A fetish for oppression and the trap of consolating its audience– modern retellings of Greco-Roman myths make mythology feel safe

I am about to revive a pretty old literary and political discourse. It might sound like a screed against wokeism but it's not. I suspect that I am far more progressive than a lot of the women reading and writing such books.

I am currently reading Ovid's Metamorphoses and therefore went on a Greek mythology spree. Having read a few classics in a row— Metamorphoses, some Émile Zola, some Balzac and a Proust volume— I wanted to read something light and fast. I decided to pick up a modern Greek mythology retelling. I picked– Song of Achilles, Circe, A Thousand Ships and Ariadne. I think everyone knows the fame of Lore Olympus and the unending Persephone/Hades love stories it has inspired. Something has to be said about the nature of the lens being used to retell these myths. Perhaps it might not be the most politically correct thing to say today but it's a pretty well debated topic in academia.

There seems to be a fetish for oppression in these retelling. A need to highlight the stories of the wronged, the ignored, the judged, the forgotten but from a very downtrodded perspective where the experience is reduced to lines like

"It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did."

"Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep."

and in that trend it seems like something original and genuinely subversive is missing. A lot of these women in these books, despite being feminist retellings, are quite lacking in their own agency, a lot of them rendered passive. Greco-Roman mythology is replete with complex female characters women who were submissive, those who were transgressive, those who were punished and those who were even rewarded.

But modern post-Madeline Miller reimaginings of these tales seem unable to grapple with the complexity and the utter harsh and alien culture of the Greco-Roman world. They were very different from us. It would have been a harsh, unsafe world for us so why do the modern retellings feel so safe? Take Ariadne by Jennifer Saint where the titular character is utterly flaccid, where her character is reduced to these lines.

"What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: However blameless the life we lead, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do."

Powerful characters like Athena rarely get a perspective because she holds the fate of the heroes in her hand and because it is impossible to show a romance with a famous virgin goddess. But most of all Athena is a goddess not human. She is divine, a idea, all powerful, overarching. It makes me wonder if those Aphrodite retellings are any good.

Stories that obscure faithfulness to the classic sources are also seen mostly in the retellings of Hades/ Persephone in order to tell a romantic story. The claim is that they wish to reclaim the narrative and push agency into Persephone's hands. I don't see how.

I can't help but feel that these retellings seem to lack diversity and an interesting perspective. There's almost no exploration of transsexuality in these retellings despite the gods being quite gender fluid at times. The themes of gender bending are quite prevelant in Greek mythology with gods and heroes taking forms of different gender. Ovid's Metamorphoses is almost exclusively about transformations, instability, and fluidity. So how come modern retellings way more conservative than the original source? Why do Ovid and Homer seem more feminist, more progressive than Madeline Miller? (Which makes her quote about the poets so funny).

Another thing that seems to be lacking is a genuinely exploration of sexual freedom. Marriage between Greek myth figures especially the gods has been both venerated and shown to be quite open and fluid. Yet modern retellers seem uncomfortable with these themes. The depiction of the marriage between Ariadne and Dionysus by Jennifer Saint refuses to explore the darkness of Dionysus in context of Ariadne. It seems almost uncomfortable which is disappointing since Ariadne is depicted in classical art mingling with the maenads and the satyrs.

It seems to me that these retellings are less about the myth and more about a very specific contemporary subjectivity projecting itself backwards. The almost YA nature of these books doesn't escape me. A lot of the writers come from a middle class backgrounds, somewhat of an elevated class position but still not obscured from the material constraints of reality. These authors project their somewhat liberal, milennial (and very very American) fantasies in order to write a Greek mythology fanfiction. It's a bad thing in the sense that now these retellings are rendered to merely escapist literatures. It cannot explore the psychosexual dynamics of these myths, cannot write stories where women have agency and power like in the case of Athena and cannot subvert the themes without falling into the oppressor- oppressed dynamics. It also cannot break free from the chains of escapist romance

Take for example:

One of my favourite classical myths is that of Hylas and the nymphs. It is depicted in the beautiful and dark painting by John William Waterhouse (1896).

Hylas is a beautiful man, Hercules' companion, part of the Agronauts who, when he goes to fetch some water for his men after a tired journey, happens upon a pond filled with naiads. Enchanted by his beauty and— he by theirs— Hylas gets submerged in the pond to live enternally with the nymphs, losing his mortality. The painting depicts the darkness of this tale. There's a psychosexual almost sadomasochistic tone to this story and if someone were to write a retelling they could write a lyrically beautiful and horrifying tale dealing with the cruelty of beauty, seduction and surrender.

There's no feminist exploration of something like this. This painting is seen by modern scholars as depicting the anxieties of men living during the women's suffragettes' movements. These anxieties are generally depicted in the form of the femme fatale archetype. Yet the subject is not passive. Yet the man in the depiction is surrendering not trying to conquer. So why is a subject like this not interesting to modern myth retellers?

Finally I will just say this: if women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access in the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, retellings that claim to give voice (apparently) to marginalized women of mythology– women from a different culture, different moral standards– they are simply flattening themselves into submission (a technique often used upon them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsense.

Not all of them ofcourse. Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson escapes these pitfalls, I suspect because it's not trying to be YA and escapist. There's something almost insidious about the nature of YA and escapist literature. In consoling its readers a lot of times it refuses to challenge them.

Ofcourse the reality of this type of fiction is that it is corporate publishing trend. Madeline Miller started it in 2011 and now we are drowning in this genre. The aim isn't to write transgressive literature, it's to sell books and sell them in bulk. It's consumerism not literature. And that's why it's not good. One day when the well has dried up someone will write an Athena retelling. She will seem like Hillary Clinton. The readers will hate it and make it flop. That would be the end of this trend.

Anyways I would appreciate if people earnestly engage with my ideas and if I didn't get comments like

– you hate fiction written by women, you are a misogynist, bad feminist, classist, elitist etc. These conversations were rife during 80s and 90s in the academia and also in mainstream. I don't think there's anything wrong with discussing them now in the context of a different type of fiction and in the light of new publishing trends.

– "why don't you write your own fiction?" A strawman argument if I have seen one. It serves no purpose and indicates that you don't wish to engage only condescend.