In the 21st century, mythology retellings have become incredibly popular, but Greek retellings remain the most prevalent. The power of retelling mythology lies in the history of the original stories, and how their enduring themes and frameworks have shaped how we think today. No part of ancient history is as studied as the classical era, and no part of ancient history has had as strong of an impact on modern day society—we see remnants in our architecture, our money, our art. Their impact is so strong, that retelling them offers rich opportunities to reexamine these underlying frameworks of society. Specifically, feminist mythology retellings have had an upsurge in the 21st century because they reflect the ongoing fight for female autonomy as seen in modern day politics. As Shreya Chatterji writes, “Myth is essentially a cultural construct, a common understanding of the world that binds individuals and communities together,” ¹and by writing feminist retellings, authors attempt to revise the very frameworks that underlie society as a form of activism, shaping the world they wish to see. Dwijen Sharma writes that, “in every act of retelling, a myth is subject to critical revision and reinterpretation.” ²At a time where women’s rights are being slowly eroded across the globe, feminist retellings are more important than ever to bring hope to readers and create more stories for women to relate to. There are two main methods of rewriting myths: increasing visibility and increasing autonomy. In the former, authors expand upon the cruelties inflicted upon women in the original myths, that are oftentimes brushed over because they are deemed unnecessary to the main plot, which focuses on the heroes who oftentimes inflict said cruelties. The second is by giving the women more autonomy and choice within the boundaries of the story. This essay will focus on Homeric myths because they are some of the oldest we have—and as a result, they many times read as more feminist or empowering than some of the later myths.

VICTIMS

Briseis, who Achilles takes as a slave in the Iliad before Agamemnon ‘steals’ her, and Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, are examples of victims who are offered greater humanity in retellings. In The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller, instead of being picked as a slave for Achilles for glory, she is picked because Patroclus does not want Briseis to be left to Agamemnon’s cruelty. Each slave Achilles takes is reframed as a rescue: “Each new girl went first to Briseis, who would speak comfort to her in soft Anatolian. She would be allowed to bathe and be given new clothes, and then would join the others in the tent. We put up a new one, larger, to fit them all: eight, ten, eleven girls.”³ This contrasts strongly with the Iliad, where Achilles views her as nothing more than a trophy, shouting at Agamemnon “He took my trophy! / He seized it and now keeps it for himself!”⁴ The framing in the original text is far more dehumanizing, and Miller offers Briseis her humanity back in retelling the tale; she becomes more than an object to be traded between power-hungry men, an “it”. Retellings also offer Iphigenia increased choice; for the story to be told she must die, but how she dies can be changed. In the poetry collection Great Goddesses, Iphigenia says to Agamemnon “You can have my life. On one condition. If I am to die, it is you who must take my life’.”⁵ Iphigenia dies no matter what, but at least in this version, she can eke out what little choice she has in the matter of her death. It offers her dignity. 

The original texts also tend to either brush over the traumatic events or focus on the glory for the heroes, but retellings linger in forgotten places. Miller describes Iphigenia’s death in far more detail: “The knife’s edge fell onto her throat, and blood spurted over the alter, spilled down her dress. She choked, tried to speak, could not. Her body thrashed and writhed, but the hands of the king pinned her down. At last her struggles grew weaker, her kicking less; at last, she lay still.”⁶ The focus is not on the so-called heroes sacrificing her to the gods, but on her body’s movements instead. It creates a visceral image that lingers. However, there is conflict in how she goes to her death: is she brutally dragged there, a helpless victim, or does she go nobly and quietly, with what little dignity and choice she has left (as in other retellings)? One gives her more autonomy, and the other gives her death visibility and frames her suffering as unnecessary. There is a tendency in the genre of retellings to focus more on visibility, like Miller does, even if it means the narrative lingers even more on the women’s suffering than the original text might, which could be problematic if taken too far into trauma porn. Similarly, Briseis is often talked about without expanding upon what it meant for her to be captured and enslaved: “I watched fire devour my entire city. / The kind oak trees that once gave me shade / alight. The place my parents first met / consumed by cruel amber flames. / The elegant bones of every temple / I had worshipped in torn asunder by fire, / every home, every shop, everything.”⁷ The caveat to these retellings is that Briseis and Iphigenia are easy to retell because they are very explicitly victims within the original narratives. Readers want to see women who are victims gain more autonomy, or at the very least have what is done to them broadcasted so that no one can look away and pretend that it did not happen. These retellings become more complicated as they move to the stories of women whose roles were far more ambiguous.

WIVES

Helen of Troy and Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, are two such characters whose roles are complicated as queens and wives due to most of their story in the old myths being entirely in service to their husbands. As Heidi Morse writes, their characters “have survived inscribed in hero narratives, in someone else’s story, not their own; so they are figures or markers of positions—places and topoi—through which the hero and his story move to their destination and to accomplish meaning. Their narrative immobility signals their own gendered petrification within myth’s symbolic order.”⁸ In contradiction to this, retellings put the women at the center of their own stories, so that they are driving the narrative. In Clytemnestra, Helen exclaims “I do not care about looks! What good are they… I am only interesting to look at.”⁹ This is rather different from the Penelopiad, where she is portrayed as someone far more attention-seeking, but either way, these retellings draw upon her many interpretations in ancient myth, from epics like the Iliad to Euripides’ Helen, and make her the main character of her story. Helen has been a point of fascination for writers since ancient times, and as a result, there are already so many different interpretations of her to draw upon in modern retellings, following the ancient tradition of retellings, but with the twist of making her the main character in a more modern, feminist way. In Great Goddesses, the Trojan War itself is reframed by Helen: “Did you think that if you trapped / the Storm Bringer’s daughter / into a life of subservience /there would be no consequences? / That you, and everything / you love, would not burn?”¹⁰ Many stories do not take into account the fact that Helen is the product of Leda being raped by Zeus in the form of a swan, and that she is technically a demigod like Hercules or Achilles. The focus on her personal motivations make the Trojan War more palatable—as though it was not her fault, but the fault of men attempting to entrap her—and allow readers to relate to her despite her complicated story and choices. 

Penelope, Queen of Ithaca, is a fascinating character because she is embedded into The Odyssey as “An edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering?”¹¹ The retellings make her real, more than just a woman who waited, instead looking at what it meant for Penelope to hold Ithaca for twenty years, similar to how many women today are in control of the household, or have to raise their children alone. For example, in the original Odyssey, Penelope says “Some god first prompted me / to set my weaving in the hall and work / a long fine cloth”¹² but in retellings like EPIC: The Musical, she sings “I said I would choose as soon as I weave this shroud / They don’t know that every night / I unthread all the work I’ve done / ‘Cause I’d rather lie / Than allow them to think they’ve won.”¹³ While in the original text, Penelope’s cleverness is the result of a god, in the retelling, she not only has a song entirely to herself, but her trickery is of her own accord, giving her more autonomy. The focus is on not letting the suitors win, framing it as a battle of sorts, and Penelope as the unconventional warrior, holding down fort. This gives her waiting strength that in the original text, is barely-there subtext. Great Goddesses yet again focuses on what is ignored in those twenty years Odysseus takes to return home: “The bards sing of his exploits as I stand alone – / cunning Odysseus, brave Odysseus – / while they are only able to feed themselves / from food and water my reign provided.”¹⁴ Yet again, the retellings focus on Penelope’s autonomy and strength in ruling a kingdom on her own while her husband was away, and points out how the bards don’t sing of it: visibility for her actions. 

Both Helen and Penelope’s retellings differ from that of the typical victim because the focus is not on their suffering, which is already a part of the narrative for the victims, but on the choices they made while the original stories focused on their husbands. They almost act like addenda to the original texts, working in sync instead of fully rewriting them—The Odyssey and Iliad will tell the stories of Menelaus and Paris and Odysseus, but the retellings will tell of what Helen and Penelope got up to while their husbands were away. In a modern day context, it is almost like having a story about a traditional family that focuses not on the husband working a 9-5, but on the wife at home and her overlooked labor in keeping the house.

VILLAINS

The hardest category of women to rewrite were the villains in the original narratives, like Clytemnestra, the murderous wife of Agamemnon, and Circe, the enchantress from the Odyssey. These women were not unwilling victims, or wives whose stories were merely subsumed by their husbands’: these women were active parts of the story, and as such, retellings don’t have to create a narrative, but shift it so that their actions can be justified. The hardest part is making readers root for women who do objectively terrible things. Retellings mainly do this by focusing on their freedom., arguing that they are only monsters because the world has forced them to be that way.

For example, in The Odyssey Agamemnon says “It was Aegisthus / who planned my death and murdered me, with help / from my own wife.”¹⁵ In the retelling Clytemnestra, she is the one who plots his death, as revenge for his murder of their eldest daughter Iphigenia. The retelling combines the older Oresteia and Odyssey, which provide no context for Clytemnestra’s gruesome murder of her husband, with the later play Iphigenia at Aulis from Euripides, to give context to her actions. The retelling also provides her with far more autonomy, making her more than just a betrayer who jumps from her husband to another man to do his bidding. In the original Oresteia, “Aeschylus presents her as violating gender norms, masculinising her behaviour, assuming manly duties of blood-revenge, and displaying the monstrous threat of feminine rule.”¹⁶ This is most evident in the language of the play, where characters say things like “Keep the bull / away from the heifer,”¹⁷ “hateful bitch,” “and she’s a viper, she’s a Scylla.”¹⁸ She is dehumanized and compared to animals so that her actions come not from a place of love for Iphigenia, and motherhood, but instead frame it as a reversal of gender roles, arguing that in murdering Clytemnestra, she has transgressed into the male sphere. Retellings frame her murder as distinctly feminine, coming from a place of vengeance only a mother could have. She does what she does to be free; in Clytemnestra, a priestess tells her “You will be despised by many, hated by others, and punished. But in the end, you will be free.”¹⁹ Tension lies in the battle between visibility and autonomy: Clytemnestra writes about how her first husband and child are murdered, and she is forced to marry Agamemnon, framing her as a victim. It takes the course of the book for her to gain more autonomy after losing it, and eventually kill her husband. However, retellings like Clytemnstra struggle between empowering their protagonists and making their struggles visible in a way that could victimize them; a far less prevalent problem when retelling the stories of obvious victims. Circe also expresses values that oppose a patriarchal order, as a uniquely independent woman in ancient myths, and retellings mainly focus on justifying her monstrous actions. In EPIC, she sings “this is the price / we pay to live / the world does not / tend to forgive”²⁰ in order to frame her actions as necessary to survive in the world they live in. In another song, both she and Odysseus sing “I’ve got people to protect, [nymphs][people] I can’t neglect / so I’m not taking chances dear,”²¹ and by singing this together, it reflects an equality to their actions. Every action taken by Odysseus in the original narrative is justified, no matter how terrible, and the musical argues that Circe and Odysseus are similar in doing whatever it takes to survive. After all, why is it that in the original text, the actions of men are allowed, but the actions of women are villainized? In the book Circe, she says “A monster, she always has a place. She may have all the glory her teeth can snatch. She will not be loved for it, but she will not be constrained either.”²² In this context, Circe is not actually a monster; she is a powerful woman doing what it takes to survive.

Ultimately, for both Clytemnestra and Circe, being a monster is a good thing because it means that they are free, and what more could a woman want? It is no wonder that the two women’s stories have been retold, and “their viewpoints resonate in today’s more sexually liberated, divorce-prone society where women have gained unprecedented power in government and the workforce but continue to strive for equality, respect and control over their own bodies.”²³ The biggest problem with the monstrous women is autonomy: how much of their cruelty is of their own volition, and how much of it is because of the systemic inequalities that shaped them? Do they still need to be punished? Circe leaves her with a happier ending, but Clytemnstra ends before the later events of the Oresteia would see her own son kill her, leaving the ending ambiguous. Retellings aren’t actually feminist if they justify why a woman is a villain and then punish her for it regardless—that just perpetuates the same systemic injustice that created her within the narrative.

CONCLUSION

In the 21st century, feminist mythology retellings rewrite these foundational myths with a focus on visibility and autonomy for the women in the story. They are not perfect by any means, and at times they are painfully human, but they are at least on more equal footing with the men around them. Whether they are outright victims like Iphigenia and Briseis, overlooked wives like Helen or Penelope, or outright monsters like Clytemnestra and Circe, their stories matter as much as the stories of the men around them. Further, by writing their stories, the authors write the world they wish to see: one where things might not be perfect, but at least women have more control over their bodies and their choices, and if they do not, they can take revenge. At a time when women feel helpless and their rights are being taken away, reading these stories can be incredibly cathartic and liberating—no wonder they are so popular. The question then remains: does retelling these stories actually do anything to rewrite the world the way we wish it was? I would argue yes: when for many modern readers, the retelling is their only exposure to the myth, they come to associate the characters with more modern values that reflect who they are more clearly. Books like Circe and Clytemnestra transform from retellings to the only version of the myth many know, thus gaining a new life of their own, and ultimately, power in how we view the world.

Bibliography

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.

Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Emily Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2023.

Miller, Madeline. Circe. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019.

Casati, Costanza. Clytemnestra. Landmark, 2023.

Miller, Madeline. The Song of Achilles. New York: Ecco, 2011.

Gill, Nikita. Great Goddesses: Life Lessons from Myths and Monsters. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2019.

Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005.

Aeschylus. Agamemnon. Translated by Sarah Ruden. In The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, page range. New York: Modern Library, 2016.

Rivera-Herrans, Jorge. “Puppeteer.” Spotify. Track 1 on EPIC: The Circe Saga. Winion Entertainment, 2024.

Rivera-Herrans, Jorge. “Done For.” Spotify. Track 3 on EPIC: The Circe Saga. Winion Entertainment, 2024.

Rivera-Herrans, Jorge. “The Challenge.” Spotify. Track 1 on EPIC: The Ithaca Saga. Winion Entertainment, 2024.

Heidi Morse. “Feminist Receptions of Medusa: Rethinking Mythological Figures from Ovid to Louise Bogan.” Duke University Press, 2018. (https://read-dukeupress-edu.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/comparative-literature/article/70/2/176/134677/Feminist-Receptions-of-Medusa-Rethinking).

Mayron Lucuara. “Clytemnestra Returns: A Philosophical Inquiry into her Moral Identity in Colm Tóibín’s House of Names.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2019. (https://www.proquest.com/docview/2622812654?parentSessionId=uydeOjH%2BTEbZnBq7zpgKTMjMhXQBiXk%2F64t%2FoocPK8g%3D&pq-origsite=primo&accountid=13567).

Steve Wilmer. “Women in Greek Tragedy Today: A Reappraisal.” Cambridge University Press, 2007.(https://www-cambridge-org.ezp.lib.rochester.edu/core/journals/theatre-research-international/article/women-in-greek-tragedy-today-a-reappraisal/47D89BE9F14FC302E6E84AE241934E1E).

Chatterji, Shreya. “MYTH CRITICISM and the RETELLING of MYTHS”. Volume IV (August 2015.) (https://sxcjpr.edu.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Myth-Criticism-And-The-Retelling-Of-Myths-Shreya-Chatterji.pdf)

Sharma, Dwijen. “The Politics of Retelling Myths.” (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dwijen-Sharma-2/publication/380575045_The_Politics_of_Retelling_Myths/links/6644626b06ea3d0b746ad399/The-Politics-of-Retelling-Myths.pdf)

1.  Shreya Chatterji. “MYTH CRITICISM and the RETELLING of MYTHS”. Volume IV (August 2015.)
   ↩︎
2.  Dwijen Sharma. “The Politics of Retelling Myths.” 
   ↩︎
3.  Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (New York: Ecco, 2012), 174-175.
   ↩︎
4.  Homer, The Iliad, trans. Emily Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2023), 1.471.
   ↩︎
5.  Nikita Gill, Great Goddesses: Life Lessons from Myths and Monsters (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2019), 240.
   ↩︎
6.  Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles, 153.
   ↩︎
7.  Nikita Gill, Great Goddesses, 236.
   ↩︎
8.  Heidi Morse, “Feminist Receptions of Medusa: Rethinking Mythological Figures from Ovid to Louise Bogan,” (Duke University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-6817398. ↩︎
9.  Costanza Casati, Clytemnestra (Landmark, 2023), 111. ↩︎
10.  Nikita Gill, Great Goddesses, 235. ↩︎
11. Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (Canongate, 2005), 9. ↩︎
12.  Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 19.139-141. ↩︎
13.  Jorge Rivera-Herrans, “The Challenge”, Spotify, Track 1 on EPIC: The Ithaca Saga, Winion Entertainment, 2024. ↩︎
14.  Nikita Gill, Great Goddesses, 225. ↩︎
15.  Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson, 11.408-410. ↩︎
16.  Mayron Lucuara, “Clytemnestra Returns: A Philosophical Inquiry into her Moral Identity in Colm Tóibín’s House of Names,” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 42 (Summer 2019), https://www.proquest.com/docview/2622812654?parentSessionId=uydeOjH%2BTEbZnBq7zpgKTMjMhXQBiXk%2F64t%2FoocPK8g%3D&pq-origsite=primo&accountid=13567. ↩︎
17.  Aeschylus, Agamemnon, trans. Sarah Ruden, in The Greek Plays, ed. Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm (New York: Modern Library, 2016), 84. ↩︎
18. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, trans. Sarah Ruden, in The Greek Plays, ed. Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, 87. ↩︎
19.  Costanza Casati, Clytemnestra, 86. ↩︎
20.  Jorge Rivera-Herrans, “Puppeteer”, Spotify, Track 1 on EPIC: The Circe Saga, Winion Entertainment, 2024. ↩︎
21.  Jorge Rivera-Herrans, “Done For”, Spotify, Track 3 on EPIC: The Circe Saga, Winion Entertainment, 2024. ↩︎
22.  Madeline Miller, Circe (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019), 73. ↩︎
23.  Steve Wilmer, “Women in Greek Tragedy Today: A Reappraisal,” Cambridge University Press Vol. 32 Issue 2 (Summer 2007),  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883307002775. ↩︎