On Monday and Tuesday I attended a conference in Durham on ‘Consent: Histories, Representations, and Frameworks’. I had such an amazing time; this blog post will be dedicated to reviewing the conference, and sharing the paper that I delivered, as well as explaining where it fits into my PhD.
The conference was organised by the (frankly wonderful) Durham PhD students/ECRs Arya Thampuran, Hannah Piercy, Rebecca White, and Sophie Franklin. I wanted to start this post by thanking them - I have rarely been to a conference that was so overwhelmingly positive, inclusive, sensitive, and erudite. I especially wanted to highlight their implementation of Eve Tuck’s method of inclusive Q&A practice, in which 5-10 minute breaks are included after the papers but before the questions. This gives the audience a chance to pause, reflect, and peer-review their questions, and affords the panellists an opportunity to recollect their thoughts before jumping into the (often quite taxing) Q&A. Also, when dealing with such a sensitive issue as consent, it gives you a chance to process your thoughts and feelings before formulating questions and contributing to debates and discussions. More information on Tuck’s method can be found here - I will definitely be advocating for using this method at all future conferences, symposiums, colloquiums, and the like!
While every paper I took in was brilliant, and the two keynotes were exceptional, there were a couple of papers which I especially loved. In the panel I chaired, ‘Contemporary Articulations of Consent’, I really enjoyed Megan Rutter’s ‘More Than Just the Purple Man’s Words: Consent and Agency in Marvel’s Jessica Jones’. In this paper, Rutter examined Jessica Jones’ loss of consent and subsequent trauma in the Netflix show as a result of the villain’s power; Kilgrave, played by David Tennant, can make anyone do what he says with the power of his voice, stripping them of their mental and bodily autonomy. She also discussed the way that mental illnesses and trauma are presented in the show, as well as how they are manifested more widely in the MCU. This was particularly enjoyable to me as a fan of the Marvel films and television shows, but someone who often struggles to align my enjoyment of the franchise with my politics.
There was one paper in particular that I was very excited to hear. This was Suzanne Lynch’s ‘Representations of Consent in Ancient Greek Literature’, and it did not disappoint! Lynch examined instances of consent and non-consent in numerous Ancient Greek texts, and posed a number of thought-provoking questions: How are consent/non-consent expressed and conveyed? Who gives consent? Who withholds consent? Who violates consent? How are they perceived and judged? What are the repercussions/consequences? Further to this, Lynch discussed the difficulties of researching sexual violence and rape culture in Ancient Greek Tragedies - her PhD project - when the Classics academy remains, by large, so resistant to feminist discourses, and use criticisms such as “anachronistic” and “ahistorical” to avoid engaging with modern critical thought.
In fact, I loved her paper so much that I made a mind-map of it:
Since we’re on the topic of myths, let’s talk about the panel I was on! (Smooth transition, huh?) I want to once again compliment the organisers of the conference, because the composition of the panel was absolutely amazing: myths, legends, and fairy tales in one - how brilliant! The panel opened with Hannah Piercy discussing rape myths and stalker beliefs in the various reincarnations of the Pelleas and Ettarde story. In the story, the highborn lady Ettarde (debatably) promises her love to the lowly knight Pelleas if he wins her a prize; he wins the prize but Ettarde snubs him, and he proceeds to stalk her. Ettard sleeps with the knight Gawain, and Pelleas plans to kill them, but then doesn't because his knight vows prevent him. What a good guy. In recognition of Pelleas’ valour and knightly duty, Ettard marries him. This story clearly depicts a stalking narrative by our modern definitions, but an earlier iteration of the crime was ‘raptus’. Piercy argued that different retellings of the story - originally in the Suite du Merlin, later popularised in Malory’s Mort Darthur and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King - offer revealing insights into the various authors’ and their corresponding society’s views on consent. Piercy was followed by Dr Emeline Morin, whose paper on ‘Sexuality, Marriage, and Consent in Fairy Tales and the Value of Rewriting Stories’ was equally brilliant! She weighed in on feminist debates surrounding fairy tales, asking if we should ban fairy tales because they perpetuate patriarchal notions of sexuality and gender, but then proceeded to conclude that the form is not fixed, and their cultural pervasiveness suggest that they can affect change and create dialogues between women. Morin ended by referencing feminist fairy tales and the Amnesty project ‘No Consent, No Fairy Tale’, which I’m really looking forward to looking up later!
Then, it was my turn. I talked about a woman from Greek myths who has been heavily adapted by contemporary female authors and, as such, she is going to be one of the two primary focusses of my first chapter ‘Women in the Texts’. The other woman I will be investigating in my first chapter will be Penelope, followed by a brief look at Helen of Troy, who still seems to be irredeemable - or, at least, unadaptable - in our contemporary climate. So, look out for blog posts on them in the near future! But, for now, here is my paper on Briseis, I hope you like it:
Could Briseis Consent?
I am going to start with some background. In Homer’s Iliad, Briseis is Achilles’ war prize. Briseis is given to Achilles by the men to congratulate him on his actions in the Trojan War. Briseis is a woman taken from the familiarity of her father, brothers, and husband, and used as a reward for a man’s exceptional killing of her people. She becomes a symbol of Achilles’ honour and status. Then, Agamemnon - the King among Kings of Greece, the leader of the army - takes her. He has to surrender his prize - another woman, named Chryseis - to appease Apollo, and so - to even the score - he takes Achilles’ prize. Achilles then refuses to fight in the War, causing the Greeks to very nearly lose, and the death toll to rise … and all of this is somehow Briseis’ fault, for being the thing which they are fighting over. Patroclus, Achilles’ second in command and closest companion, then leads Achilles’ men - the Myrmidons - into battle wearing Achilles’ armour. He is killed by Hector, who believes him to be Achilles. Achilles, heartbroken over the loss of his love, is ready to return to fighting. Agamemnon returns Briseis for the politics, but Achilles doesn't care about her now - so focussed is he on his heartbreak over losing Patroclus.
So the short answer is no - Briseis could not consent. She was a woman of Ancient Greece, with very little power or agency, and then she was taken to be the war prize - read: sex slave - of a foreign hero.
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| Briseis and Phoenix (Louvre) |
But my PhD isn’t on the Iliad. I don’t study Homer. I research contemporary adaptations of ancient myths written by women, through feminist lenses. In Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sanders asserts that ‘Mythical literature depends upon, incites even, perpetual acts of reinterpretation in next contexts, a process that embodies the very idea of appropriation’ (Sanders 2006: 63) and that ‘Each new generation of story makers adopted familiar mythic templates and outlines for their storytelling purposes’ (Ibid., 64), citing James Joyce’s Ulysses ‘as the archetype of the adapted text’ (Ibid., 6) and a key example of how myths are always adapted to fit the current concerns of society. As such, we must ask ourselves if these ancient, patriarchal myths can be appropriated for feminist purposes? In these adaptations, can Briseis consent? And, further to whether she consents or not, can the figure of Briseis be used to engage in current discourses surrounding violence against women and, more specifically, issues of consent?
In contrast to the Iliad, I am going to start with a contemporary adaptation in which Briseis does consent. In For the Most Beautiful, Emily Hauser rewrites the Trojan War as a love story between Briseis and Achilles. This novel is quite different to some of the other texts that revisit the Iliad: for one, Hauser uses the Trojan names for the gods, so Zeus becomes Zayu, Apollo becomes Apulunas, Aphrodite becomes Arinniti, Athena is Atana, and Hera is Era. Hauser also includes the perspectives of the gods in italicised interludes, which a lot of her contemporaries avoid doing, choosing instead to focus on the lived human experience, finding the characters’ beliefs in these gods more interesting than the gods themselves. This is quite an interesting trend, because Homer himself was interested in the movements and machinations of the gods, and early feminist adaptations of myth were focussed on reclaiming goddesses as symbols of feminist power and reimagining monstrous women. But to me, the most interesting divergence that Hauser takes is Briseis’ consensual relationship with Achilles. The story opens with a prophesy that ‘“He who seeks Briseis’ bed shall then her brothers three behead.”’ (Hauser 2016: 45). This causes some trouble for her when her family is trying to find the princess an appropriate husband, and it causes more problems still when Achilles raids the land and, true to the prophesy, kills her three brothers, as well as her father and her husband. Yet, when Briseis sees Achilles kill her entire family, she focusses on ‘His eyes glitter[ing] in the dark, the skin of his arms and chest tight over smooth muscles, […] His strangeness [that] was painfully gorgeous, [and] his slim height.’ (Ibid., 133). Achilles then takes Briseis as his war prize and sex slave, but after she draws him a rose petal bath and anoints him with oils, he says ‘“I shall not force you, […] No one should make love because they have to. […] But remember this, Briseis, […] You will come to my bed. I shall not wait forever.”’ (Ibid., 187-8).
Emily Hauser is a professor of Classics and her primary research interests are women in antiquity, gender studies, and classical reception, with a focus on the intersection between gender and poetics in the ancient world and its contemporary reception (Emily Hauser Online 2019: np.). Yet Hauser seems to be in favour of making Briseis and Achilles’ story a romance that adheres to contemporary notions of consent - despite how dubious that consent really is - rather than retelling the myth as a platform to discuss how myths are still beloved by contemporary society despite the fact that women are constantly brutalised and punished in them.
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| This picture makes me sad (via Pinterest) |
Before we get to an author who does make the suffering of women in wartime her primary focus, I want to quickly discuss Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles. Miller also focusses on a central love story in the Iliad, but it’s the romance between Achilles and Patroclus. Patroclus was Achilles’ Philtatos (most beloved), and their homosexual relationship was written about by Classical thinkers such as Aeschylus, Plato, and Pindar, who debated who was the erastes (protector/lover) and who was the erominos (the one who is loved), if you get what I mean, wink wink etc etc. It is only in post-Classical and Christian traditions that their relationship is heterosexualised, for instance Robert Graves called them cousins to describe their closeness and love. Miller’s depiction of Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship is really important when thinking about LGBTQ+ myths and ideas of masculinity, tradition, and legacy. Yet her depiction of Briseis is more problematic. In this text, Patroclus and Achilles “rescue” Briseis from the leering soldiers who seek her as their prize; they give her accommodation, food, and clothes, and then they go on to “save” as many women as possible from the men who seek to rape them. The women help in the camp, and they are treated like family in return. This starkly contrasts to the other women in the Greek camps, who are dressed in rags and have to serve the people who murdered their families, then ‘At night they served in other ways, and I [Patroclus] cringed at the cries that reached even our corner of the camp.’ (Miller, 2011: 218). This is problematic, as it completely sanitises Briseis’ story to keep Achilles’ legend untarnished - it places more value on his character than on her suffering. Furthermore, I think it’s fair to say that this is bisexual erasure by Miller, who desexualises the relationship between Achilles and Briseis in order to preserve the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus - how could this possibly be the gay love story that Miller intended if Achilles also liked having sex with women? When Achilles has sex with Deidameia, a necessity for his son to be conceived, he repeats ‘I did not want it. […] I did not - I did not like it. […] I wouldn't have done it myself.’ (Ibid., 127-130). We could discuss here whether Achilles consented to having sex with Deidameia, but suffice it to say that Miller erases Achilles’ bisexuality, and leaves his sexual relationship with Briseis unwritten in order to further highlight the homosexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. Of course, adapting authors can be selective, choosing which elements of the stories to include to fit their aims; they don’t have to incorporate all of the original stories. And yet, Miller’s novel does leave us wanting when considering the characterisation of Briseis in contemporary adaptations.
This brings us to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. While Hauser depicts Achilles as Briseis’ lover, and Miller depicts him as Patroclus’ lover and Briseis’ saviour, Barker opens her novel with: ‘Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … how the epitaphs pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him “the butcher”.’ (Barker 2018: 3). Barker is not interested in preserving Achilles’ legend, she is interested in women’s experiences in wartime. When Lyrnessus falls, Briseis is hiding with the women, surrounded by ‘the smells of sweaty bodies, of milk, baby-shit and menstrual blood,’ (Ibid., 4), she sees men, boys, and male babies being killed, and women getting raped and abused. In this first chapter, we are being informed that this will not be a celebration of Classical Greece and its masculine Heroes. When Achilles chooses her as his ‘prize of honour’ (Ibid., 28), he does not talk about making love and wait for her dubious consent, and he does not send Patroclus in to kindly explain that she is safe because they are homosexual. Barker’s Briseis remarks ‘What can I say? He wasn’t cruel […] He fucked as quickly as he killed, and for me it was the same thing. Something in me died that night.’ (Ibid., 28). The Silence of the Girls does not make for easy reading, but it does not shy away from the brutal realities of women’s abuse in wartime, especially not to preserve the reputation of a man. Briseis continually refers to herself as a slave - a sex slave, a bed slave, an enslaved symbol of Achilles’ honour - as well as comparing herself to the kings’ assets and dogs, because she is aware of how she is valued and commodified. She also compares her relative luck at being Achilles’ prize to the fortunes of ‘the common women around the campfires’ (Ibid., 48), who are repeatedly brutalised and then have to fight the stray dogs for scraps and sleeping spaces. In a related manner, Barker’s adaptation does not forswear the grotesque realities of life in war encampments: we see in gruesome detail the filth of the living conditions, making you wonder whether it truly was Apollo, ‘Lord of mice, […] Lord of Plague’ (Ibid., 63) who sent the famous plague to the Greek camps, or the undisposed rubbish and sewage, and the accompanying rats.
In the Iliad, Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles, and when he later returns her, he swears he has not touched her. In both Hauser and Miller’s adaptations, that remains true. Again, Pat Barker departs from this: her Agamemnon - first King of the Achaeans, who inherited his right to rule from Zeus himself - ‘prefers the back door’ (Ibid., 48). One of the older women in the camp has ‘a jar of goose fat mixed with crushed roots and herbs’ (Ibid., 48), which many of the common women use to ease the pains after anal penetration. This ‘jar’ is also used by ‘the youngest of us, Chryseis, [who] was fifteen years old; the [sweet] daughter of a priest,’ (Ibid., 48) and Agamemnon’s favourite prize. Briseis later has to make use of the same goose-fat jar, but Agamemnon swears he did not lay with her as a man lays with a woman and she says thats almost true. Yet, perhaps the most demeaning action we see in the novel is done by Agamemnon, as Briseis narrates: ‘inserting a finger between my teeth to prise my jaws apart, he worked up a big gob of phlegm - leisurely, taking his time about it - and spat it into my open mouth.’ (Ibid., 119). This is an unthinkable act of ownership, domination, and dehumanisation - it is never more clear than in this moment how much privilege he has versus how little agency she has. It’s a common trope amongst these adaptations that Agamemnon is the most irredeemable. While Achilles is cast as a ‘Butcher’ or, more often, a tragic hero, Agamemnon is a politician, a warmonger, a sexual deviant, and a monster. This depiction is quite consistent with Agamemnon’s characterisation in the Iliad, but I think this figure of a corrupt, profiteering politician is sadly still a recognisable one.
So, we can now go back to our original question: could Briseis consent? For Pat Barker - as in the Iliad - the answer is no, Briseis could not consent. Although Homer’s reasoning was probably that he just didn’t care whether or not Briseis wanted Achilles, rather than trying to highlight the brutality against women in wartime, which was the motivation for Barker. Furthermore, even when Briseis can consent, such as in Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful, we see that Briseis should not be made to, because even though Achilles is one of the last great heroes of the Bronze Age, to Briseis he is the murderer of her family and the enemy of her nation. Furthermore, with the power dynamics where Achilles is literally Briseis’ owner and she is his slave, could she ever really consent?
But in a bit of a divergence from the title of this paper, it’s not just about whether different adaptations of Briseis can consent, because, ultimately, when we ask “could Briseis consent?” what we’re really asking is if this character from Classical myths can be used to navigate contemporary feminist discourses surrounding consent - to which I think the answer is yes.
I don't think I need to tell this group that consent has always been a massive concern in feminist theory. This is still true today, despite the concerns of critic Carine Mardorissian who ‘argue[s] that more theorizing of sexual violence is needed in order to challenge [the] reductive perspectival and issue-oriented approaches that have dominated the field’ (Mardorissian 2002: 747) because ‘sexual violence has become the taboo subject of feminist theory today. The topic has been relegated to introductory women’s studies courses, where it is predominately subjected to issue-oriented and experimental analyses.’ (Ibid., 743) As someone who did their Master’s in Women’s Studies in a department that had specialised courses on “Women, Violence, and Conflict”, I can assure you that sexual violence was a topic that was in no way ‘relegated’. I think Mardorissian completely misses the nuances of modern feminist discourses; she is incredibly critical of intersections of oppression, and contemporary focusses on pornography, sex work, and sexual harassment - all of which I think are very valid feminist discourses and in no way take away from theories of sexual violence and consent. It is true that some theorists within Women’s Studies hold outdated and problematic views on consent and sexual violence: Diane Richardson, a cornerstone theorist of women’s studies, with whose opinions I often have issues with, argued in Introducing Women’s Studies that she ‘cannot accept the liberal view that “anything goes” between consenting adults. In the context of unequal power relations […] the notion of consent remains problematic.’ (Richardson 1997: 167). You may call me a liberal feminist (to which I will say thank you) but I think this idea that you can never truly consent to sex because of gendered inequality is wrong and, frankly, bleak. For one, it completely ignores every sexuality that is not heterosexual: can LGBT+ people consent? Are we the only people who can consent? Also, it attempts to undermine all of the sex positive activism and discourse that feminists have been engaging in since the 1980s.
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| Bates, Girl Up! |
Take, for instance, popular feminist author and activist Laura Bates who, in Girl Up! uses an ice cream metaphor to explain consent: whatever flavour of ice cream you like - maybe many flavours, maybe just one flavour, maybe no flavour at all - is okay, as long as the other person you’re having the ice cream with also likes that flavour, etc etc (Bates 2016: 223-5). And, put simply, don’t force-feed people ice-cream: ‘any sex without consent is rape (including oral sex, manual sex, or using other objects) […] there is no such thing as sex without consent - because it would have to be described as rape. (This us a distinction that newspapers aren't always very good at making, […])’ (Ibid., 225). Bates also makes a great point about how consent must be continual and enthusiastic, with which I have zero criticisms.
Bringing it back to Briseis, I think it is accurate to say that she can never truly consent because of the power dynamics. This is because Achilles, both in the ancient Iliad and modern retellings of it, is a blatantly patriarchal oppressor, and Briseis is his sexual slave. I think there is an argument that, in For the Most Beautiful, Hauser is trying to present a sex-positive Briseis, but I do not think it is particularly convincing considering Achilles’ ownership of her. In The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker also presents this consent as dubious or impossible, not only in Briseis’ experience, but also that of Tecmessa - Ajax’s prize, who has a very similar story to Briseis, but with one notable difference: ‘Ajax had killed her father and her brothers and that same night raped her, and yet she’d grown to love him’ (Barker 2018: 50). Briseis, like me, finds this consent unconvincing and frustrating: ‘I found it hard to like Tecmessa or feel anything much for her except a kind of exasperated pity. […] I wasn’t sure I believed her.’ (Ibid., 50) So, in conclusion, Briseis could not consent in the Iliad, and nor can she - or women like her - consent in a convincingly enthusiastic and sustained way in women’s adaptations … but she can be used to navigate contemporary feminist discourses surrounding consent, so there’s that.
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