Happy spooktober one and all!
It's the month of Goth Christmas (gothmas?) and since we can't really get dressed up and have drunken Hallowe'en parties,* I thought I would share a paper that I gave during my Month of Conferences that feels particularly seasonal for October. I gave this paper at the University of Glasgow College of Arts Annual Postgraduate Conference, for which the theme this year was 'Afterlives'. I took the theme quite literally, and wrote a paper on two interrogating ghosts in my research.
*although we can, of course, get dressed up, eat monstrous amounts of chocolate, and drink alone in our homes.
'Now that I'm dead, I know everything': Interrogating Ghosts in Feminist Adaptations of Greek Myth
My PhD examines novels by contemporary female authors that adapt Greek mythology, thinking about the myths they are adapting, how they are adapting them (are there any recurrent themes, techniques, or tropes?), and - most importantly - how they can be read through feminist lenses. Specifically, I am interested in how these ancient myths can be utilised and politicised to present commentary on contemporary society, particularly in terms of feminism. One theme that occurs again and again in the novels is the idea of female mythical figures “writing back” against their limited portrayal in Classical literature, in their newfound voices in these contemporary novels. Penelope, Lavinia, Clytemnestra, Hecuba, Briseis - there are instances of each of these women interrogating and escaping their ancient, oppressive, limited portrayals in their own voices, in contemporary novels. Moreover, in these instances, we can see Elaine Showalter’s theory of The Anxieties of Female Authorship (1997), derived from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence — this idea that the ‘anxieties of female authorship’ stem from the female author’s belief that the male dominance of the textual field suggests that she should not be writing at all (Showalter 1997; in Richards 2019: 126). So, as the female mythical figure anxiously tries out her voice for the first time, she perhaps echoes the anxiety of the female author, writing in a field (Classics) that is traditionally dominated by upper-class white men.
The texts I research, then, are literary afterlives for mythical female figures afforded by modern women writers. But some of these authors use the literal afterlife, and portray their female protagonists as ghosts that tell their side of their myths long after they have died. This is particularly the case in Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novel The Penelopiad and Ursula Le Guin’s 2008 novel Lavinia, the two of which are the main focus of this paper.
Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad
As the title suggests, the novel is a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective, how she is left behind in Ithaca for two decades while Odysseus goes to war in Troy and then takes his sweet time getting home. Her story focusses on the struggles of maintaining Ithaca, raising Telemachus, and the problems posed by the suitors. To preclude the suitors’ advances and delay her decision in remarrying, Penelope famously makes the decision to weave a funeral shroud for her father-in-law Laertes, promising to make her decision once it is complete; Penelope and her maids then unweave the shroud by night, thus ensuring that it is never finished. In The Penelopiad, Penelope is able to tell us exactly what she did and why, saying simply ‘Here’s what I did’ (Atwood 2005: 112), and thereafter relaying her version of Penelope’s most famous act. She also says:
when telling the story later I used to say that is was Pallas Athene, goddess of weaving, who’d given me this idea, and perhaps this was true, for all I know; but crediting some god for one’s inspirations was always a good way to avoid accusations of pride should the scheme succeed, as well as the blame if it did not (Ibid., 112)
Atwood’s Penelope is witty, bitchy, irreverent, and agnostic beyond belief in her inner monologue, a far cry from her pious, weepy exterior that is all Homer offered in the Odyssey.
Why, though, is the shroud important to what we’re discussing here? As Jasmine Richards explains in ‘Rereading Penelope’s Shroud’, Penelope’s act was central to the domestic plot of the Odyssey, yet it has been largely ‘overlooked in dominant critical approaches to the text’ (Richards 2019: 125). This has changed with more recent feminist classicist scholarship, that ‘has convincingly argued for the centrality of Penelope and her weaving to the plot of the Odyssey.’ (Ibid., 125). Richards argues (as do I, but not quite as well) that Penelope’s weaving of the textile is Atwood ‘stag[ing] and interrogat[ing] many of the theoretical problems associated with feminist theories of influence and anxiety. […] Penelope’s material circumstances force her into creating a textile (text) that can never be complete’ (Ibid., 127). Thus, Penelope’s weaving of the textile becomes a metaphor for her weaving the text, which is, of course, to say her finally telling her own story. In fact, Penelope refers to her project of telling her side of the events as ‘I’ll spin a thread of my own’ (Atwood 2005: 4).
Penelope opens her story by contemplating this literary afterlife, lamenting that her myth has become ‘A stick used to beat other women with’ (Ibid., 2), and she also introduces us to her literal afterlife. Her narrative opens with the line ‘Now that I’m dead, I know everything.’ (Ibid., 1) though she immediately refutes this claim at omniscience, death has afford her hindsight and the gleaning of a few factoids she’d rather not know. So, death has given her the perspective and freedom to ‘spin [her] thread’, despite ‘the difficulty […] that I have no mouth through which I can speak’ (Ibid., 4). What Penelope loses in death, her corporeality, her ‘bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness’ (Ibid., 1), she gains in her ability to interrogate the people who made her life miserable, in much the same way that she holds the Classical tradition to account for its reductive version of her. For instance, she asks Antinous, one of the suitors, why the suitors pursued her when she was getting old and not especially beautiful. He starts by laying on the compliments, calling her ‘the arrow of my love, Penelope of the divine form, fairest and most sagacious of all women’ (Ibid., 99-100) but she says:
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| John Roddam Spencer Stanhope 'Penelope' (1849) |
come now Antinous, […] we’re dead now, you don’t have to blather on in this fatuous manner down
here — you have nothing to gain by it. There’s no need for your trademark hypocrisy. So be a good fellow for once (Ibid., 100)
He calls her ‘merciless in life, merciless in death’ (Ibid., 100) but goes on to explain their plot to marry and impregnate her, and thus claim the kingdom of Ithaca. In death, she is able to get the answers she was denied in life, by interrogating those who had wronged her; because you can’t take it with you, there is nothing to be gained by continuing with the lies and deceit, so Penelope finally gets her answers.
Not everyone in Hades has the same “drop the act” attitude though — Helen clearly believes you can take it with you. She floats around the Underworld with a train of suitors and admirers, flirting with the men, being bitchy, and taking baths for public entertainment. Penelope, as the interrogating ghost, calls her out on this: ‘We’re spirits now Helen, […] Spirits don’t have bodies. They don’t get dirty. They have no need of baths.’ (Ibid., 153). Penelope finally has the courage to match her cousin’s bitchiness in the Underworld, as Helen says ‘You’re being witty, […] Better late than never, I suppose’ and Penelope retorts with a comment about Helen’s ‘bare-naked tits-and-ass bath treat for the dead’ (Ibid., 155). What we’re seeing in The Penelopiad, then, is that personality and personal grudges can remain, and being a ghost allows the freedom to female figures of myth to address slanderous gossip and set the record straight, with both mythical figures and mythological studies, in ways that they did not have the power to do in their own times.
Death: the great equaliser.
Take, for instance, the twelve maids that Odysseus and Telemachus hanged upon the former’s return to Ithaca. Penelope was ambivalent or even encouraging in the maids’ sexual relationships with the suitors — whether they consented or not — and then proceeded to sleep through their slaughter for this exact crime. In the same way that the novel gives Penelope the opportunity to ‘spin a thread of [her] own’, the maids’ songs and anecdotes interrupt her narrative, almost like a Greek chorus, to point out her privilege in life and death, versus their struggles. In the Underworld, as in the narrative, the maids constantly remind Penelope of her failed duty of care, by staying together in a group of 12 and miming their hanging whenever Penelope sees them, but running away before she gets a chance to speak to them. As Atwood says in the introduction: ’I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids; and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself.’ (Ibid., xxi)
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| 'The Penelopiad' play promotional poster, at the Buddies and Bad Times Theatre |
Ursula Le Guin's LaviniaHaunting brings us nicely onto Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia. In this novel, Lavinia is haunted by her future. In Roman myth, Lavinia is the daughter of King Latinus of Latinum, and she goes on to become - in Virgil’s Aeneid - the last wife of the hero Aeneas; they settle in Lavinium, which he names after her, and their descendants go on to found Rome. I always get sad when I think about this, because nobody has ever named a kingdom after me, but anyway… In the Aeneid, Lavinia is afforded no speech, and the most memorable thing that happens to her is that her hair catches fire, which is supposedly a good omen for the Latins after the war. The war happens because, when Lavinia reaches marriageable age, her and her father reject all of the local suitors that are hoping to become the next king of Latinum. This is because King Latinus was warned by his father Faunus, as a dream oracle, not to let Lavinia marry a Latin; and when Aeneas arrives, they recognise him as the destined one. The suitors break Latinus’ treaty with the Trojans and start a war for Lavinia and the kingdom - Aeneas ultimately kills Turnus, the head suitor (much like Antinous was Penelope’s head suitor), and he finally finds peace after years as an exile. Well, for three years, until he dies.
As Le Guin’s Lavinia narrates, ‘Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate. The man was famous, the fate obscure; not a bad balance.’ (Le Guin 2008: 4)
But what does she mean by ‘the fate obscure’? She means that, unlike Helen and, to a lesser extent, Penelope, she is not well remembered for the fighting “caused by her” or, rather, caused by the men fighting to gain glory and using her as an excuse.
I said “Haunting brings us nicely onto Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia” but I’ve yet to talk about any haunting, so let’s get to that. Lavinia is haunted by what I have come to think of as a “future ghost”, whom she comes to call ‘my poet’ (Ibid., 3). She frequents a temple where she gets visits from Virgil, who is on a ship, dying, hundreds of years in the future. They have a really interesting give and take relationship, where she tells him about her life, allowing him to live in his unfinished poem and hear first-hand about the events that led to the founding of Rome, and she gets to hear all about her future with Aeneas, who is on his way, and the things he has done on his way to Latinum, i.e. the events of the Aeneid.
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| 'Vergil' by @Artistfuly |
work.
Lavinia makes Virgil regret overlooking her in his poem. Le Guin’s Lavinia is headstrong, stubborn, perceptive, and pious, none of which are portrayed in Virgil’s poem, making him come to view her as ‘my unfinished, my incomplete, my unfulfilled’ (Ibid., 71). He knows that he is dying, and his biggest regret becomes his unfinished poem, not so that he can finish it for the principal of the thing, but because he never got to revise Lavinia’s characterisation, or lack thereof. He comes to realise, as he says, ‘O Lavinia, […] you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it.’ (Ibid., 46).
Virgil’s regret makes him realise what the forerunners of feminist Classical scholarship asserted: that (in Marta Weigle’s words) ‘mythology [the study of myths] is based primarily on [work] by male scribes, scholars, artists, and “informants” and thus concerns men’s myths and rituals. Far more is known about women in mythology, about the female figures who people male narratives, enactments, philosophies, theologies, and analyses, than about women and mythology or women’s mythologies’ (Weigle 1999: 969). Or, in Virgil’s words ‘And I knew nothing of all that! I never looked at her. I had to tell what the men were doing’ (Le Guin 2008: 43). Virgil wonders why he visited Lavinia, rather than his hero, Aeneas, or even one of the women he focussed on more primarily, such as Dido. He’s confident that he wouldn’t be going to see Camilla, since he says he made her up. He guesses it’s ‘Because I did see him. And not you. You’re almost nothing in my poem’ (Le Guin 2008: 68). He comes to realise that his focus on what Weigle terms ‘men’s myths’ has led to centuries of women in myth being overlooked. He is held to account for his oversights.
Another instance in which Lavinia interrogates Virgil is when she tells him ‘You can’t be thinking straight about the babies’, calling it ‘nefas, against the order of things, unspeakable, unsacred.’ (Ibid., 64-5) when he tells her that, in his conception of the Underworld, the spirits of babies who never got to live are piled up on the ground, crying. He says he knows what it’s like because he’s been there. But who with? Not Aeneas, since the Sybil guided him; Virgil asks ‘What man did I guide? I met him in a wood’ (Ibid, 64)… a reference to the future again, to the 14th Century, when Virgil acts as Dante’s guide to the Underworld in his Inferno. As we see the ailing Virgil get confused between his literary self as an author, his literary self as a character, Aeneas (the figure whom he wrote about), and Dante (the figure who wrote about him), you really start to see the male domination of the Classical tradition, the primacy of ‘male scribes, scholars, artists, and “informants” and […] men’s myths and rituals’ in the study of Classics.
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| Penelope at her loom |
So Penelope has ‘no mouth through which [to] speak’, but finds herself with plenty of time in the Afterlife to ‘spin a thread of [her] own’ (Atwood 2005: 4), and Lavinia also opens her narrative with a consideration about her literary afterlife. She says ‘I am not sure of the nature of my existence,’ (Le Guin 2008: 3). She is not sure if she was ever real, and thus if she could ever have an afterlife, thinking instead that she exists ‘only in this line of words I write’ (Ibid., 3); she considers that whatever life she had was not a real one, but a literary one, born - living - dying - surviving only in Virgil’s words, but since ‘he did not write them […] he scanted me’ (Ibid., 3), she has to exist instead in the words she writes for herself.
Overall, a lot of my PhD is focussed on the revival of obscure women from Greek myth in modern literature which, in other words, is their literary afterlife. But the topic of this conference gave me the opportunity to look at a very literal way that these female mythical figures, who are telling their side of the narrative, contend with their reception: as long-dead ghosts.
Happy Hallowe'en everyone, hopefully you found this blog post to be a treat, rather than a trick!
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