Myths Reimagined by Women Writers

Fresh takes on classic tales

My early experiences with mythology were as sorts of “Boys’ Own” stories of adventure, monster slaying, prize-winning, and homecoming – the Joseph Campbell cycle that stretches from the tales of Theseus and Hercules to The Odyssey and Star Wars. This, I was assured, and learned to believe, represented a universal human understanding of the world and the human place in it.

In this framework, the old wizard with the laser sword always chooses the blonde desert farm boy for his “call to adventure.” Nobody brings the magic weapon to Princess Leia. When you’re a boy, this isn’t so jarring. Theseus sets out to slay the Minotaur of Crete. The princesses are prizes. Hippolyta, leader of the warrior women Amazons, turns out to be a prize for both Theseus and Hercules. Medusa, the Gorgon so fearsome her cursed face turns all who it to stone, is beheaded and rendered a weapon for the hero Perseus to wield against the gargantuan Kraken, on his way to winning the hand of Andromeda.

But, these are all retellings of ancient stories (mostly from Ovid but also fragments of Homeric Hymns). The Middlebrow imagines that the Greek storytellers, operating in a very different cultural economy, might have told their own stories differently and perhaps more inclusively. The framing of these stories for young readers in the late 20th century reflected our societal biases and left much more to be explored. Sophocles brought us the tragedy of the defiant Antigone, Aeschylus explored the Trojan war through the eyes of Agamemnon’s abused wife Clytemnestra and Aristophanes gave us the women of the political comedy, Lysistrata.

Euridici, an Italian opera from 1600 is the oldest printed libretto in the world, and might be the world’s second oldest opera, reimagines the tale of Orpheus from his dead wife’s point of view. Composer Matthew Aucoin and librettist Sarah Ruhle have brought a new Eurydice to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, a retelling based on Ruhle’s 2004 play.

In 1917, poet H.D., recast the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from the point of view of Eurydice’s shade in Hades, about to be released from the prison of death if Orpheus can walk back to the world of the living without looking back to see if his lost love is following in him.  It’s all told from the moment of his failure of faith, undermining his heroic status. H.D. offers a Eurydice that would rather have been left for dead than subjected to a failed rescue.  She asks “why did you glance back?” and then demands to know from Orpheus:

“What had my face to offer

but reflex of the earth,

hyacinth colour

caught from the raw fissure in the rock

where the light struck,

and the colour of azure crocuses

and the bright surface of gold crocuses

and of the wind-flower,

swift in its veins as lightning

and as white.”

In Wake Siren, Ovid Resung Nina McLaughlin offers a Eurydice who is a superior musician to her Orpheus, though he is the bigger star and works constantly to undermine her. She is not driven away from their wedding by a wild centaur but by his psychological and physical abuse.  She goes to the underworld (a rock club where she is a well-established star and protected by the owner) and Orpheus hunts her down. This presentation asks the question – did the mythic Orpheus seek to rescue his love from death or to steal her away from respite?

McLaughlin’s recasting of the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses force us back to the old stories with new questions. In Ovid, Pygmalion is a Cypriot sculptor who falls in love with an ivory statue of a woman that he has carved.  Venus turns the statue into a real woman for him. It’s the story of an artist who falls in love with his art. In McLaughlin’s verse, Pygmalion is a misogynist who prefers ivory women to the real thing. He hates the visceral physicality of women.

Madeline Miller similarly interrogates The Illiad and The Odyssey. In The  Song of Achilles, the captured slave Briseis plays an active role as guardian of the love between Achilles and Patrocolus, who indulge a romantic bond that is hinted at in any reading of the story but made explicit by Miller.  The Song of Achilles becomes a tale of male love, abetted and nurtured by Briseis, who moves to the foreground of the action. In Circe, Miller takes inspiration from Odysseus’ time as consort of the island witch Circe in The Odyssey and places Circe within the pantheon of minor gods and nymphs.  Miller provides us with the motivations that aid Circe’s transformation from nymph to the island goddess who turns sailors into swine and slaughters them. Miller also tells the story of the son that Circe carried from Odysseus (but raised without him, in isolation) and how he features into the future of Ithaca.

“Tell me about a complicated man,” begins Emily Wilson’s modern poetic translation of The Odyssey, the first by a woman in English, published in late 2017. Wilson’s is not a feminist take on the story, it is an accessible, rhythmic, and unsparing take where slaves are not presented as maids and helpers, where the futility of abandoned Penelope’s efforts to stave off her suitors are presented without remorse of embellishment and where the ancient world is at least as nasty and brutish as it is heroic.

In 2017, she told Vox that she saw the Odyssey as a: “defense of a male dominant society, a defense of its own hero and his triumph over everybody else, but it also seems to provide these avenues for realizing what’s so horrible about this narrative, what’s missing about this narrative.”

UK author Jennifer Saint has entered the pantheon with a retelling of the tale of Theseus and Ariadne. Ariadne was the Cretan princess who, conspiring with the inventor Daedalus, guided the Athenian hero Theseus through the labyrinth so that he could kill the fearsome Minotaur. From the points of view of Ariadne and her younger sister Phaedra, we’re introduced to a Theseus who is a serial liar, self-absorbed and hungrier for personal glory and fame than for the good of Athens or his family. At every turn of this fast-moving novel, we see how mythologies women bear most of the suffering for the choices of men, be they kings, demigods, or gods.

The Middlebrow admits that there’s no pat conclusion to what amounts to an unplanned survey of authors who have each taken a related approach to old stories. Mythology is supposed to shed light on being human, so it has to be multifaceted in terms of gender, politics, sexuality, art, diet and all of those things that make us people. The word “reimagined” creeps up throughout here, but maybe it’s a type of scholarship or hermeneutics, where what’s being unearthed is what was already there but has slipped beneath our notice.

Works Cited:

●      The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson, W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.)

●      Circe by Madeline Miller (Little, Brown and Company, 2018)

●      The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (Ecco, 2012)

●      Wake Siren, Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin (Macmillan, 2019)

●      Eurydice by H.D. (from: Collected Poems 1912-1944 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1982: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51869/eurydice-56d22fe6d049d, though the poem was originally published in The Egoist in 1917.)

●      Ariadne by Jennifer Saint (Flatiron Books, 2021).

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Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash