“She Can Never Be the Same” or Mythical Feminine Agency, Homeric Text, and Contemporary Fiction Interpretations
(This presentation was delivered at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s panel “Re-engaging with the Old Myths: Contemporary Literature, Women, and Classics,” Boston, Massachusetts, March 8, 2024.)
INTRODUCTION
In Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, published in 2018, Briseis, the narrator, challenges the glorification of Homer’s heroic figure, Achilles (the Great, Brilliant, Shining, Godlike Achilles) revealing, “We never called him any of those things. We called him ‘the butcher’” (3). The Iliad and The Odyssey have long been revered as master texts, shaping educational systems and advising social structures on responding to economic and political conditions. However, those works also reflect a male-dominated perspective, indicative of a culture that sidelines the complexity and humanness of women. In this talk, I explore feminine marginalization in Homer’s orated narratives, later written into text, and how modern writers reinterpret the feminine characters in those narratives.
Thetis, Circe, Helen, Penelope, Briseis, and the enslaved women act as subordinate characters to the Homeric heroes, despite their influence in moving the story arcs. They are marginalized in the literature, which exhibits contemporary constructs that promote silencing women’s stories as a patriarchal principle.
While Homer's portrayals are limited by the social constraints of his time, modern storytellers like Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, and Madeline Miller provide multi-layered framing to the inner lives of his women characters. Modern versions of Homeric prose depict first-person accounts where femme characters are the protagonists. Their contemporary interpretations highlight the relevance of gender dynamics and power structures in storytelling and invite us to reconsider the voices that have been disregarded in these epics throughout history.
THETIS
The Iliadic Thetis’s immortality and overall superiority to her mortal husband, Peleus, create Achilles, the most physically dominating Homeric warrior. Yet, Homer diminishes her supremacy. Upon her introduction in Book 1, a weeping Achilles reaches out and prays to his mother for intercession (Iliad 1.415-422), indicating Thetis’s deity-like presence.
I can hear Homer’s stirring performance enunciating and emphasizing, “Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son Achilles” (Iliad 1.1), attributing his anger to Agamemnon taking Briseis. However, one could argue that Achilles’s anger stems from deeper issues, possibly rooted in the violence of his conception, when his father sexually assaults his mother, as described in Book 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller does not avoid that violence.
The novel is one of the few modern fiction interpretations that indicates Thetis’s emotions in a detailed way. Miller willingly accounts for her assault, offering Thetis liberty to show her displeasure and present herself as a goddess, not a minor Iliadic entity.
Thetis’s dilemma lies in her desire to protect her son while acknowledging that his destiny is beyond her control. She is not a member of Peleus’s kingdom, and Miller’s work informs the reader that Thetis elects to leave her prison sentence and reclaim her place in the sea. Ancient Greek social structures claimed children as their father’s family (Cahill 20), and an ancient mother (mythical and real) is connected to her children only in proximity to her closeness with their father. Therefore, when Thetis elects to leave, her son belongs to Peleus. Despite her status, Homer portrays Thetis with a maternal disposition similar to mortal mothers, reinforcing traditional gender roles even for an eternal sea nymph.
CIRCE
Homer's discomfort with feminine autonomy is evident when he details Odysseus’s interaction with Circe, the witch of Aeaea (Odyssey 10.135). A minor character to Homer, he does not indicate her role in Odysseus’s voyage as influential to the traveling soldier’s survival. After the poet refers to her as “beautiful and dreadful” (10.136,11.5,12.151), more than once, the reader encounters Circe screaming, dodging Odysseus’s sword, then grasping his knees for mercy in Book 10 (10.321-324), which is not an accurate verbal and physical response for an immortal, especially one as powerful as Circe. Also, one can presume her wolves and lions would not take kindly to a stranger attempting to attack her. Homer wants his hero to maintain superiority, even in a witch’s home. Therefore, he gives Circe the mannerisms and descriptions expected of women in archaic culture.
In the novel, Circe, Miller crafts a full life for the title character, offering the reader access to her familial history and desires before Odysseus’s existence. The author highlights Circe’s complexity and agency, reclaiming her story from being merely a subplot in Odysseus’s journey. By giving Circe her own narrative arc and making Odysseus a supporting character, Miller challenges the traditional portrayal of mythical feminine characters and critiques the limitations imposed on them by male-centric narratives. Miller even permits Circe to take a dig at Homer stating, “Humbling women seems to be a chief pastime of poets” (206).
HELEN
When Homer recited The Iliad to his audience, it is presumed they knew the underlying circumstances leading to the war—one man running off with another man’s wife. Yet, Helen is viewed as the central catalyst for the Trojan War. And Homer portrays her negatively from the onset, emphasizing the suffering caused by her actions, stating in Book 3 that both the Trojans and the Greeks “suffered all for her” (Iliad 3.154). Helen’s ambiguous circumstances—whether she left with Paris willingly or was trafficked and blames herself for it—remain a mystery, reflecting the complexity of her character. When the poet allows Helen the opportunity to speak, one of her first utterances feels like a forced confession, saying to King Priam, “I followed your son to Troy” (3.210), trailed with self-defamation, thereafter, referring to herself as “whore that I am” (3.210-220). But Homer offers little insight into her motives, leaving room for development and further exposition in contemporary interpretations. Helen is portrayed as a passive figure, fed lines by her male overseer according to ancient social standards.
Novelist Pat Barker utilizes Briseis to provide Helen substance and a viewpoint, as Briseis is depicted as the only feminine character wanting to understand Helen. In The Silence of the Girls, Briseis is a member of the noble class, and is connected to Helen through her relationship with Paris. This is a small indication that Helen has close relationships with other women. Not only is she written as empathetic and relatable, but the reader also sees Helen is not exempt from deplorable treatment. In a scene from The Women of Troy, after Helen is returned to Menelaus, Briseis notices bruises on Helen’s neck (red, black, blue, yellow indicating various stages of the injuries). Briseis says Menelaus throttled Helen but made sure not to touch her face, disciplining her for her transgressions but intentionally maintaining her beauty (44).
PENELOPE
I like to discuss Helen and Penelope in proximity to one another because history has subtly cast them as the antithesis of one another. Penelope represents the epitome of a spousal commitment that Helen does not.
She is Homer’s ideal wife, Odysseus’s other trophy, and one of the few mortal Homeric women who navigates a male-dominated environment on her own. Femininity cannot convey both mental agility and emotional stability without suspicion, particularly for mortal women. Therefore, Penelope is cunning and quick-witted but expected to cry frequently and openly over her son and husband.
She navigates a perilous home life for two decades, fending off 108 suitors (Odyssey 16.247-251) all desiring to replace her husband. Odysseus receives divine guidance and human generosity throughout his trek, but no celestial guardian or altruistic person comes to Penelope’s aid. She is voiceless regarding her abandonment in the epic poem, but early in Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Penelope anticipates her self-reliance even before marrying Odysseus, “I knew that I would have to look out for myself in the world” (Atwood 10).
In Atwood’s version, Penelope is analytical about her experiences and expresses her dormant frustration when she begins her side of the story with, “Now that I’m dead I know everything” (Atwood 1). The archetype for feminine domesticity divulges pieces of her story Homer ignores—her childhood, frustration with her son, and judgement against Helen. Her husband does not get a voice in her story, and she speaks freely regarding Odysseus’s behavior. According to her, he did not murder the enslaved women because they were raped by traitors; he murdered them because they were raped without his consent (142).
BRISEIS AND THE ENSLAVED WOMEN
Modern fiction accounts of the Trojan War present the effects of conflict on captured women. The Iliad is the first literary representation of war between settlements in Western culture and the consequences of it on those taken captive (Dué 230). Briseis and other Trojan women watch their men slain, their homes dilapidated, and their bodies considered trophies revealing women’s experiences during the ravages of war.
Briseis’s role reiterates Homer’s intention in using women in minor ways to facilitate entertainment. The Iliad portrays her as a silent figure, her voice only heard once when she laments over Patroclus’s dead body in Book Nineteen. Homer’s plot choice in showing a woman wailing over a man not related to her, a departure from archaic societal norms (Fantham 47), insinuates that either the poet exercises creative license in support of his Greek soldiers, or he is selective when enforcing a community standard.
Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy retell events of The Iliad from Briseis’s point of view and permit modern audiences to contemplate the commonalities in ancient and contemporary human trauma. Through her narrative, readers have access to the stories of quieted women like Helen, Cassandra, and others.
And speaking of other quieted women, contemporary fiction accounts vocalize the anger seething beneath the silence of the enslaved women. In The Penelopiad, Atwood puts Odysseus on trial for the murder of the twelve enslaved women. Odysseus murders those women without consequence because they are considered his property. His socioeconomic position and gender allow him full agency to dictate what their lives are worth. But now, those wronged women chant, “We demand justice! We demand retribution!” (Atwood 143).
CONCLUSION
In an interview she gave about her translation of The Odyssey, Emily Wilson said of Penelope following her husband’s return to Ithaca, “No matter how strong or smart or faithful she is, she can never be the same.” Penelope cannot endure 3,000 years as the individual Homer intended her to be, and neither can her counterparts, mortal and immortal. We all require their stories to be told in ways that are nuanced, varied, and reflective of women’s actual inner lives and lived experiences.
WORKS CITED
Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Canongate Books, 2005.
Barker, Pat. The Silence of the Girls. Anchor Books, 2019.
Barker, Pat. The Women of Troy. Doubleday Books, 2021.
Cahill, Jane. Her Kind: Stories of Women from Greek Mythology. Broadview Press, 1995.
Dué, Casey. "Learning Lessons from the Trojan War: Briseis and the Theme of Force." College Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2007, pp. 229-262.
Fantham, Elaine. Women in the Classical World: Image and Text. Oxford University Press, 1995.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles, Penguin, 1990.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily R. Wilson, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Wilson, Emily. “A Translator's Reckoning with the Women of The Odyssey.” The New Yorker, 8 Dec. 2017,
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