There’s something about our oldest stories that never gets old. Rereading classical mythology is for me an exercise in surprise and recognition mixed together. There are things I’ve always missed in a myth, the previous time around, that strike me as utterly vital to understanding its meaning. I believe that myths hit us somewhere below the brain, at some irrational, dreamlike level that somehow feels truer than ordinary stories. When I read Ovid’s myth of Apollo pursuing Daphne, “one made swift by hope and one by fear,” and the nymph metamorphoses into a laurel tree to escape the amorous god forever, it disturbs and thrills me in ways I find hard to explain.*
I wanted to capture this “mythic” effect of timelessness and inevitability in my novel The Red Word, a modern story about a war between a fraternity house and a group of ardent young feminists on a university campus. So I turned for inspiration to what is arguably the most massive epic in all of literature: Homer’s Iliad. The female students in my novel are taking a class called “Women & Myth,” and their course readings influence their perspective on the scandal unfolding around them. And life certainly seems epic, doesn’t it, when you’re in your late teens and early twenties? Your highs are Olympian, your lows like a plunge into the River Styx?
Beautifully wrought
The books in this list are the smartest, most beautifully wrought adaptations of classical myths I’ve ever encountered—and they all just happen to be by female writers. I reread many of these titles while composing The Red Word, loving the sense that these master storytellers were reworking the heavy, hardened clay of the male-centered myths into supple material for building new worlds.
A chorus of competing female voices from the Underworld—those of Penelope’s 12 maids accused of treasonous plotting and hanged by her son, Telemachus—provide the backdrop for this counter-epic to The Odyssey. Many of Atwood’s novels deal with myth and legend—her more recent works are dystopian myths of her own invention—so tackling the seminal Greek epic is for her a natural undertaking. The heroic gravitas of the story’s events is undercut by Atwood’s signature arch tone and multi-layered irony: for example, the chapter relating the abduction/elopement of Penelope’s sister Helen with Paris, the inciting incident of the Trojan war, is entitled “Helen Ruins My Life.” Through Penelope’s voice, the story works to set the record straight on epic events. Of her wedding, our heroine tells us, “And so I was handed over to Odysseus, like a package of meat. A package of meat in a wrapping of gold, mind you. A sort of gilded blood pudding.”
Feminist philosopher and critical theorist Butler uses Sophocles’ myth of Antigone to explore feminist concepts of kinship and citizenship in this non-fiction essay. As dense and difficult as all Butler’s prose, the text is worth reading for its ethical speculations on the question “What makes a liveable life?” Refusing to obey the patriarchal rules of her society puts Antigone in a position of resistance but also mortal risk. Butler uses the myth as a jumping-off point to engage with the work of Hegel, Lacan, Irigaray, and other big thinkers. She relates Antigone’s plight to today’s world, where there are increasing populations without full citizenship existing within and between states. Because these people are not being entered into the life of the legitimate community, they aren’t granted full “human” status and so exist perpetually as a “shadowy realm” haunting our public sphere, like Antigone haunts Creon’s state. It’s a wide-ranging, challenging essay that infuses the myth with bold new relevance for modern politics.
Red monster
This “novel in verse” by Canada’s most celebrated living poet retells the tale of Herakles’ tenth labor: stealing the herd of cattle belonging to a winged red monster named Geryon. The monster is the protagonist in Carson’s version, seduced and left pining by Herakles. It’s the breathtaking beauty of the language that carries this book. Carson keeps the myth in the realm of the spectacular, the otherworldly, but also an immediately recognizable picture, as here, where Geryon is described as a typically sulky teenaged son:
He burned in the presence of his mother.
I hardly know you anymore, she said leaning against the doorway of his room.
It had rained suddenly at suppertime,
now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes
filled the room. Love does not
make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other
from opposite shores of the light.
Geryon and Herakles are reunited in middle age in Red Doc>, a road-trip story in which Herakles is a war-veteran with PTSD and Geryon is a blocked artist dealing with the death of his mother. It’s more playful than Autobiography but every bit as beautiful. - Lit Hub
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