by Maria Tatar
Had Christa Wolf been reading Simone Weil, who wrote an essay about The Iliad as a “poem of force”? The true hero of Homer’s epic, the French philosopher and political activist had argued, was force, a vector that enslaves by turning anyone subjected to it into a thing. In voluminous notes in the form of four documents accompanying the novel and describing its genesis, Wolf explains why she chose to channel Cassandra’s voice: the fate of Cassandra prefigures what was to be the destiny of women in general for the next three thousand years—“to be turned into an object.”47
“To whom can I say that the Iliad bores me?” Wolf asks in a moment of uncompromising candor. Stunned by the blunt honesty of that question when I read it, I reflected on how I had long failed to connect fully and passionately with The Iliad, with my mind resistant to sorting out all the military details and committing them to memory. Why was I always mixing up Greek warriors with their Trojan counterparts (which side is Ajax on?) and unable to keep their story lines intact? It was not because I could not “identify” with Achilles or Hector or Priam but rather because Homer gave us a story held together by rage, war, violence, homicide, carnage, and “heroic” deeds. Women, Wolf tells us, experience “a different reality,” and the world of The Iliad, when seen through the consciousness of Cassandra, priestess and seer, can come to life and engage readers in new ways. Suddenly Achilles is given a new epithet: “the brute Achilles” (das Vieh Achill, in the original German, which could be translated as “Achilles the animal”). The heroic search for “glory” and immortality suddenly bows down to a different quest: the effort to avoid the ruinous destruction of a city and its people—an Untergang, utter annihilation.
Frederick Sandys, Helen and Cassandra, 1866
The threat of annihilation—in this case nuclear—is the driving force behind Cassandra. In 1980 Christa Wolf, living in what was then known as East Germany, traveled to Greece with her husband Gerhard. Two years later she delivered five “Lectures on Poetics,” four of them on her Greek travels and the fifth a draft of the novel Cassandra. The four introductory lectures were published separately as Conditions of a Narrative and take us into the world of tourism and ancient history, poetics and politics.
What motivated Wolf to turn her attention to Cassandra beyond the desire to capture something about a woman who, like the author of the novel, trafficked in words? For Wolf, the stakes were high, and she wanted to offer nothing less than a takedown of the self-destructive logic of the Occidental world, the death drive that had led to the annihilation of a city, the slaughter of men, and the enslavement of women. For her, the threat of nuclear obliteration becomes the occasion for writing about an ancient civilization that followed a path leading to its own destruction. Cassandra, whose words and prophecies have no purchase at all, becomes a proxy for the writer in Wolf’s day and age, desperately seeking to warn and dissuade (“He who strikes first will die second”) but utterly failing to execute a plan for effective resistance.
In A Thousand Ships (2019), Natalie Haynes, a British writer with a University of Cambridge degree in classics, takes up the challenge of orchestrating a polyphonic chorus, enabling us to hear the voices of the many silenced by Homer. Who channels those voices but Calliope, the Muse of Epic Poetry? And what does she sing?
I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches.48
Calliope, in her account, pays tribute to Mnemosyne, who helps bring back and memorialize the feats of women from times past. We hear voices from a parade of Trojan women including Hecuba, Polyxena, and others, and also Greek women ranging from Iphigenia to Penelope. Homer, it turns out, told us only half the story, and the silenced half is marked by acts of heroism that exceed what we have in what Haynes calls “one of the great foundational texts on war and warriors, men and masculinity.” Who can forget the words of Polyxena as she marches toward her execution: “They would not be able to call her a coward.” “Is Oenone less of a hero than Menelaus?” asks Calliope. “He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises her son. Which is the more heroic act?” “No one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind,” Penelope writes.
Odysseus’s wife pens a series of missives to her husband, each steeped in sarcasm. “You are wedded to fame, more than you were ever wedded to me,” she writes. “And certainly, your relationship with your own glory has been unceasing,” she adds as she ponders all the reasons for Odysseus’s delay in returning home to his wife and son. In other words, true heroism is situated not in those striving for glory and immortality but in the fearless women who sought to preserve life—sometimes just to survive—rather than engage in senseless acts of annihilation.
At one point, Calliope whispers into Homer’s ear: “She [Creusa] isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she—all the Trojan women—should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too.” Haynes has become the new bard, inspired by a muse who was fed up with Homer and decided to anoint a new poet to tell the story of the Trojan War. Like Homer, through the agency of the Muse, Natalie Haynes undertakes the task of memorializing, this time remembering and conferring immortality on those once left for dead, buried, and forgotten. Greek and Trojan women alike come alive, speaking to us, haunting us with a new understanding of the courage and care it took to survive and to become our new heroines.
Lifting the Silence
As we have seen, the men of myth have fared far better than the women, for we often hear about the passions that inflame them—rage, revenge, or romance—and much else. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008) begins with a complaint. “The life he [Virgil] gave me in his poem is so dull, except for the one moment when my hair catches fire—so colorless, except when my maiden cheeks blush like ivory stained with crimson dye—so conventional, I can’t bear it any longer.” Lavinia wants to be heard: “I must break out and speak. He didn’t let me say a word. I have to take the word from him. He gave me a long life but a small one. I need room. I need air.”49
Ursula Le Guin, who called herself a genre buster, once wrote that her “games” were “transformation and invention.” Speculative fiction—myth, fantasy, science fiction—enabled her to use imagination not just to subvert and challenge the status quo but also to explore alterity and gender. “All I changed was the point of view,” she said in an interview, and, with that change in perspective, we see an entire world “from the point of view of the powerless.” Writing fiction enabled Le Guin to get into other minds and to explore the consciousness of other beings. In Lavinia, we discover a voice that Virgil never let us hear. Le Guin, who spent years “struggling to learn how to write as a woman,” decided at one point not to “compete” with the literary establishment, “with all these guys and their empires and territories.”50
In a commencement speech delivered at Bryn Mawr College in 1986, Le Guin spoke to the graduates about different language registers, a Father Tongue that is the voice of power and reason and a Mother Tongue, the language of stories, conversation, and relationships. In this ideological dichotomy, the Mother Tongue is devalued as “inaccurate, unclear, coarse, limited, trivial, banal.” “It’s repetitive,” she added, “the same over and over, like the work called women’s work.” She urged graduates, much like Campbell when he spoke about the power of artists, to raise their voices in a third language, the voice of song, poetry, and literature. “I am sick of the silence of women. I want to hear you speaking. . . . There’s a lot of things I want to hear you talk about.”51
In 2018 the British novelist
Pat Barker responded to Le Guin by writing The Silence of the Girls, which begins by defamiliarizing heroic behavior in The Iliad: “Great Achilles, Brilliant Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we call him ‘the butcher.’”52 The Silence of the Girls gives voice not just to Briseis, queen of one of the kingdoms neighboring Troy and captive slave of Achilles, but to all those who suffered during the siege of Troy. What has been handed down to us? “His story, His, not mine”—we have the words and deeds of Achilles but not those of Briseis. “What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times?” she asks. “One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer.” It is almost as if Pat Barker has recruited Briseis for the #MeToo movement to write herself into history, finding her voice and recovering her humanity through the act of writing. “Now my own story can begin,” is how her account ends.
Achilles’s surrender of Briseis to Agamemnon, first-century CE fresco from Pompeii
In a sense, once Briseis is given a story and a history, she becomes as heroic as Achilles—if not more so than the Greek “hero” who enslaved her and ensured that we would be kept in the dark about her. Song and story begin to trump deeds as we learn about what matters when it comes to a literary afterlife that bestows “immortality” on a figure. At first Achilles is the one who turns to his lyre to chant songs “about deathless glory, heroes dying on the battlefield or (rather less often) returning home in triumph.” But as Briseis unfolds her story, it dawns on her that the simple lullabies sung by Trojan women to their Greek babies (in the Mother Tongue) are making sure that they too will live on: “We are going to survive—our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. . . . Their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them.”
In many ways, Barker’s novel invokes the trope of the Talking Book, an oxymoronic phrase coined by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his 1988 book of literary criticism, The Signifying Monkey. Gates uses the term to illustrate how the tension between the oral and the written has been represented in the Black literary tradition, which privileges the voice and the vernacular over the written word, and favors autobiography over third-person narrative. Here it is important to remember that Briseis, like African Americans in the antebellum South, is not granted the status of a person. A slave, she is a thing, “an ‘it,’ a possession to be valued, bartered, coveted, tossed aside. . . . Her identity and humanity have been erased.”53
At one point, Briseis overhears a squabble between Achilles and Nestor. But she stops listening to the “big words being bandied about”—honor, courage, and loyalty. Why does she tune out? Because it dawns on her that, when the two are talking about her, they refer to her not as “Briseis” but as “it.” “For me there was only one word, one very small word: it. It doesn’t belong to him, he hasn’t earned it.” Reduced to the status of a thing that circulates in transactions and exchanges, she is also denied the power of the spoken word, the right to interrupt and to assert her humanity.
Like Penelope in Atwood’s new epic, Briseis comes back from the dead to speak to us, though Briseis, by contrast with Penelope, speaks as a living, sentient being, not as a woman broadcasting from the Underworld. Briseis uses the vernacular in an autobiographical account to reveal the flaws and fault lines in Homer’s account and to write herself into history. “Will they tell your story?”—this line from the Broadway musical Hamilton is a reminder of how constantly and willfully the distaff side has been neglected, even when lives are filled with words and deeds that measure up to and, in many cases, exceed those of a culture’s “heroes.” “They” are unlikely to tell your story, and that is why you have to tell it, is the implication. Like Eliza in Hamilton, though more fully so and not just in a cameo, Briseis puts herself “back in the narrative” and earns, through her voice, the kind of literary immortality bestowed on men like Achilles.
Myths and fairy tales invite us to hit the refresh button, oxygenate the characters, fill in the gaps of the plot, and make new versions. Let us not forget that they were improvised in social spaces as an early form of collective bargaining, with call and response, give and take, and a chatty back-and-forth that often took the form of “That’s not how I heard it.” The female figures in male-dominated myths are now ready for action, and women writers today have revealed that the minds of those figures can be as deep, rich, and complex as those of the characters in the novels we read today. Centered and rounded, they have become fully realized characters, vocal and outspoken, ready to change the stories that others have told about them or to insert themselves more actively into the story. And change the narrative they do, as you can discover from looking at the titles of twenty-first-century novels inspired by mythical narratives. Just a quick effort to identify re-visions of the story of Hades and Persephone is revealing, with over two hundred retellings in print today, ranging from Emily Whitman’s Radiant Darkness and Brodi Ashton’s Everneath to Sasha Summers’s For the Love of Hades and Tellulah Darling’s My Ex from Hell.
In Circe, Madeline Miller transforms the daughter of Helios from an infamous witch who makes swine of men into a woman with powerful maternal instincts, magical healing powers, and a drive to undo the cruelty she has inherited from the gods and replace it with compassion. Circe has a history, and we learn about her unrequited love for a mortal (a fisherman named Glaucos), how she cleansed Jason and Medea of their crimes, and the role she played in the story of the Minotaur. By the time Odysseus arrives on the island of Aiaia, we know that there is a reason why she casts spells on sailors—she is also the survivor of multiple sexual assaults, defending herself from predators. Unlike the gods, with their limited emotional palette, Circe begins to evolve, moving from the unchanging righteousness and chilly insouciance of the gods to a form of compassionate care that humanizes her. When she proposes to Telemachus that he might have become known as “the Just,” he responds by saying, “That’s what they call you if you’re so boring that they can’t think of something better.”
In many ways, Miller, like Margaret Atwood before her, becomes the true sorceress, conjuring Circe and bringing her to life with a breathtaking command of the ancient world, both its gods and its mortals. When Circe contemplates her newfound vulnerability and lies in bed worrying about the mortality of her children and husband, she rises and goes to her herbs. “I create something. I transform something,” she tells us. Sensing that her witchcraft is “as strong as ever, stronger,” she is grateful for the “power and leisure and defense” that she possesses. A crafty double of her character, Miller creates a self-referential narrative, a text about the magic of words as much as of potions. She casts a spell on us as we enter the world of the ancients, discovering the rich inner lives of figures who were once inscrutable but now have a history that resonates with accounts we have read in works by male authors.54
Barker saves Briseis and Miller does the same for Circe, memorializing their lives and rescuing them from oblivion. Recall how Hannah Arendt told us about the importance of telling stories. Homer was known as the “educator of Hellas” because he made warriors immortal by memorializing their deeds. Now the time has come for new voices to assume the role of educating the young, keeping the classics alive with counter-narratives and lives reimagined. Storytellers can now channel the histories of heroes and heroines, creating communities of memory that keep alive the words and deeds of those who came before us and earned not just glory but also dignity and humanity.
Spiders, Storytellers, Webs
For many years, when I taught E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web in a course at Harvard University called Fairy Tales, Myth, and Fantasy Literature, I always drew a blank when the occasional student asked why there is a character in it named Homer. It seemed lik
e a stretch to connect Homer Zuckerman, Fern’s unremarkable uncle, the farmer who displays the pig Wilbur at the fair, with the Greek rhapsode. But over time, I began to wonder if White had cleverly placed what cinephiles call an Easter egg into his narrative about a spider named Charlotte. After all, Charlotte is no ordinary spider: she is an arachnid who knows how to do things with words. And she is also an expert in the art of memorialization.
White famously began Charlotte’s Web with the question, “Where’s Papa going with that ax?”—not exactly what you would expect in a book for young readers.55 The novel takes us from Wilbur’s rescue from death by a girl named Fern to a second liberation from the threat of slaughter, when Charlotte works magic in her web, describing Wilbur as, among other things, “Terrific,” “Radiant,” and “Humble.” In a chapter called “The Miracle,” we see (and E. B. White works hard to instruct us on how to visualize) a web that is anything but a death trap: “On foggy mornings, Charlotte’s web was truly a thing of beauty. This morning each thin strand was decorated with dozens of tiny beads of water. The web glistened in the light and made a pattern of loveliness and mystery, like a delicate veil.” And in the web are written the words, “Some Pig.”
What better way to describe the writer at work than this: “Far into the night, while the other creatures slept, Charlotte worked on her web.” E. B. White’s spider is not just a humble descendant of Arachne, the proud weaver of beautiful tapestries, but also a creature who knows how to work magic with words. She revitalizes language (some of her words are retrieved from the town dump) and wields her authority in ways that transform Wilbur and ennoble him. Beyond that, she teaches Wilbur how to use words so that, after her death, he pays tribute to her memory while her daughters are wafted away by warm spring breezes. “I was devoted to your mother. I owe my very life to her. She was brilliant, beautiful, and loyal to the end. I shall always treasure her memory.” Charlotte’s Web sounds full chords, and we will discover, in a later chapter, how women’s work—spinning, weaving, and fabricating—is connected with storytelling, as a form of resistance and revelation, an effort to lift the silence. But first, a look at the work of silencing.