal to become a minor character in Achilles’ story’
(2009: 11). Interpreting Helen weaving her own tapestry as her writing her own story interestingly echoes Penelope
‘spin[ning] a thread of [her] own’ in The Penelopiad. See Chapter 5: ‘Palimpsests: Paratexts and Intertexts’ for
further analysis.

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Helen is addressing is clearly patriarchy, both in terms of the internalised misogyny of ‘women /
who’d tell me I should be ashamed of myself’ (Ibid., l.1-2) and the patriarchal aggressors. The
latter are exemplified in the second stanza, where the repetition of ‘rape’ and ‘murder’
demonstrates the prevalence of the issues of violence against women. Helen is not only depicted
as physically above the men (she is dancing above them on the countertop) but she is also
elevated to the role of ‘goddess’ by her beauty and power, and she uses this empowerment to
hold men accountable and threaten them with violence in retaliation. In Hughes’ tripartite model,
this Helen is both a whore (because she is a sex worker) and a goddess. As a countertop dancer,
Helen has more body autonomy, since she can demand that the men not touch her, unlike in the
Ancient Greek context where she was a commodity to be taken by her husband, stolen by Paris,
and won back.
Modern poetry affords Helen an opportunity to be adapted by portraying her story without
the narrative demand for comprehensiveness and realism –– poetry is a form that can
empathetically explore Helen’s situation without necessarily engaging with the complex
questions of Helen’s blame. For example, Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Beautiful’, traces the
legends of women who were deemed to be beautiful by their patriarchal society, specifically
Helen, Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana (see Judge 2021: np.). In each of the four
sections, Duffy begins by outlining their iconic beauty and ends with their downfall. Helen is
described as ‘divinely fair, a pearl, drop-dead / gorgeous, beautiful, a peach, / a child of grace, a
stunner,’ (Duffy 2003: l.3-5). The list form is deployed to show the many legends surrounding
her, and the different phrasings suggest a cacophony of voices from high and low culture
describing her. This is echoed at the end of the section, where ‘Some said […] Some said […]
Some swore […] Some vowed’ (Ibid., l.49, 54, 58, 62) alludes to the oral history of myths in
general, the polyphony of diverse myths surrounding Helen in particular, and the dangers of
rumours that are circulated about beautiful women. Furthermore, the increasingly sinister nature
of the rumours – from being ‘smuggled / on a boat dressed as a boy’ (Ibid., 58-9) to being
hanged, or metamorphosed into a bird and forever caged – form a critique of the toxic publicity
that Helen, here an archetype of beautiful celebrities, is subjected to. Poetry lends itself well to
dealing with Helen’s legacy, because it does not have to concern itself with novelistic devices

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such as characterisation, motivation, or plot, allowing it to focus instead on asking questions
about her relation to and complicity with the discourses of women’s oppression.
Drama brings another set of possibilities and limitations to reinterpretations of Helen’s
mythos. For example, Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation of Euripides’ Helen, like Atwood and
Duffy’s poetry, deploys both modern and mythological anachronisms. The modern anachronisms
include its setting in ‘A hotel room in Egypt. It’s a fairly upscale hotel, perhaps with a dash of
colonial Victorian detail,’ (McLaughlin 2005: 133) and the references to magazines and
television, as well as mythological anachronisms. The most notable mythological misplacement
in time is Helen’s conversation with Io, whose myth is from the early Golden Age, while Helen
is at the end of the Bronze Age. In this conversation, the two women discuss how their beauty led
to abuse and vilification, and bond over the experience of ‘Having to live inside a body which
was so desired and yet so detested’ (Ibid., 146). The alliteration of ‘desired’ and ‘detested’
emphasises how these two experiences are inextricably linked for these mythic women, yet the
references to modern-day items like televisions and magazines broaden the message so it speaks
to the demand for, and vilification of, women’s beauty throughout history. As Bettany Hughes
puts it, ‘Helen was put on earth to catalyse desire. And for three millennia she has been hated for
it: [...] She is a woman blessed or cursed’ (Hughes 2005: 309). In these adaptations of Helen, we
are provided with prolific examples of women throughout history who have been dually blessed
and cursed by their beauty. Additionally, Io and Helen discuss internalised misogyny, as Io
‘admit[s], I’ve kind of hated you myself since I was a girl, […] Every magazine, every movie, all
those images of you. They were some of the first ways I ever learned to feel bad about myself.’
(McLaughlin 2005: 146). Here, two mythical women from the opposite ends of the classical
chronology are discussing how patriarchal media teaches young girls to hate their bodies and
make them compete with one another, which is another example of how anachronisms are used
in these adaptations to make modern feminist points using ancient mythical women.
Ellen McLaughlin is an American playwright who has adapted ancient Greek drama.
Though McLaughlin herself is not comfortable with the term “adaptations,” which she says tends
to involve knowledge of the original languages (Ibid., xiii), I would argue that this is not an
accurate understanding of adaptations which do not demand linguistic knowledge. While Emily
Hauser and Madeline Miller are Classics scholars, many of the authors in this thesis, such as

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Margaret Atwood and Pat Barker, rely on translations of ancient texts to create their adaptations
(Beard 2005, np.; Armistead & Barker 2019: np.). Despite McLaughlin’s reservations regarding
the label “adaptations”, she believes that ‘Every age will find its use for these stories. But the
stories will never cease to be relevant’ (McLaughlin 2005: xviii), which clearly shows her
intention to adapt the ancient texts in modern contexts. McLaughlin is aware of the power of
anachronisms, because ‘Io is one of the most ancient examples of the mortal girl raped by Zeus.
[…] I liked the notion of these two icons of exceptional female fate conversing with each other’
(Ibid., 126), and she views them as ‘bookends’ — the beginning and end of women being
punished for their beauty in mythology (Ibid., 127). McLaughlin’s characterisation of Helen is
‘an odd conflation of every modern notion of beauty bound to celebrity from Jackie through
Marilyn to Diana, as much as she is the quintessential Helen of myth.’ (Ibid., 124). Hence,
McLaughlin utilises both mythic and non-mythic anachronisms to draw a wider conclusion about
the destructive nature of beauty within patriarchy for women, which has an interesting
correspondence with Duffy’s poetic adaptation of Helen. Though McLaughlin refers to Jackie
Kennedy while Duffy refers to Cleopatra, they both identify Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana
as modern women who had fates identifiable with Helen. Aligning these women’s fates shows
that Helen’s story can demonstrate the real harm caused to women deemed too beautiful and too
powerful in patriarchal societies.
Anne Carson’s Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019) is a dramatic version of Euripides’
Helen that also aligns Helen and Marilyn Monroe. As the title suggests, the two figures of beauty
are conflated; indeed, the opening monologue, delivered by Norma Jeane Baker (the only cast
member), claims that the Trojan War ‘was caused by Norma Jeane Baker, / harlot of Troy’
(Carson 2019: 7). Like Helen in Euripides’ play, Norma Jeane disputes this claim due to the
eidolon: ‘That was all a hoax. / A bluff, a dodge, a swindle, a gimmick, a gem of a stratagem. /
The truth is, / a cloud went to Troy.’ (Ibid., 7). The long list of synonyms for ‘hoax’ is juxtaposed
against the short enjambment used to relay the ‘truth’. This imitates the polyphony surrounding
Helen’s role in the war, as well as Euripides’ acquittal of her in the Helen. Once again, the
comparison is made between Helen and Marilyn Monroe to demonstrate the construction, and
then subsequent vilification, of beautiful women in the public psyche throughout history. This is
clear in the lines:

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 Rape
is the story of Helen,
Persephone,
Norma Jeane,
Troy.
[...]
Oh my darlings,
they tell you you’re born with a precious pearl.
Truth is,
it’s a disaster to be a girl. (Ibid., 17-8)

The repetition of ‘[t]ruth is’, as well as the devices of enjambment, lists, and omitted capital
letters, reinforce that this an opportunity for maligned women deemed too beautiful to live to
share their truths. The universality of this message is communicated via temporal and spatial
displacements, such as setting the play in an amalgam of Troy and Los Angeles, while
Arthur/Menelaus is king of Sparta and New York, and the Greek Army is conflated with MGM
media. The analogues are not only drawn between Marilyn and Helen, since Persephone is also
used as evidence; specifically, Persephone as she is portrayed in a poem by the Modernist Stevie
Smith. The line ‘I was born good, grown bad’ (Ibid., 17) becomes a refrain throughout the play.
By engaging with the classical tradition in this manner, a sense of universality and authority is
provided to Norma Jeane’s message.
This message is also reinforced in the HISTORY OF WAR LESSON interludes in the play,
which offer pseudo-pedagogical and philological analyses of war. In the second lesson, ‘τραῦμα /
“wound”’ (Ibid., 14), a pedagogical approach is taken. The statement ‘Euripides makes a hero
out of Helen, who was brutalized by merely staring at war too long’ is followed by
‘TEACHABLE MOMENTS’ (Helen’s response to Menelaus’ violence against unarmed people)
and ‘DISCUSSION TOPICS’ (to compare and contrast being speared and depressed) (Ibid., 14).
In the third lesson, ‘ἁρπάζειν / “to take”’, philology is used to encompass the message of the
text: ‘if you possess a woman [...] or occupy a city, you are a taker’. ἁρπάζειν comes into Latin

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as rapio, from which the English language gets rape –– all are ‘words stained with the very early
blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities’ (Ibid., 19). The conflict of the Trojan War, and
all Western wars since, become indistinguishable from gender-based violence. The fifth lesson,
‘παλλακή / “concubine”’, explains the Ancient Greek definition of dirt as something out of
place22 and the linguistic relationship between the noun for ‘concubine’ and verb ‘to sprinkle’.
This provides the ‘TEACHABLE MOMENT’ in the Iliad when Helen is weaving the events of
the war, and Homer uses the verb ‘sprinkle’ to describe the embroidery (Ibid., 32). This implies
that, on a linguistic level, there is a condemning connection between Helen being out of place
(she is, therefore, dirt) as a Trojan concubine, and her sprinkling death into her tapestry. In light
of this, the end of the play where Norma Jeane is knitting ‘every detail’ of the fall of Troy
(including ‘every pointless prayer’ and ‘every bone that broke / in the baby they tossed over the
wall on the last day’) (Ibid., 51-2) becomes an amplification of the dirty business of war, and a
laundering of her own reputation as she focuses on telling her story and hoping to see her
daughter again. Therefore, although the novels thus far discussed in this chapter have apparent
difficulties in adapting Helen, she remains an important woman to adapt, and is reimagined in
contemporary poetry and drama.
Conversely, Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships actually stages Helen’s resistance to
adaptation within the corpus of contemporary feminist myth writing. A Thousand Ships, itself
named after Helen’s legend, affords Helen a space to tell her story, to absolve herself of some
blame, while also actively engaging with the adaptive difficulties and reluctances that come with
adapting Helen, particularly in the 21st century. When the Muse is giving the story to the poet,
she says ‘I’m offering him the story of all the women in the war. Well, most of them (I haven’t
decided about Helen yet. She gets on my nerves)’ (Haynes 2019: 41). Calliope is giving the poet
the story of some of the most central (Penelope, Clytemnestra, Hecuba) and most obscure
(Oenone, Laodamia, Creusa) women from the Troy stories, but Helen – the catalyst who has
been a rich subject of art and literature throughout the millennia – ‘gets on [Calliope’s] nerves’.

22
Carson expands on this definition of dirt as something out of place in Men in the Off Hours (2000), a hybrid text of
short poems and verse essays. In ‘Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity’,
she repeats the metaphor of poached egg on one’s plate as not-dirty, while poached egg on the floor or a book page is
dirty (Carson 2000: 148; Carson 2019: 32). For the Ancient Greeks, women were simultaneously polluted,
pollutable, and polluting, due to their their wet (and therefore unhygienic) bodies and minds, their potential for
defilement, and their insatiable sexual appetites (Carson 2000: 138-161).

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She is undecided on whether Helen gets a place in this otherwise comprehensive account of ‘all
the women’ affected by the war, its precedents, and its aftermath. As Maguire indicates, although
‘Helen is strangely absent (emotionally, physically) from the story she has initiated’, she is the
‘narrative motor’ (Maguire 2009: xi), and the story cannot be told without her. Hence, Helen
does get to voice her side of the story in A Thousand Ships, but she is not afforded her own
chapter and has to appear in one of the chapters on The Trojan Women. Helen’s voice is
interrupted by an unsympathetic Hecabe, who objects only to the ‘Trojan’ moniker when the
Greeks call Helen ‘The Trojan whore’ and explicitly tells her ‘I blame you’ (Haynes 2019: 133,
135). Thus, Helen’s vilification – as it is portrayed in Euripides’ The Trojan Women and informed
by modern conceptions of internalised misogyny – is presented in A Thousand Ships.
Despite this, Haynes’ novel does give Helen space to share her story. Helen allocates blame
more equitably; if her ‘crime was to be seduced’, she must surely share that crime with her
seducer and fellow adulterer: ‘Paris was a married man, [...] Why does everyone always forget
that? [...] Paris came to me, remember?’ (Ibid., 135). Similarly, her boorish first husband is
allotted some blame, and ‘Which of us can refuse Aphrodite? [...] A god’s power is far greater
than mine’ (Ibid., 136-7). As outlined above, Sappho blamed Aphrodite and Ovid blamed
Menelaus, so Haynes’ Helen distributes the blame among all of the characters that deserve a
share. Haynes’ Helen does consent to Paris (inasmuch as anyone can consent when the gods are
controlling their actions), but she does not submit to her reputation as a solely blameworthy
whore. Helen in A Thousand Ships owes much to Euripides’ Helen in The Trojan Women, who
(as Haynes writes in Pandora’s Jar) ‘is nowhere near as accepting of either sole or major
responsibility for the war’, and Euripides writes her ‘a legal defence, given in verse’ to overturn
her impending death sentence (2020: 66). Moreover, in Helen, Euripides ‘makes the most
exculpatory move of any ancient writer: he totally rewrites her story, thus mounting a full-scale
defence of Helen’ (Maguire 2009: 119), as we saw above with McLaughlin’s rewriting of
Euripides’ Helen. Haynes draws upon her informed opinion that ‘Euripides is one of the greatest
writers of female voices in antiquity and, frankly, in the history of theatre’ (2020: 189) in her
novelistic retelling, continuing his tradition of giving Helen an opportunity to defend herself. On
a related note, Haynes’ Helen has a sarcastic tone when she continues in the Homeric tradition of
self-flagellation ‘“I, who destroy everything I touch, polluting and ruining with my very

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existence?” Helen said, eyebrows arched’ (Ibid., 134) and we see what Hughes called the
‘feistier Helen’ of pre-Christian literature, when she uses her seductive demi-godhead to demand
respect from Odysseus who was previously mocking her (Ibid., 209-210). Also, it is narrated that
‘She was hard to describe’, yet Haynes does offer a description of Helen as ‘so tall and fair that
she seemed like a swan among ordinary birds [...] her golden hair, her pale skin, her dark eyes,’
(Ibid., 133). For Haynes, the central stake in the story is that Helen’s defence is as established in
the mythic tradition as Helen’s blame, and to exonerate Helen is to challenge the misogynistic
trend that vilifies beautiful women and blames them for suffering.
It has therefore been established that Helen poses some adaptive challenges, as evidenced
by her notable absence in Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, her unsympathetic portrayal in
Atwood’s The Penelopiad, and the acknowledgement of these difficulties in Haynes’ A Thousand
Ships. Despite this, she is beginning to be revisited in women’s revisionist myth writing. Claire
Heywood’s Daughters of Sparta (2021) is a novel of the interconnected lives of sisters Helen and
Klytemnestra, which indicates that the increasing vogue to revisit the women of Greek myth is
also finally making space in contemporary women’s storytelling for Helen’s narrative. In this
text, Paris seduces Helen, but the scales quickly fall from her eyes as she realises that ‘she had
only ever been his prize, like that poor beautiful creature he wore about his shoulders’ (Heywood
2021: 282). In comparing herself to the leopard hide that Paris wears as a cape, she fully
acknowledges that he views her as little more than an adornment and a testament to his status;
Paris says directly to her that ‘you are my woman, I won you and I took you. The most beautiful
woman in the world is mine,’ (Ibid., 282) which is a stark acknowledgement of her
objectification, accentuated by the language of possession that Paris chooses. In Heywood’s
novel, it is Klytemnestra who voices the debates surrounding Helen’s agency:

She feared for Helen. She must be so afraid, taken from her home, raped by a foreign
man. But if she had not been raped, if she had left willingly… The thought was not much
better. Oh Helen. What have you done? (Heywood 2021: 196)

Klytemnestra does not know whether Helen consented to going with Paris, but what
distinguishes this from when, for example, Atwood’s Penelope or Miller’s Achilles pose these

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questions, is that Klytemnestra’s questions come from a place of love. The use of pathos as a
rhetorical device, emphasised by the italicised rhetorical question, emphasises the distinctive tone
of sisterhood in this novel. This sisterhood distinguishes the novel from other adaptations of
Helen, because it provides a more empathetic perspective on her story. Moreover, the novel
reframes Helen’s choices so that they are no longer defined by men. For example, she chooses to
marry Menelaus so that she will be ‘sisters twice over’ (Ibid., 65) with Klytemnestra (since their
husbands are brothers so they will be both sisters and sisters-in-law) and geographically closer to
her sister, so that they are more likely to see one another. In doing this, the novel prioritises their
closeness with one another over their infamous marital and extramarital relationships. Thus, the
Trojan War is reclaimed as, in Weigle’s (1999: 969) terms, a women’s mythology.
Overall, Helen is a difficult woman to adapt in a way wholly unlike the difficulties that the
adapting authors face when considering Penelope or Briseis, mostly due to her continued fame.
Nevertheless, she can evidently be utilised to navigate modern feminist discourses, such as
women’s portrayals in the media, sexual violence, objectification, and sex work. Moreover, the
most recent iterations of feminist thought on women in myth are revisiting Helen as a source of
adaptive potential, drawing particularly upon the Euripidean Helen while also acknowledging the
difficulties that come with adapting Helen in 21st century women’s writing. Self-awareness is
necessary in contemporary Helen discourse because, as Maguire argues: ‘When narrative fails to
achieve closure, literary criticism steps into the breach. Interpretation provides one of the
strongest forms of closure, turning blanks and discontinuities into connected meaning’ (2009:
18). Though narrative sometimes fails to make Helen knowable, literary criticism, such as the
work of Laurie Maguire and Bettany Hughes, indicates how Helen can be accessed in the 21st
century beyond novelistic, poetic, or dramatic reinterpretations. Moreover, to access Helen is to
open up discussions about the representation of sexualised women in patriarchal systems and the
real dangers that they face: Helen’s entreaty for Menelaus to spare her life and her equitable
redistribution of the blame becomes a critique of the fetishisation and vilification faced by
women deemed too beautiful throughout history, from Cleopatra to Diana.

***

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It is evident that being the most famous woman from classical mythology does not translate to
being the most adaptable, as demonstrated by the relative sparseness of Helen’s representation in
these novels. Meanwhile, the comparatively forgotten character of Briseis has become the most
adapted woman, most prominently in Emily Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful, Madeline Miller’s
The Song of Achilles, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. In fact, the obscurity surrounding
Briseis, both in ancient and contemporary texts has allowed authors to create novels which are
both faithful to the ancient texts and original, as shown by the vastly divergent representations of
Briseis in the novels. Penelope’s fame can be placed between Helen’s and Briseis’, and she is
rewritten in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe, and Natalie Haynes’ A
Thousand Ships. Therefore, she has been transformed from her memory of ‘the epitome of the
good and faithful wife’ (Smith 1992: 74), into an active schemer and key critic of her prominent
husband. Atwood and Miller both ask ‘what was Penelope really up to?’ (Atwood 2005: xxi),
both in Ithaca and after the Odyssey ends because, although she is remembered, her ‘story as told
in The Odyssey doesn't hold water’ (Ibid., xxi). Because she is not the primary focus of Homer,
her motives and actions remain obscure enough for the authors to recreate her in innovative
ways. Evidently, excavating and reinterpreting the women of the Greek epics is one of the most
significant ways that contemporary female authors are adapting myth for feminist purposes. This
recalls Angela Carter’s much-quoted line:

Reading is just as creative an activity as writing and most intellectual development

depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles,
especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode (1983; 1998:
26 [my emphasis]).

New readings of old texts are at once destructive – of outdated, oppressive traditions – and
constructive, as they offer infinite regenerative potential for new stories, new perspectives, in
familiar frameworks. New wine in old bottles. The wealth of potential for creative reading can
perhaps be best indicated in a case study that considers how one myth can be re-read and

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developed for a myriad of ‘explosive’ purposes, which is the goal of the following chapter,
focused on revisions of Antigone.

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 Chapter 2: Antigone's Afterlives

Ali Smith’s The Story of Antigone, Salley Vickers’ Where Three Roads Meet, Kamila Shamsie’s
Home Fire, and Natalie Haynes’ The Children of Jocasta are all contemporary prose adaptations
of Antigone’s myth. Despite using the same source material, their approaches differ substantially.
This chapter will therefore form a case study of this specific figure from Greek myth in
contemporary literature, illustrating how the same myth can be utilised for diverse purposes, with
very different questions emerging as a result of the varying adaptations. Then, I will focus on one
specific decision that adapting authors make when revisiting Antigone: her age. While Sophocles
has Ismene as Antigone’s younger sister, there is a trend amongst more recent adaptations to cast
Antigone as the rebellious younger sister. This trend began with Jean Anouilh’s play Antigone
(1944), written during the Nazi occupation of France, and can be traced to present-day novels,
leading one to question why certain authors choose to cast Antigone as either a wilful youth or an
older extremist (Haynes 2017: np.). Antigone’s shifting age speaks to the specific issue of power
at play in the myth: portraying her as the younger sibling means that she would attract less
scrutiny, and therefore she would have more freedom to rebel, though of course this would mean
that she would have to fight harder to be heard. This specific question of age will supplement the
broader questions asked in this chapter. Building on the questions posed by earlier feminist
analyses of Antigone – ‘why […] do we continually return to this figure in our attempts to
grapple with the struggles and crises of our own times? […] what can we learn from her?’
(Söderbäck 2010: 2) – this chapter will argue that to adapt Antigone is in itself an act of feminist
(re)writing.
Sophocles’ Antigone opens with the heroine on the brink of a decision: should she obey
the political laws set by Creon, or the religious laws that demand burial rights for the deceased?
As Natalie Haynes summarises: ‘So Antigone must decide: does she obey her conscience and
bury Polynices – the punishment for which is the death penalty – or does she obey the law and
leave her brother to be picked apart by dogs?’ (2017: np.). Antigone decides that the laws of the
cosmos far outweigh the politician’s decrees, and she resolves to preserve she and her brother’s
eternal souls despite the corporeal consequence of death that she faces: ‘These laws, I was not
about to break them, / not out of fear of some man’s wounded pride, / and face the retribution of

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the gods’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles Antigone: l.509-11).23 Antigone, despite her youth, cursed
heritage, and lack of hope for a future, stands up against this misogynistic despot for moral
justice. Since taking this stance in ancient Greek myth and literature, Antigone has remained a
figure of revolution. In Hegelian aesthetics, Greek tragedy – such as Sophocles’ Antigone and
Aeschylus’ Oresteia – exemplify beauty in its most concrete form, because free individuals
proceed to action, leading to conflict and, finally, to resolution; the conflict between Antigone
and Creon in the Antigone is an example of individuals moved to act by an ethical interest, or
pathos, in the relationship between the family and the state (Aesthetics, 2:1213–14 in Houlgate
2021: np). Throughout the centuries, ‘This courageous woman, the fruit of incest, has fascinated
philosophers in the nineteenth century, inspired playwrights in the twentieth century, and
intrigued feminist thinkers and activists for decades’ (Söderbäck 2010: 2). It is the last of these
groups and their reproductions – the modern feminist preoccupation with, and adaptations of,
Antigone – on which this chapter will focus.
Why is Antigone a continued figure of interest and interpretation for theorists and
novelists alike? Casting Antigone as a revolutionary figure against despotic, misogynistic control
has its roots in antiquity. According to Lefkowitz and Romm, Sophocles’ play is centred around
moral obligation, pitting the individual against the state, as well as woman against man, since
‘Creon is angry not only because Antigone did not abide by [his laws] but also because he cannot
stand being disobeyed by a woman’ (Lefkowitz & Romm 2016: 275-6). They point to his initial
condemnation of both sisters to death despite Ismene’s innocence and his infamous comment that
his son, heretofore engaged to Antigone, will find ‘other women, other fields to plow’ as
evidence for the ‘misogynistic streak’ in Creon’s character (Ibid., 276). It is these threads of
morality against a corrupt patriarch that have been rewoven by later writers.
In Antigone Rising, Helen Morales asserts that Antigone’s myth has become ‘one of the
most meaningful for feminism and for revolutionary politics. She has become an icon of
resistance. Of pitting personal conviction against state law. Of speaking truth to power’ (Morales
2020: x). This is because Antigone embodies the enduring ‘glamorous appeal’ of a ‘“girl against

23
Anne Carson notes that Antigone and Creon’s opposition is not simply ideological, it is linguistic: they ‘stand
opposed to one another instinctually, in the very morphology of their language, in the very grain of the way they
think and speak’ (Carson 2015: np.). Even on a linguistic level, Sophocles positions Antigone and Creon as
opponents.

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the world”’ (Ibid., xiii). Morales draws a parallel between Antigone’s (ancient and fictitious)
courage and endurance in her girlhood, and the bravery of the (contemporary and real) Iesha
Evans, Malala Yousafzi, and Greta Thunberg, labelling them all as having ‘the spirit of Antigone’
(Ibid., xii). In making this comparison, Morales demonstrates how myths can be utilised and
politicised in the modern day, in the service of radical politics. As Charlotte Higgins writes in her
review of Morales’ text, ‘Creative misreadings and deliberate subversions are in fact central to
the classical tradition’ (Higgins 2020: np.), beginning with the works of playwrights and poets
such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Ovid. From ancient civilisations to today, ‘creative readings,
even misreadings, of classical texts and stories can be immensely generative’, and this is the case
with Antigone particularly, who ‘has often been creatively misread to provide a model for female
activism’ (Ibid., np.). This idea of misreading myths for their generative potential is an
interesting one, since to ‘misread’ suggests that there is a specific correct reading that one is
recognising and rejecting –– which is contrary to the widely-held understanding that there is no
one correct version of a myth. However, here the suggestion is that to alter the myth is to
galvanise it; myths are characterised by their mutability, and they exist to be repurposed and
repoliticised. If Sophocles and Euripides began the classical tradition of creatively rewriting
Antigone’s myth, it has continued through Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and Jean Anouilh, to
the present work of Natalie Haynes, Ali Smith, Kamila Shamsie, and, to a lesser extent, Salley
Vickers. Though these authors have all found in the myth the same ‘“girl against the world”’,
there remain many opportunities for generative ‘misreadings’. Julia Kristeva expresses the
mutability of myth by amplifying Antigone as an enigma, asking ‘Who are you Antigone?’
(2010: 215), and answering that she is an ‘unfathomable, indefinable figure; lacking a fixed
identity in your very authenticity; you escape yourself, Antigone’.
Ali Smith’s The Story of Antigone was published as part of Pushkin Children’s Press’ ‘Save
the Story’ campaign. Much like the Canongate Myth Series, Pushkin publishers aimed to create
‘a library of favourite stories from around the world, […] by some of the best contemporary
writers’ (Pushkin Press, in Smith 2011: 99). The Pushkin Press series has some significant
distinctions from Canongate’s, most notably that their stories are for ‘today’s children’ (Ibid., 99)
and that they are not limited to mythic retellings. In summary, ‘Save the Story is a mission in
book form: saving great stories from oblivion by retelling them for a new, younger generation’

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(Ibid., 99) — a familiar mission within the scope of this thesis. So it is important to recognise
that, unlike the other texts in this chapter, The Story of Antigone retells the myth of Antigone
specifically for children. My analysis is shaped by an awareness of this intended audience and
the ‘Save the Story’ mission; it is informed not only by analysis of the main body of the text but
also with the mock interview at the end between Smith and the crow/narrator.
The feminist relevance of Smith’s children’s story lies in its encouragement to young people
to realise the political power of their voices. Smith’s Antigone loudly entreats her sister to
‘“SHOUT IT AS LOUD AS YOUR VOICE WILL GO!”’ (Smith 2011: 19). This is clearly an
adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, who boldly states ‘shout it from the rooftops. I’ll hate you /
all the more for silence — tell the world!’ (trans. Fagles, l.100-101). Moreover, this exclamation
by the Antigone of the children’s story sheds light on the appeal of Antigone’s myth for children,
since she stands up for justice, even though she is a powerless child. This interpretation is
supported by the use of capital letters and an exclamation mark in Antigone’s speech, since it
gives the impression of her shouting as loud as possible, therefore demonstrating that the
relevance of the story for children is to motivate them to use their voices against injustice.
The intended child reader of Smith’s adaptation is apparent in the storytelling method since
Antigone’s actions are narrated by a crow, first to a dog and then to her nest of chicks.
Anthropomorphised animals as storytellers are a cornerstone of children’s literature, such as E.B.
White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) and Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972): ‘animals that talk
can let us in on another world which we may not be able to see without their help’ (Markowsky
1975: 461). While Markowsky refers to the talking rabbits allowing their young readers access to
Robert Lawson’s Rabbit Hill (1944), Smith’s talking crow provides us with a bird’s-eye view into
ancient Thebes and imparts a sense of otherness and humour to the narration. Crow’s
defamiliarisation of the actions, motivations, and histories of humans (or the ‘still-alives’ as
Crow calls them [Smith 2011: 27]), provides the reader with an outsider perspective on
humanity. Markowsky cites humour based in caricature as one of the key reasons that children’s
authors use anthropomorphism; Smith uses the caricature of the greedy, scavenging crow to
offset the gruesomeness of battle, such as how the crow describes people as ‘food specifically for
crows’ (Ibid., 14). The crow has a strong dose of irony and macabre humour, such as when she
tells the story of Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother, ending the tale with ‘Caw.

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Hilarious.’ and that of the battle of the Seven Against Thebes and Eteocles and Polynices’ death
at each other’s equally-matched hands with ‘Priceless.’ (Ibid., 27; 29). This also works to reshape
the most gruesome, sensational elements of the story for children, such as incest and murder that
are also, crucially, the most familiar aspects of the myth. Smith also uses the caricature of a
stupid dog as the crow’s audience; while the crow is a witty storyteller blessed with a full
vocabulary, the dog is not so fortunate: ‘ArooooOOOOoooo […] “Arf,” the dog said’ (Ibid.,
23-5). The crow’s acerbic wit is demonstrated at the dog’s expense, ‘Dogs. Stupid and
sentimental. […] Cretin, the crow thought’ (Ibid., 23-5), and used to establish the crow as the
storyteller and the dog as the rapt, but unintelligent, listener. Therefore, ‘the animal[s are] used to
express attributes commonly assumed to represent the creature’ (Markowsky 1975: 461), though
the crow and the dog are also used to embody two of the key themes of Antigone’s myth: decay
and loyalty, respectively. While most of the adaptations discussed here engage with these issues,
Smith’s adaptation is distinctive in its use of animals to relate some of the more gruesome themes
of the myth in child-friendly ways. This demonstrates that the myth can not only be adapted for
young audiences, but also that the important motifs of loyalty and standing up for what is right
can be related to children via the Antigone myth.
The Story of Antigone is significant for this research, not only due to the feminist
implications, but also due to the story’s self-consciousness about storytelling and adaptation. The
epilogue sees the crow repeat the story to her anthropomorphised chicks: ‘“Tell us again! Tell us
again!” […] The nest was full of hungry fledglings still wet from the egg, who’d all woken with
their hungry mouths (and ears) wide open’ (Smith 2011: 87). Here, the chicks mirror the children
reading the story and, more broadly, the story itself being told ‘again!’, this time for children.
Furthermore, the fledglings in the epilogue excitedly take over telling the story from their
mother: ‘“Tell us again the story of the still-alive girl who cared about her dead brother,”’ (Ibid.,
90). Smith’s story therefore self-consciously reflects on the phenomenon of storytelling: it fits the
Save the Story mission of retelling stories for younger generations within the novel itself and
then envisions the next step, which is that generation continuing the story.
The Story of Antigone ends with an interview, in which Crow asks Ali Smith questions about
Antigone and adaptation. Smith answers Crow’s opening question ‘So, where does the story of
Antigone come from?’ (Ibid., 93) with information about Ancient Greece and Sophocles, which

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Crow follows with a particularly telling question: ‘So you are adapting this story from
Sophocles’ adaptation of the story in ancient mythology in turn?’ (Ibid.,94). 24 When Crow
suggests that adaptation is ‘like stealing’ (Ibid., 95), Smith explains to Crow (and also to the
reader) about the dissemination of knowledge and storytelling: ‘It’s the way most stories get told,
over time. It’s one of the ways stories survive’ (Ibid., 95). This is uniquely relevant to this thesis,
since the adaptation of historic sources is inevitable and ensures the survival of the story, and the
goal of this thesis is to investigate the layers within this, looking particularly at the significant
differences in contemporary adaptations, where the myth has been reworked for feminist
purposes. Thus, Smith not only adapts Antigone’s myth from Sophocles’ adaptation, but actively
engages with the concept of adaptive tradition with the intention of explaining it to younger
readers in the fictitious interview. Furthermore, when Crow asks ‘why did you add us?’ (Ibid.,
96) Smith makes explicit the rationale behind anthropomorphising crows and dogs. She explains
that ‘the imagery in the original drama is full of crows and dogs’ due to the question of ‘what
happens to a body when you leave it unburied’ (Ibid., 96). Here, the unburied body is a metaphor
for the story itself, as they are both things that change over time (decay in the case of the body,
adaptation in the case of the story), but which is still important to people, as demonstrated by
Antigone’s actions in burying the body and by the authors who retell these myths. If Polynices
was left unburied, his body would become ‘carrion for the birds’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles,
Antigone: l.230) — it is this physical indignity as well as the fate of his eternal soul that
Antigone saves her brother from. Ultimately, Ali Smith’s adaptation of Antigone’s myth is
intended for children, yet the story provides justification for mythic adaptation in contemporary
literature, and suggests that a story in which ‘a small powerless girl stands up to an
all-powerful-seeming king,’ (Smith 2011: 94) would be inspirational and politically motivating
for young people throughout the generations.
While Smith’s novel, as its title suggests, centres around Sophocles’ drama of Antigone’s
story, Salley Vickers’ contribution to the Canongate Myth Series, Where Three Roads Meet,
focuses on the myth of Antigone’s father Oedipus and, more specifically, Sigmund Freud’s

24
Smith is taking Sophocles’ version of the myth as her starting point, which is understandable due to it being the
most familiar ancient version of the story, but – as Crow elucidates – Sophocles is just one version of the myth. This
is further explored below, in the analysis of Natalie Haynes’ The Children of Jocasta, which purposely decentralises
Sophocles’ adaptation.

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psychoanalytic interpretation. She used to be a practising psychotherapist, and believes that
‘Oedipus is a central myth for psychoanalysts, [but] Freud's not read it correctly’ (Feay &
Vickers 2007: np.). Vickers maintains that because Oedipus is an adult when he has sex with his
mother, he does not have an Oedipus complex, and that Freud fails to account for Laius and
Jocasta, whose attempted infanticide ought to be for psychoanalysts a ‘very interesting feature of
this myth’ (Ibid., np.). Laius and Jocasta’s actions are more illuminating for Vickers than
Oedipus’, since they acted with knowledge that they were the parents of the baby, while Oedipus
and Jocasta acted without knowledge of their maternal connection. Thus, her novel is formed of a
Socratic – albeit anachronistic – dialogue between Tiresias and an ailing Sigmund Freud in
Hampstead in 1938, wherein Tiresias critiques Freud’s interpretation of the myth. Antigone is
barely discussed by Tiresias and Freud, and Freud’s daughter Anna, who is conflated with
Antigone, exists in the text merely to silently interrupt the men’s discussions, demonstrating that
she is not the focus of Vickers’ adaptation. After this analysis, I shall consider Vickers’
Antigone/Anna in relation to Antigone’s potential for Psychoanalysis, particularly as theorised
by George Steiner and Judith Butler, both of whom were building upon Lacan’s interpretation of
Antigone as a model of pure desire in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1986: 328-9; in Miller 2007:
1).
When dealing with Antigone, Freud and Tiresias focus on her role as a dedicated daughter,
which is to say the Antigone of Oedipus at Colonus, rather than as a figure of political dissent, as
she is in the Antigone. Indeed, the few times that the two men mention Antigone focus on her
loyalty to Oedipus: ‘The daughters who stood by him? […] Antigone and Ismene. Especially
Antigone’; ‘Antigone and Ismene refused to be parted from their father’; ‘Antigone, had his
stubbornness and refused to leave him’ (Smith 2007: 177; 178; 179). The repetitive language in
their descriptions of Antigone and Ismene – and ‘Especially Antigone’ – demonstrates that the
aspect of her character they are focused on is her dedication to Oedipus. This relates to their
overall focus on Oedipus in the novel, as his daughters only command interest insofar as they
relate to their father. This is manifested in the noticeable lack of attention the two men afford to
Eteocles and Polynices, merely mentioning that ‘the boys never came to any good’ in contrast to
their sisters who ‘were cut from a different cloth’ (Ibid., 179). Since Eteocles and Polynices were
not loyal to their father they are not deemed relevant for in-depth discussion by Freud and

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Tiresias; in the same way, since Oedipus’ daughters stayed with him, they are a source of
dialogue, but only in relation to their degrees of relative dedication to their father. Antigone in
the role of loyal daughter is closest to her character in Oedipus at Colonus, where she is
described by Oedipus as having ‘volunteered for grief, / wandering with me, leading the old
misery, […] Hard labour / but [she] endured it all,’ (Sophocles trans. Fagles, Oedipus at Colonus:
l.377-382). This emphasis on the Antigone of Oedipus at Colonus is made explicit in Where
Three Roads Meet when Oedipus’ death is described: ‘When Oedipus was very old, and more
rancorous than ever, he arrived one day, in the company of his stalwart daughter Antigone, at
Colonus,’ (Smith 2007: 182), wherein Antigone is again characterised by her devotion to her
ailing father. Furthermore, the novel ends with the epigraph ‘He died, as willed, in a foreign land,
/ his eternal resting place in quiet shade, / his passing not unmourned’ (Ibid., 195), which is a
line spoken by Antigone towards the close of Oedipus at Colonus. To use Antigone’s epitaph as
an epigraph demonstrates her role for Oedipus, Tiresias, and Freud which is to loyally attend her
father. There is a definite valorisation of loyalty to the father figure in this text, indicating that the
Antigone that Tiresias and Freud are discussing is the Antigone of Oedipus at Colonus – the
dedicated daughter – rather than the political dissenter of Antigone.
Vickers conflates Antigone with Freud’s daughter Anna in Where Three Roads Meet. Much
like ‘stalwart’ Antigone, Freud’s daughter Anna followed him to England as he escaped the
persecution of the Nazis and cared for him as he died of cancer; as Vickers puts it in the preface
to the novel, Freud moved to Hampstead ‘along with the constant Anna (referred to by Freud as
his “Antigone”)’ (Vickers 2007: 10 [preface]). This similarity is made explicit in the narrative,
such as when Freud says Anna is ‘a brave girl’ and Tiresias agrees that ‘It is good to have a
courageous daughter’ (Ibid., 17). Here, Tiresias’ vague language in his agreement broadens the
scope of the men’s sentiments to apply to both Anna and Antigone, thus highlighting the two
daughters’ similarities. 25 This comparison is made more explicit when they discuss ‘The

25
Perhaps the most oppressive portrayal of a female figure by Tiresias and Freud is in their dealing with the Sphinx,
which they describe as ‘a lion-bodied, sharp taloned brazen-winged, snake-tailed, smug-faced, ravening woman, be
she ever so pitiless’ (Vickers 2007: 93). The language used to describe the Sphinx deliberately mirrors derogatory
language often applied to women, most notably ‘brazen’, ‘smug’, and ‘pitiless’. Griselda Pollock argues that Freud’s
preoccupation with Sphinxes (as demonstrated by his ownership of numerous Sphinx-related artworks) is indicative
of Psychoanalysis’ interpretation of the feminine as something monstrous and uncivilised (Pollock 2008: 90).
Pollock argues that Freud invokes the Sphinx to portray a ‘horrible image of the maternal body as a monster or

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daughters who stood by him? […] Especially Antigone’ and Freud exclaims ‘Like my Anna!’
(Ibid., 177). Freud and Tiresias also reduce Anna to her father’s carer: ‘my daughter will bring in
my tea tray at five’; ‘I can eat nothing, barely drink, but Anna insists’ (Ibid., 28; 155). Anna’s
recurring role in providing her father with afternoon tea recalls Antigone’s role in Oedipus at
Colonus, where she is has ‘never a second thought / for home, a decent life, so long as your
father / had some care and comfort’ (Sophocles trans. Fagles, Oedipus at Colonus: l.382-4).
Anna’s caretaking also plays a structural role in the novel as her silent interruptions cause the
breaks in dialogue that account for the chapters. Much like their descriptions of Antigone, Freud
and Tiresias are repetitive in their accounts of Anna’s interruptions: ‘… ah, I am sorry, this will
be my daughter with the tray and the best china. […] I have talked enough, Dr Freud. But I’ll
return’; ‘Your daughter will be arriving soon with the sacred tray. […] Enough words for today,
Doctor’; ‘The sacred vessel is about to arrive. […] I’ll be back, Doctor’ (Smith 2007: 39; 57-8;
107). Anna is treated as an interloper by the men, despite their increasingly elevated language in
describing the afternoon tea, from it being simply a meal to a ‘sacred tray’ and a ‘sacred vessel’.
With this religious language, the dinner tray becomes a sacred object, paralleling Freudian
tradition with the mythic tradition, in the same way that Anna is equated with Antigone. The
conflation of these two women indicate that the primary concern of this adaptation is not
Antigone at all, but rather a dialogue about the reception of myth in Psychoanalysis, and the
Anna/Antigone figure is used mainly as a structural device.
While in Freud and Tiresias’ Socratic dialogue Anna and Antigone’s voices are notably
absent, Antigone is becoming an increasingly important figure in post-Freudian Psychoanalysis.
This focus began with Jacques Lacan in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, where he
argues against the reductive interpretation of Antigone as ‘really a tender and charming little
thing’ (1986; 1992: 262). Instead, he offers her as a character defined by Até (delusion, ruin,
folly), going on to characterise Sophocles’ Antigone as ‘something uncivilized, something raw’
(Ibid., 263). Ultimately, Lacan argues that Antigone represents a kind of ‘fierce presence’ (Ibid.,
265) in direct contravention to milder interpretations of Antigone, or those that sideline her in
favour of her father’s myth. The Lacanian model of Antigone is an important challenge to

enclosure’ (Ibid., 105) and that, in Freud’s model of Psychoanalysis, ‘the feminine, like the Sphinx, still remains
outside the realm of the truly human’ (Ibid., 90).

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Freudian Psychoanalysis, which sidelines Antigone in favour of her father’s myth. It is Antigone
as a ‘tender and charming little thing’ that is picked up on in Vickers’ Freudian retelling of the
Theban Cycle. Moreover, Lacan’s exploration of Antigone’s ‘fierce presence’ marks a theoretical
shift back to Antigone, rather than Oedipus, in psychoanalytic thought, which has been taken up
by George Steiner and Judith Butler.
In Antigones, George Steiner attempts to answer the same question as this chapter: ‘Why are
the “Antigones” truly éternelles and immediate to the present?’ (2011: ix). Steiner notes that,
though ‘Sophocles’ Antigone had held pride of place in poetic and philosophical judgement for
over a century’, Freudian Psychoanalysis has caused critical, interpretative focus to shift to the
Oedipus Tyrannos in the 20th Century (Ibid., 7). Oedipus Tyrannos perhaps suited Freud’s
psychoanalytic goals better than Antigone due to its overt focus on sex. As Chase confirms in
‘Oedipal Textuality: Reading Freud’s Reading of Oedipus’, ‘Freud uses the drama of Oedipus to
tell a story about psychic development and to describe the status of sex in human existence’
(1979: 54). Chase specifies that Freud has read Sophocles’ Oedipus, rather than just adopting the
general semantics of the Oedipus legend (Ibid., 54). Chase theorises that Freud’s infamous
reading of the Oedipus myth is an interpretation, and that the Sophoclean myth can be utilised to
recontextualise Freud’s interpretation. This is a thesis similar to Vickers’ in Where Three Roads
Meet, which is a revisitation of the Oedipus myth based on the belief that Freud has
fundamentally misunderstood the myth (Feay & Vickers 2007: np.). By virtue of being an
interrogation of Freud’s interpretation, Where Three Roads Meet is focused entirely on
Freud/Oedipus, with Antigone/Anna being marginalised and silenced. Yet, Steiner’s work
indicates that ‘an “Antigone” [is] lodge[d] ineradicably and via incessant replication in our
private and public sensibilities’ (Steiner 2011: 127). Steiner concludes that one can observe in
Antigone ‘and in the spell which she has cast on the western imagination, […] countless dreams
and symbolic representations’ (Ibid., 128), thus demonstrating the potential of Antigone for
psychoanalytic interpretation. Vickers’ sidelining of Antigone can therefore be accounted for due
to her marginalisation in psychoanalytic thought; Lacan and Steiner’s consideration of
Antigone’s enduring appeal, however, indicates that it is Antigone, rather than Oedipus, who is
the more innovative figure for post-Freudian psychoanalysis.

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 In Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler builds on Steiner’s ‘controversial question that he does not
pursue: What would happen if psychoanalysis were to have taken Antigone rather than Oedipus
as its point of departure?’ (2000: 57). They track Antigone’s ‘postoedipal’ (Ibid., 57) fate,
arguing that her life and death is just as defined by incest as Oedipus’, if not more so. Butler
asserts that ‘Antigone’s father is her brother, since they both share a mother in Jocasta, and her
brothers are her nephews, sons of her brother-father,’ and that her relationship with her late
brother Polynices is incestuous, being a replacement for the father and husband that she can
never have (Ibid., 57). Butler uses this as a springboard to make a case for Antigone to become a
figure for Queer Psychoanalysis, because she ‘fails to produce heterosexual closure for that
drama, and that this may intimate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as
its point of departure’ (Ibid., 65). They concede that Antigone does not ‘achieve another
sexuality’ besides heterosexuality, but she does ‘deinstitute heterosexuality by refusing to do
what is necessary to stay alive for Haemon,’ and, in refusing to become a wife and mother and in
‘embracing death as her bridal chamber’ she subverts the heteronormative expectations for her
gender (Ibid., 65). Therefore, although Antigone has been marginalised by Freudian
psychoanalysis, as suggested in Where Three Roads Meet by Anna/Antigone’s interloping
silence, post-Freudian psychoanalytic thinking continues the centuries-long tradition of
replicating and reinterpreting Antigone.
Ali Smith focuses on Antigone’s myth in The Story of Antigone and Salley Vickers’ Where
Three Roads Meet disputes Freud’s interpretation of Oedipus’ myth at the expense of Antigone.
In Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie harnesses the issues of moral turmoil and political dissent in
Sophocles’ Antigone to highlight Islamophobia and citizenship issues faced by present-day
British Muslims. Home Fire is an atypical contemporary adaptation of Greek Mythology:
Antigone and her mythos are never mentioned within the text, instead the stories and characters
are echoed and re-framed:26 Oedipus becomes Adil Pasha, Antigone becomes Aneeka, Ismene
becomes Isma, Polynices becomes Parvaiz, and Creon becomes Karamat. What is in a name?
Research by Richard Alford proved that naming practices help to construct and reflect
conceptions of personal identity and cultural signifiers, such as kinship organisation, cultural

26
Yet we know that this is an adaptation of Antigone due to the novel being marketed as such by both the authorial
and editorial paratexts. For further analysis of this, see Chapter 5 ‘Palimpsests: Paratexts and Intertexts’.

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difference, and religious systems. ‘[N]ames connect us to our family, to our language, and to our
traditions’ and colonial practices have often included renaming colonised peoples as an act of
domination and violence (Facing History and Ourselves 2018: 1:iii). Hence, in renaming the
figures from the Theban Cycle in her retelling, Shamsie indicates the cultural identities at stake
in the novel and the British Muslim identity politics central to Home Fire. Adil Pasha, Shamsie’s
Oedipus, was radicalised and, a generation later, his son Parvaiz follows his father’s footsteps
into ISIS. Meanwhile, the Home Secretary Karamat Lone is ‘Striding Away From Muslim-ness’
(Shamsie 2017: 52) to rise to political power. Lone strips Parvaiz of his citizenship and does not
let the 19 year-old boy come home when he realises the error of his ways, leading to tragedy and
suffering, particularly for Aneeka and Isma, or Antigone and Ismene. I will analyse Shamsie's
reconfiguration of Antigone as Aneeka and Ismene as Isma and, from there, her reinterpretation
of Sophocles’ drama as commentary upon modern-day British citizenship.
Shamsie’s reimagined Antigone, Aneeka, faces a similar choice to her hermetic foremother.
Aneeka must reconcile her dual identity as a young British woman and a Muslim. For Antigone,
the turmoil lies in natural versus political law because Creon decrees that Polynices’ body should
not be buried, in direct defiance of the laws of the gods. Unlike Creon, Antigone declares her
respect for divine law: ‘These laws, I was not about to break them, / not out of fear of some
man’s wounded pride, / and face the retribution of the gods’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles, Antigone
l.509-11). Similarly, Aneeka goes to Karachi to retrieve her brother’s body after he is killed
trying to escape ISIS, to protest Lone’s leaving Parvaiz stateless in death:

In the stories of wicked tyrants, men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept
from their families—their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked
graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am
here to ask for justice. I appeal to the prime minister: Let me take my brother home.
(Shamsie 2017: 224-5)

Like Antigone, Aneeka defies man-made laws that oppose moral justice both in word and deed.
The generalised phrasing at the beginning of Aneeka’s monologue not only outlines the parallel
between Aneeka and Parvaiz and Antigone and Polynices, but also comprises a more universal

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philosophising about immoral laws and power-hungry politicians of the sort advanced by
Antigone.
Aneeka selectively wears a headscarf on the grounds that ‘I get to choose which parts of me I
want strangers to look at’ (Ibid., 72). She wears the headscarf in public, but takes it off to have
sex with Eamonn, demonstrating her freedom to choose when she wears the headscarf as part of
her identity as a young British Muslim woman. The discussion of headscarves by contemporary
British Muslim women largely centres on their choice to wear a headscarf, in direct opposition to
the misconception that covering hair necessarily involves oppression (see London 2021: np;
Killian 2019: np.). A number of factors influence this choice, however. Chris Allen et al.
interviewed British Muslim women in collaboration with Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim
Attacks) to produce the report ‘“Maybe we are hated”: The experience and impact of
anti-Muslim hate on British muslim women’ in 2013. Their research found that ‘Muslim women
who are visible [wearing the hijab, niqqab, or other Muslim-specific clothing] are, on many
occasions, the group that is targeted the most’ (Allen et al. 2013: 5). Muslim women are more
likely to be subjected to Islamophobic attacks, especially when wearing the niqqab or other
religion-specific clothing (Siddique 2013: 1), indicating that this choice is not always
straightforward for women. Aneeka’s Aunty Naseem says ‘In my days either you were the kind
of girl who covered your head or you were the kind who wore makeup’ (Shamsie 2017: 64).
Evidently, Aneeka is both the kind of girl who covers her head (a Muslim) and the kind of girl
who wears makeup (sexually active). The self-determination in Aneeka’s choice to be both is
most stark when she asks ‘Leave this on?’ (Ibid., 71) and wears her hijab during sex with
Eamonn. In fetishising the symbol of modesty, Aneeka reconciles these two ostensibly disparate
sides of her life and identity. This echoes Antigone’s refusal to choose marriage with Haemon
over death as her marital bed –– while Antigone refuses to conform to the heteropatriarchal
demand for marriage, Aneeka refuses to conform to Naseem’s definitions of Muslim
womanhood.
By contrast, Isma consistently wears a hijab as a symbol of her faith, which is one way in
which she is identifiable with Sophocles’ Ismene. Her conformity with the laws of Islam mirrors
Ismene’s conformity with Creon’s laws of Thebes. The Qur’an decrees that women should cover
their heads for modesty (Qur’an 7:26; 24:31; 33:59) and Isma chooses to conform to that;

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similarly, Ismene says to Antigone ‘think what a death we’ll die, the worst of all / if we violate
the laws and override / the fixed decree of the throne,’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles, Antigone
l.70-2). Although Ismene did not participate in her sister’s crime, she allies herself with
Antigone, calling to be martyred alongside her: ‘I share the guilt, / the consequences too’ (Ibid.,
l.603-4). Likewise, Isma wants to fly to Karachi to share Aneeka’s martyrdom: ’I want to be with
her, that’s all’ (Shamsie 2017: 236). The same conversation with Karamat Lone demonstrates
Isma’s quiet activism:

“Why sociology?” he said. […]

“I wanted to understand why the world is so unfair.”
“Shouldn’t your God give you those answers?” he said, surprised by the slight teasing of
his own tone.
“Our God did, in a roundabout way.”
“How’s that?” he said. […]
“For starters, He created Marx.” (Ibid., 237)

Mentioning Marxism to the Conservative Home Secretary undermines his political values, but
there is a more subtle critique within the exchange. When Lone mocks Isma’s faith (‘your God’)
she retaliates with a reminder of his Muslim upbringing (‘Our God’). Lone apparently misses the
subtle rejoinder and has no significant response to her Marxist comment, demonstrating the
power of quiet activism that is often overshadowed by more overt, performative activism, as
exemplified by Antigone and Aneeka.
Kamila Shamsie has said that ‘Antigone […] has, at its centre, the question, what is the
relationship of state to citizen?’ (Major & Shamsie 2018: np.). Creon decrees that Polynices
cannot be buried in Thebes, and condemns his body to rot outside the city, something which
would not happen in modern Britain – ‘We have hygiene laws, if nothing else’ (Ibid., np.) – but
interpreting this decree as ‘you have no claim to this land, you have no place here, living or dead’
(Ibid., np.), clarifies the parallels between ancient myth and modern politics. While in Ali
Smith’s story, the unburied body is a metaphor for the body of the text, for Shamsie the unburied
body becomes symbolic of the state and citizenship. Parvaiz, Shamsie’s Polynices, experiences

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having ‘no claim to this land’ in both life and death, in his radicalisation and posthumous
statelessness. When Creon issues an edict that Eteocles deserves burial rites while his criminal
brother does not, he is decreeing that Polynices has ‘no claim to this land […] living or dead’. In
Home Fire, IS recruiters target Parvaiz, first by mugging him to make him think about ‘How he
hated this life, this neighbourhood’, and then by brainwashing him against Britain and its
‘emasculated version of Islam, bankrolled in mosques by the British government’ (Shamsie
2017: 123; 131). Likewise, Creon states in Antigone that Polynices ‘returned from exile, home to
his father-city / and the gods of his race, consumed with one desire— / to burn them roof to
roots—who thirsted to drink / his kinsmen's blood’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles, Antigone l.223-6).
A figure who leaves his ‘father-city’ only to return with the intention of destroying it maps quite
easily onto modern narratives of radicalisation, with young men leaving the U.K. to join the
Islamic State and considering their previous homeland the enemy. Hence, Shamsie draws a
parallel between the ancient drama and modern politics in order to demonstrate how citizenship
and state enemies have been sources of anxiety to civilisations throughout history.
Shamsie’s fictitious government clearly mirrors this political landscape, with the real-world
2014 Immigration Act being reflected in the text’s forthcoming ‘Immigration Bill [that will]
make it possible to strip any British passport holders of their citizenship in cases where they have
acted against the vital interests of the UK’ and the Home Secretary stating that ‘citizenship is a
privilege not a right or birthright’ (Shamsie 2017: 198). Karamat Lone makes Parvaiz stateless,
thereby sending the message that ‘you have no claim to this land, you have no place here, living
or dead’. Karamat states that ‘the day I assumed office I revoked the citizenship of all dual
nationals who have left Britain to join our enemies’ (Ibid., 188). He refuses to allow Parvaiz’s
body to be repatriated back to Britain for burial, stating ‘we will not let those who turn against
the soil of Britain in their lifetime sully that very soil in death’ (Ibid., 188). This resonates with
Creon’s decree that makes the burial of Polynices illegal. Similarly, Aneeka is not made literally
stateless but the Home Secretary does in effect strip her of her ability to return to Britain, since
she could not return with her Pakistani passport without applying for a visa, her British passport
having been seized by authorities. This is comparable to Creon’s ruling to entomb Antigone,
which effectively sentences her to death without having to publicly kill her. In both the
Sophoclean drama and the contemporary novel, this “ruling” is supported by public opinion. The

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Chorus school Antigone ‘You went too far [...] attacks on power never go unchecked’
(Sophocles, trans. Fagles: l.942, 960), while Twitter acts in much the same way as a Greek
Chorus to reflect public opinion in Shamsie’s novel, and support Karamat: ‘#WOLFPACK Just
started trending’ (Shamsie 2017: 190). This ruling is only overturned on the advice of Tiresias in
Sophocles’ play, and Karamat’s wife, Terry (a conflation of Creon’s wife Eurydice and Tiresias):
‘Look at her, Karamat: look at this sad child you’ve raised to your enemy,’ (Ibid., 254). Thus
Shamsie adapts Sophocles’ Antigone to portray institutional Islamophobia in modern Britain,
with Karamat’s Conservative government being aligned with Creon’s draconian rulership.
Antigone retains significance in mythic adaptation and, while feminist politics are not explicit in
Shamsie’s adaptation, the figure of a young girl standing up to despotic rule has once again been
utilised to address real-world injustices.
Thus far, I have demonstrated the differences in Antigone’s adaptations by contemporary
authors. The Story of Antigone, Where Three Roads Meet, and Home Fire are united specifically
by their adaptations of Sophocles’ work. By contrast, in The Children of Jocasta, Natalie Haynes
decentralises Sophocles’ version of the myth. In the ‘Afterword’, Haynes recalls ‘being startled
to find out there were other versions of the myth’ (2017: 327) and cites Homer’s reference to
‘“beautiful Epicaste, mother of Oedipus”’ (Ibid., 327) in Book 11 of the Odyssey, when
Odysseus journeys to the Underworld. Haynes points out that Homer’s version of the Oedipus
myth is relayed in just ten lines of verse, but it differs from Sophocles’ version (Ibid., 327); in the
Odyssey,27 the myth is centred on Epicaste and, though it refers to her suicide, there is no
mention of the auto-enucleation. As Haynes asks, ‘when did Epicaste become Jocasta?’ (Ibid.,
327). There are notable differences between Haynes’ adaptation of the Theban myth and
Sophocles’, such as the reversals of fates for Oedipus’ children and the centring of the previously

27
‘… I saw
fine Epicaste, Oedipus’ mother,
who did a dreadful thing in ignorance:
she married her own son. He killed his father,
and married her. The gods revealed the truth,
to humans; through their deadly plans, he ruled
the Cadmeans in Thebes, despite his pain.
But Epicaste crossed the gates of Hades;
she tied a noose and hung it from the ceiling,
and hanged herself for sorrow, leaving him
the agonies a mother’s Furies bring.’ (Homer, trans. Wilson 11:271-281)

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marginalised Jocasta and Ismene as protagonists. Haynes’ Antigone also differs from Sophocles’
in other ways, such as in her altered ambitions to marry and become queen, as well as her
ultimate, tragic fate.
In The Children of Jocasta, Polynices and Eteocles mutually kill one another and their
posthumous fates are flipped, as Polynices receives funeral rites, while Eteocles is left unburied
and deemed an enemy of the state (Haynes 2017: 230); more significant, though, is the sisters’
interchange: Ismene buries her brother’s body, instead of Antigone (Ibid., 276-8). Ismene’s
action compared to her historic inaction relates to Bonnie Honig’s theory in Antigone,
Interrupted. In much the same way that Haynes believes that Antigone ‘shines so brightly that
Ismene gets lost in the glare’ (Ibid., 330), Honig maintains that Antigone’s ‘strident act renders
the subtle invisible’ (Honig 2013: 177), referring to the burial. She suggests that Antigone and
Ismene are in a sorority of conspiracy (Ibid., 151) and that Ismene does, in fact, bury Polynices,
as evidenced by Polynices being buried ‘twice over’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles Antigone: l.539)
and Ismene’s confession. Honig asks ‘Why has no one for hundreds of years or more taken
[Ismene] at her word? She confessed’ (Honig 2013: 164). For Honig, destabilising the previously
‘settled’ belief held in Antigone’s reception that Ismene ‘is an anti-political character who lacks
the courage or imagination to act when called upon to do so’ would be immensely more
generative than simply repeating Antigone’s ‘possibilities of political reception’ (Ibid., 151-2).
This relates to my contention that the individual feminist appeal of The Children of Jocasta lies
in its excavation of sidelined female characters in Antigone’s myth, namely Ismene and Jocasta.
Ismene’s appeal for feminism lies in redressing her reductive portrayal as the silent, scared sister.
In light of Honig’s theory, Haynes’ The Children of Jocasta is the next step for feminist
reinterpretations of the Theban Cycle: to refocus attention on the overshadowed sister of
Antigone.
As Luce Irigaray argues in Speculum of the Other Woman, ‘Ismene seems indisputably a
“woman” in her weakness, her fear, her submissive obedience, her tears, madness, hysteria’
(Irigaray 1974; 1985; 2010: 102). For Irigaray, identification with the revolutionary resistance of
Antigone is the clear feminist route, so she continues the tradition of othering Ismene to amplify
Antigone’s activism (see Goldhill 2008: 159). This epitomises Ismene’s surviving reputation,
which is subverted in Haynes’ novel. Under the obscurity of Antigone’s shadow, Ismene is free

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to defy Creon without suspicion; Haynes’ Ismene capitalises on the assessment of her as a
submissive younger sister to carry out the deed of burying Eteocles.
Ismene reflects that ‘It never occurred to any of them to wonder if I might have had anything
to do with it. I was still the youngest child, the one they could overlook’ (Haynes 2017: 298).
This offers great insight into the potential power of political invisibility given the nervous,
obedient Ismene portrayed by Sophocles, Lacan (1959), and Zižek (1989); moreover, this is far
more insightful than the youthful Ismene at the beginning of Haynes’ novel. Here, Ismene speaks
to the way she has been ‘overlooked’ both within, and outside of, the novel, in receptions of
Antigone, as a potentially political agent. Ismene begins the novel naïve and often uncertain – ‘I
wanted to ask why, […] I couldn’t remember what had happened’ (Haynes 2017: 45) – but by the
end manages to exploit her invisibility to oppose an oppressive ruler.
Ismene is one of two autodiegetic narrators in The Children of Jocasta along with her mother,
Jocasta. The Children of Jocasta is a bildungsroman for Jocasta who begins as a fifteen-year-old
bride to an ageing King Laius, and becomes the visibly older wife to a young Oedipus, his
‘flawless skin’ contrasted with her wrinkles that ‘[bore] the marks of every time she had bent
every finger’ (Ibid., 162). Moreover, she grows from a young girl who experienced madness due
to the “loss” of her first child and was plagued by ‘terrible, suffocating uncertainty’ (Ibid., 98) to
a politically savvy queen who asserts her power over the Theban Elders that were capitalising on
her madness: ‘You were the Secretary of the Treasury. Now you’re just a rude old man who used
to be important,’ (Ibid., 159). The Children of Jocasta is a coming-of-age story for the two most
overlooked women of the Theban Cycle: Ismene, who ‘gets lost in the glare’ (Ibid., 330) of her
sister’s brilliance, and Jocasta, whose ‘part of the narrative […] has traditionally been
overlooked’ (Ibid., 328). 28 Hence, whilst there is a long history of Antigone being rewritten for
feminist aims, with contemporary authors using the figure of Antigone to speak to issues as
far-ranging as Islamophobia and the political potential for children’s voices, The Children of
Jocasta proves that the Theban Cycle has further potential for feminist authors, since Jocasta and
Ismene can be as politically motivated as Antigone.

28
Liz Lochhead’s play Thebans (2003) also gives new prominence to Jokasta in her Scots language revision of the
Theban Cycle.

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 Haynes’ interpretation of Antigone as a character is founded on her romance with Haemon
and her desire to be queen. She is often engaged in romantic sentiment while Ismene uncovers
the plot unfolding in the castle: ‘holding hands with our cousin Haem […] My sister will surely
marry Haem […] Ani went wherever Haem was, wherever they could meet in private’ (Ibid., 66;
69; 89).29 Antigone’s Sophoclean single-mindedness is refocused on romance, rather than a
young girl standing up to an unjust patriarch. Ismene clearly considers Antigone to be vapid due
to her constant preoccupation with her appearance, as opposed to Ismene’s focus on education:
‘What if she needed [the maids] to help her change her dress or rearrange her hair? We couldn’t
all run around the palace like barbarians, she would say’ (Ibid., 7). Though Ismene judges her
sister to be shallow, Antigone is instead revealed to be rather opportunistic and politically
calculating. Immediately after the death of their brothers, Antigone mentions being crowned and
Ismene asks ‘How long after she saw our brothers dead did she decide she should succeed
them?’ (Ibid., 212). Moreover, Antigone’s tragic hanging in the Sophoclean drama becomes a
calculated risk for Haynes’ Antigone, for whom the ‘dramatic gesture’ was a means to assure
support: ‘“I will be queen of Thebes, Isy. I am the rightful heir. The throne is mine.’ (Ibid., 304).
This ‘gesture’ was apparently calculated correctly by Antigone as she is greeted by the Theban
crowd that ‘began shouting her name, and calling her Basileia, Anassa, queen’ (Ibid., 305). This
is a far cry from Sophocles’ Antigone who stoically accepts that she is married to death: ‘no
wedding-song in the dusk has crowned my marriage— / I go to wed the lord of the dark waters’
(Sophocles trans. Fagles, Antigone: l.907-8). Haynes’ characterisation of Antigone is mediated
through the lens of her more subtle sister, recasting Antigone’s activism as performative and
overwrought in comparison to Ismene’s more understated act. The Children of Jocasta is
comparable to Where Three Roads Meet since Antigone is not the primary focus of either
adaptation, though while Vickers’ novel sidelines Antigone to interrogate Freud’s interpretation
of Oedipus, Haynes’ novel looks beyond Antigone to the women whose voices are suppressed by
her stridency.
Ultimately, Antigone is not the only figure of the Theban Cycle who is ‘meaningful for
feminism and revolutionary politics’ (Morales 2020: x); evidently, Ismene and Jocasta can also
29
In Ismene’s narration, she uses nicknames for herself and her siblings in the form of name abbreviations: Eteo,
Polyn, Ani, and Isi. While Shamsie renamed the mythic figures as an act of cultural revision, Haynes’ use of
shortened names speaks to Ismene’s bildungsroman in The Children of Jocasta.

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break out of the oppressive system, particularly once an adapting author looks beyond
Sophocles’ version of the myth. While Antigone has remained a vociferous figure in the face of
injustice, there is still work to be done excavating the voices of the women silenced by
Antigone’s actions, particularly Ismene. Haynes’ divergent reinterpretations of the sisters raises
the question of whether the lauded strong female voice is, in turn, silencing other women.
Evidently, there are stereotypes assigned to Antigone’s character in The Children of Jocasta that
one might consider unhelpful in terms of empowering portrayals of women (the romantic lead,
the shallow girl concerned primarily with her appearance, the calculating ambition). In light of
Haynes’ novel, these stereotypes become a plausible discussion of who are the silencers and who
are the silenced. As we have seen with Penelope’s silencing of the maids, and the primacy of
privileged, royal voices (Penelope, Clytemnestra, and Helen) over slaves such as Briseis and
Eurycleia, the question of ‘who is being silenced by this voice?’ is a vital one when adapting
mythical figures.

***

Henceforth, this chapter will critically examine Antigone’s age in mythic literature and
contemporary adaptations. First, one must ask why it is important to consider this shifting
tradition. Put simply, why does Antigone’s age matter? Haynes suggests that changing
Antigone’s age marks a ‘move away from the earliest incarnations of the myth’ helping to
‘ground the novel in the here and now, rather than allowing it to slide into melodrama,’ (2017:
np.). This suggests that Antigone as a young rebel is a more identifiable figure in a modern
setting and in terms of form, in a realist novel rather than a tragic play. More than this, taking
into account the central contention of this chapter – that to adapt Antigone is political by
definition – Antigone’s age is important because it speaks to the issue of power at play in these
reproductions. Rebelliousness is a mainstay of feminist activism, and recasting Antigone as the
younger sibling increases her powerlessness in contrast to the state’s power, therefore amplifying
her rebellion.
In Greek myth, Antigone is the older and Ismene the younger sister, but this is rarely the
case in contemporary adaptations. The trend of reimagining Antigone as the younger sister began

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with Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, and is continued in Ali Smith’s The Story of Antigone and Kamila
Shamsie’s Home Fire. While Natalie Haynes does make Antigone the elder in The Children of
Jocasta, she also makes Ismene become Antigone in terms of her actions, thus somewhat
maintaining the modern move towards recasting Antigone as the youngest of Oedipus’ children.
This chapter will conclude by analysing Antigone’s age in these adaptations, and investigate
what the recasting of her as the younger sister tells us about the position that Antigone holds in
contemporary attitudes.
In Sophoclean drama, Polynices is explicitly the older brother but the nature of the seniority
between Antigone and Ismene is less clear. In the Antigone, the sisters’ ages are only referred to
in terms of how young they both are. Creon refers to them as ‘those two young girls’ (Sophocles,
trans. Fagles, Antigone: l.865); in Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone greets Ismene as ‘dear sister,
dear Ismene, […] my own sister’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles, Oedipus at Colonus: l.347-9) with no
reference to age. Yet Ismene refers to herself as ‘the third’ (Ibid., l.358) after Oedipus and
Antigone, thus insinuating that she is the youngest. In the Antigone, the titular character’s
motivation for burying Polynices stems from piety and a sense of duty, ‘I will lie with the one I
love and loved by him— / an outrage sacred to the gods!’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles, Antigone:
l.87-8), while Ismene refuses to participate owing to her youthful fear of authority and death:
‘we’re underlings, ruled by much stronger hands, / so we must submit in this’ (Ibid., l.76-7). For
Sophocles, Antigone is the older sister, acting as an ‘extremist’ (Haynes 2017: np.), motivated by
familial duty and piety.
Furthermore, Haynes points out that the shift in Antigone adaptations that make her the
younger sister begins with Jean Anouilh who imagined Antigone as ‘not the dutiful older sister,
but rather the young rebel’ (2017: np.). Anouilh’s drama does follow Sophocles’ in some
respects, for instance when Anouilh’s Ismene says ‘Antigone, be sensible. It’s all very well for
men to believe in ideas and die for them. But you are a girl!’ (Anouilh, trans. Galantiére 1946:
13), which echoes Sophocles’ Ismene saying ‘Remember we are women, / we’re not born to
contend with men’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles, Antigone: l.74-5). The most notable divergence on
Anouilh’s part, however, is the shift in the sisters’ ages. Antigone becomes the almost petulant
child in ‘Little Antigone gets a notion in her head — the nasty brat, the wilful, wicked girl;’
(Anouilh, trans. Galantiére 1946: 11) while Ismene is a frustrated older sister: ‘Listen to me

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Antigone. […] I’m older than you are. I always think things over, and you don’t. You are
impulsive. […] Whereas, I think things out’ (Ibid., 11). Anouilh’s Ismene is explicit in both her
assessment of her sister as a wilful youth and herself as a more measured, reasonable elder:
‘There you go, frowning, glowering, wanting your own stubborn way in everything. Listen to
me. I’m right oftener than you are’ (Ibid., 11). Anouilh’s drama also diverges from Sophocles’ in
its omission of Tiresias and the introduction of a Shakespearean-inspired Nurse, but in this
exchange between Antigone and Ismene Anouilh has ‘followed Sophocles in his choice of
scenes’ (Conradie 1959: 11). For Fleming, this 1944 play is a canonical aspect of Antigone’s
reception, though there is a tension between those who see Antigone as an analogue for the
French resistance and Creon as Nazi occupation, and those that interpret the play as
collaborationist propaganda (Fleming 2008: 164-8). Fleming concludes that the play throws into
stark relief the complication of casting Antigone as the poster-girl for feminism, yet ‘[f]ew now,
if any, are concerned with Antigone’s lapse into fascism’ (Ibid., 186). Anouilh’s play marks the
beginning of the trend of rewriting Antigone as the younger sister, to emphasise her political
prowess (whether in the service of far-right or more liberal ideologies), which can be traced
through the novels discussed here.
Anouilh’s version is alluded to in Hollie McNish’s dramatic adaptation of Antigone. This
adaptation was commissioned by Storyhouse as part of their Originals series, which invites
writers to retell stories from across the ages to reflect on living in the present era (Clifton 2022:
np.). In the opening scene, Antigone says to Ismene:

And I know what you’re gonna say already, Izzy.

Oh Antigone! Calm down
Oh Antigone, life isn’t easy!
Oh there goes Antigone, daydreaming again! (McNish 2021: 11).

Here, Antigone specifically anticipates the words of Anouilh’s condescending Ismene,

suggesting an engagement with the history of adapting Antigone for later eras. Moreover, this
signals that, in the same way that Anouilh was writing in the context of Nazi occupation, McNish
is writing with the contemporary political climate in mind. McNish makes explicit the connection

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between Creon as an unjust and power-hungry ruler and former US president Donald Trump: ‘as
I watched Donald Trump’s final speeches as US president [I thought] that’s just like Kreon’
(Ibid., xi). She presents this in the play by mirroring Trump’s speech patterns, exemplified by
Creon’s repetition of ‘great’ when describing Eteocles as a ‘Brave soldier, loyal citizen, such a
great, great man’ (Ibid., 31). This is not the first time Creon’s demagoguery has been used to
critique fascist politicians. In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf said that Creon’s politics were
‘typical of certain politicians in the past, and of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini in the present’
(Woolf 1938: 109). The Sophoclean drama ‘could undoubtedly be made, if necessary, into
anti-Fascist propaganda’ and Woolf notes an ideological symmetry between Antigone and ‘Mrs
Pankhurst, who broke a window and was imprisoned in Holloway’ (Ibid., 109). For McNish, like
Morales, Antigone’s characterisation hints toward Vanessa Nakate, Malala, and Greta Thunburg,
since she is ‘very opinionated, believes deeply in her Gods [which, in Nish’s version, are the
Earth and the Environment] but can be found annoying to listen to all the time by some people’
(McNish 2021: xxi). Antigone’s potential for left-wing political activism is exemplified in the
play when she quotes the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky: ‘Obedience will always be the
easiest option, Izzy / – that doesn’t make it right’ (Ibid., 21). Finally, although McNish’s play
alludes to Anouilh’s earlier adaptation, it does not make explicit who is the elder between
Antigone and Ismene, and the only casting note for Ismene’s character is that she ‘Must be good
at crying!’ (Ibid., xxii). Despite this apparently regressive characterisation of Ismene, McNish
relates that part of the initial appeal of the play for her was that it passes the Bechdel test –– two
named female characters speak to each other about something other than a man (Ibid., xii). This
is not the only motif within Antigone that remains relevant; McNish lists the position of women
in society, the unjust power of monarchy, the effect of power on men’s egos, the importance of
speaking up against injustice and the difficulty in safely doing so (Ibid., xii) as some of the
aspects of the play that remain potent.
Natalie Haynes is the only author within the scope of this chapter who maintains Antigone as
the elder sister. When Jocasta is pregnant with Ismene, she reflects on the temperaments of her
older children: ‘Polynices did everything noisily, even breathing. Eteocles was quieter, […]
Antigone raged at the slightest provocation. […] This one was nowhere near as restless as the
other three had been.’ (Haynes 2017: 177). The dramatic irony is rich here, with the polarised

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differences between Polynices and Eteocles foreshadowing their conflict and mutualistic deaths,
while Antigone’s rage and Ismene’s comparative calmness allude to their responses to despotism.
Moreover, Haynes’ novel follows Sophocles’ plays in Oedipus’ preference for his daughters.
This is central to Oedipus at Colonus, in which he offers love to his daughters and curses to his
sons; his ‘dearest, sweet young girls!’ versus ‘That son I hate! […] Equals, twins in blood’
(Sophocles, trans. Fagles: l.1256; 1332; 1556). This is also present in Haynes’ novel: ‘Oedipus
loves having daughters […] He prefers Ani to either of the boys’ (Ibid., 180). Though Haynes’
novel purposely differs from Sophocles’ version of the myth in a number of significant ways, the
birth order of Jocasta’s children and Oedipus’ opinions of them are two ways in which her novel
is aligned with Sophocles’ dramas. These similarities suggest that Haynes’ novel is a direct
response to the ancient sources, rather than a continuation of 20th–21st century reception trends.
By seeming to address the ancient texts directly, Haynes’ novel can cut to the issues of
empowerment and political activism at play in the myth. Despite the fact that Antigone is the
older sister in Haynes’ novel, she is only Antigone (or ‘Ani’) in name, while Ismene is Antigone
in action because she buries their brother. If Ismene is Antigone in action, Haynes’ Ani
nonetheless retains some of her Sophoclean characterisation, for instance when she calls for her
brothers to be buried together: ‘Neither of them will rest easily if they are separated in burial.
They were together in life and together in death. Let them be together again now, and forever’
(Haynes 2017: 255). In her role as the pious older sister, Haynes’ Antigone reminds the Thebans
that the ‘sins of the living should be punished in life, but not after death. The limits laid down by
the gods were quite clear’ (Ibid., 255). In this version, Antigone is arrested for her speech, thus
providing enough distraction for Ismene to bury their brother, which later leads to Antigone
being crowned queen. While the enduring appeal of Antigone’s myth is due in large part to the
image of a girl shouting for justice, Ismene’s understated actions in Haynes’ novel suggest that
there is also transformative power in quiet resistance, as much as there is in performative
activism.
In The Children of Jocasta, Antigone remains the older sister, but she and Ismene share the
mantle of being “Antigone” in word and action, and share the burden of her characterisation as
simultaneously pious and dutiful, wilful and rebellious. This recalls Honig’s interpretation of the

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Antigone, both sisters bury their brother, though Antigone is the only one to face the
consequences, thus creating ‘sororal conspiracy’ between them:

If Ismene did it, and if Antigone sacrificed herself for her sister, then we have here the
story of two women partnered in their difference – one brazenly bold, the other possessed
of a quieter courage – both plotting and conspiring in resistance to overreaching
sovereign power but acting also in love or loyalty for each other. (Honig 2013: 170)

Thus, the Theban Cycle offers more than one model of female activism, one of which has been
largely overlooked for centuries. Antigone embodies Audre Lorde’s belief that ‘what is most
important [...] must be spoken’, while Ismene challenges the idea that ‘silences [must] be broken’
(Lorde 1977; 2019: 40; 44), since she epitomises quiet activism. In analysing the age of the
sisters, one can therefore access the enduring appeal of this myth for feminism.
In Ali Smith’s The Story of Antigone and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Antigone is
unequivocally the younger sister. In Smith’s children’s story, Antigone is ‘the younger one’, and
‘The more she talked, the more the older one, her sister, looked scared, looked around her,
looked like she wished with all her heart that the younger one would be quieter’ (Smith 2011:
13). Smith’s Antigone is akin to Anouilh’s, a wilful, headstrong young girl, frustrated with her
more timid older sister. In Anouilh’s play, Ismene says ‘I’m an awful coward, Antigone’
(Anouilh, trans. Galantiére 1946: 12), and in Smith’s story she ‘pulled her hand away. She
backed away from her sister’ (Smith 2011: 16) in shock and fear. Smith’s decision to cast
Antigone as the younger sister relates to the target audience of her story, a modern child being
more receptive to a young rebel rising up against the older authority, rather than a girl acting out
of duty to her gods and kin.
Antigone as the younger sister to Ismene is taken to the extreme in Home Fire, where Aneeka
(Shamsie’s Antigone) is significantly younger than Isma (Ismene). In fact, due to their age
disparity and their being orphaned, Isma raised Aneeka and her twin Parvaiz, thus blurring the
line between sibling and parent. Isma, thinking of Parvaiz, narrates ‘Her baby, her brother, the
child she’d raised’ (Shamsie 2017: 41), and she describes Aneeka to Karamat Lone as ‘my sister.
Almost my child’ (Ibid., 235). This fogging of the parent/sibling relationship is the only way in

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which the incest so prevalent in the Theban Cycle is present in Shamsie’s novel; Isma’s parental
description of her siblings echoes Oedipus’ description of Antigone and Ismene as ‘My sisters,
yes, their father’s sisters!’ (Sophocles, trans. Fagles Oedipus at Colonus: l.600). Therefore, in
having the Antigone analogue be substantially younger than the Ismene, Home Fire alludes to the
central theme of incest within the myth, without having it subordinate citizenship and morality.
As well as the incestuous implications, Aneeka and Isma’s ages also contribute to their
characteristics and motivations, much like in the works of Anouilh, Smith, and Haynes. In Isma’s
estimation, nineteen-year-old Aneeka is ‘A woman-child, a mature-immature’ (Shamsie 2017:
47). Shamsie’s Antigone, then, is somewhere between the older Antigone, motivated by a sense
of justice and duty, and the younger Antigone, the headstrong rebel. This ‘mature-immature’ age
is evident in Aneeka’s impulsiveness in going to Karachi, thus effectively ending her citizenship
in Britain, alongside her eloquent demand for justice. Upon her arrival in Karachi, Aneeka
narrates that ‘Here she would sit with her brother until the world changed or both of them
crumbled into the soil around them’ (Ibid., 210). This sentiment communicates her mature
dedication to her brother and justice, as well as her immature ambitions to change the world. The
alternative, ‘crumb[ling] into the soil’, works on both levels, as it could be a youthful flair for the
dramatic or a realistic calculation of their fates.
Conversely, Isma is very much a mature woman, as portrayed by her matter-of-fact statement
‘I want to be with her, that’s all’ (Ibid., 236) that, in contrast to Aneeka’s, does not seek to
change the world or end it, but simply states her desire. In response, Karamat Lone figures that
Isma is ‘Not a girl, this one. An adult, far more dangerous than that banshee in the dust’ (Ibid.,
235). In Lone’s estimation, Isma is ‘more dangerous’ exactly because of what separates Ismene
from Antigone, that she is more careful in her actions and words. Lone does not consider Isma as
Luce Irigaray considered Ismene, as ‘indisputably a “woman” in her weakness, her fear, her
submissive obedience,’ (Irigaray 1947; 1985; 2010: 102), but rather as Bonnie Honig does, as
‘subtle, sub rosa, quiet, under cover of darkness’ (Honig 2013: 161). In Lone’s estimation, Isma
is more of a political threat than her sister, as her quiet ploy to join her sister is more akin to his
political manoeuvring than Aneeka’s ‘banshee in the dust’ performance on-screen. Thus, in
Home Fire, Antigone becomes not only the younger sister to Ismene, but a much younger sister;
while Aneeka being a young woman allows her to walk the line between the typical

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characterisations of Antigone as the elder or younger sister, Isma is characterised as being
equally politically ‘dangerous’ due to the patience and maturity afforded to her as the
significantly older, maternal sister.
Ultimately, in analysing Antigone’s age, we are able to access each adaptation’s overarching
aims. Like all of Haynes’ work, The Children of Jocasta is grounded in Classics, which accounts
for her outlier choice to maintain Antigone as the older sister. Smith wrote The Story of Antigone
for children, so having the protagonist as the younger sister makes her more identifiable for the
younger audience and augments the argument that Antigone’s myth encourages children to use
their voice to advocate for justice. In Home Fire, having Isma as the much older sister allows for
an allusion to incest, and accounts for their choices: Aneeka does what she does because she is a
‘woman-child’, and Isma is more measured in her actions due to her maternal maturity. Finally, it
is noteworthy that the ages of Antigone and Ismene are not mentioned in Salley Vickers’ Where
Three Roads Meet since the sisters are not the main focus of the novel.
This analysis of Antigone’s age points to a broader topic when researching adaptations
which, though they may engage with the same source texts, do so for quite disparate purposes.
As Sanders explains in Adaptation and Appropriation, ‘Mythic paradigms provide the reader or
spectator with a series of familiar reference points and a set of expectations which the [adapter]
can rely upon [...] while simultaneously exploiting, twisting and relocating them in newly
creative ways and newly resonant contexts’ (2006: 81). While Antigone’s story provides the
‘familiar reference point’ of a girl standing up against injustice, the multiple approaches to
adapting her myth, as demonstrated within this chapter, illustrate the many ways that the story
can be retold. Moreover, ‘political commitment [frequently] informs and influences these acts of
recreation’ (Ibid., 81), and this is certainly the case with Antigone’s afterlives, where her spirit of
political dissension is recast to address a myriad of social injustices. Antigone is ‘the feminist
heroine par excellence’ since she has become ‘[s]ynonymous with confrontation, resistance to
tyranny, and defiance of patriarchy,’ (Fleming 2008: 165). To rewrite Antigone is a political act,
and the most recent retellings of Antigone illustrate that primary among contemporary feminst
concerns are how young people are using their voices for social justice. Shamsie’s Aneeka
protesting her brother’s statelessness inexorably mirrors Iesha Evans taking a stand against
racially motivated police brutality (Sidahmed 2016); Smith’s Antigone and Haynes’ Ismene

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demonstrate the political power of a girl’s dissenting voice, much like Greta Thunberg
demanding a response to the climate crisis, asking world leaders ‘How dare you? You have stolen
my dreams and my childhood’ (UNTV 2019). While Söderbäck may anxiously ask ‘is this eternal
return of Antigone not a sign that we lack new imaginaries?’ (2010: 4), this chapter offers some
indication that, if anything, the ‘eternal return’ to Antigone’s mythos demonstrates the infinite
adaptive, imaginative, and activist potential for Greek myths.

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 Chapter 3: Mythic Masculinities

In the same way that the first chapter of this thesis critically explored contemporary womanhood
through the women of ancient epics, this chapter considers how contemporary female authors
adapt the male heroes of Greek myth, with a focus on how they engage with modern theories of
masculinity. In particular, this chapter asks what the specific value might be of analysing mythic
men with reference to modern theories of masculinity. If the role of myth in antiquity was to
narrate and etiologically explain the social and natural order, adapting myth serves the role of
reappropriating these ancient myths in the service of shedding light on contemporary society.
This indicates that adaptations of ancient men can shed light on contemporary masculinities. This
chapter will explore instances where mythic masculinities have been rewritten in contemporary
literature for feminist purposes. It will first consider Jeanette Winterson’s novella for the
Canongate Myth Series, Weight, that retells the myths of Atlas and Heracles. In Greek myth,
‘Atlas, under strong constraint, holds up the broad sky with his head and tireless hands, standing
at the ends of the earth, [...] for Zeus the resourceful assigned him this lot’ as punishment for his
leading role in the Titanomachy (Hesiod, trans. West 1988, Theogony l.507). Meanwhile, the
hero Heracles is most famous for his Twelve Labours and subsequent immortality (see
Apollodorus Library II.5): as mythographer Edith Hamilton explains, ‘The greatest hero of
Greece was Hercules. [...] Hercules was the strongest man on earth and he had the supreme
self-confidence magnificent physical strength gives’ (1942: 225). It is the strength of Atlas and
Heracles that is emphasised in accounts of their mythos, and it is their strength as metaphors for
masculinity in Winterson’s retelling that will be analysed here. This analysis will particularly
reference both Connell’s model of hegemonic masculinity and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model
of male homosocial desire, as well as more contemporary conceptions of toxic masculinity.
Thereafter, this chapter, in direct dialogue with the first chapter that analysed adaptations of the
women of the Homeric epics, will analyse how Achilles and Odysseus – the male heroes of the
same epics – are adapted in the same modern texts. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and
Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls both adapt Achilles, while Miller’s Circe and Margaret
Atwood’s The Penelopiad present versions of Odysseus. This latter half of the chapter will focus
on how these adapting authors contend with the legends of heroic men: do they uphold their

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heroic status, or do they judge their actions to be irreconcilable with modern ideologies that do
not valorise violence in quite the same ways? It is in staging these questions that the chapter will
also consider the adaptive choices made by Jennifer Saint in her novel Ariadne, particularly in
terms of Theseus’ legendary heroism. This chapter will function as a mirror to the first chapter, in
examining the (destructive and generative) potential for ‘putting new wine in old bottles’ (Carter
1983; 1998: 37), this time in terms of mythic masculinities.
Classical myths have always served the purpose of maintaining patriarchal rule and
dissecting the human and, particularly, the male condition. By the same token, these myths need
to be explored if patriarchy is to be unsettled. As classicist Bettany Hughes notes, ‘the purpose of
the myth-merchant, the storyteller, was to hold [their] audience rapt and to transmit social and
political messages, to explore man’s place in the world, to dissect the human condition’ (2005:
343), and as Pomeroy interprets it, Zeus establishes ‘a patriarchal government on Olympus’ to
‘introduce moral order and culture’ (1975; 2015: 2). More recently, online, Alt-Right, white
nationalist, men’s rights groups (known as the Red Pill) use classical mythology, philosophy,
imagery, and iconography to promote their vitriolic agendas. Donna Zuckerberg outlines her
research into the weaponisation of the literature and history of ancient Greece and Rome by the
men of the Red Pill, to promote white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies (Zuckerberg 2019:
5). She looks at how men on these Reddit pages use, for example, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and the
myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus to reinforce rape culture, to ‘lay bare the mechanics of this
appropriation’ (Ibid., 5). For her, this trend cannot be ignored because it has the potential to
reshape how ancient Greece and Rome are perceived in the modern world, and because they lend
historical weight and legitimacy to discriminatory world views. Zuckerberg also draws upon
Page DuBois’ work which responds to those who have appropriated material from antiquity in
the service of a conservative political agenda. Dubois is a classicist who worries about
‘contemporary writers [that] use the Greeks to argue for their [conservative] views. Their
positions lend implicit support to politicians and religious leaders who advocate for so-called
family values, restriction of women to their homes and obedience to their husbands as well as the
dissolution of the separation between Christianity and the state and the promotion of
homophobia, militarism, xenophobia, and the restriction of immigration’ (DuBois 2001: 4).
Thus, the Classics have been used in the service of conservative, patriarchal ideologies in recent

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history, where the misogyny and patriarchy of Greek myth have been extrapolated and exploited
for oppressive purposes.
Before considering the texts introduced above I shall outline some aspects of the
dominant theories of masculinity. Studying masculinities is vital at present, because masculinity
is in crisis, particularly evinced by the Male Suicide Crisis. Suicide is the biggest cause of death
for men under the age of 45 in the UK, and male suicide rates are higher than female rates, one
reason for which is that men are less likely to ask for help or express negative feelings (Baffour
2018: np.). Men’s Studies as an academic field emerged in the mid-1980s, partly as a response to
questions about men raised by feminism (Kimmel 1986: 518). A key theorist in the field of
masculinities is R.W. Connell, whose theory of hegemonic masculinity critiques the assumption
that ‘one’s behaviour results from the type of person one is’ (Connell 1995; 2005: 67) as well as
the distinction between behaviours that are considered either “masculine” or “unmasculine”. For
Connell, this conception is inherently flawed, because firstly, it considers masculinity only in
terms of the personal, rather than the social, and secondly, it is ‘inherently relational’ because it
depends on defining masculinity in contrast to femininity (that is, not masculinity), thereby
relying on dated concepts of polarised gender binaries (Ibid., 68). Connell also outlines the
historical approach wherein, until the eighteenth century, women were only considered different
from men as ‘incomplete or inferior examples of the same character’; the emergence of actual
gender differences came with bourgeois ideas of separate spheres in the Victorian era (Ibid., 68).
As an alternative to these models which present masculinity as an object ‘(a natural character
type, a behavioural average, a norm)’, Connell argues that ‘we need to focus on the processes
and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives’ (Ibid., 71).
Masculinity, and gender as a whole, is a set of practices, rather than something tangible, physical,
and/or factual. Furthermore, when Connell argues that ‘With growing recognition of the interplay
between gender, race and class it has become common to recognize multiple masculinities’
(Ibid., 76) she is clearly approaching the more contemporary concept of intersectionality. Thus,
Connell warns against a subsequent oversimplification because there is not, for instance, a unified
Black masculinity or working-class masculinity, in the same way that there is not a single model
of ‘man’.

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 It is from this understanding of masculinity that Connell then approaches the concept of
hegemonic masculinity. Her model derives from Gramsci’s sociological theory of hegemony
which analyses class dynamics, and hypothesises that there are social structures which maintain
class differences (Ibid., 77). Connell applies this to patriarchy because, like class, ‘At any given
time, [there is] one form of masculinity rather than others [that] is culturally exalted’; hegemonic
masculinity thus refers to ‘the configuration of gender practice’ which embodies current ideals
within patriarchy, and therefore guarantees ‘the dominant position of men and the subordination
of women’ (Ibid., 77). Principally, while hegemony ‘relates to cultural dominance in the society
as a whole’, hegemonic masculinity refers to the ‘specific gender relations of dominance and
subordination’ within that framework (Ibid., 77). Crucially, while hegemonic masculinity
primarily oppresses women, it also creates stratification between groups of men, with men who
enact corporate or military aggression presently in power, while unmasculine men are oppressed
by the hegemonic structures. Connell labels this structure of oppression ‘Subordination’ (Ibid.,
78), and explains the structure of ‘Complicity’:

The number of men rigorously practising the hegemonic pattern in its entirety may be
quite small. Yet the majority of men gain from its hegemony, since they benefit from the
patriarchal dividend (Ibid., 79).

There are few men who actively enact masculine praxis, yet most men benefit from the social
gender dynamics wherein, broadly, men are dominant and women are subordinated. All men are
therefore complicit in hegemonic masculinity because they profit (socially and economically)
from the ‘dividend’. She argues that there must be ‘some correspondence between [the] cultural
ideal and institutional power, collective if not individual’ (Ibid., 77); businessmen, government
officials, and military leaders all enact masculinity to create and maintain a gendered hegemony.
On the other hand, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that the rigorous practice of hegemonic,
heterosexual masculinity also has a number of negative implications for men. Primary among
these is the fear of being accused of being homosexual, or ‘homosexual panic’, which follows
from the dependence of patriarchy on the cultivation of close social bonds between men, a
situation in which ‘many twentieth-century western men experience their vulnerability to the

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social pressure of homophobic blackmail’ (Sedgwick 1985: 89). As Edwards points out, such
bonds ‘are not readily distinguishable from the most reprobated homosexual bonds’ and thus
‘individuals [are forced] into the frighteningly unsettled, coercively incoherent, murderously
self-contradictory quicksands of homosexual panic’ (Edwards 2009: 38). While men who do not
practise the hegemonic pattern still benefit from the patriarchal ‘dividend’, they are also under
the continual and costly pressure to prove and/or deny their identity.
Connell also maintains that these figures who typify hegemonic masculinity may not
necessarily be actual men in that they may be fictional, such as actors, or ‘even fantasy figures,
such as film characters’ (Connell 1995; 2005: 77), or indeed, mythological figures. In Weight,
Jeanette Winterson retells the classical myths of Atlas and Heracles to navigate such problems in
masculinity; Atlas and Heracles’ strength, in particular, typifies hegemonic masculinity because
their mythic strength makes them exemplars of the hegemonic pattern. Atlas’ strength is evident
in the way that he carries the Kosmos on his shoulders at great cost to himself: ‘I could hardly
breathe. I could not raise my head. I tried to shift slightly or to speak. I was dumb and still as a
mountain.’ (Winterson 2005: 23) Here, the short sentences signal Atlas’ physical exertion,
conveying his restricted, laboured breathing. The repeated ‘I’ at the start of each sentence
reinforces the all-consuming strain as he is fully absorbed in his struggle. Yet his ability to hold
up the Kosmos and, after he acclimatises to the eponymous weight, to sustain profound thoughts
and relatively normal conversations, indicates his strength. Similarly, Heracles’ Labours
demonstrate his stamina and strength; in Weight, when describing the ten Labours he has already
completed, his tone is casual: ‘I have already killed the Nemean Lion, destroyed the Hydra,
caught the golden hide of Artemis…’ (Ibid., 32). The list form accentuates his offhand tone
which suggests that Heracles is not physically challenged by battling beasts, nor is he affected by
challenging powerful goddesses. This tone is typical of adaptations of Heracles; in Ted Hughes’s
play Alcestis, the introductory dialogue establishes his nonchalance when discussing his labours,
as he mentions ‘Yet another labour. […] Stealing horses. / The man-eating horses of Diomed.
[…] death has never troubled me much.’ (Hughes 1999: 29-30). Heracles, then, has become a
ubiquitous symbol of masculine strength. In Weight, his casual tone typifies his attitude to his
own strength, as for instance when he offers Atlas the following – ‘I’ll take the world off your
shoulders while you go. Now there’s a handsome offer’ (Winterson 2005: 34). Heracles does not

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consider the (physical and, as we shall see, emotional) strain on himself, only the benefits for
himself and for Atlas, the better to convince him. The adjective ‘handsome’ is particularly
noteworthy here because it supplements the persuasive tone and connotes a specifically
masculine model of beauty. Since ‘one can understand [men’s] power as brute force’ (Whitehead
& Barrett 2001: 16) or, rather, that physical strength and violence is one way in which men
maintain patriarchal hegemony (Connell 1995; 2005: 257), Atlas’ and Heracles’ strength
establishes them both as exemplars of hegemonic masculinity. Though their powers are of mythic
proportions, they act as hyperbolic figures of male strength, which is one way that patriarchy
maintains hegemony. In Weight, Atlas and Heracles’ unrealistic strength becomes a hyperbolic
reflection of physical strength as a masculine trait. Their powerful statuses as a Titan and a
demigod mean that they are hierarchically above mere mortals and, in the same way that their
mythic strength is magnified masculine strength, their godliness is an amplification of hegemonic
masculinity. While gods rule over mortals, men, in turn, ‘claim and sustain a leading position in
social life’ (Connell 1995; 2005: 77) over women. If ‘the number of men rigorously practising
the hegemonic pattern in its entirety may be quite small’ (Ibid, 79), Atlas and Heracles become
symbols of this elite, hegemonic class of men.
Atlas and Heracles’ relationship becomes increasingly complex when read with reference to
Sedgwick’s model of homosocial masculinity. As Bird explains, ‘Homosociality refers
specifically to the nonsexual attractions held by men (or women) for members of their own sex’
(Bird 1996: 121). Although homosocial relationships can also be sexual, and they inexorably
impact other sexes, and the (social, sexual, and political) relationships between the sexes. For
example, Heracles’ masturbation is a recurring motif:

“So you think you’re stronger than I am, do you Atlas? Can you balance Africa on
your dick?”
[...] Heracles already had his own dick out and was working it furiously to make it stand.
“Come on, stick it on here. Let’s have the whole continent smack on my bulb.”
[...] Heracles was just about to come. “This’ll put snow on the Himalayas, eh boy?”
He lay back, scattered over the stars. “Go on Atlas, now you.”
“I don’t have a free hand.”

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 “I’ll do it for you if you want – mate to mate.”
“I’m too tired.”
“You sound like a girl.” (Winterson 2005: 51-2).

For Heracles, masturbation constitutes a show of masculine strength, demonstrated by the

competitive nature of the exchange, particularly the challenging questions. Heracles masturbating
in view of Atlas and, in turn, offering to perform a sex act for him, could arguably function as a
hyperbolic manifestation of Sedgwick’s model of male homosocial desire, because there is a
libidinous aspect to their interaction, but they are crucially not lovers, since the offer is specified
as ‘– mate to mate’. Though, the extremity of the setting – with Heracles masturbating over
mountain ranges and continents, and then leaning back amongst the stars – stretches the
hyperbole to the point of parody, thus satirising male bonding. This exchange functions as a
parodic rendering of contemporary “laddish” culture (see Bates 2014: 139-148; Diaz-Fernandez
& Evans 2019: 237-247). This interpretation is evidenced by the juxtaposition between these
giant heroes (both in terms of their legend and their physicality) and the use of anachronistic,
“laddish” language, typified by ‘dick’ and ‘bulb’. In addition, Atlas’ feminine-coded rebuke ‘I’m
too tired’ (a cliche based on the misunderstanding of consent that women must provide a reason
not to have sex) and Heracles’ subsequent critique of his effeminacy all contribute to the satirical
tone of the exchange. Heracles in Weight bears satirical resemblance to The Dog Woman in
Winterson’s earlier novel Sexing the Cherry (1989): a grotesque giant woman, wrapped in a skirt
big enough to be a ship’s sail; as Heracles can have the continent of Africa on his penis, The Dog
Woman could throw an elephant. In The Passion (1987), Winterson’s parodic rendering of
Napoleon is also – certainly ironically – larger than life; Sanchez categorised The Passion as
‘historiographic metafiction’ (1996: 95-104), a term coined by Hutcheon to refer to works that
incorporate fiction, history, and theory, and that necessarily involve parodying genre and history.
Hence, though the characters of Heracles and Atlas in Weight can be read in terms of formative
theories of masculinity – most notably Connell’s model of hegemonic masculinity and
Sedgwick’s homosocial male desire – they are, more immediately, satires of modern masculinity,
rendered in mythic archetypes.

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 Another theory of masculinity that is relevant to the study of Weight is ‘toxic
masculinity’, a term that is increasingly popular in discussions of masculinity. Though ‘toxic
masculinity’ has become widely used in both academic and popular discourses, its meaning and
origins are somewhat obscure (Ging 2017: 3). For Kupers, it describes ‘the need to aggressively
compete and dominate others and encompasses the most problematic proclivities in men’
(Kupers 2005: 713; in Ging 2017: 3). For Connell and Messerschmidt (2005), hegemonic
masculinity sometimes refers to men’s engagement with toxic practices, though such toxic
practices are not always defining characteristics of hegemony. In Rape: From Lucretia to
#MeToo, Sanyal draws upon Serano’s definition that men take on the role of sexual aggressors to
gain attention and feel desirable and Schultz’s claim that ‘[j]ust as hetero women are often forced
to choose between the images of the virgin and the whore, modern straight men are caught in a
cultural tug of war between the Marlboro Man and the Wimp’ (Serano 2009; Schultz 1995: 112;
in Sanyal 2019: 136) to conceptualise toxic masculinity. For Sanyal, ‘The process that teaches
men from boyhood to feel and express only half of the full range of human emotions and repress
and deny the other half [is] “toxic masculinity”’ (Sanyal 2019: 137). This framework of
masculinity is important because understanding the effects of gender on boys and men sheds light
on gendered violence, and men who are in touch with their more empathetic, ‘unmanly’ feelings
(sensitivity, neediness, and fear), are more likely to recognise those feelings in others, and
therefore understand consent (Ibid., 138-9). Toxic masculinity conceptualises the methods by
which boys and men are conditioned to suppress ‘unmanly’ feelings, and how that has different
negative effects for men, who are more likely to suffer with depression and commit suicide, and
women, who are more likely to be victims of gender-based violence due, in part, to the toxic
cycle of masculinity.
In ‘Boys Will Be Boys: The Making of the Male’, Marina Warner makes a distinction
between masculinity as it is presented in modern media compared to how ancient audiences
would have understood mythical heroes. In contemporary culture (outlets of which include
television, computer games, and toy shops), male figures are mythologised as rapists and
warriors, which sets up models, rather than counter-examples, of masculinity (Warner 1994: 27).
This contrasts to the mythic heroes of Greek cycles, such as Oedipus, Jason, and Orestes, who
served as tragic warnings (due to their crimes, including hubris, matricide, infanticide,

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autoenucleation, and suicide) rather than exemplars. Their stories ‘[did not] make them
exemplary, but cautionary: they provoked terror and pity, not emulation’ (Ibid., 27). This
contrasts to contemporary models of toxic masculinity, which ‘[do not] cry, “Beware!”, but rather
“Aspire!”’ (Ibid., 27). Warner specifies that this analysis does not offer ‘an excuse, a rationale or
adequate explanation for men’s capacity to rape and kill’ but equally it rejects ‘the universalising
argument about male nature’, which is a rejection of the essentialist stance that men are
inherently violent (Ibid., 29). She ends the lecture with a quotation from Mary Shelley’s
apocalyptic novel, The Last Man (1826): ‘“This, I thought, is Power! Not to be strong of limb,
hard of heart, ferocious and daring; but kind, compassionate, and soft.”’ (Ibid., 31). It is a
measure of our present failure that these words are embarrassing – ‘a foolish dream, a chimaera’
– rather than utopian, but it does leave us with the connecting thread throughout Shelley’s work,
which is applicable here to toxic masculinity: ‘if monsters are made, not given, they can be
unmade, too’ (Ibid., 31). Hence, though Greek myth offers a plethora of ‘toxic’ heroes, it is
important to specify that, in earlier contexts, these were cautionary, rather than aspirational,
models of masculinity.
In Weight, Heracles is an example of such toxic masculinity. An aspect of toxic
masculinity is hypersexuality, and Heracles’ hypersexuality is demonstrated by his numerous
explicit sexual encounters in the novel. For example, he imagines raping his step-mother Hera,
‘forc[ing] his prick in her,’ (Winterson 2005: 42). The brusque colloquialism ‘prick’ supplements
the rough abrasiveness of the fantasy. This rape fantasy is uncomfortably comedic, as Heracles’
‘prick kept filling and deflating’ (Ibid., 40). His oscillation between erection and flaccidity acts
both comically and metaphorically, as a physical image of the complexity of their relationship:
Heracles is sexually attracted to Hera, yet she is his stepmother who drove him mad. This scene
ends with Heracles ‘drop[ping] his hand to his prick and start[ing] to masturbate. […] As he
started to come, she kissed him once’ (Ibid., 43). This has a conclusive tone, as though Heracles’
masturbation overcomes his previous sexual conflict regarding his feelings for Hera, and this is
supported structurally by the line-break which follows his orgasm. By concluding the scene with
Heracles’ orgasm, the scene takes on a sexual rhythm, starting with flirtation, such as when
Heracles calls Hera ‘drop dead gorgeous’ (Ibid., 40); continuing on to foreplay and fantasy, and

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ending with his orgasm. When Heracles kidnaps Iole by sacking a city, killing all her relatives,
and seizing her mid-suicide attempt (Ibid., 113-4), the sexual imagery is similarly explicit:

Heracles caught her in his arms as she reached the earth, one hand moving straight
between her legs. As he carried her over his shoulder, his prick bursting, he massaged her
cunt with his dirty bloody finger, and made her wet. (Ibid., 114)

There are a number of elements here that mirror Heracles’ sexual relationship with Hera. The
‘wet’ imagery here recalls Heracles ‘wetting his fingertip’ (Ibid., 42) on Hera’s nipple; and the
masturbatory images, previously of Heracles pleasuring himself with his hand, and here of him
touching Iole ‘with his […] finger’ all create a consistent narrative about Heracles’ sexuality as
inexorably brutal. The repeated use of ‘prick’ also creates consistency, as well as suggesting
violence, intrusion, and destruction. The word choice ‘prick’ is an anachronism that undercuts
the character’s classicism, therefore demoting this classical hero to a common rapist. There is
also an unresolved tension between the elevated reputation of the classics and the baseness (as
well as complexity and absurdity) of human desire. The weight of Heracles’ hyper-masculinity is
therefore tied to sexual violence and his seemingly insatiable sex drive, presenting him as an
exemplar of toxic masculinity, as it pertains to sexual violence.
While Heracles’ hypersexuality is an example of masculinity’s toxicity for women, we also
can see in his characterisation the toxic effects of masculinity on men. Heracles suffers from
acute anxiety: ‘the thought-wasp, buzzing Why? Why? Why?’ (Ibid., 67). The ‘thought-wasp’, a
take on the oistros (demonic fly) that torments Heracles, here symbolises Heracles’ anxiety – the
repetition of ‘Why?’ and the imagery of something that buzzes ominously around one’s head and
stings creates a familiar representation of doubt, anxiety, and persecution. A wasp is also notably
something violent and poisonous which pricks, so it plagues Heracles in a way not dissimilar to
how his sexual aggression affects women. The pressures of performing the labours causes
Heracles anxiety, which mirrors how the pressures of performing masculinity cause men anxiety.
Stylistically, the scene of Heracles ‘having a panic attack’ (Ibid., 67) is italicised, which
separates it from the rest of the text to highlight the disjunction between the larger than life figure
having a moment of human frailty, and the ancient mythical figure having a very contemporary

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panic attack. This recalls Sedgwick’s theories of the ‘social pressure’ that men suffer in
attempting to enact hegemonic masculinity, and particularly the anxiety caused by an inability to
suppress what Sanyal calls “unmanly” feelings of sensitivity and neediness and fear (Sanyal
2019: 138-9). Although, as Edith Hamilton notes, the ‘greatest hero of Greece was Hercules. [...]
the strongest man on earth’ (1942: 225), Winterson portrays him as anxious, his ‘ thought-wasp’
replicating this sense of being trapped in a box of his own poisonous masculinity.
A further aspect of self-damaging toxic masculinity is the way in which men who ‘challenge
the status-quo, [are] forced back into compliance, whether through mockery and derision or
through outright violence’ (O’Malley 2015: np.). This ‘force’ is seen in ‘Zeus [who] was anxious
[because] real heroes don’t think.’ (Winterson 2005: 57); Zeus symbolises patriarchal hegemony
and he is ‘anxious’ when seeing Heracles diverge from the traditional heroic (masculine) path.
Heracles’ characterisation in Weight demonstrates the two sides of toxic masculinity: his
conformity to hyper-masculine tropes has toxic ramifications both for women (against whom he
is sexually violent) and himself as a man (indicated by his anxiety).
Conversely, Atlas rejects the model of masculinity enacted by Heracles. He is as physically
strong as Heracles and, therefore, by the logic of the novella, just as masculine, but he does not
exhibit any of the toxic behaviours that Heracles does. Instead, he shoulders his burden with
‘such grace and ease, with such gentleness, love almost,’ (Ibid., 83). The multiple sub-clauses
communicate a gentle, rhythmic cadence reflecting Atlas’s grace as he settles back into holding
the Kosmos. The kind and caring language used to describe Atlas is not a contrast to his strength,
but rather a supplement to it: Atlas can bear the weight much more easily than Heracles who,
when he sees this display, feels ‘ashamed’ because ‘He would gladly have dashed the world to
pieces if that would have freed him’ (Ibid., 83). Atlas’ ability to bear the Kosmos with gentleness
and grace, especially compared to Heracles’ belaboured attempt, suggests that masculinity need
not be toxic and oppressive in order to be strong. Moreover, while the narrative ends with
Heracles installed on Olympus as a hero, but still battling the ‘thought-wasp’, Atlas is given a far
more emancipated ending. He rescues Laika, the dog that the Russians sent into space, so ‘Now
he was carrying something he wanted to keep,’ (Ibid., 127) which leads him to have ‘a strange
thought.’ (Ibid., 134). Atlas asks himself ‘ Why? / Why not put it down?’ (Ibid., 149), in which the
repetition of an italicised ‘Why’ echoes Heracles’ thought wasp, but transforms it positively.

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Ultimately, Atlas’ capacity to show love, and therefore eschew toxic masculinity, frees him from
his weight.

***

While the first chapter focused on the women of the Greek epics (Penelope, Briseis, and Helen)
with reference to feminist theories, this chapter will now examine the male protagonists of these
epics (Achilles and Odysseus). Achilles is at the forefront of Madeline Miller’s The Song of
Achilles and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, but they contend with his legend in quite
distinct ways: while Miller’s novel aims to preserve Achilles’ heroism, Barker’s novel dethrones
Achilles as the best of the Greeks at Troy, focusing instead upon his sexual and martial brutality.
This move to interrogate mythic heroes and find their ethics and actions irreconcilable with
modern morals – particularly regarding violence and treatment of women – is also present in
Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, where Theseus’ heroism is also scrutinised. Odysseus, like Achilles, is
adapted quite differently in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller’s Circe – in
the former, Odysseus is the (absentee) patriarch and example of hegemonic masculinity but, in
the latter, he is denied patriarchal control of the eponymous goddess’ island.
In The Song of Achilles, Miller chooses to present an Achilles that is not defined by his
rage, the rage that opens the Iliad: ‘Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,’
(Homer, trans. Fagles: 1:1). Miller’s Achilles is not portrayed as stereotypically masculine, which
is particularly striking when he poses as a woman in Deidameia’s entourage: ‘He was holding the
earrings up to his ears now, turning them this way and that, pursing his lips, playing at
girlishness’ (Miller 2011: 152). Achilles ‘playing at girlishness’ is an act of gender
performativity, in that he is, in Judith Butler’s terms, staging femininity. For Butler there are no
intrinsic traits of masculinity or femininity, but by performing the socially accepted traits of the
gender binary, people reinforce ‘the illusion that there is an inner gender core’ (Salih & Butler
2004: 254). Achilles’ feigned interest in earrings and pouting is a performance of femininity
which is intended to cement his disguise as a woman, yet it also ‘produces the effect of some true
or abiding feminine essence or disposition’ (Ibid., 254). It is particularly interesting that Achilles
is a man dressed as a woman, since Butler’s theories particularly focus on drag because ‘In

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imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself’ (Butler 1990:
137). Achilles – an archetype of mythic masculinity, enduring throughout the centuries as an
ideal warrior – wearing a dress and performing womanhood reveals the performativity of gender
itself. Achilles’ performance as Pyrrha is not emasculating to him – for him, it is ‘An irritant, but
not a crippling shame, as it would have been to another boy’ (Miller 2011: 130). This scene was
not invented by Miller; an extant fragment of the Cypria recounts this part of Achilles’ myth,
where Odysseus and Diomedes arrive on Skyros to find Achilles, whom Thetis has hidden there
amongst the women (Cypria fr. 19, in West Greek Epic Fragments 97ff.; in Alexander 2009, 250
[footnote]).
As classicist Caroline Alexander writes in The War That Killed Achilles – a text that
studies what the Iliad can tell us about attitudes to war throughout the centuries – ‘when one of
the “girls”, ignoring the other finery, grasps [the armaments], they know they have found their
man. The fact that Achilles was not immediately recognizable as a young man is intended to be a
tribute to his striking beauty’ (Alexander 2009: 94). Alexander also notes that Achilles’
Olympian foil can tell us much about his character:

The traits that define Apollo - bringer and averter of destruction, healing powers,
aloofness and withdrawal, youthful beauty, skill in the lyre – have a striking counterpart
in the Iliad: these are the traits that also define Achilles, the most beautiful hero at Troy,
whose wrath has wrought plaguelike destruction, who was taught healing arts by Chiron,
and who is discovered by the Embassy in his tent [playing the lyre] (Ibid., 172).

To the Ancient Greeks, beauty to the point of femininity and hypermasculine wrath were not
mutually exclusive, but rather qualities that combine to accentuate one another in gods and
godlike heroes. In choosing to accentuate Achilles’ beauty and overwrite his wrath, 30 Miller’s
text preserves his legend and suggests that contempt for apparently feminine traits in men is a
relatively modern concept. Considering the title and the story being told via Patroclus’
enamoured, homodiegetic narration (comparable, to a limited extent, to Nick Carraway’s

30
As explored in Chapter 1: ‘Women in the Texts’, where Manne’s theory of ‘Himpathy’ is used as a framework to
consider how Miller exonerates Achilles specifically from the crime of rape, in the case of Briseis.

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narration in The Great Gatsby [1925]) it is clear that the purpose of Miller’s adaptation is to
preserve Achilles’ heroism and make it palatable to a modern audience that would not valorise
rape and violence.
Rather than exemplifying oppressive masculinity, Miller’s Achilles clashes with such
patriarchal power, as is epitomised in Agamemnon. As indicated in the first chapter, Agamemnon
is portrayed in contemporary women’s adaptations of the Iliad as an irredeemable, sexually
deviant, warmonger – the epitome of hegemonic masculinity. In The Song of Achilles, however,
Achilles is completely opposed to Agamemnon: ‘The contrast between the two had never seemed
more sharp: Achilles relaxed and in control […]; Agamemnon with his face tight as a miser’s fist,
louring over us all’ (Miller 2011: 263). Achilles is a ‘sharp’ contrast to Agamemnon’s ‘specific
gender relations of dominance and subordination’ (Connell 1995; 2005: 78), as demonstrated by
his ‘relaxed’ demeanour versus Agamemnon’s tense and threatening manner. This portrayal of
Agamemnon as a sullen and incompetent ruler does have its roots in the Iliad which, in
Alexander’s interpretation, presents in this character a ‘pointed portrayal of a traditional king
who is unworthy of command’ (2009: 36). Alexander calls Agamemnon’s failed test of the army
(where he suggests that they should all go home, to test their loyalty) an ‘astounding act of
idiocy’ and also suggests that ‘as illogical and disastrous as the trial may be, it is entirely
consistent with the Iliad’s carefully drawn depictions of Agamemnon in action’ (Ibid., 35).
Indeed, when combined with Agamemnon’s mishandling of Chryses and the subsequent plague,
and his taking of Briseis with the resultant withdrawal of his best warrior, the trial scene is
‘simply one more example [...] of Agamemnon’s unfitness to command’ (Ibid., 35). Crucially, in
contrast to Agamemnon, we can see a version of Achilles beyond ‘a one-man genocide whose
defining characteristic was his unquenchable anger’ (Haynes 2011: np.). In his interactions with
Agamemnon, Achilles portrays himself as ‘a weary man engaged in the exhausting work of war,
which he performs expertly but without much appetite’ (Alexander 2009: 168); in his kind
treatment of Priam and ‘in his elegant forestalling of Agamemnon’s possible defeat in
competition at the funeral games, Achilles demonstrates profound knowledge of the disposition
of men’s souls,’ (Ibid., 210). Though Agamemnon was chosen by Zeus to lead the Greek army,
he is far from a flawless ruler, and it is through the accentuation of his unfitness to command that
Miller’s adaptation portrays Achilles in a more forgiving light.

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 Conversely, Achilles in Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is dethroned from his heroic
legend. The opening lines of the novel make it abundantly clear that this narrative is not going to
preserve Achilles’ song: ‘Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles …
how the epitaphs pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him “the Butcher”’
(Barker 2018: 3). In stripping him of his epithets, and unerringly emphasising his brutality, the
narrator conveys that the purpose of the novel is antithetical to any sympathetic portrayal of
Achilles. Briseis, the protagonist of Barker’s novel, is ‘his reward for killing sixty men in one
day,’ (Ibid., 37), which is a very blunt way to communicate Achilles’ martial brutality. Equally,
the line ‘He fucked as quickly as he killed’ (Ibid., 28) provides an unflinching portrayal of his
sexual violence – the blunt, direct, and matter of fact language delivered in short clauses serve to
dethrone Achilles from his heroic status. Barker does not overwrite Achilles’ Apollonian beauty
in her quest to scrutinize and delegitimize Achilles’ claim to heroism: her Achilles is depicted as
‘probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent,’ (Ibid., 56). His
beauty remains inextricable from his characterisation, as it was for Homer and Miller, but it does
not indicate any sort of morality or godliness in his character. While he is ‘probably’ the most
beautiful, his brutality is ‘certain’.
This depiction of sexual violence is not limited to Achilles; indeed, it is portrayed as a
systemic problem throughout the Greek army. After the murdering and ‘the looting stopped –
there was nothing left to take – and the drinking began in earnest. […] / And then they turned
their attention to us’ (Ibid., 16). The list form shows the progression of the army’s actions, from
raiding, to murdering, to looting, to drinking, to then ‘turn[ing] their attention’ to the women
with the intention of raping and enslaving them. The apparent naturalness of their actions speaks
to endemic rape culture ‘in which rape and sexual assault are common [...] a culture in which
dominant social norms belittle, dismiss, joke about or even seem to condone rape and sexual
assault’ and in which ‘victims are silenced and blamed, the crime is normalized and perpetrators
are completely ignored’ (Bates 2018: 56; 61). This culture is strongly echoed in Barker’s novel,
most notably in the way in which it works to silence victims, and the title of The Silence of the
Girls refers specifically to this systemic silencing of female victims. In addition, sexual assault is
normalised and condoned, as demonstrated both in the previous example and when Briseis
reports seeing ‘a woman raped repeatedly by a gang of men who were sharing a wine jug,

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passing it good-naturedly from hand to hand while waiting their turn’ (Barker 2018: 16). Here,
gang-raping women is as normal as sharing a drink, and the soldiers’ cheerful, patient
demeanours clearly indicates that the behaviour is condoned. Barker’s anachronistic use of rugby
chants draws a direct line between the brutal, explicit rape culture in the ancient and mythical
army and contemporary culture, where in the U.K., for instance, over 85,000 women are raped
and 400,000 sexually assaulted every year (Bates 2018: 56). Barker’s novel exemplifies one
approach to dealing with mythic masculinities, which is to highlight how such age-old violence is
still present in mainstream culture, perpetuated in acts as seemingly harmless as rugby chanting.
As much as there is a continuum between normalised rape culture and sexual violence, so too is
there a continuum between these ancient myths and enduring essentialised assumptions regarding
male power and female subjugation.
It is important to note, however, that contemporary feminist authors are not the first to
villainise the heroes of Greek myth. Indeed, ‘the Iliad’s most outstanding Achaean heroes are
unambiguously cast as villains in the works of later writers’ (Alexander 2009: 219).
Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Odysseus, in particular, ‘make multiple appearances in the plays of
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as bullying, duplicitous, cold-blooded tyrants’ (Ibid., 219).
This suggests that the heroism of these classical heroes has been interrogated throughout literary
history, and that contemporary female authors are the latest to consider these figures in light of
contemporary morality.
Dethroning heroes from classical myth is also a key preoccupation in Jennifer Saint’s
Ariadne, in which Theseus’ heroic legend is interrogated. Theseus’ heroic reputation is first built
up under Ariadne and Phaedra’s enamoured gaze, and subsequently critiqued as Theseus’ actions
reveal that his morals are far from heroic (in the sense of being just, though they are heroic in
that they are typical of heroes). Put simply, Ariadne and Phaedra initially hero worship Theseus.
When Theseus regaled them with his journey to Athens, Ariadne ‘could see that Theseus would
have known in an instant what to do. […] Beside me, Phaedra was rapt, spellbound by his clean,
decisive heroism’ (Saint 2021: 86). The sisters’ rapturous attention and confidence in Theseus’
abilities shows they are enthralled by him and that, in particular, they view him unequivocally as
a hero. Their initial veneration of Theseus speaks to his continued reputation as ‘The great
Athenian hero’ that ‘had so many adventures and took part in so many great enterprises that there

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grew up a saying in Athens, “Nothing without Theseus.”’ (Hamilton 1942: 208). In Apollodorus’
Library alone, Theseus performed six Labours en route to Athens where he then faced Medea
whose plot was to poison him. But ‘Theseus drove Medea from the land’ and then famously
delivered Athens from its duty to deliver youths to Crete to feed the Minotaur. Theseus was also
involved in the hunt for the Calydonian boar, the Argonauts, Heracles’ katabasis, the Theban
Cycle, the mythos of Helen and, of course, the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus (Apollodorus,
trans Hard 1997: III.16; Epit.1; I.8; I.9; II.5; III.6-7; III.10; Epit.5.2). “Nothing without Theseus”,
indeed. Ariadne describes Theseus thus:

He did stand alone amongst men, this great Athenian hero, of whom so many legends
would be woven. He was taller, broader, handsome, of course – and of the bearing not
just of a prince but the poised strength of a panther waiting to strike. A man who would
inspire songs and poems, whose name would be heard to the ends of the earth. (Saint
2021: 54)

His heroism, demonstrated by his beauty, status as Athenian royalty, and ferocity, is deliberately
accentuated here – it is this heroic reputation that the novel later works to counter-write. The
multiple clauses and elevated language speak to the elevation of his narrative. Yet, the reliability
of the heroic accounts is immediately brought into question when Ariadne asks herself ‘Did I feel
the cogs of destiny, the gliding of the Fates’ loom, or was it actually just the thumping of my
excited heart?’ (Ibid., 55). In doing this, the autodiegetic narrator suggests that we should doubt
not only her enamoured, naive perspective, but also the literary tradition of celebrating the heroes
of Greek myth. This rhetorical question paired with the above reference to the many legends that
will be woven point to another key concern in Ariadne: the question of whose story is being told
and whose is not; the question of who will be remembered favourably and who will not. This
motif is central not only to this text, but across the corpus of feminist adaptations of Greek myth
(Ariadne, for instance, is much more excited to think ‘I would be part of his story now’ (Ibid.,
93) than Barker’s Briseis is when she thinks that her experiences will be subsumed by Achilles’
legend, that she is ‘stuck inside his story’ [Barker 2018: 297]). This recurrent concern will be

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further analysed in Chapter 5 ‘Palimpsests: Paratexts and Intertexts’; for the purposes of this
chapter, the concern of whose story it is works to demonstrate the ubiquity of the male heroic
narrative.

It is this male heroic narrative that Ariadne interrogates. Daedalus, who is famous for his
intellect, demonstrates a shrewd understanding of Theseus’ character:

I can give you the means to lead Theseus from the Labyrinth. […] But, Ariadne, do you
think that is what he wants? […] Does a Prince of Athens who strives for legend want
to be rescued from a monster by a beautiful girl? Do you think he will allow you to
take him by the hand and smuggle him from Crete under a blanket, like a sack of grain?
[...] Theseus wants your help, but not to spirit him away from the battle. He means to
defeat the mighty Minotaur tomorrow. He will leave Crete with its greatest treasure
plundered, its labyrinth left open and its myth dissolved. It will be Theseus’ courage
that is sung of (Saint 2021: 60-1 [my emphasis]).

Daedalus understands, before Ariadne does, that his own legend is Theseus’ priority, not justice
for Athens or romance with Ariadne. Daedalus’ multiple questions speak to the masculinity at
stake in hero narratives. In this case, Theseus needs Ariadne’s help, but he cannot have it
remembered that he relied on a woman; the lines emphasised within the above quotation point to
the demand that the hero’s legend alone is preserved, especially without reliance on ‘a beautiful
girl’. Moreover, Daedalus’ questions indicate that the narrative of the masculine hero is now
being interrogated in contemporary retellings.

Ariadne’s anger at Theseus for abandoning her on Naxos is the most clear critique of the
masculine hero figure in the novel. She explicitly shouts ‘You are no hero, you faithless coward!’
(Ibid., 128): in this exclamation, Ariadne literally strips Theseus of his heroic legend. Daedalus’
warning questions are echoed in Ariadne’s enraged narration, where she proposes that ‘he would
not tell of how he had crept out before dawn and left me sleeping, unsuspecting, whilst he slunk
away. That shameful retreat would not feature in his boasts, would it?’ and asks ‘How many

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women had he left in his path before me? How many had he charmed and seduced and tricked
into betrayal before he went upon his way, another woman’s life crumbled to dust in his fist,
claiming every victory for himself alone?’ (Ibid., 128). As well as her personal anger, Ariadne
considers his broader pattern of behaviour; there is dramatic irony here too as the reader may
know of Theseus’ other wronged women, including the assaulted Amazon, Hippolyta, as well as
Helen and Phaedra while they were both still children. This angry iteration of Ariadne draws
upon Ovid’s interpretation of her in Heroides X, ‘Ariadne to Theseus’, where she says ‘All wild
beasts are gentler than you and not one, / could have abused my trust more than you’ (trans.
Isbell 1990; 2004: l.1-2). As Isbell notes, ‘It is difficult to find in this letter anything of love. [...]
She succumbed to the conniving opportunism of a man who desired her only peripherally while
he acquired everything she could give’ (Isbell 1990; 2004: 89). Contemporary adapting authors
are once again turning to Ovid’s Heroides, where the voices of mythical women were principally
heard, in shaping their contemporary re-characterisations of these figures. Here, Ariadne’s anger,
originally given voice in Ovid, and once again voiced in Saint’s novel, is not only indignant
about her personal treatment at the hands of Theseus, or Theseus’ treatment of women more
generally, but the valorisation of mythical heroic men whose actions were ruinously
misogynistic. ‘I could not have been Ariadne’, reflect Cixous and Clément in The Newly Born
Woman, not because of the shame of sex outside of love and marriage, but because ‘Theseus
doesn’t tremble, doesn’t adore, doesn’t desire; following his own destiny, he goes over bodies
that are never even idealized. Every woman is a means, I see that clearly’ (Cixous and Clément
1975; 1986: 76). For Cixous and Clément, it is clear that Theseus exploits women without desire
for them; it is an empty consumption in which women are only valuable to him for the way they
supplement his ambition for heroism.

In ‘Ariadne’s Mystery’, Deleuze reads Theseus in terms of the overman in Nietzsche’s

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For Deleuze the ‘sublime or higher man conquers monsters, poses
enigmas, but he ignores the enigma and the monster that he is himself’ (Deleuze 1994: 8). To
become an Übermensch he ‘must discard his Heroic will’ (Nietzsche 1883; 1966: 188; in
Deleuze 1994: 8) because it is a product of society that Nietzsche nihilistically rejects. Hence,
through a Nietzschean reading, as through an Ovidian one, Theseus’ heroism is subverted into a

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character flaw; he only cares about his own legend, because ‘each higher man is fixated on his
own prowess that he repeats like a circus act’ (Deleuze 1994: 9). If Theseus is ‘the spirit of
negation, the great fraud’ while Ariadne is ‘anima, the soul’ and the spirit of affirmation, then
‘As long as Ariadne loves Theseus, she participates in this endeavor to negate life’ (Ibid., 8).
When she is with Theseus, she is passive, but ‘Under Dionysus’s caress, [her] soul becomes
active’ (Ibid., 8-9). Hence, dethroning Theseus as a hero has been a repeated focus for modern
philosophers: in both Cixous and Clément and Deleuze’s treatises, Theseus is characterised by
self-interest, and primarily concerned with his grandiose view of his own talents. When we read
Theseus’ heroism as a character flaw, we can therefore read Ariadne’s abandonment by him as an
affirmation that liberates her from his sublime, higher-man control.

Ariadne’s anger towards Theseus has a narrative foil in Phaedra’s indifference. ‘Still just
as handsome, I noted dispassionately.’ (Saint 2021: 158): the scales quickly fall from Phaedra’s
eyes, as she transitions from a ‘spellbound’ girl in Crete to a dispassionate and distrusting
resident of Athens. Ariadne ultimately forgives Theseus when they meet again, unable to find
‘any words of reproach or anger’ (Ibid., 265) because of her affirmative life with Dionysus,
whereas Phaedra never forgives him: ‘I hated him for leaving my sister, for leaving me, for his
lies, for all of it. […] To think I had ever hung upon his words or gazed at his green eyes and
thought him handsome or exciting or noble!’ (Ibid., 288). Phaedra is incredulous that she ever
considered Theseus heroic, and she continues to loathe him throughout their marriage, perhaps
because she is married to the ‘higher-man’, while her sister’s married life is comparatively
idyllic. On a related note, Phaedra poses a challenge for adaptation in terms of contemporary
feminist mythmaking that is comparable to Helen, in that it is remarkably difficult to consider her
mythos through any feminist lens. Indeed, Edith Hall has reported an ‘intuitive loathing of
Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus’ due to its ‘toxic ideology in which Hippolytus’ stepmother
Phaedra falsely accuses him of rape’, thus providing evidence in favour of the misconception
regarding the regularity with which women frame innocent men for sex crimes (Hall 2015: np.).
Natalie Haynes builds on this in Pandora’s Jar, where she argues that ‘Phaedra can be used to
legitimise the myth that many women lie about being raped’ (Haynes 2020: 210). Moreover,
Phaedra’s mythos ‘adds in no small quantity of our own prejudice: against step-mothers, against

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female sexual desire and, yes, against women who accuse men of injuring them, rightly or
wrongly’ (Ibid., 201). Thus, her myth can be weaponised to discredit women, particularly those
who are speaking up against their abusers. Phaedra in Ariadne is particularly interesting to
consider in the context of this chapter because Saint exonerates Phaedra from this crime, and
places the blame back onto the hero, Theseus. In Saint’s adaptation, Phaedra had only written
Hippolytus’ name, and it is Theseus’ hot-headedness and recollection of his own behaviours –
including ‘rapes, forced marriages, kidnaps and child rape,’ (Ibid., 206) – that guide him to the
conclusion that he ‘know[s] what men do’ (Saint 2021: 344). In this version, then, it is Theseus,
not Phaedra, who falsely accuses Hippolytus of rape, which is in line with the dethroning of the
heroic legend that is present in Ariadne, as well as in the treatment of heroes in contemporary
feminist revisionist myth writing.

Finally, the treatment of Odysseus in contemporary retellings of Greek myth is

particularly interesting in terms of hegemonic control. Hegemony ‘refers to the cultural dynamic
by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social life’ (Connell 1995; 2005: 77).
This is identifiable with oikos in the Odyssey, in that oikos refers to the family’s home, hearth,
and holdings. As I explore in Chapter 1, the Odyssey asks: ‘Who will take charge of the oikos
and polis in his absence?’ (Felson & Slatkin 2004: 103). At the heart of the narrative is the
question of who will maintain the class and patriarchal hegemony when Odysseus – the
figurehead of both – is gone. The oikos and hegemony are at stake, therefore the very
continuance and indeed survival of the patriarchy itself. Upon his re-entry to Ithaca, Odysseus
says to Penelope, ‘This is / your house’, because she has maintained the domestic economy
during his absence: ‘the trees are full of fruit; the sheep have lambs; / the sea brings fish and
people thrive.’ (Homer, trans. Wilson, 2018: 19: 113-115). The ‘patriarchal domestic economy’
that Felson and Slatkin refer to is Ithaca as a home and hearth, or Odysseus’ realm of oikos, but
Odysseus also maintains his class and gendered hegemony through a functioning ‘patriarchal
domestic economy’. His hegemony is endangered during his twenty-year absence, but is
maintained by Penelope for her husband. It is this patriarchal oikos that is portrayed in Margaret
Atwood’s The Penelopiad, in which Penelope chronicles Odysseus’ long absence: ‘What can I
tell you about the next ten years? Odysseus sailed away to Troy, I stayed in Ithaca’ (Atwood

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2005: 81). The sentence structure here, wherein Odysseus’ movement is mirrored by Penelope’s
stasis, separated by a comma as they are separated by the Aegean Sea, reinforces the idea that
Odysseus has ‘sailed away’ from the hearth (and wife) that he controls. The rhetorical question
answers Felson and Slatkin’s question ‘What are the obligations of the wife?’, because she is
obligated to tell ‘you’, the reader, about the decade at home, where she is maintaining the oikos
and polis, because ‘the patriarch is gone, perhaps never to return’. In The Penelopiad, as in the
Odyssey, the disruption of hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal oikos is a source of anxiety,
which is assuaged with ‘the husband’s successful return and successful elimination of all
competitors for his wife’ (Felson & Slatkin 2004: 103), hereby symbolising a reinstatement of
patriarchal hegemony.

What happens when an oikos has a non-masculine hegemony? In the Odyssey, we see two
such instances, as ‘Both Circe and Calypso manage their lives [and lands] independently of
husbands’ (Felson & Slatkin 2004: 106). Both immortal women maintain their hegemony in the
Odyssey, and Odysseus is subjected to it rather than the conqueror of it. Odysseus is the subject
of a woman’s oikos, as is clear in Madeline Miller’s Circe, where the eponymous goddess says ‘I
am a host’ (Miller 2018: 202), thereby asserting that it is her land and he is a guest. Though there
would be a risk of a female host to a male guest falling into the familiar maid / waitress / servant
roles, Circe consistently rejects this model, as demonstrated in the following scene in which
Circe demonstrates her control over Odysseus’ men:

The table grew stained [with wine], as if with slaughter; and they looked to my nymphs to
clear it up. When I told them they would do it themselves, they eyed each other, and if I
had been anyone else, they would have defied me. But they still remembered their snouts.
(Ibid., 192-3)

Here, the table is a symbol of the domestic, the centre of the hearth, and the soldiers stain it in
their attempt to pervert and claim Circe’s home; yet still she maintains control. Odysseus’ men
expect Circe’s nymphs to act as serving girls, waiting on them and tidying up after them, but
Circe’s assertive language ‘told them they would’ and the reminder of her transfiguration of them

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into pigs empowers her and reinforces her hegemony. In fact, Circe’s transformations of
intruding men into pigs ensures her complete control over her oikos. Circe reports that the men
‘hated it all, their newly voluptuous flesh, their delicate split trotters, their swollen bellies
dragging in the earth’s muck. It was a humiliation, a debasement’ (Ibid., 172). In transforming
men into pigs, there is a reversal in gendered power dynamics because the men are humiliated
and debased, hierarchically demoted to the ‘muck’, while she is the omnipotent figure that puts
them there. The gendered language used to describe the pigs (their ‘voluptuous’ bodies; their
‘delicate split[s]’ invoking vaginal imagery; and their ‘swollen bellies’ suggestive of pregnancy)
reinforces this interpretation that the men have been demoted and made effeminate, while she is
the matriarch. This is demonstrated when she judges that ‘men make terrible pigs’ (Ibid., 172):
the men are pigs in the colloquial sense that they act disrespectfully towards women, but they
also fail at being pigs, because they bristle at the debasement. Circe asserts her dominance over
Odysseus in a more subtle way: ‘I began to ask him small favours. Would he kill a buck for
dinner? Would he catch a few fish?’ (Ibid., 192), wherein she assigns him tasks befitting his
newly subordinate role. Odysseus readily agrees: ‘I will do it before dinner tomorrow.’ (Ibid.,
193). While she subordinates Odysseus’ men by making them perform “feminine” duties like
cleaning, Odysseus is charged with “masculine” tasks such as hunting and fishing yet, crucially,
he does these things in service to Circe, so Odysseus and the Ithacans are forced into the role of
servers, a position they assumed Circe and her nymphs would occupy. Subordination of a
different gender and the lower ranks within one’s own gender is a key aspect of hegemonic
control (Connell 1995; 2005: 78), and Circe demonstrates her power to subordinate Odysseus
and his men, as well as the horde of nameless nymphs sent to serve her. Although Odysseus is
the patriarch of Ithaca, his power is not transferable to Circe’s isle, and thus he is denied his
hegemony over Aiaia.
Circe does not judge Odysseus to be a toxic man, particularly in comparison to her father
Helios and (ex-)lover Hermes. Helios is cast as the ultimate patriarch either on his sun-chariot, or
on his throne in his obsidian castle where, Circe recalls, ‘At my father’s feet, the whole world
was made of gold’ (Miller 2018: 5). The ‘gold’ is a reference to the sunlight – hence, godly
power – that exudes from him, but also the way that he is highly valued as the Titan of the sun.
By placing herself and the world at her father’s feet, Circe is presenting a (meta)physical

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hierarchy with her father above everything else, therefore casting him as the epitome of
patriarchal power. With such power comes many instances of toxic masculinity, such as his ego –
‘My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it.’ (Ibid., 4) – and, more
disturbingly, when he burns Circe with the entire heat of the sun for daring to tell him he was
wrong for dismissing Pharmaka, the herbs from which she derives her witchcraft (Ibid., 54-5).
Hermes is portrayed as similarly egotistical, his estimation of his own intelligence making him
belittle others: ‘See how quickly he made one a fool? That’s what he desired most of all: to drive
others into doubt, keep them wondering and fretting, stumbling behind his dancing feet’ (Ibid.,
96-7). Hermes’ conceit regarding his own godly intelligence is toxic because he emotionally and
psychologically abuses people for his own entertainment. His toxicity is exemplified when he
says ‘Nymphs always do [run screaming], […] But I’ll tell you a secret: they are terrible at
getting away’ (Ibid., 158). Hermes is not only enforcing rape culture here – and trying to
introduce it to Circe’s island – but actively encouraging it with a grin and a wink. Circe thinks
that this joke is typical among the Titans and Olympians, shining a light on the systemic problem
of rape culture in patriarchal structures. The endemic rape culture among gods is analogous to,
even symbolic of, contemporary culture, where rape jokes proliferate to normalise sexual
violence. Circe challenges both of these figures of toxic masculinity, summoning her father and
threatening him to negotiate her freedom from Aiaia and denying Hermes entrance to Aiaia. Like
her continued control of Aiaia’s oikos, Circe’s journey of empowerment culminates in her ability
to challenge the toxic masculinity as it manifests in her world, which also functions as a critique
of contemporary misogyny in Western society.
While Circe considers Odysseus to be a victim of war, the gods’ machinations, and time
itself, rather than an exemplar of toxic masculinity, Penelope and Telemachus report otherwise.
They claim that Odysseus ‘made life for others a misery’ (Ibid., 279), citing his braggadocio over
blinding Polyphemus as the cause for his lengthy delay in getting home and, ultimately, the cause
of death for his fellow Ithacans. They also report that he was emotionally and psychologically
abusive to them upon his return, due to his boredom with ‘A greying wife who was no goddess
and a son he could not understand’ (Ibid., 284) compared to his two decades of adventure. This
iteration of the returned hero owes a literary debt to Tennyson’s interpretation in ‘Ulysses’, in
which the eponymous hero finds himself an ‘idle king’, ‘Match’d with an aged wife’ and with a

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son who is ‘by slow prudence to make mild / A rugged people’ – that is, much unlike himself
(Tennyson 1833; 1842). Tennyson imagines a bitter and restless Ulysses, ‘made weak by time
and fate, but strong in will’ (Ibid.), often leaving Ithaca in search of further legend. Tennyson's
Ulysses is intent on reliving the greatest moments of his odyssey, such as travelling to the
Underworld: ‘It may be we should touch the Happy Isles, / And see the great Achilles, whom we
knew’, as well as having fresh adventures to increase his reputation: ‘Some work of noble note
may yet be done’ (Ibid.). In Sanyal’s (2019) model of toxic masculinity, men are
disenfranchised by their enforced isolation from their emotions and, for Odysseus, this is
epitomised in the circumstances of his death. He is suspicious and unwilling to extend xenia,
causing him to be killed by Telegonus’ spear imbued with Trygon’s venom. Odysseus’ toxicity in
this scene is exemplified by him shouting ‘I am the ruler here’ (Ibid., 252) wherein he jealously
guards his rulership, to his ultimate detriment. As with Achilles, different adaptations of
Odysseus portray him in divergent manners, underlining the sense that he is a mythical figure
with a strong ability to reflect and inflect changing contemporary discourses about masculinity –
its power, weaknesses and limitations.
Zuckerberg writes that ‘for many the study of Classics is the study of one elite white man
after another’, but that, crucially, ‘No matter how white and male Classics once was, we are not
that anymore. In spite of the numerous obstacles that remain, [Classics] is now more diverse than
ever,’ (Zuckerberg 2016: np.). This movement to diversify Classics, to de-centre the upper-class
white man as the subject of classical studies, means that the current moment is particularly
exciting when considering the reception and reinterpretation of male mythical figures. If this is a
time when the male domination of Classics as a discipline is being challenged, it also follows
that the men within myth can be challenged in new ways. As we have seen in this chapter,
mythical heroes such as Achilles, Theseus, and Odysseus have been scrutinised, as well as
transformed, satirised, humiliated, and exposed, generating narratives that, while set in the
ancient world, stage and interrogate many feminist concerns with modern masculinity. These
concerns include the emotional toll that patriarchy takes on men, the gender-based violence that
women suffer at the hands of men, and the inexorable connection between normalised rape
culture and misogynistic violence. When adapting mythic men for modern audiences, the authors
must ask, can the actions of these heroes be reconciled with modern morals? Moreover, what are

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our morals, and what does it take to be considered heroic to modern audiences? In the case of
Theseus, Jennifer Saint unequivocally rejects him as an adaptable hero: he is held accountable
for his crimes and the crimes of others, most notably Phaedra’s. However, in the cases of
Achilles and Odysseus, there is more flexibility in the judgement of their actions. In the cases of
Saint’s Ariadne, Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, and Miller’s Circe, in particular, these male
characters are crucially no longer in the foreground, to give voices to the previously overlooked
and silenced women of myth. In Miller’s The Song of Achilles, of course the eponymous hero is
the focus, but his story is (as we shall see in the following chapter) more focused on his capacity
as a queer romantic lead rather than as a warrior or aggressor. Jeanette Winterson’s Weight, on
the other hand, utilises parody as a method to focus on mythical men and their contentious
relationships with their masculinity. Carter’s contention that ‘intellectual development depends
upon new readings of old texts’ (Carter 1983; 1998: 37) can also be applied to the men of myth
as they are adapted in contemporary feminist literature.

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 Chapter 4: Queering Myth

This chapter briefly outlines queerness in Ancient Greek culture and myth, before moving onto
queer classical reception and the enduring importance of Classics for queer youths. After this, the
chapter will turn to Sappho, from whom the terms Sapphic and lesbian are derived, particularly if
not, winter, the Sapphic fragments translated by Anne Carson. This examination of Sappho’s
poetry and dominant critical approaches to her biography and works will evidence the
interrelations between queerness and Classics, more specifically how Sappho has been used to
narrate female same-sex desire and how the fragmentary nature of the remaining Sapphic poetry
is inextricably linked to this. The chapter moves on to examine two examples of LGBTQ+
representation in contemporary mythic novels. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles is an
immensely popular mythic adaptation, wherein the Trojan War is a gruesome backdrop against
which the love story of Achilles and Patroclus is staged. My analysis will consider how ancient
and modern understandings of homoeroticism are portrayed in the novel. Ali Smith’s Girl Meets
Boy is an adaptation of Iphis and Ianthe, whose myth has fallen into obscurity since the medieval
and early modern eras, but which Smith has reinvigorated into a lesbian and genderqueer
narrative. Ultimately, this chapter will conclude by considering what makes these contemporary
adaptations distinctive from their predecessors – namely, how attitudes to LGBTQ+ identities
and rights make the early twenty-first century particularly generative for queering myths.
It is well known that same-sex relationships among men were a significant part of
Ancient Greek culture. Pederasty was common in Ancient Greek society, in which an older male
citizen of the polis (the erastes, lover) would form a relationship with a younger man (the
eromenos, loved) of the same class; this relationship was overtly sexual, but was broadly
considered to be educational too (see Rice 2005; 2015: 1-7; Kampen 2002; 2015: 1-4). There are
many accounts of men’s bodies inciting lust in classical mythic literature. For instance, in
Aeschylus’ Myrmidons, Achilles says of Patroclus ‘I did respect the intimacy of your thighs / by
lamenting you’ (fr. 136). Gods, as well as heroes, had same-sex relationships. Zeus, in the form
of an eagle, carried Ganymede to Olympus to be his immortal cupbearer; Poseidon stole Pelops
in a chariot; and Apollo tragically killed his lover Hyacinth in a game of discus (Theognis fr.
1.1345; Pindar Olympian Ode 1.40 ff; Apollodorus 1.3).

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 The presence of queerness31 in Ancient Greek culture and myth has had subsequent
ramifications in classical reception, both historically and in more contemporary scholarship.
Foundational work in queer classical scholarship includes Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality
(1978). Dover’s monograph was the first to describe homosexuality in Ancient Greek art and
literature, thus providing a basis for further research into sexuality in Ancient Greek culture and
morality. His work laid much of the groundwork for more recent scholarship into sexualities in
antiquity, such as Davidson’s The Greeks and Greek Love (2007) and Lear and Cantarella’s
Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty (2008). Jennifer Ingleheart’s Masculine Plural (2018) is also
a key source when considering queer classical scholarship, as it studies the interconnected
histories of sexuality and classical reception within Victorian and Edwardian public education,
with particular reference to Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge, a poet, classicist, and soldier in the First
World War. Ingleheart concludes that Queer Classics can be mobilised to ‘counter the harmful
public image of Classics as inherently stuffy and conservative’ (Ingleheart 2018: 298), and that it
calls for a more embodied analysis of ancient source material, in direct challenge to Classics as a
purely cerebral, exclusionary discipline.
Emerging research in Queer Classics can also provide a form of community for queer
researchers. As Hannah Clarke’s survey and wider research has demonstrated, the ‘largest reason
that research participants seem to be interested in the Classics as young queer people is that
Classics remedies, to a certain extent, anxieties of feeling culturally temporary’ (Clarke 2019:
np.). This anxiety for LGBTQ+ people can be assuaged by the visibility of queer figures in
ancient myths, such as Heracles and Hylas, Achilles and Patroclus, Sappho, and Bilitis, which
provide a sense of queer history, as well as a sense of community for ‘contemporary

31
For the purposes of this study, ‘queerness’ is used as an umbrella term to denote non-heterosexual sexual
identities, including lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities; queerness is also used in a gendered context, referring to
non-cisgendered people, including transgender, nonbinary, agender, or gender nonconforming people. More broadly,
queer theory calls for a challenging of the heterosexual/homosexual division, to open space for multiple identities
and cultures that do not fit into these labels. Critical work useful to the context of this definition include Berlant and
Warner’s ‘Sex in Public’ (1998) which provides a critical analysis of heteronormativity and provides an argument for
queer world-making and counterpublics. Rich’s ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980)
prompts readers to consider the paucity of lesbian visibility, structures of lesbian sexualities, and the potential for
lesbian literary criticism. Rich provides numerous examples of how male power has suppressed female sexuality ––
including denying female sexuality, sexual violence, and social, familial, and economic control –– and she proposes
that lesbian sexuality should be defined, not by sexual preference, but rather by resistance to compulsory
heterosexuality. Further to this, she proposes that we redefine women-centred experiences as part of a lesbian
continuum to counter the restricted and clinical terms used to define female sexuality.

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Classics-loving queer youth’ (Ibid., np.). Clarke created a survey of LGBTQ+ people studying
Classics, with particular questions pertaining to whether there were figures from myth or
antiquity that particularly resonated with them as LGBTQ people, and their estimation of the
importance of queer representation in both the classroom and popular media (Ibid., np.). Clarke’s
research found that LGBTQ+ youths turn to the Classics to legitimise their queer identity and
desire for a queer cultural inheritance. Clarke acknowledges that ‘Twenty-first century identities
don’t map easily onto ancient figures, [labelling] Greeks and Romans as “gay” is not useful, and
it is likewise useless to depict them as “straight”’ (Ibid., np.). Nevertheless, her research indicates
that Queer Classics has generative potential for both research and researchers alike.
Sappho is the earliest surviving woman writer of the west (Greene 1996: 1); she was
considered to be the female counterpart to Homer. She was ‘The Poetess’ to his ‘Poet’ and
Aristotle reported that ‘although she was a woman’ she was highly honoured (Rhetoric, 1389b12
in Greene 1996: 1). Moreover, Sappho is a central figure in Queer Classics, as she is the ancient
lyricist from Lesbos from whom the identifiers sapphic and lesbian are derived. Though the term
lesbian was prescribed by doctors seeking to pathologise female same-sex desire, it became the
chosen identity marker of women-loving women. As sapphist classicist Ella Haselswerdt writes
in ‘Re-Queering Sappho’, a self-reflexive piece considering the importance of the queer potential
of the fragmentary Sapphic corpus:

women found in the imposed name of their supposed sexual disease a tradition worth
embracing — a set of beautiful fragmented poems about the love of one woman for
another, full of detailed imagery of flowers, women, and fruit, with an attention to private,
embodied experiences of lust, loss, and longing. (Haselswerdt 2016: np.)

In Sappho’s poetry, as in her name, women found a historical record of their desire and, through
this, legitimisation. Haselswerdt notes, ‘I can’t deny my personal investment in the lone voice of
the woman who loves and longs for other women’ (Ibid., np.); evidently, in queer classical
reception, as in the history of lesbianism, Sappho’s voice resonates as one that narrates queer
women’s desires.

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 Yet, not all classicists agree with the classification of Sappho as a queer lyricist. Glenn W.
Most claims that Sappho’s reputation as the founding mother of lesbianism is ‘a onesided [sic]
distortion’ (Most 1996: 35), an act of creative reception rather than one of historical accuracy.
Most cites the origins of the terms sapphic and lesbian as labels of sexual dysfunction and the
Attic comedies that portrayed Sappho as the polar opposite of a woman-loving woman (Ibid., 27,
35). The comedies referred to by Most are those which portrayed Sappho ‘primarily as an
oversexed predator — of men’; though lesbian now means female same-sex desire, in ‘classical
Greek, the verb lesbiazein—“to act like someone from Lesbos”—meant performing fellatio, an
activity for which inhabitants of the island were thought to have a particular penchant’
(Mendelsohn 2015: np.). While Sappho is, at present, celebrated as a queer figure, ‘Victorian
scholars [did] their best to explain away her erotic predilections’ by arguing that her relationships
with young girls was that of a schoolteacher and her students (Ibid., np.). In Sappho is Burning,
Page DuBois maintains that any study into the history of sexuality must include Sappho, due to
her work centring female narrators that desire other women (she criticises Foucault in particular
for understating Sappho’s relevance in the history of sexuality [DuBois 1997: 146–157]).
Mendelsohn wryly labels these debates ‘the Sappho wars’, though the issue of Sappho’s sexuality
transcends spirited academic debates and satirical commentary. Haselswerdt recalls a
conversation in which a colleague proposed that Sappho was a man, and it upset her greatly,
leading her to question ‘But why did I care so deeply? Why do I so badly want a female Sappho?
And why do I so badly want a queer Sappho?’ (2016: np.). Haselswerdt argues that her
eponymous call to re-queer Sappho is a part of the ‘fight for the legitimacy of lesbianism’ and
that ‘in re-queering Sappho, we might simultaneously make some headway into rehabilitating
lesbianism as a radical and queer contemporary identity’ (Ibid., np.). The contentious queer
legacy of Sappho remains, in academic circles, important: is labelling Sappho a lower-case
lesbian a wilful distortion of fact or an important part of history for women-loving women?
Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s fragments, if not, winter, is particularly vital to
this chapter because her formal and linguistic choices contribute to the debate surrounding
Sappho’s queer legacy. Carson’s technical deployment of square brackets to denote papyrological
enigmas, such as where the papyri are damaged or destroyed, or the writing rendered illegible
over time, attempt to create a more direct link between the experience of reading Sappho’s poetry

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in its surviving form and the translated work. There are some drawbacks to this approach: as
Carson writes in her introduction, the brackets are ‘an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological
event rather than an accurate record of it’ and that ‘it will affect your reading experience, if you
allow it’ (Carson 2003: xi). However, she asserts that ‘Brackets are exciting’ because they
recreate ‘the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a
postage stamp’ (Ibid., xi). Carson outlines how she has attempted to minimise the evidence of her
voice in the translation to allow Sappho’s voice to preside, though she admits that ‘[t]his is an
amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor’ (Ibid., x). In
translating Sappho, Carson uses the same technique as Emily Wilson in her Homeric translation
— using plainer language to make the work more accessible.
This hypothesis of the transparent translator resonates with Wilson’s introduction to the
Odyssey, in which she states that ‘there is no such thing as a translation that provides anything
like a transparent window through which the reader can see the original’, but she hopes that her
rejection of ‘bombastic or grandiloquent’ language will make the epic more accessible, and more
akin to Homer’s tone (Wilson 2018: 86; 83). Wilson commends Carson on her introduction, that
‘enable[s] even the Greekless reader to understand some of the most important textual problems
in Sappho’ (2004: np.), thus demonstrating the translators’ aligned goals. Referring to Carson’s
choice of parentheses and minimalist publication style, Wilson points out that Carson’s
translation ‘make[s] effective use of blank space’ (2004: np.). Carson’s blank spaces are effective
as an artistic allusion towards the fragmentary nature of Sappho’s extant poetry, as well as an
engagement with more recent female short-form poetic traditions, popularised by poets such as
H.D., Dorothy Parker, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath. Thus, in the choices that Carson
makes as a translator, she tries to provide the reader of the translated Sapphic fragments with as
close an experience as possible to reading them in their original state by effectively utilising form
and simple language.
What, then, is the queer significance of this plainer, more accessible style? Carson alludes to
the lesbian significance of Sappho’s legacy in the following quotation:

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 Controversies about her personal ethics and way of life have taken up a lot of people’s
time throughout the history of Sapphic scholarship. It seems that she knew and loved
women as deeply as she did music. Can we leave the matter there? (Ibid., x)

Moreover, she then quotes Gertrude Stein’s writing on Sappho, particularly the assertion that
‘She ought to be a very happy woman’ (Stein 1903-1932; 1999: 461, in Carson 2003: x): in
quoting Stein’s overt reference to lesbian pleasure, Carson alludes to the queer significance of
Sappho. As Wilson writes in her review of if not, winter, ‘For Carson, what matters is Sappho’s
poetry, not her gender or her sexual orientation. But Sappho’s words themselves are not
gender-neutral’ (2004: np.). Though Carson’s aim is not to highlight Sappho’s queer significance,
her desire to simply ‘undo a bit of the cloth’ (Carson 2003: x) and allow Sappho’s words to shine
through completes this task for her. This expressed desire to ‘leave the matter’ of her sexuality,
the inherent implication that all that can be said has been said, and thus it is up to the individual
reader to decide how they read Sappho, functions in the same way as the aforementioned
parentheses. Carson writes that ‘brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure’ (2003: xi),
and I would argue that her rhetorical question ‘Can we leave the matter there?’ offers the same
‘free space of imaginal adventure’ for reading.
Though Carson herself wishes to ‘leave the matter’ of Sappho’s sexuality, the fact
remains that much of Sappho’s surviving poetry fragments are centred around the themes of
female desire and yearning. Fragment 38 is a good example of desire in Sappho’s poetry, which
is translated as either ‘you burn me’ (trans. Carson 2002) or ‘you scorch me’ (trans. Raynor
2014). Mendelsohn calls this ‘the sexy little Fragment’ (2015, np.) and, indeed, though only this
line of the poem is preserved, the sense of lust the words contain remains potent. In the longer
Fragment 96, Sappho writes that a woman ‘Surpasses all the stars. And her light / stretches over
salt sea / equally and flowerdeep fields’; she writes that women ‘equal goddesses in lovely form’
and invokes Aphrodite to elucidate her feelings: ‘]desire / and[ ]Aphrodite’ (trans.
Carson 2002). Fragment 96 also refers to ‘remembering / gentle Atthis’. Atthis was one of
Sappho’s most significant lovers and, according to the Suda (the Tenth Century Byzantine
encyclopaedia), it was ‘Through her relations with them [Atthis, Telesippa, Megara] she got a

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reputation for shameful love’ (Suda s.v. Sappho, in Carson 2002: 361). Sappho dedicated a
number of her poems to Atthis, such as the following:

]
]
] Atthis for you
]
]
(fr. 8)

I loved you Atthis, once long ago

a little child you seemed to me and graceless
(fr. 49)

For centuries, Sappho’s relationship with Atthis, preserved in the fragments of her poetry, has
been a point of interest for lesbians, classicists, and even composers. Georg Friedrich Haas’ 2009
opera Atthis ‘sews Sapphic fragments together in an account of a relationship between the poet
and the younger woman’ (Hall 2015: np.). Sappho compares Atthis to a child: this is what
Mendelsohn calls ‘her susceptibility to the graces of younger women’ (2015, np.). Sappho’s
relationships with younger women can be understood as a feminised version of the pederastic
tradition.
Yearning for lost love is also a key theme in Sappho’s surviving poetry: ‘but a kind of
yearning has hold of me—to die / and to look upon the dewy lotus banks / of Acheron’ (fr. 95).
Sappho yearns for Acheron, the river of woe in Hades, due to losing her eromenos, Gongyla.
Sappho’s most famous poem is perhaps Fragment 107: ‘do I still yearn for my virginity?’. The
meaning of Fragment 107 is veiled by time, as there is no consensus on the meaning of virginity
to the Ancient Greeks (Rangos 1995: 1-2). It is most likely that Ancient Greek virginity did not
refer to abstinence from any sex with any gender, though it could refer to penetrative
heterosexual intercourse — if this is the case, then Sappho could be yearning to return to a time
before she had heterosexual sex. Yet, others argue that Grecian virginity was more aligned with

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notions of marriageability and fertility, as evidenced by the word for a maiden’s state, parthenia,
and the disparity in virgin Olympians, such as Artemis and Hestia (see Rangos 1995; Ciocani
2013: 23). Hence, Sappho could be yearning for her youth, which is further evidenced by the fact
that she was ‘likely past middle age when she died, since […] she complains about her graying
hair and cranky knees’ (Mendelsohn 2015: np.). Whatever Sappho meant by ‘virginity’, the
recurrent theme of yearning in her poetry has led to a tradition of female same-sex desire being
closely entwined with yearning. More recently, queer yearning has been harnessed for its activist
potential by bell hooks who, in yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, uses it to refer to
‘common passions, sentiments shared by folks across race, class, gender, and sexual practice’
that can ‘[open] up the possibility of common ground where all these differences might meet and
engage with one another’ (hooks 1999: 12; 13). As Wilson noted, Sappho’s words are not
gender-neutral: the Sapphic fragments are concerned with female same-sex desire and yearning,
and this accounts for the calls to re-queer Sappho by queer classicists such as Haselswerdt.
The papyrological event of Sappho’s surviving poetry can hold as much significance to
contemporary readers as her much-contested sexuality. For DuBois, the power of Sappho’s
poetry lies not only in the representation ‘of the place of the individual and her desire, not only of
the evocation of pleasure, luxury, and the meditation on loss;’ it is also an example of ‘turning
preexisting poetic materials to new use, to a poetic project different from that for which they
were first composed’ (DuBois 1997: 7). In other words, the enduring appeal of Sappho’s work
lies not only in her communication of female-centric desire, but also in the differences between
the poetry of Sappho in her own time and the poetry of Sappho as we have it today. Habinek
notes that the recurrent theme of yearning and the incomplete preservation of Sappho’s poetry
appeals to the postmodern embracing of incompleteness (1996: xiii), yet this is not a separate
entity to Sappho’s queer appeal. The fragmentary remains of her work and the continued debates
surrounding her sexuality come together to form the ‘undeniable source of the interest she
continually attracts from disparate readers’ (Ibid., xiii). For subsequent readers, then, the existing
form and meaning of Sappho’s poetry are inextricably linked. Although, of course, this could not
have been Sappho’s intention: she could not have anticipated that papyrological disintegration
would lead to her poetry’s fragmentary reception. Habinek asserts that ‘the fragmentary nature of
the surviving texts has only increased their value for succeeding generations’ (Ibid., xiii), and

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cites Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Lesbos’ from her posthumous collection Ariel as evidence for this.
Habinek points to Plath’s mimesis of Sappho’s dialogic and pastoral style – for instance in the
lines ‘And I, love, am a pathological liar,’ and ‘I should sit on a rock off Cornwall’ (Plath 1965:
ll. 7, 29) – as a point of comparison. Yet, Plath presents the narrating persona as the departing
lover, rather than the departed, and Habinek argues that this is a rejection of Sappho:

[T]he testimony of Plath's poetry suggests that she belongs instead to a long line of
female writers who have found it necessary to reject the authoritative example of Sappho
in order to get on with their creative lives (Habinek 1996: xiii).

In rejecting Sappho in this manner, Plath resists ‘the hegemony of the elite classical tradition’
(Ibid., xiii) by denying the authority of this tradition, and forging her own literary path. This
demonstrates how female writers can move beyond the intimidating shadow that Sappho’s poetry
and its reception have cast in order to pursue their own creative lives.
Carson presents a prosaic fictionalisation of Sappho in ‘Irony is Not Enough: Essay on
My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2nd Draft)’ in Men in the Off Hours (2000). The short story
reimagines Catherine Deneuve as a university teacher and philologist, with a specialism in
Sappho. The story opens with a clear conflation between Sappho and the fictitious Deneuve’s
sapphism: ‘Sappho put it simply. Speaking of a young girl Sappho said, You burn me. Deneuve
usually begins with herself and a girl together in a hotel room.’ (Carson 2000: 128). From the
beginning, the actress-turned-academic’s sexuality is presented as a modernisation of Sappho’s
own, as indicated by the ‘hotel room’ and its implication of casual sex. As an educator, Deneuve
also continues the feminised pederasty, although it is noteworthy that the setting in a university
rescues the modernised Sappho from accusations of paedophilia, while maintaining the power
imbalance. The unnamed girl that is the object of Deneuve’s desire recalls Atthis, particularly her
‘graceless[ness]’ (fr. 49): her voice is described as ‘animal’, she ‘stumbles in’ and ‘thrusts some
pages’ at her teacher for an assignment, and she translates Greek with ‘extreme vulgarity’
(Carson 2000: 129; 131; 133). Deneuve yearns for the young girl, who is often physically or
emotionally absent, which captures the tone of Sappho’s fragments. Stylistically, the short
sentences replicate the fragments, and the invocation of natural imagery is also characteristic of

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Sappho’s work: ‘Imagine a springtime garden of watered boughs and uncut girls.’ (Ibid., 133).
Catherine Deneuve became a cult icon for women-loving women in the 1980s after playing a
queer vampire in The Hunger (dir. Tony Scott, 1983). In conflating Deneuve and Sappho, the
short story invites us to consider whether the queer relevance of certain cultural figures lies not in
their actual sexualities, but in the queer reception their art.
Before considering the most contemporary examples of authors utilising mythic source
materials to narrate same-sex desire, it is important to note that these twenty-first century
examples are part of a long tradition since Ancient Greece of queering myth. Three such
examples, which I propose are important in proving the hypothesis of this chapter, but which lie
outside the scope of this thesis, are Jeanette Winterson’s Art & Lies, Mary Renault’s Fire From
Heaven, and the work of Oscar Wilde. Winterson’s Art & Lies is a speculative fictitious
autobiography of Handel, Picasso, and Sappho. Winterson’s Sappho addresses the same concern
as Anne Carson’s introduction to if not, winter — namely, that Sappho’s sexuality is more
famous than her surviving work. Winterson’s Sappho laments:

So little of her remains. Her remains are scandalous. The teasing bones that shock and
delight. Yet, it is certain, that were every line of hers still extant, biographers would not
be concerned with her metre or her rhyme. There would be one burning question […]
What do Lesbians do in bed? (Winterson 1994: 289)

This quotation echoes Carson’s desire to ‘leave the matter there’ (2002: x), indicating and
indicting the persistent prurience with regard to ‘scandalous’ lesbian sexuality. Mary Renault’s
Fire From Heaven is a fictionalised account of Alexander the Great’s life, with particular focus
on his relationship with Hephaestion: ‘Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should
offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose [Alexander]. Joy hit him like a
lightning-bolt’ (Renault 1969: np). Madeline Miller’s more contemporary novel, The Song of
Achilles, has been compared to Renault’s novel (for example, Williams 2011) in much the same
way that Alexander the Great and Hephaestion’s relationship was compared to Achilles and
Patroclus’. Furthermore, Oscar Wilde is one of the most famous examples of an erudite figure
looking to Greek Antiquity and myth for academic, creative, and personal inspiration. As

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Evangelista argues, Greece provided a discourse for Wilde to communicate his sexual desire for
other men, because Greek myth enabled lovers to articulate emotions that were publicly declared
to be perverted and criminal (Evangelista 2009: 126). Wilde famously rewrote his lover Douglas
as Hyacinthus, which Evangelista points to as an aesthetic justification of his own homosexuality
(Ibid., 126). Wilde, then, is a key example of Ingleheart’s contention that Classics has played a
formative role in English upper-class homosocial institutions and homosexual practices
(Ingleheart 2018). Thus, there has been a long and complex relationship between ancient Greek
myth and culture and what is now the LGBTQ+ community, and Greek myths are frequently
queered, in-line with changes in individual and societal attitudes to same-sex desire.
Smith’s Girl Meets Boy and Miller’s The Song of Achilles are two texts in which female
writers utilise mythic source material to narrate more current queer experiences. Smith’s novella
is an optimistic anti-capitalist and eco-activist retelling of Iphis’ gender change in Ovid’s
Metamorphosis and Miller’s novel is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad, told primarily as a love story
between Achilles and Patroclus. Miller’s The Song of Achilles is perhaps the most popular
contemporary adaptation that queers myth, and it is my contention that while interpreting
Achilles and Patroclus as lovers is not Miller’s invention, Miller’s novel effectively brings their
relationship into the twenty-first century by foregrounding consent and tenderness. In so doing,
the ancient mythical characters can thus become icons of contemporary LGBTQ+ literature.
According to the Iliad, Achilles and Patroclus are close childhood friends who lead the
Myrmidons to war in Troy; they hold each other in very high esteem, as demonstrated when
Achilles calls him ‘my prince, Patroclus’ (Homer, trans. Fagles: b.16, l.57) and ‘Son of
Menoetius, soldier after my own heart,’ (11:718) while Patroclus thinks of Achilles as ‘his great
friend’ (11:272). Their closeness is central to the plot of the Iliad because it is Patroclus’ death
that incites Achilles to return to fighting, thus ensuring that Hector will die by Achilles’ hand,
that Achilles will die soon after, and that Troy will then fall. As Edith Hamilton relays, Achilles
declared that ‘I will kill the destroyer of him I loved; then I will accept death when it comes’
(Hamilton 1942: 271). Hamilton’s word choice is effective in communicating the epic scale of
Achilles’ feelings, and the tragic ramifications of his actions. It is when Achilles learns of
Patroclus’ death that we truly see their closeness, as he acts like a woman mourning the death of
a loved one:

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 A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles.
Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth,
he poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face
and black ashes settled onto his fresh clean war-shirt.
Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust,
Achilles lay there, fallen ...
tearing his hair, defiling it with his own hands. (18:24-30)

Tearing one’s garments and hair was a part of ancient mourning processes, present in Greek and
Ancient Hebrew traditions, and it was a practice particularly reserved for women to perform
(Jastrow 1900: 38). Here, then, where Achilles’ grief manifests, there is also a declaration of love
between the two Myrmidons. Moreover, when the shade of Patroclus visits the grief-stricken
Achilles, he entreats the prince to ‘Never bury my bones apart from yours, Achilles, / let them lie
together’ (23:100-1), which has long since been considered a declaration of their intimacy.
Evidently, mythic source texts already presented Achilles and Patroclus as lovers.
Furthermore, representing Achilles and Patroclus in a romantic relationship has a
considerable history between Ancient Greece and Madeline Miller. In Shakespeare’s Troilus and
Cressida, for example, Ulysses criticises Achilles for not fighting, and ‘With him Patroclus, /
Upon a lazy bed’; Thersites says to Patroclus ‘Prithee be silent, boy. I profit not by thy talk. Thou
art said to be Achilles’ male varlet. [...] Why, his masculine whore.’ (Shakespeare 1609: act 1,
scene 3, l.150-1; act 5, scene 1, l.15-18). Shakespeare’s contemporary Marlowe, in Edward II
used Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship as an example of a same sex relationship between a
nobleman and a ‘minion’, as an indication of the nature of the homosexual relationship between
Edward II and Gaveston: ‘And for Patroclus, stern Achilles drooped’ (Marlowe 1594: l.728).
These early modern iterations of Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship evince that Miller’s text is a
more recent iteration of the long-standing literary tradition of writing Achilles and Patroclus’
relationship in romantic terms, rather than a modern fabrication. For early modern playwrights,
‘Achilles’ closeness to his companion has been a source of anxiety for other male characters,
because [...] it keeps him from battle and thus prevents him from expressing his manliness in

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appropriately militaristic ways.’ (Heavey 2015: 16). Achilles’ desire ‘become[s] a caution to
early modern men about the weakening (and feminising) effect of excessive desire, whether
heterosexual or homosexual’ (Ibid., 16). Heavey draws upon Bruce R. Smith’s Homosexual
Desire in Shakespeare’s England, in which he argues that early modern masculinity was ‘an
inherently unstable business’ due to masculine identity being defined by men’s relationships to
other men (Smith 2000: 128; in Heavey 2015: 3). Thus, in early modern drama, Achilles and
Patroclus were portrayed as lovers, yet the love was a source of anxiety.
Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles is a contemporary portrayal of Achilles and
Patroclus as lovers, following the tradition of Aeschylus and Shakespeare. Miller’s adaptation
differs from Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s in that the relationship is the central romance, rather
than a concern related to a broader issue about power. As Miller herself has said ‘I think that now
we are at a place in our culture where we can re-accept that interpretation of the story,’ (Day
2012: np.) indicating that this contemporary moment – where LGBTQ+ voices are being
increasingly heard – is able to reimagine Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship as a romance and to
think about the wider implications of this. Moreover, Miller opines that it ‘felt like it was a love
story already, but I sometimes think the idea of them as lovers has been a little bit whitewashed
from the record’ (Ibid., np.). As we have seen, Miller is not the first person to write Achilles and
Patroclus as lovers; in Myrmidons, Aeschylus presented their relationship as romantic,
particularly when Achilles refers to ‘the intimacy of [Patroclus’] thighs’ (fr. 136). For McKenna,
The Song of Achilles ‘provides a welcome tonic’ to ‘de-gayifying’ adaptations of the Iliad, such
as the 2004 film Troy, that he accuses of ‘eviscerating the original storyline’ in which Achilles
kills Hector and dooms Troy due to his grief of losing his lover (McKenna 2015: 91-2).
McKenna asserts that the romance between Achilles and Patroclus is immanent in the Homeric
original, therefore ‘Miller’s work should be understood in the most radical way possible’ because
it ‘is not simply that she interprets the best aspects of The Iliad through her novel; rather, she
allows the Greek epic to fully become itself’ (Ibid., 95). Although Miller’s novel is not original
in its conception of Achilles and Patroclus as lovers, it is radical in its gesture towards reclaiming
queer Achilles and Patroclus from interpretations such as Hollywood’s Troy, which seek to
‘whitewash’ the myth.

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 This is not to say that it is a straightforward task to reinterpret Achilles as a romantic
lead. He is described by Haynes as ‘a one-man genocide whose defining characteristic was his
unquenchable anger’ (2011, np.). The Iliad opens with the invocation of the Muses to
‘Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,’ (1:l.1) — Achilles’ rage, though, can be
a source of nuanced reinterpretation. As Maia Lee-Chin writes in ‘Achilles’ Rage and
#MineToo’, her experiences as a rape survivor and her resultant indescribable anger led her to
identify with Achilles, despite the irony that she was ‘find[ing] comfort in the rage of a rapist
[…] He, a rapist, and I, a victim’ (2020: np.). Lee-Chin recognises the role that Patroclus plays in
tempering Achilles’ temperament, as ‘Patroclus reminded him of his commitment — no, his duty
to humanity, his own or otherwise’ (Ibid., np.). The author also undertook this journey of
forgiveness and remembered humanity, saying ‘I found a Patroclus of my own’ (Ibid., np.).
Miller’s adaptive choice to make Patroclus the homodiegetic narrator, the one singing the
eponymous song of Achilles, confirms him as the only figure whose death affects Achilles — it
is through Patroclus that Achilles is humanised, which speaks to the broader genre of the novel.
Achilles must be at least partly humane to be considered as a romantic lead, and it is only
through Patroclus’ enamoured perspective that the reader can view a sympathetic Achilles.
Evidently, Achilles remains a figure of interest and, potentially, identification, and this has been
compounded by Miller’s influential debut novel which moves away from Achilles’ enraged
legend to rewrite him as a romantic protagonist.
The Song of Achilles is an incredibly popular novel, evidenced by its awards and reviews.
It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2012, which comes with accolades, £30,000 prize
money, and ‘a significant spike in sales as a result of the win’ (Brown 2012: np.). Joanna
Trollope, chair of the 2012 judging panel, described the love story as ‘in a curious way, uplifting’
despite the inevitable tragedy (Ibid., np.). Haynes was also on the judging panel and, in her
review of the novel, wrote that ‘Miller’s prose is more poetic than almost any translation of
Homer’ (Haynes 2011: np.). For Haynes, Miller makes their doomed romance more appealing
with the in-depth characterisation of Patroclus as the self-deprecating, besotted lover, and
Achilles as ‘the lover beneath the bloodshed and fury’ (Ibid., np.). Haynes recognises the allure
of knowing the tragic ending – ‘But we know Achilles will never return from Troy […] We know
that Patroclus must die before Achilles’ (Ibid., np.) – and how that contributes to the enjoyment

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of reading ‘deeply affective version[s]’ of familiar stories. The Song of Achilles also has a large
fan-following, as demonstrated by its significant tags on the fanfiction website ‘Archive of Our
Own’, on which the tag “Fandom: The Song of Achilles” has 960 works, and the tag
“Relationship: Achilles/Patroclus” has 2,246 works; 32 on ‘Tumblr’, the most popular posts tagged
“The Song of Achilles” and “TSOA” amass 10,000–37,000 notes. 33 The popularity of – and
fandom surrounding – Miller’s novel speaks to the desire to tell LGBTQ+ stories in mythic
contexts in present-day literary culture. This desire relates to what Clarke recalls as looking for
herself in the stacks: a desire to feel represented in literature, history, and popular culture, and
turning to Classics for evidence of queer history (Clarke 2019: np.). Miller’s novel provides both
a queer history that goes back centuries and representation in modern day literature.
The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus as depicted in The Song of Achilles can
be read through dual lenses, as both ancient and modern notions of same-sex relationships are
blended in the novel. In terms of ancient modes of homosexuality, the narrator Patroclus alludes
to institutionalised pederasty, but goes on to define his relationship with Achilles in opposition to
this. His relationship with Achilles is unusual in the ancient context, as ‘many boys took each
other for lovers. But such things were given up as they grew older, unless it was slaves or hired
boys’ (Miller 2011: 166). Patroclus and Achilles’ relationship is not pederastic or childish
indiscretion, neither of them is the Marlovian ‘minion’ (of a lower social class, elevated by their
relationship with the king); they are the same age, born into the same social class, and they both
consent. The equality and non-coercive consent that is central to Patroclus and Achilles’
relationship in Miller’s novel is indicative of the contemporary demand for explicit consent in
romance literature, in contravention to ‘the [lingering perception] that romance novels are full of
romanticized sexual violence’ (Faircloth 2018: np). Thus, the relationship between these heroes
is re-framed to appeal to a modern audience, which demonstrates how these ancient stories can
be reworked with contemporary conceptions of queerness and consent at the forefront.
Moreover, Patroclus’ narration provides instances in which the gap between the ancient
setting and modern readership is bridged, such as in the protagonists’ experiences of
homophobia. Although homophobia is a relatively recent term, coined by psychologist George

32
source: Archive of Our Own, last accessed: 30th March 2022
33
source: Tumblr, last accessed: 30th March 2022

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Weinberg in the early 1960s, Miller’s inclusion of homophobic incidents in The Song of Achilles
is another example of how ancient mythical figures can negotiate modern experience and
sensibilities. Patroclus notes that ‘Our men liked conquest; they did not trust a man who was
conquered himself’ (Miller 2011: 166) which is a reference to the Hesiodic Heroic Age, in which
war and conquest were central social tenets. The prejudice of being sexually ‘conquered’ by
another man was because men were shamed for taking on a submissive sexual role and called
malakos (soft, effeminate) in mockery (Rice 2005; 2015: 4). This conquering phobia is also
reflected in literature in the intervening period, for example in Thersites’ insults to Patroclus in
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. In Sissyphobia: Gay Men and Effeminate Behavior, Tim
Bergling coins the neologism ‘Sissyphobia’ to refer specifically to the homophobia faced by
effeminate men in recent history (Bergling 2001). Thus, Patroclus’ reflection on ‘conquered’ men
being mistrusted reveals both ancient and more modern prejudices against gay men. Similarly,
Odysseus’ comment to Achilles and Patroclus that ‘“I’ve heard that you prefer to share. Rooms
and bedrolls both, they say”’ (Miller 2011: 165) serves this same purpose, where ‘I’ve heard’ and
‘they say’ imply that there is something salacious or shameful in their ‘preferences’ and echoes
Ulysses’ gossiping in Troilus and Cressida. It is also noteworthy that Miller has Odysseus share
this gossip, as he is also defined in his epic and subsequent reception by his sexuality, in his case
his many extramarital (heterosexual) affairs. Achilles and Odysseus, both Aristos Achaion, Best
of the Greeks, have their legends bound up in their sexuality.
Similarly, Achilles and Patroclus in The Song of Achilles do not map easily onto the
Ancient Greek notions of erestes/eromenos. This is mostly due to the fact that their relationship
is not pederastic. In classical discourse, Achilles and Patroclus are listed as an example of ‘a
pederastic couple that was not ideal’ as they ‘were similar in age, and there is much dissension as
to which of them was the erastes and which was the eromenos’ (Holmen 2010: np.). There is
debate about who would be the erestes and who the eromenos from ancient source texts, as
Aeschylus’ tragedy Myrmidons has Achilles as the lover, and Patroclus as the loved, while in
Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus calls Aeschylus’ interpretation ‘nonsense’ (Plato, 178A-185C: 183
in Holmen 2010: np.). Instead Plato opines that ‘Quite apart from the fact that he was more
beautiful than Patroclus…and had not yet grown a beard, he was also, according to Homer, much
younger’ (Ibid., np.). Miller, however, does not choose between Aeschylus’ interpretation or

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Plato’s — she does not apply the erestes and eromenos roles to the couple. The Ancient Greek
terms that the two characters do use for each other, however, are significant. During their early
friendship in Phthia, Achilles explains to his father that ‘“I wished him for a companion.”
Therapon, was the word he used. A brother-in-arms sworn to a prince by blood oaths and love’
(Miller 2011: 35). In the Iliad, Patroclus is Achilles’ most trusted advisor and most loyal general
in Troy, and this is the connotation of the word choice Therapon in The Song of Achilles. Yet, as
the plot progresses and their relationship transitions into a romantic one, the Ancient Greek
moniker that Achilles affords to Patroclus also changes: ‘“Philtatos,” Achilles says, sharply.
Most beloved.’ (Ibid., 333). The sharpness of Achilles’ tone and the bluntness of the short
sentences reflect this bittersweet moment, as Patroclus hears this as a dead shade, and the
grief-stricken Achilles is saying this to King Priam, who has come to plead for his son’s body to
be returned. Although Achilles and Patroclus do not conform to the erestes/eromenos structure,
their relationship is still defined within the scope of Ancient Greek concepts of intimacy.
Miller reserves the use of Ancient Greek monikers for the most poignant narrative
moments: the establishment of Achilles and Patroclus’ friendship and the moment when Achilles
is forced to remember his humanity after the death of Patroclus, taking ‘the step of forgiveness,
one towards tenderness and love’ (Lee-Chin 2020: np.). The other instance in the text when
Ancient Greek is deployed is when Achilles’ father gives Patroclus a nickname: ‘ Skops, Peleus
took to calling me. Owl, for my big eyes. He was good at this sort of affection, general and
unbinding.’ (Miller 2011: 48). Though this may seem inconsequential, this is a scene of
significant foreshadowing. Peleus’ affection and humanity sharply contrast to Thetis’ cold
persona, which is a constant point of tension in the novel. This juxtaposition is embodied in their
child, particularly when Achilles struggles to find his humanity after the death of his ‘Philtatos’.
In addition, Peleus calls Patroclus Skops when he tells the story of Meleager and his wife, a myth
that foreshadows their tragic fates. In the myth, Meleager refuses to fight despite the pleas of his
advisors and people, until his wife Cleopatra entreats him to, but it was unfortunately too late to
receive the gifts he was promised (March 1998; 2001: 250). This foreshadows how Patroclus
would entreat Achilles to fight, but he would not relent until it was too late — until after
Patroclus dies. Patroclus’ name is an inversion of Cleopatra’s, in the same way that his story is a
mirror of hers. This foreshadowing is significant because it speaks to the thread of tragedy that is

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woven throughout the love story. Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship in The Song of Achilles is
defined using Ancient Greek terminology at the most significant narrative events, despite their
non-conformity to the pederastic model.
In the same way that Achilles and Patroclus do not conform to the pederastic social
structure in The Song of Achilles, their sexual relationship is also not obviously pederastic. The
explicit sexual intercourse between Achilles and Patroclus in the novel is manual: ‘He stroked me
gently […] My hand reached, found the place of his pleasure […] My fingers were ceaseless […]
His hand was ceaseless now’ (Miller 2011: 94, 95, 172). There are less explicit allusions to
sexual activity between Achilles and Patroclus, such as when they ‘lay on the river-bank,
learning the lines of each other’s bodies anew’ (Ibid., 96), that leave the specifics of their
intercourse unsaid. It is noteworthy that there is no evidence in the novel of intercrural
intercourse, though this is widely accepted to be the most common method of pederastic sex
(Rice 2005; 2015: 1-4). Therefore, though Aeschylus and Plato discussed Achilles and Patroclus’
relationship in terms of pederasty, and classicists such as Holmen consider them a pederastic
couple (though an imperfect one), Miller’s interpretation of the two Myrmidons differs
significantly. Achilles and Patroclus in The Song of Achilles do have a queer romance, and
although it does not fit into the Ancient Greek model of pederasty, it is still defined using Ancient
Greek parameters of intimacy.
Since the central romance of The Song of Achilles is based on ancient, mythical
characters and their relationship is modelled on ancient notions of intimacy, the question
therefore arises of how the author has so successfully captivated a modern audience. Miller’s use
of juxtaposing imagery and prepossessing language forms a large part of the novel’s
contemporary impact. She juxtaposes images of music and war as a microcosm of the
interlocking themes of love and death in the novel. Achilles’ skill with the lyre, from Patroclus’
enamoured perspective, adds depth to a figure previously characterised by his speed and rage on
the battlefield. When Miller’s Achilles plays the lyre, Patroclus reports that ‘His head fell back a
little, exposing his throat’ (Miller 2011: 33), which is a very open, vulnerable position,
particularly when compared to his fighting style: ‘Achilles’ limbs blurred and struck’ (Ibid., 84).
Achilles’ lyrical skill is also present in the Iliad, particularly in the Embassy to Achilles, where
Achilles plays peacefully: ‘delighting his heart now, / plucking strong and clear on the fine lyre’

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(9:224-5). Achilles’ god-given and war-honed speed and rage are still present, as demonstrated
when Odysseus and Ajax arrive and ‘Achilles, startled, / sprang to his feet, the lyre still in his
hands’ (9:232-3). These two seemingly disparate aspects of Achilles’ persona are also married in
The Song of Achilles, in Patroclus’ comparison of his fighting-style to dancing: ‘His feet beat the
floor like a dancer, never still’ (Miller 2011: 42). The marriage of Achilles as a musician and
Achilles as a fighter is a microcosm of the novel itself because it is a love story, but also a war
story. In Thomas Heywood’s early modern drama The Iron Age I, Achilles plays his ‘effeminate
flute’, epitomising his self-indulgent refusal to fight (Heywood 1632: G3r-G3v; in Heavey 2015:
16). This speaks to the change in attitudes towards masculinity, as a refusal to fight is perhaps not
as condemnable in the present day. As explored in the previous chapter, men’s heroic narratives –
and thus masculinity itself – is being interrogated in contemporary feminist myth writing; male
heroism is being increasingly redefined by women, and while Winterson parodied
hypermasculinity and heterosexual machismo, Miller provides a valuation of aesthetism,
sensitivity, and emotional intelligence. Music thus becomes a method of bringing forth
discussions of what makes a heroic man into the twenty-first century, as well as speaking to the
different intentions behind the adaptations of Achilles’ homoerotic desire: for Heywood, this is a
source of masculine anxiety, for Miller, it is the central romance of her novel.
As Patroclus undertakes the task of portraying an Achilles who is both a lover and a
fighter, telling a story that is both a romance and a tragedy, there are poignant moments that relay
these seemingly juxtaposed ideals. For instance, Patroclus reflects that when Achilles starts
leading raids, ‘He seemed so much the hero, I could barely remember that only the night before
we had spat olive pits at each other,’ (Miller 2011: 209-10) wherein the hyper aggressive image
of Achilles leading raids feels incongruous with the boyish charm of Patroclus’ love interest.
This is even more apparent when Patroclus helps Achilles to dress in armour for battle, and they
share a tender moment before the bloodshed, and Patroclus ‘saw the stiff leather dig into his soft
flesh, skin that only last night I had traced with my finger [and] felt his lips on mine, the only part
of him still soft’ (Ibid., 210). The repetition of ‘soft’ in relation to the armoured man who earns
the title ‘“Aristos Achaion.” Best of the Greeks.’ (Ibid., 166) for his skill in war epitomises the
way in which Miller uses juxtaposing symbolism to marry music and war, love and death, in The
Song of Achilles.

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 In addition, Miller has received much praise for the aesthetics of her language in the
novel. In her review of The Song of Achilles, Natalie Haynes commends Miller's prose as more
poetic than any rendering of Homer (2011: np.), and it is this rhapsodic language that persuades
the reader to consider Achilles as a romantic figure, rather than an enraged rapist. Consider, for
instance, the sentences ‘We were like gods, at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so
bright we could see nothing else but the other’ and ‘When he died, all things swift and beautiful
and bright would be buried with him’ (Miller 2011: 96; 158). Rather than rage and revenge,
Achilles becomes characterised by his love and joy. Both of these sentences use multiple clauses
to create a tripping sensation, as though there are too many emotive epithets to express. The
lines communicate an excess of love pouring out between Achilles and Patroclus, which is
experienced as an illuminating ‘bright’ pleasure rather than a weight, and which lights up
Patroclus’ prose itself. This overflowing sensation is further demonstrated by the repeated mantra
‘This, and this and this’ (Ibid., 47; 96; 350). Miller’s use of romantic language, therefore, is the
most persuasive aspect of the novel that allows contemporary readers to accept Achilles as a
romantic lead. In reviews of The Song of Achilles, the reviewers tend to make specific reference
to Miller’s prose, for example: ‘In prose as clean and spare as the driving poetry of Homer,
Miller captures the intensity and devotion of adolescent friendship’ (Russell 2012: np.).
Therefore, Miller’s deployment of lines such as ‘He is half of my soul, as the poets say’ (Miller
2011: 284) significantly contribute to the popularity of her novel, and the popularity of The Song
of Achilles demonstrates the desire for undefensive queer myths in the contemporary moment.
Although less well known, Smith’s 2007 novel for the Canongate Myth Series, Girl
Meets Boy also actively queers myth. Smith adapts the myth of Iphis and Ianthe as told in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, but with a focus on queer identities in contemporary society. Metamorphoses is
particularly important to this thesis because Ovid does what the authors within the scope of this
thesis do, only two thousand years earlier: he adapts and alters myths. As Feeney writes in his
introduction to the Metamorphoses, ‘Ovid knows and loves the traditions of his literary past, but
refuses to be intimidated or enslaved by them. Everything is to be invigorated by unexpected
perspectives, everything is to be made new’ (2004: xxviii-xxix). Moreover, ‘Transformation is
the title of the poem and the single linking thread that unites the hugely various stories’, and
while transformation is a broad theme, the ‘main connecting thread is an interest in identity’

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(Ibid., xxii; xxix). Ovid adapts myths under the umbrella theme of transformations to explore a
multitude of identities, a tradition that continues to the 21st century with the texts covered in, and
beyond the scope of, this thesis. More relevant to this chapter, Ovid surveys the imaginative and
moral possibilities of hybridity: metamorphosis can be oppressive to the point of imprisonment
or death, or it can be a positive force, liberating the metamorphosed or otherwise allowing them
to realise their possibilities (Ibid., xxiv; xxix). Through metamorphoses, a person can realise their
identity and find liberation; this identity can – and often does in Ovid – refer to sexuality. Indeed,
Feeny goes as far as to say that all of the most memorable stories are in the realm of love and
sexuality (Ibid., xxx), for example Echo and Narcissus, Deucalion and Pyrrha, and Cephalus and
Procris. Hence, Ovid’s Metamorphoses offer opportunities to break away from sexual and gender
norms because of his focus on transformation and hybridity.
The sexual and gendered ‘possibilities of hybridism’ in the Metamorphoses are
epitomised in Ovid’s telling of the myth of Iphis, at the close of Book IX. In this myth, Iphis was
born as a girl but raised as a boy, since her father had demanded of her mother ‘if by chance /
[…] your child is a girl […] / you must kill her’ (Ovid, 9:677-679). On the advice of the
Egyptian goddess Isis, Telethúsa gives her child the gender-neutral name Iphis, and raises her as
a boy. In time, Iphis and ‘a fair-haired girl called Ianthe […] famed for her beautiful looks’ (Ibid.,
l.715-7) had their marriage arranged and fell in love. Iphis and her mother fear that their secret
will be revealed at the ‘wedding between two brides, where the groom has failed to appear’
(Ibid., l.763), so they both pray to the goddess Hera: ‘O Juno, goddess of marriage, O Hymen!’
(Ibid., l.762). Hymen was a minor god of marriage ceremonies in Hellenistic religion, but who
was merged with Hera/Juno in later Greek and Roman mythos, as she symbolised the ideal wife
and the patron of marriage and the family (Bardis 1988: 94). On the morning of the wedding,
Hera transforms Iphis into a boy: ‘her limbs grew stronger, and even her features / sharpened’
(Ovid, 9:788-9), allowing Iphis and Ianthe to marry successfully. Here we can see how the
eponymous theme of metamorphosis in the Ovidian epic allows for the exploration of identity,
particularly in terms of sexuality (Iphis experiences same-sex desire for Ianthe) and gender (Iphis
undergoes a gender transformation).
Despite Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe capturing the current zeitgeist of queer gender and sexual
identities, it has not persevered as one of the most popular stories from Metamorphoses unlike,

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for instance, his rendering of Apollo and Daphne. Instead, the myth of Iphis and Ianthe has fallen
into relative obscurity in the modern era, which is confirmed by Valerie Traub (2019: 1). Iphis
has not captured the attention of many artists and authors and has therefore remained somewhat
unknown outside classical studies and even within it, as Traub notes, ‘the plight of Iphis and
Ianthe has not attracted the broad critical interest of scholars seeking to understand Ovid’s
influence on literary history’ (Ibid., 1). Much like the interest shown in Achilles and Patroclus’
relationship in the Early Modern period, Mediaeval translators, mythographers, and adapters did
consider Ovid’s Iphis a source of fruitful inquiry. Though ‘Ovid’s impact on the literary
production […] across the genres of epic verse, lyric, erotic epyllia and drama – has been
comprehensively surveyed’ (Ibid., 7), very little critical attention has been paid to the popularity
of this particular metamorphosis in the Medieval and Early Modern period. Ovidian
Transversions aims to redress this critical neglect by exploring the wide-ranging issues to which
this myth was made to speak in early modern France and England (Ibid., 2). While the myth was
applied to Christian purposes in this historic period before it fell into obscurity, more recent
literary critics ‘offer lesbian and queer interpretations of “Iphis and Ianthe”’, and it is with these
interpretations that the myth is beginning to re-enter ‘wider scholarly conversation […] as a story
of cross-dressing and lesbianism’ (Ibid., 9). The scholarship within Ovidian Transversions, such
as McCracken’s ‘Metamorphosis as Supplement: Sexuality and History in the Ovide moralisé’
(2019: 43-59) and Lanser’s ‘Changing the Ways of the World: Sex, Youth and Modernity in
Benserade’s Iphis et Iante’ (2019: 261-278) redress the academic oversight of the significance of
Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe in the early modern period, and the myth is re-entering cultural
conversations as a queer myth.
I have argued elsewhere (Judge 2019) that the Ovidian myth can be read through a
contemporary queer theory lens. Drawing on medical definitions of gender dysphoria,
particularly the transgender requirement to ‘live and be accepted as a member of [a different] sex,
usually accompanied by the wish to have [gender affirmation] treatment’ (NHS Online “Gender
Dysphoria” 2016, in Judge 2019: 80), I argue that Iphis’ myth can be read as a transgender
gender-affirmation narrative. Gender affirmation is the – typically hormonal and surgical –
process which changes a trans person's body to match their gender identity. After her
metamorphosis, Iphis ‘felt a new vigour she’d never enjoyed as the female she’d been’ (Ovid,

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9:790), in which the use of ‘vigour’, from the Latin virgoris, could be the male author and
translator assuming that masculinity feels stronger and more vigorous in their comparison of the
male and female experience, or it could be interpreted in terms of gender affirmation (Judge
2019: 80). Within the latter interpretation, ‘Iphis feels a “new vigour” as her body’s biological
sex now accurately reflects her gender identity’ (Ibid., 80), which has significant implications for
queer myths because this interpretation suggests that Ovid’s myth could be an important tool for
genderqueer cultural representation. Moreover, I argue for an understanding of Iphis as a
genderqueer figure, rather than a specifically transgender one, as the term genderqueer is ‘an
umbrella term used to describe gender identities other than man and woman – for example, those
who are both man and woman, or neither man nor woman, or moving between genders’ (NHS
Online “Gender Dysphoria” 2016). This will be particularly useful in the following analysis of
Smith’s Girl Meets Boy as a genderqueer narrative. Ultimately, I assert that ‘the mythological
Iphis has cultural relevance in contemporary society, as her myth can be utilised for genderqueer
representation’ (Judge 2019: 80). This article evidences Traub’s assertion that Ovid’s Iphis and
Ianthe has entered a wider scholarly conversation ‘as a story of cross-dressing and lesbianism’
(Traub 2019: 9) — as a lesbian and genderqueer myth.
For Feeney, ‘The staggering extent of [Ovid’s] success is most evident in the impact that
the Metamorphoses has had on other creative artists [...] an impact that shows no sign of abating
even in the contemporary world,’ (2004: xxxii). Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy is evidence of Ovid’s
creative impact on artists in the contemporary world and, along with Miller’s The Song of
Achilles, it is also evidence of the most recent iterations of creators actively queering myth
in-line with contemporary society’s attitudes to LGBTQ+ identities. Before expanding on this, I
would draw attention to Smith’s adaptive choices in the novel: like Isma/Ismene and
Aneeka/Antigone in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Smith creates new characters that mirror their
mythic counterparts — Iphis becomes Robin and Ianthe becomes Anthea. Anthea is phonically
similar to Ianthe, the name Anthea ‘means flowers, or a coming-up of flowers, a blooming of
flowers,’ (Smith 2007: 82) mirroring the name Ianthe, which means ‘bloom of a violet’ and
encapsulates femininity, beauty, and maidenhood (Wheeler 1997: 194). While Robin is in a
constant state of becoming her gender in the novel, Anthea’s understanding of gender and
sexuality grows and blooms throughout. Robin is Smith’s reimagined Iphis, and while her name

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does not have the same phonic relationship to her mythic counterpart, it is still significant. For
one, Robin is a gender-neutral name, but spelled in the stereotypically “masculine” way, which
relates to Robin’s fluid gender. Robin’s surname is Goodman, which can be taken as humorous
gender-play – she is a good man – but it is also reminiscent of the domestic demon Puck, from
English folklore, who was referred to as hob-goblin, or Robin Goodfellow (EB, 'Puck' 2016, np.).
Robin Goodfellow would sometimes perform small household tasks for humans, yet they often
tended towards knavery and trickery. Though Robin Goodman does not demonstrate any of her
namesake’s homemaking skills, the following activist tendencies of Goodman indicate a
Puck-like mischief. Just as in Shamsie’s Home Fire, Smith’s characters’ names gesture towards
their mythic counterpart, while also indicating that this is a modernised version of the story.
Unlike Shamsie’s novel, where the myths of Oedipus and Antigone are never mentioned
but the themes of the Theban Cycle are replicated, Girl Meets Boy demonstrates a metatextual
awareness of the myth that is being adapted. For Genette, metatextuality ‘unites a given text to
another, of which it speaks without necessarily citing it (without summoning it), in fact
sometimes even without naming it’ (Genette 1997: 4). Metatextuality occurs in revised myths, as
outlined by Tekin in her analysis of Cherrie Moranga’s and Liz Lochhead’s drama. Tekin
expounds that ‘the postmodern understanding of the text [as intertextual and poststructuralist]
introduces an inevitable collaboration of intertextuality and self-referentiality, both of which are
embodied in [...] metatext’ (Tekin 2012: 42). When rewriting is considered, and mythic rewriting
in particular, the text is necessarily in dialogue with its earlier source and ‘[t]hus, any rewriting of
any text may be viewed as a metatext’ (Ibid., 42). ‘[S]he told me the story of Iphis’ (Smith 2007:
86): in Girl Meets Boy, Robin tells Anthea the myth, thus creating a metanarrative in which the
characters within the retelling are aware of the myth that they are mirroring. Moreover, they
utilise their metanarrative for activist purposes, as the characters become eco-activists who
graffiti Inverness with messages such as ‘IN NO COUNTRY IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW
ARE WOMEN’S WAGES EQUAL TO MEN’S WAGES’ (Ibid., 134), and sign them off with the
mantra ‘THIS MUST CHANGE. Iphis and Ianthe the message girls 2007’ or ‘the message boys’
(Ibid., 133-4). While The Song of Achilles can be considered a more straightforward adaptation,
because the novel draws upon a history of male same-sex desire, Smith’s adaptive choices speak
to the fluidity that is central to Girl Meets Boy (as it was central to Ovid’s Metamorphoses before

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it) — sexuality, gender, and the borders between narratives all blur to present a celebration of
gender fluidity and to highlight the activist potential of queering myths.
By rewriting the Ovidian myth as a lesbian and genderqueer narrative, Girl Meets Boy
queers myth and, as well as being a celebration of queerness, it also highlights the paucity of
lesbian myths. In the Metamorphoses, Iphis worries that ‘Cows never burn with desire for cows,
nor mares for mares;’ and ‘The female is never smitten with passionate love for a female.’ (Ovid,
9:731; 734) Evidently, Iphis here identifies as a female and feels same-sex desire for Ianthe,
establishing the Ovidian original as a lesbian myth. This interpretation has significance because,
while we established above that male same-sex desire is prevalent in ancient sources,
‘Homoerotic female desire is comparatively rarely represented in ancient literature, despite the
iconic status of the poet Sappho’ (Morales 2008: 49). While male homoerotic desire is present
both explicitly and through the subtext of closeness in ancient literature, the ‘ancient novels,
which promote female rivalry over female friendship, provide few representations that could be
judged part of a “lesbian continuum” (Ibid., 50). Morales refers to Adrienne Rich’s ‘Compulsory
Heterosexuality and Lesbian existence’, in which she employs the term ‘lesbian continuum’ to
include a range of woman-identified intimacies that are not limited to sexual experiences,
including the intimacy of ‘bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical
and political support;’ and wilful marriage resistance (Rich 1980: 648-9). Rich theorises that this
broadened scope of lesbianism allows us to ‘grasp breadths of female history and psychology
which have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of
“lesbianism.”’ (Ibid., 649). Since ancient sources focus more on female rivalry over intimacy
(with Sappho as the notable exception), it is difficult to locate the ‘lesbian continuum’ in ancient
literature. This is confirmed by Pomeroy, who expounds that ‘Other than the stories about the
Amazons, there are no [Greek] myths alluding to female homoerotic associations’ (Pomeroy
1977; 2015: 12). Ovid’s Iphis, then, who ‘burn[s] with desire’ for another woman, is particularly
noteworthy. Ovid portrays a same-sex marriage between women as impossible, because it is
outside of the bonds of societal demands, where laws enforced marriage, rewarded childbearing,
and promoted heterosexual family (Morford et al. 2011: 22). Lindheim also recognises this,
pointing to the social constructs of antiquity, in which the ‘res (“the social circumstances,”)
demand that marriage be heterosexual’ (2010: 186). Smith’s adaptation, on the other hand,

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reflects modern attitudes to lesbianism and therefore does not portray lesbianism as impossible.
In 2013, Kaye Mitchell read Smith’s Girl Meets Boy in terms of queer fiction. In this analysis,
Mitchell focuses on the lesbian interpretation of Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe, which is also reflected
in Smith’s novel. For Mitchell, Smith’s adaptation portrays ‘lesbian sex [as] “impossible” only in
the view of the obviously sexist and ignorant friends of Anthea’s sister’ (Mitchell 2013: 65).
Mitchell focuses on Smith’s lesbian narrative, in which she ‘seek[s] both to re-naturalise nature’
by reclaiming water from a massive corporation, ‘and to emphasise the naturalness of female
same-sex desire’ (Ibid., 65). The ‘lesbian continuum’ present in Ovid’s myth and Smith’s
reinterpretation (where lesbianism becomes a possible conclusion to the story of Iphis and
Ianthe, or Robin and Anthea) is a radical excavation of a myth that had fallen into obscurity and
that is rare in its portrayal of female same-sex desire.
In ‘Contemporary Meets Ancient, Queer Meets Myth, Girl Meets Boy’ (2019), I focused
on the genderqueer element of Iphis’ myth and its reinterpretation in the character Robin in Girl
Meets Boy. Robin is presented as gender nonconforming in the novel:

She had a girl’s toughness. She had a boy’s gentleness. She was as meaty as a girl. She
was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome and rough as a girl. She was as
pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy. (Smith 2007: 83-4)

Comparing Robin’s gender to a girl, then a boy, and back again, ‘creates almost a pendulum of
gender, where her identity swings back and forth steadily and fluidly’; additionally, ‘the gendered
attributes that she is given are opposite of the stereotypical attributes ascribed to the specific
genders’ (Judge 2019: 82). This subversion of stereotypes unsettles the entire concept of
gender-based assumptions and biological gender, by showing that gentleness, toughness,
handsomeness, and prettiness are not gender specific. The novel suggests that such temperaments
should be attributed to one’s personality, rather than assumed due to biological sex or gender.
This works to both demonstrate the fluidity of Robin’s gender and, more broadly, complicate the
concept of gender itself, as ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ are problematised. In addition, the choice to use
‘boy’ and ‘girl’ rather than ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘male’ and ‘female’, or ‘masculine’ and
‘feminine’, adds a further nuance of growth, suggesting that Robin is in a constant state of

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becoming her gender, and that gender identity is always changing, something that we are always
growing into (Ibid., 83).
In this article, I draw upon the work of Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, particularly their
theory of gender performativity, where they claim that ‘a performative twist of language and/or
discourse that conceals the fact that ‘“being” a sex or gender is fundamentally impossible’
(Butler 1990: 19). For Butler, the patriarchal constriction of language and discourse work to
“prove” there are indisputable markers of biology that cannot be altered — the ‘linguistic terms
that facilitate and articulate a set of fantasies’ (Ibid., 134), ‘fantasies’ here referring to the idea
that gender is something biological and binary. ‘Gender ought not to be construed as a stable
identity’ (Ibid., 191), which is definitely the case with Robin. She refuses the labels of man or
woman, girl or boy, or even transgender, genderqueer, or gender nonconforming, saying simply
‘The proper word for me, […] is me’ (Smith 2007: 77). Thus, Smith’s Girl Meets Boy presents a
genderqueer Robin as a reimagined Iphis, and her genderqueerness problematises binary
understandings of gender and reductive gender-based assumptions regarding personality.
Ranger (2019) expands on this genderqueer interpretation to argue for reading Smith’s
Girl Meets Boy as a queer translation of Ovid. Citing the radical translation praxes of Emily
Wilson, Josephine Balmer, Anne Carson, and others, Ranger makes the case for understanding
the last thirty years of classical translations as feminist/queer translations. A key feature of
feminist translation is the visibility of the translator/rewriter who self-reflexively situates herself
within the work, and these strategies have been repurposed for queer translation practices, ‘which
draws attention to the treatment of queer characters in a source text, or “hijacks” a text to
foreground issues of gender and sexuality’ (Ranger 2019: 234-5). Hence, ‘the cultural and
feminist turns of Translation Studies have reconceptualized the possibilities of translation,
expanding its generic and strategic boundaries, and redefining its processes, artefacts, and
gendered metaphorics’ (Ranger 2019: 233). Within this broader, queerer definition of translation,
Smith’s text can be understood as a translation of Ovid. Unlike classicists such as Miller and
Haynes, Smith works with translated editions of the classical texts, in this case Mary Innes’ and
Ted Hughes’ translations of the Metamorphoses (Ranger 2019: 232). Ranger proposes that
‘critical queer theory suggests itself as a methodology for the translation of “troublesome”
subjects in ancient texts — that is, subjects who resist binary categories of gender or sexuality’

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(Ibid., 232) and ultimately suggests that Smith’s queer text becomes a queer translation. Reading
Smith’s text as a translation rather than, or as well as, a retelling, however, has important
implications because, as Ranger argues, ‘a queer translation practice is an activist project’ which
combats homophobic discourse in Classics, Translation Studies, and contemporary culture
simultaneously, and ‘enables ancient queer bodies and identities to retain their multiplicities in
translation’ (Ranger 2019: 232; 251-3; 232). Smith’s text, then, does not only (re)queer Ovid’s
myth, but it also engages in the broader phenomenon of queering ancient texts in translation, thus
participating in the radical feminist/queer methodologies emerging in contemporary Classics.
This conceptualisation of Girl Meets Boy within the context of revolutionary translation
methodology recalls my ‘Literature Review’, where women’s translations were cited as
indicators of the debates in feminist Classics as a whole. In terms of this project, this argument
proves that feminist rewritings of myth are as much a part of the classical tradition as
translations, and such works indicate the increasing demand to not only hear women’s voices in
Classics, but reflect on how they can radically alter the legacy of conservatism in the discipline.
Moreover, a traditionally conservative discipline can be developed to speak to contemporary
activist goals.

Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles are two literary
exercises in queering myth and, in doing so, they reveal not only a method of reinstigating queer
history, but also how queering myth can be radically politicised. These are two instances of
authors actively queering myth, yet this is not to say that Greek myths, and Ancient Greeks
themselves, were not also queer, as extant Sapphic Fragments, vases, and mythic literature all
demonstrate. If the Ancient Greek source texts were already queer, and there has been a long
intervening history between antiquity and these most recent queer retellings, what makes these
most recent examples distinctive from their forerunners? B.J. Epstein proposes that ‘acqueering’
a text can include: adding in queer sexualities, sexual practises, or gender identities; changing
cis/het identities to queer ones; removing extant homophobia or transphobia in language or
stories, or, alternatively highlighting it to force the reader to confront it; or including editorial or
authorial paratexts, such as prefaces or footnotes, to discuss queerness and/or translatorial
choices (Epstein 2017: 121 in Ranger 2019: 235). This contemporary methodological

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understanding of ‘acqueering’, or actively queering, ancient source texts is central to what makes
these contemporary queer myths distinctive from their predecessors. This active practise of
excavating queer figures, removing longstanding homophobia, and intentionally choosing
language to highlight the queer in the myth is at the core of queer translation studies and, as we
have seen, central to contemporary queer mythmaking. Miller’s choice to retell the story of the
Iliad with a focus on Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship in The Song of Achilles and Smith’s
choice, from all of the Metamorphoses and beyond, to adapt one of the rare myths that portray
female homoerotic desire are examples of this deliberate effort to ‘acqueer’ the Classics.

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 Chapter 5: ‘I want to tell the story again’

Palimpsests: Paratexts and Intertexts

Mythic adaptations can be understood as palimpsests: a manuscript on which later writing has
been layered upon earlier writing. As Linda Hutcheon points out, ‘[to] deal with adaptations as
adaptations is to think of them as […] inherently “palimpsestuous” works, haunted at all times by
their adapted texts’ (2006: 6). In terms of mythic adaptations, the newer meanings inscribed by
contemporary authors are layered on top of the meanings ascribed to myth throughout history.
Sometimes these hauntings to which Hutcheon refers are literal (which is the case, as elucidated
below, in Margaret Atwood’s Penelope and Ursula Le Guin’s eponymous Lavinia), but more
often it refers to the fact that ‘When we call a work an adaptation, we openly announce its overt
relationship to another work or works’ (Ibid., 6). When working with adaptations one must of
course be aware of the earlier works being adapted, yet adaptation is also ‘a process of creation’
because it is not simply repeating the earlier work, it ‘involves both (re)interpretation and then
(re-)creation’ (Ibid., 8). Hence, ‘an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative – a work that
is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing’ (Ibid., 9). With contemporary
women’s adaptations of Greek myths, one can identify the layers of meaning throughout the
history of classical reception: from the original oral myths, to their first instances of being written
and preserved, to their replication via empire (such as in the case of Roman mythology), to their
long histories of loss, retrieval, translation, and adaptation for various purposes. This chapter
seeks to add a further layer of meaning to the palimpsest of mythic adaptation: the layer of para-
and intertextual awareness demonstrated by contemporary mythic adapters and its subsequent
presence in the texts themselves. The first task is to demonstrate that the authors within the scope
of this thesis have an active understanding of each other’s work, which will be demonstrated by
drawing upon paratextual sources – namely interviews, reviews, and theses – which confirm that
the authors have an awareness of the current literary momentum of the genre of feminist myth
writing. Thereafter, the chapter highlights in-text instances where this paratextual awareness
becomes intertextual — references within the novels to the work of the authors’ contemporaries,
to the novels that are also contributing to the present popularity of female authors adapting Greek

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myth. This has led to a phenomenon within this literature of women writing about their current
literary circumstance within the novel itself or, more specifically, women writing about women
writing about myths. I argue that feminist adaptations of myth must be understood as
palimpsestuous, and will consider the potential implications of this understanding.

The term “paratext” was coined by Gérard Genette in his text Palimpsestes, and further
theorised in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. For Genette, ‘text rarely appears in its naked
state, without the reinforcement and accompaniment of a certain number of productions’ (1991:
261). Genette refers to the paratext as ‘a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a
privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that
[…] is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it’ (Genette
1997: 5; in Ratner 2018: 734). Genette’s peritexts (paratexts that are embedded in the same
volume as the text body; as opposed to epitexts, that occur firstly outside the volume) occupy two
categories: those controlled by the publisher and those controlled by the author. The former
typically includes a spine title, title page, copyright notice, advertisements for other titles from
the publisher; the latter, ‘authorially driven peritexts’, include epigraphs, dedications, and
footnotes (Ratner 2018: 734). These two categories, however, are indistinct: some of this
extra-textual content – such as copyright notices, advertisements, and reviews from “relevant”
authors – can be influenced by the author, despite traditionally being controlled by the
publishers; similarly, publishers can guide authorial peritexts.
An example relevant to this thesis of peritextual content that could equally be influenced by
the publishers and/or by the authors themselves is the use of quotations on the covers of the
novels, which combine to create the illusion of an immediate ‘literary ecosystem’ (Ibid., 733).
On the cover of Miller’s The Song of Achilles, for example, there is a quotation from Bettany
Hughes, classicist and author of the polemical Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore (2005),
describing Miller’s novel as ‘Sexy, dangerous, mystical’ (Hughes in Miller 2011: np). Similarly,
Atwood’s The Penelopiad has on its back cover a quotation from the prominent classicist Mary
Beard:34 ‘Atwood takes Penelope’s part with tremendous verve… she explores the very nature of
mythic story-telling’ (Beard in Atwood 2005: np.). By including reviews from popular classicists

34
Beard has amassed a large, if controversial, social media presence which has increased her platform, despite
significant instances of racism, rape apologism, classism, and transphobia (see Ramaswamy 2018; Bisset 2021).

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with high media profiles on the covers of these novels, the publishers – Bloomsbury and
Canongate, respectively – are implicitly making the case for the esteemed value of these novels
in the field of Classics. The connection between Atwood’s novel and Miller’s is further
accentuated by a quotation on the inside cover of The Song of Achilles, where a reviewer ‘hope[s]
The Song of Achilles becomes part of the high school summer reading list alongside Penelopiad’
(Simonson in Miller 2011: np). Similarly, Emily Wilson reviewed Shamsie’s Home Fire, a
quotation from which is included inside the cover of the novel: ‘In fictional responses to the
Classics, I very much enjoyed and admired Home Fire […] a politically and psychologically
acute novel modelled on Sophocles’s Antigone’ (Wilson in Shamsie 2017: np.). Wilson’s work
translating Sophoclean drama, particularly Antigone, makes this review singularly relevant,
because it proves the connection between these literary adaptations and Classics as a discipline.
In turn, quotations from Mary Beard and classicist, radio presenter, and novelist Natalie Haynes
are included on the ‘Praise’ page in Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey (Wilson 2017:
np.). Quotations from Ali Smith are included on the cover and inside pages of Shamsie’s Home
Fire; on the cover of Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, there is a quotation from Jeanette Winterson. Salley
Vickers’ Where Three Roads Meet and A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok – both within the Canongate Myth
Series – sport cover quotations from Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin’s novel Lavinia was not published
within the Canongate series but it was released soon after the books of her contemporaries
Atwood, Winterson, and Byatt, to whose works Le Guin’s is often compared. 35 Quotations from
Miller – an adapter of Greek myth whose prominence has increased since she won the Women’s
Prize for Fiction – are featured on the covers of Natalie Haynes’ The Children of Jocasta
(‘Passionate and gripping’ [Miller in Haynes 2017: np.]) and A Thousand Ships (‘Haynes gives
much-needed voice to the silenced women of the Trojan War’ [Miller in Haynes 2019: np]).
Miller is cited on the latter as ‘Madeline Miller, author of Circe’ (Ibid., np.), thus making this
connection between the novels within the same field even more explicit. The authors’ praise is
used by the publishers to endorse the work and lend authority to each new adaptation, by placing
it within the same context as other more established mythic adapters and classicists. These

35
See Atwood 2011: np; Atwood 2018: np.; Atwood & Le Guin 2010: np; Winterson 2004: np; Le Guin 2007: np;
Haven 2017: np; &c.

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quotations, then, demonstrate a concerted effort by the publishers to create connections between
these authors’ works.
These constructed connections indicate a paratextual network, where quotations from authors
of related literature are used to create ‘A system much larger than a single book […] that attempt
to guide reader response’ (Ratner 2018: 736). The inclusion of such quotations on the covers of
these texts, then, ‘play simultaneously a role integral to the book and one that connects them to
the larger marketplace in which that book circulates’ (Ibid., 736). Ratner argues that such a
paratextual network should be understood within ‘the broader ecological term symbiosis [which]
offers a more useful frame because it acknowledges that texts and their paratexts interact in
sometimes parasitic and sometimes mutualistic ways’ (Ibid., 735). For Ratner, paratexts can be
‘parasitic’ because they can affect the readers’ experiences of the text in a way that is completely
separate to the main body of the text itself. The network creates a cultural and economic pressure
on the reader to consume all within this ‘larger marketplace’; a reader cannot read the works of
Natalie Haynes, for example, without also purchasing the works of Madeline Miller; or, that one
cannot appreciate Shamsie’s adaptation of Antigone without having read Sophocles’ drama and,
particularly, Emily Wilson’s translation of it. These paratexts can symbiotically be ‘mutualistic’
too, which is also the case with this constructed peritextual network: such quotations by
overlapping authors create the illusion of an active authorial network within the genre of
contemporary feminist adaptations of Greek myth.
When dealing with paratextual content, Genette makes it clear that both the ‘author and the
publisher […] are responsible for the text and for the paratext’ (1991: 266). A key example of the
editorial paratexts within this thesis is Canongate’s editorial contributions for the publication of
The Myths series. The idea to commission the series was Jamie Byng’s, Canongate’s Managing
Director, following the success of The Pocket Canons series in which popular contemporary
thinkers and celebrities introduce sections of the Bible (MacMillan 2019: 64). The Pocket
Canons series was spearheaded by a design agency, Pentagram, which as MacMillan argues in
her thesis on feminist rewriting in the Canongate Myth Series ‘points to the continuing aesthetic
value of ancient stories. Indeed, what the mission statement further stressed was the
“contemporary” nature of the intended audience’ (Ibid., 64). This lay the groundwork for Byng’s
subsequent project, by again using ‘recognised authors as both a marketing technique and a

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channel through which to make ancient narratives that might be perceived as outdated seem
current and important’ (Ibid., 65). In an interview, Byng opined that ‘writers have been doing this
[rewriting myths] for centuries but as a publishing idea I felt it had real potential’ (Byatt 2006:
np); for MacMillan, Byng’s comments point to ‘the inextricable connection between the project
as an artistic undertaking and a marketing campaign’ (MacMillan 2019: 65). With regard to the
editorial paratextual network, each of the novels are prefaced with the same note from the
publishers,36 which works both to unify the works under the umbrella of the series and market the
other novels within the peritext of the individual book itself. Moreover, many of the books
include endmatter advertisements for other stories within the series, and general praise for the
series itself (Atwood 2005: np.; Winterson 2005: np; &c.). Byng’s interview acts as an editorial
epitext – paratextual content from the publishers that occurs outside of the text – and the
endmatter advertisements for other books within the same publishing event are editorial peritexts
–– paratextual content from the publishers within the physical confines of the text itself (Genette
1991: 262-4). Genette provides the formula ‘paratext = peritext + epitext’ to illustrate that the
peritext and the epitext together create the paratextual field (Ibid., 264). Editorially, the paratexts
of the Canongate Myth Series includes peritextual and epitextual elements that operate for
primarily promotional purposes.
As mentioned above, the authorial paratext plays a collaborative role with the editorial
paratext, and these paratexts are often epitextual. If authorial peritexts include footnotes and
epigraphs, and publishing epitexts can include anything from advertisement to prospectuses
(Ratner 2018: 734), the examples given by Genette of ‘the authorial epitext [include] interviews,
conversations and confidences’ (1991: 267). In an interview with Boyd Tonkin, Margaret
Atwood recalled that ‘Byng, like a sprite out of some Border ballad, “leapt out from behind a
gorse bush and talked me into it”’ (Tonkin 2012: np.). Atwood’s interview does much the same
thing authorially as Byng’s did editorially, which is to advertise the series as a publishing event
led by Canongate, that boasts the work of ‘the world’s greatest contemporary writers’
(Canongate Online 2020: np). Atwood shared that she had ‘two false starts on other legendary

36
‘Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our
longings and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human. The Myths series brings together some of
the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the
series include: […]’ (Vickers 2007: np; &c.)

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yarns [… then] out of my unconscious […] there appeared in particular the hanged maids, who
have always bothered me about the Odyssey’ (Tonkin 2005: np.). This comment speaks
intriguingly to The Penelopiad, where Penelope describes her narrative as ‘spin[ning] a thread of
my own’ (Atwood 2005: 4) and, in the preface, Atwood relates that she has ‘always been haunted
by the hanged maids; and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself’ (Ibid., xxi). In the
interview, then, Atwood echoes the opening to her novel, which shows that this paratext is in
direct conversation with the text itself; this connection is a palimpsestic one, as Atwood’s
paratexts contextualise the text, adding a layer of meaning to her words. Similarly, on her
website, Winterson highlights the publishing event of the Canongate Myth Series – ‘Publishers
sometimes have great ideas. Jamie Byng, the passionate impresario behind Canongate, called me
to tell me about his Myth series. […] Pick a myth. Any myth.’ (Winterson 2006: np) – and
echoes the text itself in her paratextual content: ‘mine would be the story of Atlas and Hercules
because I have an Atlas Complex’ (Ibid., np.). Again, in an interview with Suzi Feay, Salley
Vickers is described as ‘the latest author to take up the invitation from Canongate publishers’ and
Vickers opines that ‘Oedipus is a central myth for psychoanalysts […] Freud’s not read it
correctly!’ (Feay 2007: np.), which is the central thesis of Where Three Roads Meet. These are
three instances wherein the authorial epitexts – in the form of interviews – frame the texts
themselves, as well as demonstrate the same goal as the editorial epitextual interview above,
which is to market the Canongate Myth Series as an innovative publishing event. Further to this,
these authorial epitexts demonstrate the palimpsestuous nature of contemporary mythic
adaptation, because the author is able to add layers of commentary to their texts, enabled by
online content.
Authorial interviews that speak tellingly to the texts also occur outside of the Canongate
Myth series. For instance, in an interview with Kira Cochrane, Miller shares her motivation
behind the narrator of The Song of Achilles: ‘Patroclus doesn't appear very much in The Iliad.
He's elusive. A mystery, really. And so I wanted to explore the question: who is this man who
means so much to Achilles?’ (Cochrane 2012: np.). Miller’s decision to retell Achilles’ story
particularly from Patroclus’ perspective is a source of interest to scholars (see McKenna 2015:
92) predominantly because, as Miller notes, he is a far more elusive figure in the Iliad than his
lover. In this interview, then, Miller addresses a question of significant interest to the readership

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of the novel, demonstrating how authorial epitext can contribute meaningfully to the ‘literary
ecosystem’ surrounding a text. Moreover, Miller’s epitextual interviews provide a useful insight
for this thesis more broadly, such as in her interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy for Channel 4’s
‘Ways to Change the World’ series. In this interview, Miller answers ‘Yes! […] Absolutely!’
when asked if she intended Circe to be considered feminist literature, and that ‘partially I wrote
The Song of Achilles because I was incredibly frustrated that the interpretation of them as lovers
had been closeted in recent years’ (Guru-Murthy 2019: 8:17; 33:40). Miller summarises the
classical debates surrounding Achilles and Patroclus — that we will never know what Homer
intended, or even if Homer was a person (though she declines to further weigh in on the Homeric
Debate), but that we do know that ‘some ancient authors absolutely read the Iliad […] as a love
story […] with Achilles and Patroclus at the centre. Plato takes them as ideal lovers’ (Ibid.,
33:15).37 She also opines that retellings are ‘exactly in-line with Homer’ and the classical
tradition, since ‘these stories belong to everybody and everyone was tinkering with them and
retelling them’, and that she is grateful to Rick Riordan (the author of the Percy Jackson series)
for making mythology accessible to YA readers (Ibid., 34:05). Miller also cites Emily Wilson as
a scholar whose work operates in ‘really interesting and exciting ways’, and highlights Wilson’s
choice to translate what was previously the twelve hanged maids as ‘slaves’ instead, to signal
their absolute lack of agency, making it all the more unjust when ‘Odysseus – theoretically the
hero – kills them anyway’ (Ibid., 36:00). Evidently, authorial epitexts – in this case, specifically
interviews – add an extra layer to the palimpsestuous network of contemporary women writers’
adaptations of Greek myths. Moreover, epitexts illuminate how the authors consciously engage
with the same central questions as those throughout this thesis, specifically regarding adaptation,
reception, and feminism.
If interviews are an accepted mode of authorial epitexts, thus contributing to the paratextual
literary network that is being established within this chapter, then reviews and theses must – by
the same logic, and where relevant – also count as authorial paratext. Throughout this thesis, I
have drawn upon Natalie Haynes’ reviews for the Guardian newspaper, such as her review of
Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017)38 and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2011).39
37
See Chapter 4: ‘Queering Myth’ for further detail on this debate.
38
See Chapter 2: ‘Antigone’s Afterlives’
39
See Chapter 4: ‘Queering Myth’

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Haynes also uses this paratextual platform to review some of the most significant, emergent,
popular non-fiction from the field of Classics, such as Mary Beard’s SPQR and Edith Hall’s
Introducing the Ancient Greeks. For the latter, Haynes writes that ‘She is especially good on the
nuance that thrives in every corner of the Greek world. […] Hall’s passion for the Greeks is
never uncritical’ (Haynes 2015: np.). She also draws a parallel between Hall’s text and
contemporary politics, particularly the Trojan Horse affair where there was an alleged conspiracy
to introduce ‘Islamist’ ethos into several schools in Birmingham, but the conspiracy was a hoax
spread by the media (see O’Toole 2017). During this scandal, senior Conservative politician
Michael Gove announced that schools should teach ‘British values’ such as democracy, which
she describes as ‘a gratifying moment for those of us who spend much of our time pointing out
that we would be nothing without the ancient Greeks’ (Haynes 2015: np.). Haynes then uses this
as a springboard to justify the continued need for classical education. She also reviews dramatic
productions, such as Simon Stone’s production of Medea and Juliette Binoche’s production of
Antigone (Haynes 2019: np.; Haynes 2015c: np.), as well as reviews of new translations, such as
Clare Pollard’s translation of Ovid’s Heroides and AM Juster’s accessible – ‘terrifically easy to
read’ – translation of Tibillus’ Elegies (Haynes 2013: np.; Haynes 2012: np.).
Moreover, Haynes uses her platform as a Guardian contributor to engage in key debates
occurring in Classics scholarship. For instance, in her piece ‘Helen of Troy: the Greek epics are
not just about war, they’re about women’, she opines that ‘women are part of every aspect of the
Trojan war, from its causes to its terrible consequences’ (Haynes 2019b: np.). Although the
famed opening line of the Iliad suggests that it is about one man, the epic poem actually provides
‘countless examples of what it means to be a man: absolutist like Achilles, cunning like
Odysseus, weak like Agamemnon, protective like Hector, wise like Nestor, bereaved like Priam’
(Ibid., np.). Yet, ‘Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles’(Homer, trans. Fagles
1.1) also alludes to a woman, to the goddess that tells the story via Homer: ‘He doesn’t name her,
but she is presumably Calliope, the muse of epic poetry’ (Haynes 2019b: np.). Haynes’
presumption exposes one of the sidelined women of the Iliad – the muse that creates it – and
alludes to her heteroglossic novelisation of the Trojan War, A Thousand Ships. Haynes describes
Calliope as ‘hiding in plain sight’ (Ibid., np.), which is akin to the muse’s portrayal in Haynes’
novel. Calliope’s narrative is interspersed throughout the novel, as she provides the poet with the

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stories of the women of the Trojan War — the stories that we are reading in the novel. The novel
opens with her perspective:

Sing, Muse, he says, and the edge in his voice makes it clear that this is not a request.
If I were minded to accede to his wish, I might say that he sharpens his tone on my
name, like a warrior drawing his dagger across a whetstone, preparing for the
morning’s battle. But I am not in the mood to be a muse today. Perhaps he hasn’t
thought of what it is like to be me. (Haynes 2019: 1)

Calliope is ‘hiding in plain sight’ behind the poet who is the implied author of the text. Haynes’
novel begins in the same way as Homer’s epic poem, with the poet demanding the Muse’s labour.
Haynes’ Calliope, however, differs from Homer’s: for one, she is named; additionally, she is a far
less obliging Muse than she is in the Iliad. Homer’s epic poem is a testament to her
accommodating his demand to sing of the wrath of Achilles, whereas the Calliope of A Thousand
Ships is glib and unaccommodating. Moreover, she narrates that ‘It’s all I can do not to laugh’
(Ibid., 40), mocking the poet for his frustrated disappointment as he impotently fails to compose
literature without her.
For Haynes – in her novel, as in her review – the muse that is credited with the singing of
the Trojan War is truly integral because without her the stories cannot be told. Even when
Haynes’ Muse concedes to sing for the poet, she continues to be disobliging, since she chooses to
share the women’s accounts instead of the male heroes’ stories that the poet was seeking. While
the poet wonders ‘How does his poem keep going wrong?’, Calliope tells us that ‘he hasn’t
understood at all. I’m not offering him the story of one woman during the Trojan War, I’m
offering him the story of all the women in the war’ (Ibid., 40). Calliope’s characterisation in A
Thousand Ships forms a critique of the longstanding literary tradition of the muse as a loved
object, silent and passive, to amplify the male artist’s activity and genius, which reinforces
gender based stereotypes: man creates, woman inspires; man is the maker, woman is the vehicle
of male fantasy (see Murray 2008: 328-9). In Haynes’ article, the Iliad provides ‘countless
examples of what it means to be a man’ courtesy of Calliope, where now she is providing
countless examples of what it means to be a woman within the same mythical context. Evidently,

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authorial paratextual platforms – in this case, Natalie Haynes’ online news column 40 – is in
direct dialogue with her creative prose.
Research theses can also be considered authorial epitexts. Emily Hauser’s doctoral thesis
‘Since Sappho: Women in Classical Literature and Contemporary Women's Writing in English’
(New Haven: Yale 2017) is of particular importance to this research. Hauser pursues many of the
same directions of inquiry raised within this thesis, particularly concerning women writers who
are creating space for themselves in the western canon by ‘reworking “old tales” — and in
particular, tales of the women of the ancient world […] to give them more agency — to give
“silenced women” a “voice”’ (Hauser 2017: 3-4). In analysing the women of classical literature
in their twenty-first century receptions, Hauser draws upon the scholarship of Carolyn Heilbrun
who asserts that ‘We cannot yet make wholly new fictions; we can only transform old tales’
(Heilbrun 1990: 104; in Hauser 2017: 3). Though identifiable with the aims of this thesis,
Hauser’s research differs from mine. There are notable differences in methodology (she
approaches this research as a trained classicist, while I come from an academic background in
literature and Women’s Studies), as well as scope. In her 2017 thesis, she works with texts that
predate the scope of this research, such as Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles (2001) and Erica Jong’s
Sappho’s Leap (2003), while this thesis includes novels that have been published as recently as
2021.
Most pertinent to this research is Hauser’s comparison between the Penelope of Homer’s
Odyssey and her reimagining in Atwood’s The Penelopiad as well as the Lavinia of Virgil’s
Aeneid and her subsequent interpretation in Ursula Le Guin’s novel Lavinia. Hauser argues that
Lavinia is a personification of literature itself, which is a symptom of women being appropriated
into the abstract throughout literary history, and she makes an interesting case for Aeneas’ three
wives – Creusa, Dido, and Lavinia – each resonating with a particular literary tradition: Homeric
epic, tragedy/elegy, and Virgilian epic, respectively (Ibid., 211-214). With Penelope, Hauser
analyses the manipulation of narrative structure in the Homeric epic, with particular reference to
Book 19, arguing that she ‘can be seen as enshrining the process of the transformation of oral
narrative to written plot’ (Ibid., 105) which, in turn, motivates her analysis of Penelope’s
40
Natalie Haynes also has a BBC Radio 4 series called Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. This speaks to
Haynes’ paratextual presence as an expert in Classics and a vocal advocate for bringing antiquity to a modern
audience, which is then reflected in her literature, as is demonstrated throughout this chapter.

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narrative in The Penelopiad. Hauser contends that Atwood’s Penelope is, of course, ‘written in
the knowledge of the textual ending of the Odyssey’ and, further to this, she asks ‘How does
Atwood’s Penelope differ when she knows the ending of her story, and when she is the creator
and narrator of her tale?’ (Ibid., 105). In The Penelopiad, Penelope narrates beyond her ending in
the Odyssey: to expand on this point, in more recent feminist reconfigurations of her – Madeline
Miller’s Circe and Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships – she is also written in the knowledge of
her textual afterlife in Atwood’s text. Overall, as well as working in conversation with the
questions of this thesis, Emily Hauser submitting a doctoral thesis that focuses in large part on
Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia substantiates the concept of
the ‘literary ecosystem’ that this chapter seeks to demonstrate.
Evidently, there is a network of paratextual content in the genre of contemporary feminist
adaptations of myth, that is comprised of both peritextual (within the same physical volume as
the text itself) and epitextual (external to the volume) paratexts. This chapter has thus far worked
to prove that the authors and publishers of contemporary feminist revisionist mythology have an
awareness of the genre beyond their own contribution. Further to this I want to ask what the
textual implications of this extra-textual content are. How, in each case, is the author’s
cognisance of the broader context of their work – their awareness of this current literary moment,
of the vogue of women rewriting myths – present in their writing? This chapter will now
examine instances in which the studied texts make intertextual references to other works within
this corpus. Firstly, however, I will briefly outline how I shall be using the term intertextuality for
the purposes of this chapter.
French poststructuralist feminist Julia Kristeva argued that a text is ‘a permutation of texts, an
intertextuality in the space of a given text’ wherein ‘several utterances, taken from other texts,
intersect and neutralize one another’ (Kristeva 1980: 36; in Allen 2000: 35). Moreover, texts are
made from ‘the cultural (or social) text’ — all of the different discourses, language constructions,
and social and institutional structures that make up culture, meaning that texts are not isolated
objects, but ‘a compilation of cultural textuality’ (Allen 2000: 35). Intertextuality is based on the
understanding that a text is not a fixed, stable, and singular object, but a manifestation of the
social and relational basis of all language and signification. More pertinent to the aims of this
thesis are the gynocritical theories built upon Kristeva’s model of intertextuality. Gynocriticism is

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a formative part of feminist literary theory and criticism, and it is a term first used by Elaine
Showalter in the 1970s to describe a new literary project that sought to construct a female
framework for analysing women’s literature. Showalter defines gynocriticism as ‘the feminist
study of women’s writing, including readings of women’s texts and analyses of the intertextual
relations both between women writers (a female literary tradition) and between women and men’
(Showalter 1990: 189; in Allen 2000: 141). Showalter creates an image of a network that
connects women’s writing across time periods and national divisions; hence, gynocriticism
depends, at least in part, on the intertextual relations between women writers. Therefore, the
paratextual network sketched out above is not only a ‘literary ecosystem’, but a gynocentric
literary network. This network works to establish – before even entering the content of the novels
– a ‘female literary tradition’; more specifically, the most contemporary contributions to the
literary tradition of feminist myth-making. Thus, when analysing intertextuality in contemporary
feminist adaptations of Greek myth, I will be operating within the theoretical framework of
gynocritical intertextuality.
This ‘literary ecosystem’ or ‘female literary tradition’ that exists in the paratexts also presents
itself within the texts, as intertextual references or allusions to other works within the genre. The
exploration of intertextual references within the literature works to demonstrate how the
extra-textual awareness by authors and publishers of the current vogue for feminist myth-making
are also present within the texts themselves. The authorial and editorial palimpsestuous network
is contributed to in the consideration of intertextuality. In Hutcheon’s model, adaptations are
‘haunted at all times by their adapted texts’ (2006: 6), and a further haunting is present in the
intertextualities exhibited in the texts. These intertexts are present both within a single author’s
body of work and without, that is to say that the authors make reference both to their own works
and to the works of other authors within the genre.
The former is most prevalent in the work of Madeline Miller who, in her 2018 novel Circe
makes reference to her 2011 novel The Song of Achilles. Odysseus tells Circe about the Trojan
War and its most famous figures, including Achilles and Patroclus: ‘The best part of him died,
[…] His lover Patroclus. He didn’t like me much, but then the good ones never do’ (Miller 2018:
185). This quotation demonstrates that Miller maintains her interpretation in The Song of Achilles
and Circe of Achilles and Patroclus as lovers; moreover, it demonstrates that the Odysseus

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portrayed in Circe is the same Odysseus portrayed in The Song of Achilles. Circe’s Odysseus
who states that Patroclus did not like him is in-line with Patroclus’ narration in The Song of
Achilles, where he tells Achilles ‘I do not trust them’ and notes that ‘The stories named
[Odysseus] polutropos,41 the man of many turnings.’ (Miller 2011: 171; 155) – the Odysseus of
Circe comments on the mistrust Patroclus showed in The Song of Achilles. Why would Miller
make this intertextual reference to her earlier novel? The reference confirms The Song of Achilles
as a retelling of the Iliad and Circe as a retelling of the Odyssey: in the same way that Odysseus
features in the Iliad and takes centre stage in the Odyssey, Odysseus features in The Song of
Achilles and has a more central role in Circe. Odysseus is not, however, the central figure of
Circe – that role is of course Circe’s. In the same way that Circe only features in Odysseus’
narrative in the Odyssey, Odysseus only features in Circe’s narrative: Circe traces ‘Circe’s
journey, as she labours to learn witchcraft, turning lions into pets and men into pigs, and weaves
a rich tapestry of life — of which, Odysseus is only one part.’ (Judge 2020: np.). Hence, one way
that intertextuality can be used is within a single author’s body of work, to create sequential epics
in the same manner as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
Intertextuality also occurs externally, which is to say when one author refers to the works of
other authors within the corpus of contemporary women’s adaptations of Greek myth. Analysing
the connections between the novels in terms of intertextuality is essential for establishing the
phenomenon of contemporary feminist myth writing as a female literary tradition. A key
example of this occurs within Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, where the epistolary interludes
from Penelope to Odysseus echo the voice of Atwood’s Penelope in The Penelopiad.42 Haynes’
Penelope loses patience for Odysseus’ return: her first letter begins ‘My dearest husband,’ and
ends ‘Your loving wife,’ and she assures him that ‘I don’t blame you,’ (Haynes 2019: 57; 57; 60);
by contrast, her final letter is addressed curtly to ‘Odysseus,’, it is signed ‘Your wife/widow,’ and
opens with the terse statement ‘It seems almost superfluous to mention that my patience is
stretched like the thinnest thread’ (Ibid., 253; 261; 253). This impatient Penelope owes a debt to
the Ovidian model, who epistles ‘Penelope to the tardy Ulysses: / do not answer these lines, but
come,’ and she describes him as ‘loiter[ing] in some foreign place’ – a far less heroic, and more

41
Emily Wilson chooses to translate Polutropos as ‘complicated’ in her translation of the Odyssey.
42
For more detailed analysis, see chapter 'Women in the Texts'

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impatient, portrayal of his odyssey (Ovid, trans. Isbel, 1.1-2;1.71). Penelope’s most famous act in
the Odyssey, ‘By day I wove the web, / and in the night by torchlight, I unwove it’ (Homer, trans.
Wilson 19.148-9) becomes a recurrent motif of weaving in The Penelopiad, and Haynes’
Penelope also uses weaving imagery – ‘thread’ – to illustrate her emotions and thoughts.
Atwood’s Penelope declares ‘Finally, a scheme occurred to me’ (Atwood, 2005: 112) in
reference to her un-weaving plot and she recognises Odysseus through his disguise immediately,
demonstrating that she is at least equal to Odysseus in scheming. Similarly, Haynes’ Penelope
recounts conversations with Telemachus: ‘Cleverer than you, Mama? he says. No, precious, I tell
him. Not quite as clever as me’ (Haynes 2019: 59). Haynes’ Penelope, like Atwood’s, critiques
Odysseus’ proudest schemes, proving that her intellect is at least equal to her famously tricksy
husband. Penelope’s final letter in A Thousand Ships (which is addressed to Athene) laments that
‘My name is a byword for patience and loyalty,’ (Ibid., 314), which echoes Penelope’s regret in
Atwood’s text that her myth has become ‘A stick used to beat other women with’ (Atwood 2005:
2). Equally, in Madeline Miller’s Circe, Penelope is called ‘the spider in her web’ (Miller 2018:
281), which both utilises the weaving imagery and presents her as an equal schemer to Odysseus.
Circe narrates that ‘Loyal, songs called her later. Faithful and true and prudent. Such passive,
pale words for what she was’ (Ibid., 292), which also elucidates the argument that Penelope’s
myth has become a reductive story of obedient wifehood rather than one of domestic scheming.
Haynes’ adaptation of Penelope, then, contributes to the emerging tropes in adaptations of
Penelope, as revealed in the similarities between Haynes’ Penelope and earlier adaptations; these
similarities are intertextual references to earlier adaptations of the same mythical figure,
demonstrating how paratextual awareness becomes intertextual allusion.
Another example of external intertextuality within the corpus of contemporary feminist myth
writing is Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, which can be read as a paraquel to Madeline Miller’s Circe.
Drawing on Margaret Atwood’s definition in ‘Dire Cartographies’ (2011: 66-96), paraquels are
stories that cover the same period of time (unlike prequels, that precede a story’s events, or
sequels that follow on), which typically depict the same events from a different perspective.
Before considering the content, there is evidence to support this paraquelic interpretation in the
titles and front covers of the novels. The title Ariadne mirrors Circe, because both novels are
named after the protagonist, a previously sidelined woman of a heroic epic. Though Circe is the

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sole autodiegetic narrator of her novel (while Miller’s other novel, The Song of Achilles, features
Patroclus as a homodiegetic narrator), Ariadne shares the narrative with her sister Phaedra.
Notably, the novel is not called Ariadne and Phaedra, because this would not create the same
link within the literary ecosystem to Circe. Equally, the hardback cover of Ariadne is dark blue,
with gold decals, recalling the iconic black and gold aesthetic of Circe’s cover. Hence, the title
and editorial paratext of Ariadne gestures towards Circe, instantly implying a connection
between the novels.
In terms of mythic lineage, Circe is Ariadne’s aunt, and they share a relation to Helios, who is
Circe’s father and Ariadne’s grandfather. Hence, the novels are paraquels in that they follow
members of the same family, and they both cover some of the same myths. In Miller’s novel,
their myths intersect when Circe assists in the birth of the Minotaur: during her trip to Knossos,
she meets a young Ariadne and an enslaved Daedalus. The motif of Ariadne dancing and being
cautioned against happiness lest she invite a god’s wrath are central to Ariadne, but they are
foreshadowed in Miller’s novel, where ‘Ariadne’s light feet crossed and recrossed the circle. [...]
I wanted to say, do not be too happy. It will bring down fire on your head. / I said nothing, and let
her dance.’ (Miller 2018: 118). In making the adaptive choice to include the same traits in her
characterisation of Ariadne, Saint’s novel inextricably recalls its award-winning predecessor.
This paraquelic recollection has the dual effects of reminding the reader that mythic adaptations
are drawing upon the same extended universe of gods, mortals, and monsters, as well as aiding in
the construction of this literary ecosystem of women’s revisionist myth writing.
On the other hand, Circe and Ariadne interpret Pasiphaë differently, in much the same way
that Helen, Ismene, Achilles, and other mythical figures are characterised differently in each
retelling. In Circe, Pasiphaë is a cruel sister, and unrepentant for her sacrilegious bestiality
‘Bitch, [...] I fucked the sacred bull, all right?’ (Ibid., 109), which contrasts to her more
sympathetic portrayal in Ariadne, where she is described as ‘a fragile sunbeam. The furnace of
pain’ (Saint 2021: 18). Though the characterisation of Pasiphaë is different, this quotation from
Ariadne illustrates another way in which the novel is a paraquel to Circe, because the poetic
language and deliberate word choice that invokes the sun (therefore providing a reminder of the
characters’ Titanic heritage) is a replication of the same linguistic methods deployed in Miller’s
novel. This speaks to the generative potential of mythic adaptations, as the same figure is adapted

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in completely opposite ways, yet the novels deal with the same myths, and can therefore be
considered paraquelic. In the context of palimpsests, the intertextuality – both within an author’s
body of work and without – contributes additional layers of meaning to the female literary
tradition of adapting myth. The intertextuality that is prevalent across contemporary feminist
myth writing serves as evidence of the autographic and allographic awareness of the current
momentum for the genre.
When considering the authors’ extra- and intertextual awareness of this literary
phenomenon, it is important to note that women’s writing has always been concerned with
reflexivity, as well as writing about the process, phenomenon, and politics of women writing.
This can be traced back to the foremother of feminist writing, Mary Wollstonecraft, who called
to ‘Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience’
(1792; 2014: 50) in her famous treatise for women’s education, The Vindication of the Rights of
Women. Later, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously claimed that ‘a woman must
have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (1929: 3). In reference to female
literary tradition, Woolf pointed out that ‘a woman writing thinks back through her mothers’
(Ibid., 70), which feminist literary critic Mary Jacobus analyses as a matter of rewriting. The
(re)discovery of female literary tradition, she claims, is not confined to strictly writing about
“female domains”, but involves ‘a recognition that all attempts to inscribe female difference
within writing are a matter of inscribing women within fiction’ (Jacobus 1979; 2012: 21). It is
this, concludes Jacobus, that is ‘at stake for both women writing and writing about women’
(Ibid., 21). Women writers are inheriting and revising the language of their mothers, and
therefore are – at least in part – writing about women’s writing. Feminist revisionist myth
writing, then, is a specific instance where women are inscribing themselves within literature,
thinking back through mythic mothers in their writing. This chapter will hereafter focus on the
authors within this study and the instances where they have written about women’s writing and,
more specifically, written about women adapting myth in their writing. One concept that recurs is
that of female mythical figures “writing back” against their limited portrayal in classical
literature, in their newfound voices in these contemporary novels. There are many instances of
mythical women interrogating and escaping their ancient, oppressive, limited portrayals in their
own voices, in contemporary novels, which shall be outlined and analysed below.

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 Alluding to Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, Elaine Showalter argues that the ‘anxieties
of female authorship’ stem from the female author’s belief that the male dominance of the textual
field suggests that she should not be writing at all (Showalter 1977; in Richards 2019: 126). The
anxiety of female authorship is further analysed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The
Madwoman in the Attic, where they ask ‘What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture
whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are […] both overtly and covertly
patriarchal?’ (Gilbert & Gubar 2000: 45-6). Gilbert and Gubar’s theory of the anxieties of female
authorship exposes the androcentric bias of the western canon (Ibid., 48). Though ‘the female
poet does not experience the “anxiety of influence” in the same way that her male counterpart
would,’ the female author’s anxiety lies instead in the confrontation of male persecutors in the
literary field (Ibid., 48). For Gilbert and Gubar, women’s writing is palimpsestic because it
contains decodable subtexts that explore the difficulties of writing in an androcentric field (Ibid.,
xxiii) and their authorship is a ‘revisionary struggle’ (Ibid., 49) because women have to revise the
limited portrayal of their gender in male-written literature throughout history. Thus, in feminist
revisionist myth writing, as the female mythical figure anxiously tries out her voice for the first
time, she echoes the anxiety of the female author, writing in fields (Literature and Classics) that
are traditionally dominated by privileged white men. The texts studied here, therefore, constitute
literary afterlives for mythical female figures afforded by modern women writers. Tellingly, in
Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, the literal afterlife is used,
portraying their female protagonists as ghosts that tell their side of their myths after they have
died.
Penelope’s aforementioned weaving of the shroud is particularly pertinent to the topic of
women’s writing. As Jasmine Richards opines in ‘Rereading Penelope’s Shroud’, Penelope’s
weaving of the textile is Atwood ‘stag[ing] and interrogat[ing] many of the theoretical problems
associated with feminist theories of influence and anxiety. […] Penelope’s material
circumstances force her into creating a textile (text) that can never be complete’ (Richards 2019:
127). Connected to this is Nancy K. Miller’s goal in her gynocritical essay ‘Arachnologies’,
where she had ‘taken as possible tropes of feminist literary agency examples from antiquity of
women’s weaving’ (Miller 1988: 77) – the weaving of textiles in literature is thus emblematic of
women’s writing. For Miller, ‘When we tear the web of women’s texts we discover […] the

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representations of writing itself’ (Ibid., 83-4), so rewriting and analysing Penelope’s weaving
becomes an exploration of women’s writing practises. Indeed, Penelope refers to her project of
telling her side of the events as ‘I’ll spin a thread of my own’ (Atwood 2005: 4); thus, Penelope’s
weaving of the textile becomes a metaphor for her weaving the text, which is to say her finally
telling her own story.
One might go as far as to say that the entirety of Greek myth can be retold through the
metaphor of women weaving textiles. This is the case in Charlotte Higgins’ Greek Myths: A New
Retelling (2021), where Ovid’s Metamorphoses are retold through some of the most famous
weavers in Greek myth: Athena, Alcithoë, Philomela, Arachne, Andromache, Helen, Circe and,
as a matter of course, Penelope. This is an ekphrastic storytelling technique, as these female
mythical figures have ‘woven their tales on to elaborate textiles’ (Higgins 2021: 9), and the text
is largely comprised of descriptions of these imagined artworks. In the introduction, Higgins
points out that text and textile are derived from the same Latin root, texere, and the women in her
retelling are weaving their stories back into the mythic tradition. Helen, for instance, is
‘obsessively’ weaving the Trojan War, over and over again, ‘as if it might give up its brutal
mysteries’ (Ibid., 183) – she retells the story in textile time and again in the hope of processing
her trauma. Similarly, in Philomela’s myth, her brother-in-law rapes her and cuts out her tongue –
an act that Helen Morales calls ‘the original nondisclosure agreement’ (2020: 72) – but she
‘weaves her story, and thus bears witness to the crime,’ (Higgins 2021: 10). In Higgins’ Ovidian
retelling, Philomela weaves love stories, before using her loom to testify against her abuser.
Thus, not only can the whole corpus of Greek myth be told from the women’s perspectives, but
they can be told in ekphrastic representations of weaving, that is, women’s storytelling
techniques.
Penelope opens her story by contemplating her literary afterlife, lamenting that her myth has
become ‘A stick used to beat other women with’ (Atwood 2005: 2), and she also introduces us to
her literal afterlife. Her narrative opens with the line ‘Now that I’m dead, I know everything.’
(Ibid., 1) – she is not omniscient, but death has afforded her hindsight and the gleaning of
significant knowledge. Emancipatory death has given her the freedom to ‘spin [her] thread’,
despite ‘the difficulty […] that I have no mouth through which I can speak’ (Ibid., 4). What
Penelope loses in death, her corporeality, her ‘bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness’ (Ibid., 1),

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she gains in her ability to interrogate the people who populated her mythos, in much the same
way that she holds the classical tradition to account for its reductive version of her. For instance,
she asks Antinous why the suitors pursued her when she was getting old and not especially
beautiful. She says:

come now Antinous, […] we’re dead now, you don’t have to blather on in this
fatuous manner down here — you have nothing to gain by it. There’s no need for
your trademark hypocrisy. So be a good fellow for once (Ibid., 100).

He calls her ‘merciless in life, merciless in death’ (Ibid., 100) but goes on to explain their plot to
marry and impregnate her, and thus claim the kingdom of Ithaca. In death, she is able to get the
answers she was denied in life, by interrogating those who had wronged her. The novel gives
Penelope the opportunity to ‘spin a thread of [her] own’, and the maids’ songs and anecdotes are
interwoven into her narrative. In the Underworld, as in the narrative, the maids constantly remind
Penelope of her failed duty of care, by staying together in a group of twelve and miming their
hanging whenever Penelope sees them. As Atwood says in the introduction: ‘I’ve always been
haunted by the hanged maids; and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself’ (Ibid., xxi).
Haunting is a useful metaphor to access the key concerns of this chapter, since the female
mythical figures can contend with their literary afterlives (that is, how their story has endured),
while the text itself is palimpsestuously haunted by that which it is adapting.
Haunting is also central to Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia. In the Aeneid, Lavinia is afforded no
speech, and only one memorable thing happens to her, that her ‘flowing hair caught fire, / her
lovely regalia crackled in the flames, [...] for Lavinia, prophets sang of a brilliant fame to come, /
for the people they foretold a long, gruelling war.’ (Virgil, trans. Fagles: 6.81-9). As Le Guin’s
Lavinia narrates:

Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her
take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my
man and my fate. The man was famous, the fate obscure; not a bad balance. (Le Guin
2008: 4)

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By ‘the fate obscure’, Lavinia means that, unlike Helen and, to a slightly lesser extent, Penelope,
she is not well remembered for the fighting “caused by her” or, rather, caused by the men fighting
for gains and using her as an excuse. Lavinia is haunted by a future ghost, whom she comes to
call ‘my poet’ (Ibid., 3). Virgil, on a ship, dying, hundreds of years in the future visits her in her
temple. They have a relationship of reciprocity, in which she tells him about her life, allowing
him to live in his unfinished poem and hear first-hand about the events that led to the founding of
Rome, and she gets to hear about her future with Aeneas, who is on his way, and the things he
has done on his way to Latinum; that is, the events of the Aeneid itself.
Like Penelope interrogating Antinous and the twelve maids holding Penelope to account in
their (literary) afterlives, Le Guin’s Lavinia makes Virgil accountable for his work. Lavinia
makes Virgil regret overlooking her in his poem, her rich characterisation by Le Guin making the
fictionalised Virgil come to view her as ‘my unfinished, my incomplete, my unfulfilled’ (Ibid.,
71). He knows that he is dying, and his biggest regret becomes his unfinished poem because he
could not revise Lavinia’s characterisation, or lack thereof. He comes to realise, as he says, ‘O
Lavinia, […] you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it.’ (Ibid., 46). Virgil’s regret makes
him realise what the forerunners of feminist classical scholarship asserted:

mythology is based primarily on [work] by male scribes, scholars, artists, and

“informants” and thus concerns men’s myths and rituals. Far more is known about
women in mythology, about the female figures who people male narratives,
enactments, philosophies, theologies, and analyses, than about women and
mythology or women’s mythologies (Weigle 1999: 969).

In Virgil’s words, ‘And I knew nothing of all that! I never looked at her. I had to tell what the
men were doing’ (Le Guin 2008: 43). Virgil wonders why he visited Lavinia, rather than his hero
Aeneas, or even one of the women he focussed on more primarily, such as Dido. He postulates
that it is ‘Because I did see him. And not you. You’re almost nothing in my poem’ (Ibid., 68). He
comes to realise that his focus on what Weigle terms ‘men’s myths’ has led to centuries of
women in myth being overlooked and he is held to account for his oversights. Another instance

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in which Lavinia interrogates Virgil is when she tells him that he ‘can’t be thinking straight about
the babies’, calling it ‘nefas, against the order of things, unspeakable, unsacred.’ (Ibid., 64-5). At
the same time he reveals to her that, in his conception of the Underworld, the spirits of babies
who never got to live are piled up on the ground, crying. He says he knows what it’s like because
he’s been there. But with whom? Not Aeneas, since the Sybil guided him; Virgil asks ‘What man
did I guide? I met him in a wood’ (Ibid, 64) — a reference to the future again, to the 14th
Century, when Virgil acts as Dante’s guide to the Underworld in Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s
inclusion in Le Guin’s portrayal of Virgil is indicative of the palimpsestuous nature of mythic
adaptation, as Virgil’s reception is necessarily informed by Dante’s rendering of him in his
Inferno, as much as it is by his own, unfinished epic. As we see the ailing Virgil get confused
between his literary self as an author, his literary self as a character, Aeneas (the figure whom he
wrote about), and Dante (the figure who wrote about him), the male domination of the classical
tradition is highlighted, which is to say the primacy of ‘male scribes, scholars, artists, and
“informants” and […] men’s myths and rituals’ in the study of Classics.
Emily Hauser interprets Lavinia as a personification of literature itself. Hauser draws a line
between female personified abstractions in the form of goddesses (such as Night, Memory, and
Strife) and the female personifications of genres (such as Comedy, Poetry, and Music) to the
manner in which ‘women are easily appropriated into the sphere of the abstract’ (Hauser 2017:
211). Hauser pays particular attention to Lavinia’s silence in Virgil’s epic, relating it to ‘the
theme of the silencing of women’s voices and its relationship to personification, and passivity, in
literature’ (Ibid., 214). This is a silence which, centuries later, Le Guin engages with ‘to open up
to its generative qualities in order to allow Lavinia to embrace the narrative of the Aeneid as a
whole’ (Ibid., 214). Weaving – Penelope’s most famous act – becomes, in feminist rewritings, a
metaphor for women’s writing; relatedly, Lavinia’s silence and inaction symbolise the treatment
of women in male-written literature, as decorative, passive personifications of abstract concepts.
To summarise, Penelope has ‘no mouth through which [to] speak’, but finds herself with
plenty of time in the afterlife to ‘spin a thread of [her] own’ (Atwood 2005: 4), and Lavinia also
opens her narrative with a cogitation about her literary afterlife. When she says ‘I am not sure of
the nature of my existence,’ (Le Guin 2008: 3) she alludes to an uncertainty about whether she
was ever real or could ever have an afterlife. Instead she exists ‘only in this line of words I write’

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(Ibid., 3) and considers that whatever life she had was not a real one, but a literary one, surviving
only in Virgil’s words. Yet since ‘he did not write them […] he scanted me’ (Ibid., 3) she has to
exist instead in the words she writes for herself. Though Atwood and Le Guin’s mythological
protagonists operate within a literal afterlife in their literary afterlives, there are other instances
within contemporary feminist adaptations of Greek myth in which the protagonists write back
against their limited portrayal that do not occur in the afterlife.
In her 2005 novel Weight, Jeanette Winterson repeats the mantra ‘I want to tell the story
again’ (Winterson 2005: xvi; 100; 137), a sentiment that summarises the phenomenon of authors
writing about writing and the protagonists writing back against their limited portrayals in myth.
There are cases both within the Canongate Myth Series and without, of the authors writing about
writing. In Girl Meets Boy, Ali Smith wrote ‘I mean, do myths spring fully formed from the
imagination and the needs of a society [...] as if they emerged from society’s subconscious?’
(2007: 89). In doing so she echoes the Jungian theory of mythic archetypes in which myths, like
dreams, are understood as expressions of the collective unconscious because they express core
ideas of the human species (Jung 1936; 1959: 96-7; 46-7). On a similar note, in Where Three
Roads Meet, Tiresias claims that ‘the interpretation is everything’ (2007: 83) — a dual reference
to Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and Vickers’ reinterpretation of Freud’s interpretation of
Oedipus. Psychoanalysis is a key field when considering the reception of classical myth (see
Zajko & O’Gorman 2013): Oedipus has become inextricable from the Complex named for him,
and Jungian theory has myth built into its foundations. Although it is at the core of Vickers’ text
and only a small allusion in Smith’s novella, both authors are gesturing towards a layer of the
mythic palimpsest: its reception in psychoanalysis.
There are further significant instances of the protagonists writing back against their limited
portrayals in myths, which reveal how these contemporary novels can engage meaningfully and
variously with the classical tradition. Miller’s Circe, for example, holds ancient poets to account
with the admonishing observation that ‘Humbling women seems to be a chief pastime of poets.
As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep’ (Miller 2018: 181). In Circe, the process
of mythic retelling is referred to when Circe tells the mythos of Odysseus to Telegonus: ‘Those
stories were still in me, […] I found myself hesitating, omitting, altering’ (Ibid., 229). Circe
recreates the myths in the same way that these adapting authors are engaging in acts of

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(re-)creation. Miller teaches Classics; here she has Circe teaching the Odyssey to Telegonus and
facing the same problems as many Classics teachers: ‘They’re wildly inappropriate […] it’s kind
of shocking that we actually teach them to children because they’re filled with so much violence’
(Guru-Murthy & Miller 2012: 31:50). In The Silence of the Girls, Briseis ends her narrative by
thinking that the Trojan women are ‘going to survive - our songs, our stories’ (Barker 2018: 296)
as they are passed down via oral tradition, yet she wonders ‘What will they make of us, the
people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal
reality of conquest and slavery’ (Ibid., 324), thus criticising the classical tradition for
romanticising rape and slavery throughout history: ‘No, they’ll go for something altogether
softer. A love story, perhaps?’ (Ibid., 324). In both texts, the patriarchal traditions of myth are at
once exposed and responded to, therefore reappropriating myth into a gynocentric model that
reinterprets the same stories from women’s perspectives. Moreover, these perspectives reveal
that, by informally passing on stories to their children, women have long since been the
progenitors of cultural history.
Writing back against – and reclaiming the narrative from – the androcentric mythic tradition
is also present in Saint’s Ariadne. Phaedra’s disenchanted narration of Theseus’ version of his
feats symbolises women’s disenfranchisement within an androcentric literary tradition. Theseus
tells ‘rollicking yarns crammed full of adventure and excitement, but I grew so weary of hearing
how faultless he was’ and Phaedra portrays him as ‘so absorbed in his own legend that he could
not see another person as anything more than a minor part of his mighty story’ (Saint 2021: 192;
217). In Phaedra’s at once exhausted and incensed narration, we are presented with a critique of
Theseus’ posturing and, more broadly, the masculine legend that forces others into supporting
roles. Conversely, Ariadne tells not only her own story, but weaves into her narrative the story of
so many mythic women that have been treated injuriously and unjustly. This interweaving of
stories becomes literal when Ariadne weaves a tapestry that features Leto, Io, and Semele, and
she reflects that ‘With no one peering over my shoulder, I was free to tell the stories I wanted [...]
It was not full of dutiful scenes [...] It was something else entirely.’ (Ibid., 208). As in Atwood’s
The Penelopiad and Nancy K. Miller’s ‘Arachnologies’, weaving becomes a symbol of women
writing women’s stories, as a reflexive departure from the male domination of the literary field.

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 In ‘Arachnologies’, Nancy K. Miller offers a gynocritical interpretation of Ariadne’s myth,
as well as Arachne’s. Miller uses their myths as they are told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as
examples that speak to the importance of foregrounding gendered experiences of authorship and
the female subject over the postructuralist destabilising of authorship and texts. In her rendering,
Arachne’s story is a parable of women’s writing, as the myth portrays a female desire to produce
art and, more specifically, women’s narratives (Miller 1988: 94). In her contest with Athena,
Arachne embeds narratives and, crucially, she ‘constructs a feminocentric protest: Europa, Leda,
Antiope, are the more familiar names of women carried off against their will by the “heavenly
crimes” of divine desire,’ (Ibid., 81). Gynocriticism is the feminist study of women’s writing, and
we see here how a gynocritical lens can be applied to a mythic source text to represent the female
literary tradition. If Arachne is the parable for women’s writing, Ariadne provides a metaphor for
its analysis. In providing the thread for the labyrinth, ‘She is that which allows the male [critic]
to penetrate the space of the great artist’ – Daedalus or Ovid in this case but, more broadly, the
author – and to return victorious: ‘Ariadne is thus the “woman in the text” the critic takes into the
abyss of discourse’ (Ibid., 94). For Miller, Ariadne is a figure for interpretation because the
reader can enter and exit again the labyrinthine text, yet Ariadne also symbolises a female
principle of interpretation and intertextual reading, that renders the male as heroic critic and the
female as merely a symbol (Allen 2000: 153-4). In reading Ariadne as the method of literary
criticism, one recalls Showalter’s model of gynocriticism as also relating to the intertextual
relations between women and men, because Ariadne’s clue enables, but can also be exploited by,
the male (critic or hero). When Miller asks ‘whose powers do we admire?’ (the critic that follows
the thread, or Ariadne who provides the thread) and, more directly, ‘whose story is it?’ (Miller
1988: 93) we are seeing the same concerns staged in a theoretical setting that attempts to place
the subjects of feminist criticism in the centre, as we see in Saint’s creative prose.
In A Thousand Ships, Haynes’ Calliope encapsulates this gynocentric concept of women,
making space for their perspectives in the literary field:

But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look
upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges

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 of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or
he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.
And for what reason? Too many men telling the stories of men to each other. […]
there must be some reason why they tell and retell tales of men. (Haynes 2019: 176).

The multiple clauses that place women as opposed to men refocuses the emphasis on the
women’s war, pain, and stories. There is a shift in language from this specific instance, as
demonstrated by ‘the poet’, to a more general philosophising on women’s writing and the
shifting of focus away from men telling men’s stories. What we are seeing here is a dual
phenomenon of the female authors writing about the process of rewriting myth, and the female
protagonists writing back against their limited portrayal in Greek myth and subsequent reception
until recent adaptations. This adds an extra layer of meaning to this network of texts, wherein the
texts themselves and the characters within them become self-reflexive, reflecting upon not only
the composition of their one text itself, but also demonstrating an awareness of the history of
reductive portrayals of women in myth and the current literary moment for mythic adaptation by
women authors.

As Hutcheon writes, ‘the appeal of adaptations for audiences lies in their mixture of
repetition and difference, of familiarity and novelty’ (2006: 114). As I have argued above, the
concept of the palimpsest explains a great deal about the para- and intertextual relationships
within the literary corpus of contemporary women’s adaptations of Greek myth. As Genette
proposes, hypertextuality refers to ‘any relationship uniting text B [hypertext] to an earlier text A
[hypotext], upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’ (Genette 1997:
5) and he utilises James Joyce’s Ulysses as a text B/hypertext to Homer’s Odyssey as a text
A/hypotext. Hence, mythic adaptations have an inextricable relationship to the myths they are
adapting. The contemporary era allows for even more complex relationships in the field of
mythic adaptations because, as this chapter argues, these authors more overtly stage their
awareness of the other authors working within the same field, and therefore their understanding
of the prevalence of the contemporary moment for feminist myth-making. This paratextual
awareness has translated into intertextual references to other works within the same genre as well

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as to the dual phenomenon within the literature of female authors writing about mythic
adaptation and having their female protagonists “write back” against their previously limited
portrayals. What are the feminist implications of this? As I argued previously, although ‘this
generation of women writers is not the first to look to myth for a source text’ (Judge 2020: np.),
they should be thought of as the latest generation of mythic adapters, the most recent layer to the
palimpsest. Mythic adaptation is akin to a wall, with feminist authors using Greek myth as the
connective cement, upon which they can lay their contribution (Ibid., np). Conceptualising
contemporary feminist adaptations of Greek myth as the latest in a history of ascribed meanings
to mythic adaptations generates, in gynocritical terms, a ‘female literary tradition’ of
myth-making.

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 Conclusion

[Is] Oenone less of a hero than Menelaus? He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to
bring her back to him, costing him countless lives and creating countless
widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their
son.

Which of those is the more heroic act?

- Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

In 2020, Harriet McMillan completed her doctoral thesis on feminist rewriting in the Canongate
Myth Series (University of Edinburgh) and concluded that broader work on feminist rewriting of
mythology beyond the Canongate project would be a worthwhile area of study (McMillan 2020:
287). This thesis takes the Canongate Myth Series as its starting point, though I have aimed to
take a more comprehensive approach, looking at the contemporary phenomenon of women
rewriting Greek myth as a whole. This approach has allowed me to draw broader conclusions
about recent women’s myth writing, and it has afforded me the ability to create a more
contemporary project taking in texts that have been published as recently as 2021. The
immediacy of this project is best evidenced by the inclusion of novels such as Jennifer Saint’s
Ariadne (2021) and Charlotte Higgins’ The Greek Myths: A New Retelling (2021). In this thesis,
I have asked why there has been a huge expansion of interest among women writers adapting and
retelling classical myths, and what their work reveals about current issues and priorities within
feminism.

Before considering the feminist motivations, it is worth noting the more general reasons
for the current vogue of women rewriting myths. For one, it is demonstrably true that myths have
enduring cultural capital and appeal. As Barthes notes in Mythologies, myth is a semiological
system that is ‘extremely difficult to vanquish’; semiological myth can be used to enforce a
bourgeois and colonialist worldview, or it can ‘signify the resistance’, taking the form of a
‘left-wing myth […] a reconstituted myth’ (Barthes 1957; trans. Cape 1972; 1982: 123, 136-8).

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Hence, myths have the capacity to enforce bourgeois or colonialist status quos, or – as is the case
with the liberal feminist literature within this research – they can signify the resistance by
reconstituting the myths. Moreover, Greek myths offer an interconnected network of characters
and stories, which Westenfeld recently compared to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2021: np.).
Indeed, as my final chapter contends, not only is contemporary women’s mythic literature an
ever-expanding network, but when texts such as Saint’s Ariadne and Miller’s Circe include many
of the same characters, plot points, and stylistic choices, the novels can be considered paraquels.
Just as Spiderman’s origin can be told and retold in different superhero movies, the mythic
narratives of Penelope, Clytemnestra, or Antigone are revisited by different authors. There is a
consumerist hope — held by publishers, producers, and fans alike — for ‘a Marvel-style
Mythology Cinematic Universe’, that will begin with HBOMax’s forthcoming eight-part Circe
miniseries (Ibid., np.). In publishing, therefore, the recent proliferation of women’s myth writing
and the huge popularity of novels such as The Song of Achilles and Circe has not only inspired
other authors, but has also signalled to publishers an extremely profitable niche in the market.

The thesis has identified a number of key reasons why Greek myths are popular in the
field of feminist adaptation. For one, the myths themselves offer great diversity within their
female mythic archetypes which allows for a wide range of narrative possibilities, and with these
possibilities arise an equally wide range of social and political applications. Blundell notes
goddesses, royals, and monsters as the key categories of women in myth, while for Pomeroy the
categories are goddesses, whores, wives, and slaves (Blundell 1995: 17; Pomeroy 1975). For
Smith, the categories are much simpler, as she notes that ‘“Bad” women always seem to me to be
far more interesting than the “goody two shoes” type, and ancient Greek myths offer a veritable
cornucopia of examples,’ (Smith 1992: 75). Analysing adaptations of mythical women in terms
of how they conform to, and break out of, this moralistic binary has been a recurrent focus
throughout this thesis. Examples of this include adaptations of Penelope that challenge her
reputation as a good wife and adaptations of Clytemnestra that are more sympathetic to her than
to Agamemnon. Moreover, I have analysed how adapting authors choose between providing a
fresh perspective on a well-known story (for example, when adapting Helen or Antigone) or to
fill in the blanks with more shadowy and obscure mythical women (key examples within this
thesis have been Briseis and Ismene). As Sian Lewis asks, ‘Is it possible to exploit myth to

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explore areas about which we know little?’ (2011: 452): while we can identify oppressive social
norms in myth, can we also use to feminist advantage the more enigmatic elements of myth? The
texts within this thesis that have excavated Briseis, Ismene, and Iphis certainly suggest so. On the
topic of Iphis, Lewis notes that ‘stories which treat changes of gender depict it as surprisingly
undisruptive’ (Ibid., 455), as is also the case with Tiresias, Kaenis, and the Amazons, the latter of
which can be understood as masculinised or androgynous women. If the changing of gender is
not a cause for alarm or a herald of disaster, then ‘myth loses its familiar role of exemplifying
[conservative] ideas and norms’ (Ibid., 455), instead offering fertile avenues for further
exploration. Hence, Greek myths are popular for feminist writers because they offer a diverse
range of feminine archetypes and gender subversions to be reinterpreted with an emphasis on
contemporary concerns.

Ultimately, these mythic archetypes have proven themselves to be immensely malleable,

particularly in the context of contemporary feminism. These classical re-imaginings tell us much
about the development of feminist discourse, transcending a traditionally conservative genre
where women are reduced to essentialised roles to engage with contemporary feminist discourse
through a mythic framework. Rather than capitulating to the inherently conservative traditions of
myth, this thesis argues that myths can and have been repurposed to speak to contemporary
feminist concerns. The first chapter demonstrated that Penelope can be reimagined to challenge
the patriarchal demand for wifely obedience, unacknowledged domestic labour, and the
intersection of class in gender-based oppression; the gaps in Briseis’ myth leave ample room to
adapt her in divergent manners, to stage the question of whether violent myths can be adapted
into consensual romances or whether it is more fruitful to use Briseis to narrate rape as it is used
as an instrument of war; and while Helen has been a source of inspiration for centuries, she poses
a number of issues for contemporary feminist adapting authors, namely around whether she
consents to going to Troy (therefore implicitly blaming her for the war), or whether, if she is
stolen (thereby removing her agency). Nevertheless, she is a useful figure to navigate feminist
concerns with the dangers faced by women deemed beautiful in misogynist societies, women’s
portrayal in the media, sexual violence, and sex work. ‘Women in the Texts’ found that, within
the scope of contemporary feminist adaptations of Greek myth, the women of the Trojan Saga
are of particular interest to women writers seeking to simultaneously pose a challenge to

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outdated, oppressive traditions that have their roots in antiquity, and offer infinite regenerative
potential for new stories, new perspectives, in familiar frameworks. This is because this single
saga offers diverse female characters – princesses and slaves, loyal and adulterous, loved and
hated – in interconnected stories, with a dramatic war for a setting. While the first chapter
critically examined the phenomenon of various women from the Trojan Saga being adapted in
feminist literature, the second chapter functions as a case study, in order to demonstrate how one
female mythical figure can be adapted in quite divergent ways by contemporary women writers.
In ‘Antigone’s Afterlives’, I focused on the significant differences in adaptations of Antigone, in
order to demonstrate the malleability of Antigone’s myth for a variety of political purposes,
ultimately concluding that to adapt Antigone’s mythos is in itself an act of feminist revisionist
writing because her enduring symbolism is as a figure of resistance against patriarchal control.
The third chapter demonstrates that revisiting the heroic men of Greek myth is a fertile avenue
for staging concerns regarding modern masculinity. It is proven within ‘Mythic Masculinities’
that the crisis of masculinity is a key concern for feminists, and that the heroes of Greek myth
embody a number of masculine stereotypes which can be used to narrate feminist concerns about
hegemonic masculinity and the impact of toxic masculinity on people of all genders. The chapter
also raises questions about whether the actions of these heroes can be reconciled with
contemporary values relating to gender equality, ultimately concluding that the heroic men are
critiqued and often ridiculed for their inconsistency with modern values around gender equality.
As the fourth chapter of this thesis contends, there has been a long and complex relationship
between queer sexualities and Classics, though it proves that contemporary queer mythmaking is
distinct from its forerunners due to the active practice of excavating queer figures, removing
extisting homophobia, and intentionally choosing language to highlight the queer in the myth.
Finally, ‘Palimpsests: Paratexts and Intertexts’ is a crucial contribution to this project, because it
not only proves the burgeoning literary ecosystem of contemporary feminist myth writing, it also
demonstrates how women writers use the mythic framework to reflect on women’s writing itself.
When the texts present the female mythical figure making space for her myth to be told, this
symbolises women making space in the literary field for women’s narratives to be told by women
writers. The recurring motif of women weaving textiles becomes emblematic of women weaving
their own stories, their own texts, in critical dialogue with the male domination of the textual

224
field. Hence, Greek myths are popular for feminist adaptation because they are uniquely
preserved in western cultural consciousness, and therefore provide familiar frameworks from
which to explore contemporary feminist concerns.

My original contribution to the study of literature lies in the analysis of a body of work
that is still emerging and setting it in the context of a more longstanding tradition of adaptation in
order to determine where it takes the genre of classical adaptation. My scope, however, is limited
by the still ongoing nature of this literary phenomenon. If a PhD thesis were a never-ending
endeavour, this project could continue to grow alongside the corpus of literature. Take, for
example, Pat Barker’s recent sequel to The Silence of the Girls (2018), The Women of Troy
(2021) — a text that could have radically altered some chapters of this thesis, had I not been
constrained by time and word-count. The novel spans the intermittent, impatient period between
the fall of Troy and the Greeks departing on their ships. Of course, the continuation of Briseis’
story in The Women of Troy, writing further beyond her ending in the Iliad, would have been
examined in the Briseis section of ‘Women in the Texts’, and Neoptolemus could be interpreted
in ‘Mythic Masculinities’ as the figure who most has to contend with Achilles’ heroic legend.
The interpretations of Penelope and, in particular, Helen in the novel would no doubt yield
further fascinating questions. Of Penelope, Hecuba – as a prisoner of war, after the fall of her city
and the loss of most of her family – bitterly reflects ‘Faithful Penelope, loyal Penelope, wise
Penelope … I was all those things – fat lot of good it did me’ (Barker 2021: 103). Here, Hecuba’s
irreverent dialogue puts its finger on the key problem of Penelope: that her faithfulness has been
used as a measure against which all other women fall short. Barker also presents Helen as a
victim of domestic violence, with bruises visible on her neck, due to Menelaus punishing her for
what he perceives to be her role in instigating the war. In so doing, Helen becomes as much a
victim of the war as Briseis or Hecuba, and she is given a platform to transcend her tradition of
reductive portrayals. Interestingly, The Women of Troy would also contribute meaningfully to the
chapter ‘Antigone’s Afterlives’. This is because of the invented subplot of Barker’s character
Amina, who buries Priam in defiance of Neoptolemus’ ruling that he shall remain unburied. This,
of course, imports the plot of Sophocles’ Antigone. Like Antigone’s call to honour the laws of
the gods over those of Creon, Amina challenges Neoptolemus’ ruling with the words ‘you can’t
just overrule the laws of god. Nobody can – I don’t care how powerful you are’ (Ibid., 159). In

225
deploying Antigone in this uncanny context (familiar in its Greek mythological setting;
unfamiliar in the Trojan, rather than Theban, Cycle), Barker is borrowing and redeploying the
instantly recognisable symbol of a powerless young girl standing up to a corrupt, patriarchal
power. I have very deliberately chosen to include this consideration of where Barker’s sequel
would fit into my project in the conclusion, rather than revisiting my chapters to include the
novel, or omitting it altogether, to illustrate the fact that this corpus of literature is proliferating,
and any current research in this field is necessarily unfinished.

Research must continue into this expanding literary phenomenon. For one, more books
are being published in this vein, each with the potential to fundamentally alter our understanding
of the genre. Susan Stokes-Chapman’s recently published novel Pandora (2022), retells the
Greek myth of Pandora in the form of a crime novel, with elements of romance literature, set in
Georgian London. This hybridity of genres and historical fictions suggests that the tropes and
traditions of 21st century women’s revisionist myth writing are already being stretched, modified,
or perhaps even rejected. Further inquiry into this subject might include in-depth studies into the
recently-published and as-yet-unpublished works within this genre, with particular attention paid
to their place within the context of the literary phenomenon of contemporary women’s myth
writing. In addition, more critical attention must be paid to the publishing aspect of literary
production: what are publishers’ thoughts, motivations, and incentives regarding women’s myth
writing? In keeping with my academic background in English and American Literature and
Women’s Studies, I am particularly interested in the social and activist potential for women
reclaiming myth – what is generated, for example, when women in collectives or activist groups
turn to myths for figureheads and analogues? – and the genre’s place in the context of recent
women’s writing and current literary trends. Hypothetically, should this trend abate, the field of
inquiry would gain more hindsight with which to consider the corpus of literature as a whole,
beginning, I would propose, with Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) and concluding at
some as yet unrealised juncture.

Of course, this raises the question of why continue this research? Why is it important in
the contemporary climate? Revisiting, adapting, disrupting, challenging, and (re-)claiming
culturally significant stories from the cultural authorities, the oppressive reign of caucasian

226
heteropatriarchy, is revolutionary. Greco-Roman myth is only one example of what I am
considering here as culturally significant stories –– such a broad umbrella can include, but is in
no way limited to: other myth systems, fairy and folktales, “classic” books, and historical eras.
Angela Carter’s works are arguably the cornerstone of revolutionary adaptations of fairytales;
novels that adapt exalted works include Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) and Jeanette
Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019); fictionalised works that adapt historical figures and events
notably count Hillary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall (2009); critical attention is being
paid to the renaissance of historical fiction, such as in Ina Bergmann’s monograph The
Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed (Routledge, 2020); adaptations of Norse myth, for instance in
A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok (2011), and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) and Norse Mythology
(2017); adaptations of British and Celtic myths and legends, such as Maria Dahvana Headley’s
The Mere Wife (2018) and, indeed, her recent feminist Beowulf translation (2021), and Amy
Jeffs’ Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain (2021) – all of these are examples of culturally
significant stories being revisited and disrupted. Moreover, to have women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+,
and working class people rewrite these narratives is an act of cultural reclamation, to stake their
claims in these stories inasmuch as – and to challenge how – they have been claimed by
privileged, white, heterosexual, cisgendered men. In its most positive light, such adaptations, and
studies of them, are a celebration of how these preserved stories can metamorphose and grow in
their treatment by more diverse minds.

227
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