‘Consider us pure symbol’: rediscovering Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey through revisionist retellings

Abstract

‘Feminist retellings of history dominate 2019 Women's prize shortlist’ - The Guardian. Simone de Beauvoir highlights the fact that ‘[history] has shown that men have always held all the concrete powers; from patriarchy’s earliest times they have deemed it useful to keep woman in a state of dependence; their codes were set up against her; she was thus concretely established as the Other’. It is precisely this imbalance in narrative that contemporary female writers are trying to adjust by attempting to reimagine history; this time from women’s point of view. Back in 2005 Margaret Atwood published her take on the Odyssey in the form of The Penelopiad in which it is Penelope’s individual voice as well as the choral voice of the murdered maids that guide the reader along a discovery of originally hidden truths. As part of the Canongate Myth Series, this novel is one of the earliest contemporary feminist takes on Greek myth. Following in her footsteps to arrive at the Women’s prize shortlist mentioned above were Madeline Miller and Pat Barker with their novels Circe and The Silence of the Girls respectively. In these works, the witch Circe and the demeaned Briseis each take their turn in recounting their experiences inside Homer’s epics. By analysing these three major retellings in contrast to their originals, this study attempts to shed light on the concealment of the female figure in classical mythology and its reemergence in revisionist mythmaking. The introduction attempts to track a comprehensive, yet far from exhaustive, genealogy of Egyptian, Greek and Roman myths to highlight similarities between the female characters found within the different mythologies. It also aims to expose the reader to some of the major criticism and theory around feminist writing (écriture féminine) to pave the way to an understanding of the literary culture in which the female authors of the novels were writing and thus, an understanding of what their writing is attempting to achieve. An exploration of Carl Jung’s studies in the archetypes also features in preparation for an analysis of their workings within both Homer as well as Atwood, Miller and Barker’s works. This is significant as it ultimately points to the essence of the study; i.e. the understanding of present paradigms through ancient myths retold. Through modern retellings, myths are brought back to life and back into culture. The use of archetypes and symbols in both old and new myths, moreover, tap into the collective unconscious which is eternally present through generations. The innovation is the female perspective which sheds new light on what might have actually happened within the well-known stories. The retellings complicate the classical texts through their subversive narrative. The reader is thus invited to wonder whether there is a possibility of a change of story; and the significance of this could spill out of myths into more concerning things.