Big Books for Big Audiences: Mythic Methodologies & Legendary Lit Reviews, Pt.2

on

 


This is the story of how I’ve written about Beyoncé in my lit review, among other things. 

For all things methodological, see Mythic Methodologies & Legendary Lit Reviews, Part 1

One of the core contentions in my literature review is that much of the relevant work occurring in contemporary feminist Classics is not happening within the academy, it is materialising in content created for general audiences. 

To borrow from Johanna Hanink who, in turn, was echoing Mary Beard,* there is a rising trend of female academics writing ‘big books’, that is, working on the major epics and key events from ancient history rather than being relegated to obscure research interests. There is also an increasing popularity in ‘writing big about the classics’, by which she means writing ‘big books [for] big audiences’ (Hanink 2017: np.). Beard’s SPQR (2015)* and Hall’s Introducing the Ancient Greeks (2014) are both key examples of female classicists ‘writing big about the classics’ for wider audiences. Crucially, this is not to say that these works do not contribute to the academy. On the contrary, such works make the classics more accessible to wider audiences, thus encouraging more engagement with classics within the academy (Hanink 2017: np.). 

*Yes, Beard is becoming Classics' Voldemort, but we don't have time to get into that right now... 


These texts are often able to engage with topics more directly and immediately, due to there being less demand for academically distanced language and a generally quicker publication process. 

Though Hanink cites Helen Morales’ Pilgrimage to Dollywood (2014) as an example of this phenomenon, it is Morales’ more recent text for wider audiences, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths (2020) and Natalie Haynes’ Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths (2020) that have been particularly useful in the critical construction of my thesis. 





Helen Morales, Antigone Rising (2020)

I draw predominantly upon Helen Morales’ Antigone Rising (2020) in the chapter ‘Antigone’s Afterlives’, when addressing the question of why Antigone is a continued figure of interest and interpretation. 

Her text includes further examples of how contemporary feminists are creating innovative interpretations and analyses in Classics presently, which are particularly useful to my theoretical framework. 


Killing Amazons: In Greek myth, the Amazons were symbolic of disobedient and foreign women, since they lived without need of men, wore men’s armour, and fought better than most men. Morales claims that ‘there is a relationship between the ancient fantasy of killing women and the modern reality’ (Ibid., 3). Morales’ stance is that we have inherited some beliefs about women from antiquity and that those beliefs ‘form the imaginative scaffolding that underpins out beliefs about women today’ (Ibid., 5). She evidences this by drawing a parallel between Greek heroes killing Amazons and the Isla Vista killings. 

Tracing misogyny propagated online by toxic men’s rights groups back to the Greeks punishing Amazons in their myths for their sexual, social, and martial freedoms — since they are both ‘punishment[s] of sexually renegade women’ (Ibid., 6-7) — is a useful example of how an Ancient Greek mythological framework is useful for shedding light on contemporary misogyny. 


It is in this analysis that Morales makes the point that she has ‘worried about whether it is a crass move to make: too academic, too contrived’, to compare trauma that is real and recent to ancient myths (Ibid., 14). She counters that turning to ancient material helps to illustrate how long-standing such cultural narratives are, and how classical antiquity plays a role in legitimising violent misogyny today (Ibid., 14). Hence, looking at the role that Amazons play in Greek myths can provide insights into attitudes towards sexual violence in the present day. 

Sexual assault is a recurrent point of inquiry in this thesis, due to its omnipresence in Greek myth and its revisitation by contemporary authors. It has been a continued source of inquiry for feminist Classicists: how do we contend with the sexual violence of Greek myth? And, how do we contend with the centuries of fetishised depictions of sexual violence from Greek myth? 
Bernini's 'Apollo & Daphne' 
(1922-1925) 
Currently on display in the Galleria Borghese, 
Rome



‘Go into any art museum’, states Morales, and you will see Daphne metamorphosing into a tree, The Rape of Europa, The Rape of the Sabine Women, The Rape of Proserpina, ‘Lucretia, Leda, Polyxena, Cassandra, Deianeira…’ (Morales 2020: 66) – raped women have been the artists’ muses throughout the centuries. Myths provide ‘a repertoire of rape narratives’ (Ibid., 66), including Phaedra who lied about being raped, Cassandra who was punished for revoking consent, and Medusa who was punished for being raped. For Morales, ‘predatory men still silence women; the removal of Philomena’s tongue is the original nondisclosure agreement’ and ‘the myth of Helen is perhaps the most dangerous of all the rape myths’ because it has been told and retold in so many different ways that it is impossible to discern whether she consents (Ibid., 72; 67). These rape myths are ‘firmly entrenched in our culture’ and they certainly contribute to the normalising of sexual violence and rape culture in the West. As much as these myths concerning sexual violence provide the framework for rape culture, they also contain the seeds for #MeToo, which Morales reads in the sisterhood of Philomena and Procne, and the determination of Ceres/Demeter in her search for Proserpina/Persephone (Ibid., 72-4). 

‘Beyoncé’s feminist mythmaking’: One incredibly interesting interpretation in Antigone Rising is the analysis of Beyoncé and entrenched ideas of whiteness in Classics. Much like Audre Lorde’s open letter to Mary Daly, criticising her white, Eurocentric bias in Gyn/Ecology (1979), ‘Beyoncé, a generation later, is having the same argument with, and through, popular culture,’ (Morales 2020: 107). It is an argument demanding the acknowledgement that ‘Greek and Roman antiquity have played a major role in constructing and authorizing racism, colonialism, nationalism, patriarchy, Western-centrism, body normativity, and other entrenched, violent societal structures’ (Hanink 2017: np.). 

Beyoncé has issued a challenge to this entrenched racism, firstly by adapting iconography of Venus in her pregnancy photoshoots that ‘escape the common trap for black Venuses: denigration and hypersexualisation’ (Morales 2020: 105). 

Photography by Awol Erizku



Beyoncé’s challenge continues in the Carters’ music video filmed in the Louvre. Beyoncé becomes Nike and Venus when she performs in front of their marble statues and, more than that, ‘the juxtaposition of her black body with the white marble challenges long-held assumptions about whiteness, antiquity, and beauty’ (Ibid., 113). White marble “skin” has become idealised and romanticised, due in large part to the extant statues we have from antiquity; in fact, this is a misapprehension, since the statues were originally polychromous, though time has removed these details. 

Beyonce becomes Nike of Samothrace


In Beyoncé’s rendering, the kneeling statue of Hermes becomes Kaepernick taking the knee, lending the cultural capital of the ancients to the Black Lives Matter movement (Ibid., 115-6). 
'The power & paradox of Beyoncé & Jay-Z
taking over the Louvre' 



Thus, Beyoncé’s performance becomes ‘a visual intervention in this controversy and a gorgeous and artistic dismissal of the old lies that conflate whiteness of marble with ideal beauty’ (Ibid., 114). Morales calls this ’Beyoncé’s feminist mythmaking’ (Ibid., 118), evidencing the importance of this analysis in providing critical context for this thesis, since it is evidently not only authors, and white feminists, that are performing subversive recreations of antiquity for activist purposes and Beyoncé functions as the perfect example of the current vogue for feminist mythmaking. 

Ultimately, Morales concludes that ‘the creative  adaptations of myth – the stories, videos, images, and novels that present radically different perspectives – are more than individual contestations: they amount to a formidable cultural change’ and that ‘subversive myth making is a process – one that involves the past and present and all of the versions in between’ (Ibid., 148). 


Natalie Haynes, Pandora’s Jar (2020) 

I read a tweet recently that said your literature review isn’t about you, it’s about telling your reader everything they need to know to catch them up on your topic. 



If this is the case, what my readers need to know is that Pandora’s Jar is VITAL to any discussions of recent feminist theory in Classics:


We have made space in our storytelling to rediscover women who have been lost or forgotten. They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people (Haynes 2020: 3)


The text itself is dedicated to revisiting the women from Greek myth beyond their symbolic, essentialised roles (Penelope is the good wife; Clytemnestra is the bad wife; Medea is the bad mother; Helen is the untrustworthy lover; Eurydice is the worthy lover…). 

Phaedra is an interesting example, as her myth is somewhat unadaptable through a feminist lens since it ‘can be used to legitimise the myth that many women lie about being raped’ (Ibid., 210). Haynes suggests that she is an important figure to consider in terms of women’s agency in myth, since Phaedra’s actions are guided by Aphrodite. Conversely, Jennifer Saint chooses a different route in adapting Phaedra for Ariadne, where she is specifically exonerated from the crime of falsely accusing Hippolytus of rape, therefore not contributing to legitimising false rape allegations. 

Left: Aphrodite (Jacquelyn Stucker); Right: Phaedra (Hongni Wu) at London Royal Opera 2019


Moreover, Pandora’s Jar often provides analyses that act in interesting conversation with Haynes’ novelistic retellings. A key example of this insight lies in Haynes’ interpretation of Clytemnestra as ‘the mother of a daughter who has been slaughtered like an animal. Is it any wonder she nurses an unquenchable rage against the man who committed this crime?’ (Ibid., 151), which echoes Clytemnestra’s characterisation in A Thousand Ships where her perspective is introduced in the following manner: ‘Ten years was a long time to bear a grudge, but Clytemnestra never wavered. Her fury neither waxed nor waned, but burned at a constant heat.’ (Haynes 2019: 286). Thus, Pandora’s Jar not only provides a contemporary feminist Classicist interpretation of some of the most significant women from Greek myth, but it also works in conversation with Haynes’ novels that feature heavily in my thesis. 

 For Haynes, there is ‘a strange assumption’ that ‘the myths have always focused on men and that women have only ever been minor figures’. While the ‘stories centred on men have been taken more seriously by scholars’ and have thus gained more cultural capital, it is also true that women have always featured in mythic texts (Haynes 2020: 285-6). Euripides wrote about the Trojan War with plays centred on the female characters, and Ovid’s Heroides retold many of the most familiar heroic myths from the perspectives of the women implicated in their stories. Hence, Haynes asks ‘What on earth makes us believe that the Iliad, where Helen is a relatively minor player, is somehow more authentic than Euripides’ Helen?’ and, more broadly, if Ovid and Euripides knew that ‘the stories of Greek myth could be told just as well from women’s perspectives as men’s, how did we forget?’ (Ibid., 286). 

 ‘she’s in the damn story. Why wouldn’t we want to hear from her?’ 

Rachel Sorsa as Euripides' Helen (adapter, Nick Salamone; dir., John Lawrence Rivera, 2012) 


Texts written for general audiences by trained Classicists contribute to breaking down the ivory tower of Classics – that is, they make it more accessible. This is also the case with podcasts, which I also talk about in my literature review. (At some point, I may have to admit that I don’t actually know what a literature review is meant to be.) But that is a story for another day. 



If you got this far, I hope this means that you’re a fan of my blog. If that is the case, and you have a little to spare, please consider supporting me via ko-fi  

And a special thank you to my beautiful model, Zelda, her sister Carina, and their Papa for their infinite patience for my nonsense. 

Comments

Post a Comment