The Gods Should Be Kicked in the Teeth: A Journey through Feminist Mythology Retellings
TW: mentions of sexual assault
Picture it: San Diego. 2018. It was a fine April day and I was shelving books at the indie bookshop where I worked when my phone vibrated in my back pocket with a notification from the Book Riot Slack. I opened up the mobile app and combed through a ton of excited (and confused) messages before I finally figured out what so many others already knew: the hardcover—yeah, hardcover!—of Madeline Miller’s Circe was available for preorder on Amazon for $2.79.
The TL:DR summary here is that former Book Riot Contributing Editor Rincey Abraham Davis had mentioned looking forward to reading Circe in an Instagram post, and then a follower pointed out this weirdly discounted pre-order price. Rincey then brought that piece of info over to one of the Book Riot Slack channels and all manner of book nerdery ensued. It was almost certainly a mistake for a hardcover of such a highly anticipated literary fiction release to be listed for three bucks, but a whole bunch of people nabbed the book at that price before someone got wise to the sitch and changed it. You can listen to Jeff and Jenn discuss the whole thing on an episode of the Book Riot podcast.
This kerfuffle over the pricing of Circe reminded me that I’d guilted my boss, the bookstore owner, into giving me his advanced reader copy a few weeks prior, which I wanted to read more because it was about a witch than because of the mythology. I’d been a nerd for the Greek and Roman myths since I was a kid (I used to list Troy starring Brad Pitt as Achilles as one of my favorite movies, judge me if you like), but I hadn’t yet discovered my penchant for a well-written myth retelling.
Obviously, they existed: tons of titles in our own roundups of classical mythology retellings and retellings of myths, folklore, and classics were published before Circe was even a twinkle in Madeline Miller’s eye. But it does seem like Circe helped herald in a new, or at least more persistent, wave of a particular kind of feminist mythology retelling. I challenged myself to jot down as many feminist retellings as I could in two minutes without consulting any source besides my little grey cells. I came up with 14 without breaking a sweat. So yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and call that a wave.
I’ve read so many of these retellings that Book Riot folks just drop an Edelweiss link in my DMs when a new one is announced. I think Liberty leaves mythology retellings for me when we pick which books to talk about on All the Books because I won’t shut up about them. The honest truth is that I’ve loved a great many of them, but there are ones that stand out. The ones that do tend to have a few things in common.
The Silenced Get to Speak
The giving of a voice to the voiceless is one of the more obvious hallmarks of this wave of feminist mythology retellings, one that works best for me when the story we’re presented with isn’t just a fleshing out of a story we know, but one that allows us to connect with the voiceless and confront the implications of their silence. I loved Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, whose titular character never speaks a word in Virgil’s Aeneid but is this delightful, pragmatic heroine in Le Guin’s hands. I went into Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls expecting some of those same vibes (my fault entirely) and what I got was a rude awakening.
Set during the final weeks of the Trojan War, Barker hands the mic in this story over to Briseis, Achilles’ concubine, and the other silenced women of the Iliad, daring you to try and look away. We all know women tend to get a raw deal in mythology overall, but Barker makes sure you confront that fact and sit with the discomfort of how little consideration we’ve historically given to how the women in these beloved epics fared. Speaking of Briseis alone, she was once a queen but has now been handed over to Achilles as a prize. Her sole purpose is to wait around in a tent ready to submit to the sexual desires of the man responsible for sacking her city and slaughtering her family. In the hands of a less capable writer, the depictions of this violence might have felt gratuitous and there for shock value. That’s not what Barker’s passages read like to me; instead they grabbed me by the face and asked what the hell I thought was happening to women like Briseis if not this. We as readers are forced to look at the heroes of these stories in a different light, perhaps most especially the ones we’ve thought of as the good guys.
More like this: A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (we hear from all of the women on both sides of the Trojan war. Spoiler: there are no winners), Ithaca by Claire North (another one where we hear from lots of women, primarily Penelope of Ithaca, similar to A Thousand Ships but different in tone)
The “You’re Wrong About” Treatment
I am a huge sucker for books, films, podcasts, etc that unpack a narrative we’ve all gotten a little (or a lotta) bit wrong, whether due to mishandling by the media or just a historical game of telephone. That’s why I love the podcast You’re Wrong About so much—it turns out I’m wrong about a whole lot of shit!
It also turns out I like when a feminist retelling pulls a “you’re wrong about” in fleshing out a woman’s story, which might sound like the same thing as giving a voice to the silenced but isn’t necessarily. Take stories like that of Elphaba in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, or Angelina Jolie’s portrayal of Maleficent in the movie of the same name. These stories take the narrative of a maligned woman and go “nuh uh uh, not so fast.” When mythology retellings do this with a feminist lens pointed at a woman we’ve only known as a villain, it’s my catnip.
This is where Circe absolutely shines for me.
Leave a comment
Join All Access to add comments.