Recognising Women by Women: AnAnalysis of the Female Gaze in regard to Classical Literature
andArt
By Heidi (Dee) Atkinson
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Dr Helen Gorrill for her support throughout writing this dissertation and her invaluable feedback and encouragement. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Anwen Hayward M.A. and LivAlbert B.A. for taking the time to answer my questions and for lending their expertise to my research. I would also like to thank Professor Calum Colvin for his support and inspiration towards my art practice.
Abstract
This dissertation addresses the inherent malleability of mythology and the impact of shifting societal views on portrayals of women in literature and artwork. Analysing the discordance between narratives of the male and female gaze, in ancient sources and contemporary reinterpretations. Conducted through the lens of Major and Savin-Baden’s qualitative research methods, to address the range of sources and media that inform this dissertation’s analysis of the female gaze within classical literature and artwork. Examining depictions of women in visual sources from ancient Greece whilst acknowledging the contemporary inability to fully comprehend their purpose or intention due to overwhelming missing contexts from the ancient world. Critically analysing depictions of women from Epic poetry, surviving plays and the patriarchally inclined intentions of those sources through a feminist lens. This dissertation then examines how contemporary female authors have approached women in retellings of mythology, adjusting their narrative focus to contextualise and explore female characters. The positionality of the women rewriting these myths is essential to both the reader’s interpretation of said myth and how said retellings interact with other variations of these mythologies, aligning with Seymour’s rebuttal of Barthes’disregard for authorial intent. Then exploring the archetype of monstrous women prevalent throughout Greek mythology, analysing visual and literary portrayals and the evolution of animalistic embodiments of the wild world to more humanoid depictions indicative of complex societal fears in ancient Greece. This dissertation substantiates the necessity of the female gaze when addressing classical sources, recognising the benefits of critical observation and analysis of the ancient world outside preexisting patriarchal biases.
Chapter
Chapter
List of Illustrations
Figures
1.1 The Phigaleian Frieze, 420-400BCE, Marble…………………………………………..11
1.2 The ExekiasAmphora, 540-530BCE, Ceramic………………………………… 13
1.3 Death of Priam, 550-540BCE, Ceramic………………………………………………..13
1.4 Medea in Chariot, 400BCE, Ceramic………………………………………… 15
3.1 Red-Figure Hydria, 500BCE, Ceramic…………………………………………………23
3.2 AtticRed-FigureCup, Douris, 480BCE, Ceramic………………………………………23
3.3 Medusa, West Pediment, Temple of Artemis at Corcyra, 590-580BCE, Limestone 24
3.4 Red-FigurePelike, 450-440BCE,Ceramic……………………………………………...26
3.5 Perseus with the Head of Medusa, Benvenuto Cellini, 1545-1554, Bronze Sculpture…27
3.6 Medusa with the Head of Perseus, Luciano Garbati, 2008, Bronze Sculpture…………27
Introduction
Women in mythology whether mortal, divine, monstrous or a combination of all three, have ever-shifting portrayals across surviving literature, artwork, modern depictions and interpretations. This dissertation seeks to explore these portrayals by acknowledging their original contexts, the ramifications of missing information and the impact of patriarchal portrayals on depictions of women. Exploring how interpretations of myths by contemporary classicists, artists and authors differ from prior portrayals. I will be analysing a variety of archaeological and contemporarysources using aconstructionist, qualitativeresearch synthesis approach ‘to recognise and acknowledge different interpretive positions and consider how they support or refute each other’(Major and Savin-Baden, 2011, p.656).
Chapter one; Women within Poems, Plays and Pottery, examines surviving sources from the ancient world (800BCE to 100BCE, and how those artworks, myths and literatures evolved) and the limitations presented by lost and fragmentary sources. Highlighting the importance of understanding original intentions of surviving material to effectively interpret them from a modern mindset, approached through Boardman’s (2016) analysis of ancient Greek artwork. Discussing the malleability of mythology due to changing perspectives, societies and methods of preservation, which are subject to surrounding biases as much as interpretations are. Analysing theportrayalof womeninEpicpoetry,contrastedwith depictionsofmalecharacters, and the realities of oral storytelling becoming written. Then examining the portrayal of women in visual sources such as sculpture, surviving pottery and their depictions in compositions alongside men. Considering the differences between male portrayals of characters such as the Amazons in comparison to women from Epic poetry in visual and mythological sources. This chapter then analyses the depiction of female characters in surviving plays, how male playwrights portrayed women in dramatic contexts.
Chapter two; Rewriting women, analyses the modern interpretations and portrayals of women in mythology through the female gaze. Particularly focusing on how agency is reassigned to female characters and providing them with a narrative space in which their motivations and personal journeys are explored separately to the traditional depictions of male protagonists. Exploring the work of female authors, classicists and scholars, whose work reconstruct myths
through a feminist lens that reprioritises the significance of women in mythology and the impact of their power as women within a traditionally patriarchal narrative. This chapter investigates how questioning previous interpretations of mythsreveals biases of translators and the patriarchal mentality that permeates generalised versions of myths. Exploring how narratives are skewed in favour of male protagonists, and the process of retelling these myths through the female gaze by female authors.
Chapter three; FearsomeWomen,examinesmonstrosityasavehiclefor societalfear.Analysing howdepictionsofmonstersembodieddangerouselementsof ancientGreece,andtheportrayals of monstrousfemininity thatcondemned powerful women within a patriarchal power structure. Analysing the contrasting masculine and feminine depictions of natural forces, deconstructing favourable portrayals of male characters by male narratives and how they cast female monsters antagonistically within myths. Examining how these destructive feminine personifications are depicted with animalistic traits to convey the mortal danger they present to male heroes across mythology.Beforedeconstructingtheimageof thegorgonanditsdichotomoususagein ancient Greece. Focusing on the portrayal of the gorgons as sisters, and how that has evolved to single out Medusa in retellings and artworks, modifying her monstrous traits. This dissertation then dissects the myth of Medusa and Perseus through the female gaze, examining the actions and intentions of each character from a contemporary perspective. Forming an overall impression of the Medusa myth by considering the multitude of interpretations across literature and artwork, ancient and contemporary.Analysing how Medusa’s character has been impacted and changed by so many renditions, by the male and female gaze alike.
This dissertation will conclude with a summary of findings regarding the portrayal of women in classical literature, artwork and their subsequent depictions. Reflecting on the research conducted throughout this dissertation evidencing the benefits of reanalysis through a feminist lens, alongside recommendations for further academic work.
Women within Poems, Plays and Pottery
It is perhaps most effective to consider mythology as a living organism, something which changes, grows and often reflects the environmentit exists within. There are no origins that we can divine for myths, only recognise patterns, themes and possible inspirations from what has survived. Everything that we can study, debate and analyse are ‘accidents of survival’ (Boardman, 2016, p.15) andmust beunderstood assuchbeforetheir naturecanbeinvestigated. Softer organic material (such as cloth, paper and wood) deteriorated without proper preservation whilst harder materials (such as marble, lime and metal) survive more successfully. Although they were subject to repurposing until intentional collections began in the 13th century (Boardman, 2016, p.17). Surviving literary works such as poems and plays provide us with a limited understanding of the material and media people from the ancient world may have experienced. These surviving works are often from collected archives that survived as popular media through Rome and subsequent time periods; ‘representational art in painting or sculpture[…] was determined by astyle invented in 5th century Greece, transmitted by Rome and misread by the Renaissance’ (Boardman, 2016, p.13). This process of preservation subjected each version of these transcripts to translations and changes on the whims and opinions of whomever possessed them. The consideration of sources in this dissertation are ‘not limit[ed] by date, […] to include as many articles as possible in [this] examination’(Major and Savin-Baden, 2011, p.649).
When analysing previous interpretations of myth, Hayward (2024;AppendixA, p.37) suggests that assuming versions of the ancient world we are fed are accurate, because of their persisting narratives (of around 200 years) despite being themselves reinterpretations, results in a limited understanding of that period. We can treat reanalysis as an opportunity to ‘unpick the biases and the assumptions’(Hayward, 2024;AppendixA, p.37) that make up generalised knowledge of mythology and life in the ancient world. Persisting versions stem from reconstructions of the ancient world by 18th and 19th century men who often went unchallenged in their assumptions regarding the nature of fragmentary sources. Taking advantage of how ‘validity was not frequently an issue, but if assessed it was based upon internal validity (bias) or external validity (generalisability)’ (Major and Savin-Baden, 2011). ‘The sources that survive from ancient Greece are, almost exclusively, those written by men’(Albert, 2024b, p.16) portraying
their interpretations of the world around them, few sources focused on women and their experiences in the ancient world. During the 18th century, scholars began to recognise the ‘problem in accepting an undifferentiated legacy of “classical art” along with uncritical identifications’ (Boardman, 2016, p.25), this awareness of perspective and personal bias providedspacefor different interpretationsto contributeandadvanceunderstandingsof ancient sources, beyond the insular conclusions made by the male gaze. ‘Historically myths have been retold and retold and retold, and all the different versions that we have, even from the ancient world, we don’t necessarily know exactly what that change was’ (Hayward, 2024; Appendix A, p.45) or why those changes occurred. Therefore, it is important to remain aware of the context of myths and media whilst analysing them, to accurately and effectively understand both sources and their interpretations.
Epic poems such as The Iliad and The Odyssey are some of the most well-known poems that have survived from Ancient Greece. The narrative of such poems displays the complexities of concepts such as heroes, glory (Kleos within Homeric Epic) and responsibility alongside the portrayal of warfare, honour and the roles of deities, men and women within those environments. These poems have inspired conversation and depictions for years, the themes expressed in myths perpetuate modern storytelling still, indicating the ‘capacity of myth to inspire and accommodatechange’(Hardwick, 2017).These epicpoems were, likemanymyths, told orally and distributed through word of mouth ‘our surviving manuscripts stand at the end of centuries of oral performances, in some ways serving as fixed epitomes of that ongoing process.’(Foley, 2007). Beforetheyweretranscribed(andthereisnowayto knowwhen, where or by who), narrative techniques such as epithets and titles allowed storytellers to recall plots and characteristics more easily using repeating descriptions; ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ (Homer, 1987) conveyed the setting of a scene, ‘Diomedes of the loud war-cry’ (Hay Festival, 2023) and ‘Cunning Odysseus’(Homer, 1987) detail traits of charactersthat help outlinetheir actions. The nature of this method led to numerous variations of the poems circling throughout ancient Greece, a pattern that is mirrored in today’s world, creating innumerable variations of translations and depictions of stories. ‘Each element of [these] depiction[s] must be examined and seen in relation to all the other elements before the intention of the work can be fully understood’ (Carpenter, 2022, p.10), changes in the understanding and portrayals of myths occurred concurrently with the changes in their surrounding environments. Particularly, the depiction of women in translations of epic poetry differs wildly and often reflect a translator’s opinion of their importance towards the plot. ‘The disappearance of so many women was not
simple chance. The men who penned the vast majority of the surviving sources simply wrote them out of the narrative as unimportant.’(Dunn, 2024, p.5).
When analysing women from Homeric Epic poetry there are fewer to depict in comparison to the extensive list of male protagonists. The division between goddesses and mortal women is exaggerated by the goddess’s influence over the plot itself. The Goddesses in The Iliad play major roles in the actions of mortals and their effect on the war; Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Thetis and Iris are all depicted actively guiding the tide of war. Whilst the mortal women; Helen, Hecuba,Andromache, Cassandra,Briseis andChryseisareportrayedin relation to malecharactersandtheir influenceuponthem,‘theyareall extremelytragicfigures’(Farron, 1979). Whilst in The Odyssey the ancillary characters: Penelope, Athena, Nausica, Arete, Eurycleia and Helen, all offer aid and support to Odysseus’ cause, using ‘his characteristic cunning in his service [which] tends to validate both Odysseus’ mêtis and his position as the central figure of the poem’ (Doherty, 1991). Meanwhile, the antagonistic female characters prove themselves formidable and memorable in their hindrance of Odysseus. Circe, Calypso, Scylla and Charybdis; these characters are expanded on because of their impact on the main protagonist Odysseus, alongside his crewmates. They actively obstruct Odysseus’ journey home to Ithaca and so possess individual, daunting, defining traits.
There are few depictions of women from ancient Greece that express such individual attention to characters and the bonds between them as the warriors within The Iliad. It is only in similar contexts of battle that the male gaze even attempts to depict a collective of women, we see this primarily in depictions of the Amazons. Where ‘the gender divide which Epic warfare tries to enforce’ (Greensmith, no date) is reduced because these warrior women were held in high regards by storytellers and the male gaze in ancient Greece. ‘Amazons are the second most popular mythological figures (after Heracles) found on vase paintings. More than a thousand Amazons appear on [surviving] vases’ (Haynes, 2021, p.115). It is perhaps the familiar contextual setting of battle that allows the male gaze to depict the Amazons with as much reverenceastheydomalewarriorselsewhere, althoughtheAmazonsfight asacollectiveunlike the individual pursuits of glory wesee in male warriors (Haynes, 2021). Figure 1.1for example depicts two Greek warriors battling two Amazons, not only does the piece dedicate equal spacing within the composition to all the warriors present. TheAmazon on theleft of the image is depicted ready to meet the Greek’s blow straight on in defence of her fellow Amazon, their strong stances mirror one another and leave little doubt that the sculptor intended for them to be viewed as equals. Artworks of ‘groups of struggling figures gods and giants, Lapiths and centaurs, Greeks and Amazons [an Amazonomachy]’ (Boardman, 2016, p.154) were popular themes depicted throughout ancient Greece, rendering the battle between civilisation and barbarianism. Ancient Greeks respected theAmazons as warriors, Figure 1.2 displays the duel between Achilles and the Amazon queen Penthesilea, in which Penthesilea is struck down. Despite the defeat it is clear in their depiction that the artists hold respect for each character; they are both warriors utilising weaponry. Each figure is depicted with musculature indicative of their warrior status, andboth arewearing detailedandintricatearmour,portrayingtheir royal rank to the viewer.
Whilst the Amazons receive a rare level of respect from the male gaze both within myths and depictions of their characters in artwork, other women from Epic poetry do not. The mortal Trojan women of The Iliad such as Andromache, Hecuba, Cassandra and Helen, are depicted as fractions of myths rather than contributing characters, ‘intense, emotional, intelligent people who are trapped in a passive role’ (Farron, 1979). We often see snapshots of them depicted in pottery, as part of a scene, often to amplify the actions of a male hero also depicted. We see this in Figure 1.3 depicting the death of Priam, a brutal scene in which Andromache and Hecuba are portrayed supplicating who we can presume is Neoptolemus (The son of Achilles) as he beats Priam to death with Andromache’s infant son-Astyanax. The composition of this vase displays the pointlessness of their (Hecuba and Andromache) supplication as Neoptolemus is already committing this brutality. This action takes up the centre of the composition, bracketed by women who earlier in thetext were acting as tacticians and advisors to their husbands Priam and Hector, ‘a warrior is both a fearsome fighter and an anxious husband and father, and a woman is both a military tactician and a hysterical soon-to-be widow’ (Greensmith, no date). The pathos evoked in this composition is towards the Trojans, the impact of war on a familial unit, the artist expresses how removing this act from the context of battle amplifies the cruelty of Neoptolemus’ actions. And yet our focus is on the perpetrator before the victims, Neoptolemus is central, taking revenge for his father’s death and continuing the cycle of loss, whilst the queen and future queen of Troy are relegated to the sides as tragic figures. ‘The Iliad is a study of the dehumanising effects of War, in which the nature of heroism is questioned’
(Weil and Holoka, 2003). The women depicted in myths are, in male narratives, inflicted with the consequences of men’s actions, and indicators of emotion within a scene.
Analysing the portrayal of women from surviving plays allows contemporary classicists such as Haynes, Dunn and Greensmith, to deconstruct the male gaze and examine the characters across these plays through afeminist lens.Athenianplaywrights weremale and so was the cast, performers relied on masks and costumes to portray different characters on stage, only Athenian plays survive (Albert, 2024b). These remaining plays provide insight to theAthenian male gaze of women from the period of their production, however ‘the plays, no matter how famous they are now for their mythological storytelling, were themselves retellings of something more ancient’ (Albert, 2024b, p.27) and would have been familiar to playwright’s audiences. Euripides’ plays display interesting portrayals of women in dramatic depictions within a predominantly patriarchal period, exploring themes of motherhood and powerful women particularly in his tragedies that other playwrights do not investigate. Euripides’ Bacchae provides an insight on the necessity of women to society that Euripides was aware of and played on. Narrating Dionysus’returnto Thebes to establish his divinity over his matriline, particularly his cousin Pentheus, the king, who ‘forbade the worship of Dionysus’ (Carpenter, 2022). Dionysus summons the women of the city to leave and revel in the mountains as maenads in retaliation. The Bacchae is an exploration of the collective power of women as much as it is a study of divine punishment. Dionysus extends liberation from societal roles within Thebes to the women of the city in the form of madness, ‘holding out to them his rites of ecstasy’ (Euripides and Franklin, 2011, p.15). Euripides discerns the potential of women unburdened by morality and consequence throughout the plot. His portrayal of women in these plays are ‘full of powerful, frightening women’ (Haynes, 2021, p.149) indicative of his male audience’s anxieties towards them, warning ‘Athens against the consequences of its obsessively male political order’ (Vasillopulos, 2014) for greater thematic impact within this tragedy.
Similarly, Euripides’ tragedy Medea portrays a jarringly powerful and vengeful woman to his male audience. Euripides’ characterisation of Medea is unapologetic, and his narrative is not favourable towards Jason, he is called ‘worst of men!’ (Haynes, 2021, p.245). Despite her murderous actions, Medea is somewhat humanised through the chorus’sympathy towards her (Hayward, 2024,AppendixA, p.47). She ‘refuse[s] to be passive and take[s] a terrible revenge on [her] tormentors’ (Pomeroy, 1995), the extreme nature of her actions (infanticide and
murder) indicates her divine heritage (reminiscent of Dionysus’divine wrath in The Bacchae). ‘She has, through her excessive, unrelenting savagery deified herself’ (Vasillopulos, 2014), Figure 1.4 depicts Medea’s appearance above the stage using a crane, which had only been used for godly characters before Medea. Euripides does not diminish his female characters for the male gaze, he affords them the same complexities as his male characters, to create interesting theatrical depictions (Pomeroy, 1975).
Rewriting Women
Portrayals of women in classical mythology have been predominately led by male narratives due to patriarchal societies. However, retellings of these myths through the female gaze have increased as feminist classicists, artists and authors who recognise the untapped potential of complex female characters, have focused their expertise on strengthening our understanding of women in classical myths. Paternalistic retellings often depict these women as ancillary characters, assisting the male protagonist’s journeywith littlemention or gratitude ‘-these men, these gods who toyed with our lives and cast us aside when we had been of use to them, who laughed at our suffering or forgot our existence altogether.’ (Saint, 2022, p.128). We see this particularly in the Cretan myth of the Minotaur in which a male hero receives accolades, overlooking the women intrinsic to his success. Crete possesses a rich archaeological background, revealing ‘women-revering Minoans of Bronze age Crete.’ (Dunn, 2024, p.11). Dunn’s novel The Missing Thread (2024), exploresthe history of the ancient world through the women who shaped it. Dunn’s analysis of Crete, and its archaeological discoveries reveals that ‘Their surviving art and architecture […] give the impression that, in their richly creative society, women were often more prominent than men.’ (Dunn, 2024, p.12), exploring the realities of Minoan society behind the myths of the Minotaur. Realities that were obscured by patriarchal assumptions until feminist reanalysis challenged the preconceived presumptions of the male gaze, comparably to the myth. Highlighting the importance of women in ancient history and the active roles they fulfilled in society before their ‘powers diminished in the Mycenaean age.’(Dunn, 2024, p.28). By evaluating the physical evidence of the roles women held in Bronze age Greece and analysing the archaeological finds from a modern perspective (and with access to a wider body of knowledge, from a variety of perspectives contributing to discoveries and interpretations). Dunn’s novel suggests that readdressing female characters from a modern perspective, with a greater knowledge base, is beneficial to a contemporary audience’s understanding of women in the ancient world.
The roles of women in myth have been diminished by male narratives. Reviewing these narratives through a feminist lens, enables myths ‘skewed in favour of men by a male dominated society, which views male heroism ambivalently and female heroism malevolently’ (Pomeroy, 1995) to be retold in a less preferential manner, that does not overlook the actions of female characters. Ariadne, for example, the mythological princess of Crete, whose deeds
were disregarded in favour of Theseus’ acclamations of honour and fame regarding the defeat of the minotaur. It is only in recent years that a retelling of this myth focuses on her character, her motivations and her hardships. Jennifer Saint expands on Ariadne’s character in her 2021 novel Ariadne, providing her with an agency befitting a protagonist in this myth. Theseus is portrayed as the antagonist, as he is in many mythspertaining women (as theabductor of Helen and Antiope (Oakley, 2013)). Saint depicts the complexities of ancient Greek society with a clarity that bypasses a lot of the cultural differences between ancient and modern audiences. Ariadne’s realisation of the roles women in myth are given, reflects the growing awareness of contemporary women regarding the lack of characterisation female characters received in patriarchal narratives. ‘No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women’s pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats.’(Saint, 2022, p.15). Saint conveys the process of women recognising and relating to women by utilising the perspective of a young woman facing her own hardships. This scene is particularly poignant as it acknowledges the sharing of a feminine narrative between women, it reminds us that most surviving material is patriarchally inclined. That myths important to women and shared between them in the ancient world ‘were prone to being overshadowed and wilfully miscast’ (Dunn, 2024, p.4) and lost because they were not preserved as male narratives were. ‘He would be bragging of how hehad beatenthe monster of Crete to death and scattered his bones-without a word to acknowledge my part, my sacrifice, what I had done for him.’(Saint, 2022, p.128) Saint displays how regarding a myth through the female gaze can dramatically shift the tone and the perceived protagonist.
An author’s intentions are fundamental to how their audience perceives a narrative, this has not changed between ancient Greece and now. The sources and stories that have survived to modern day cannot be examined autonomously from their creators, translators and interpreters as Barthes suggests, without detrimentally affecting the nature of the work (Seymour, 2018). The collective and contextual history inform interpretations of the myths and subsequent work inspired bytheseclassical sources, visual andliterary.Authorialintentioninfeminist reanalysis and retellings of classical mythology is particularly important, as the impact of patriarchal bias must be acknowledged to effectively deconstruct it (Seymour, 2018). For example, the character of Clytemnestra has been illustrated as ‘Masterful, seductive, revengeful’(Anderson, 1932) by Aeschylus, her character and actions have been debated over extensively. There is however, little debate over Agamemnon’s actions who had ‘sacrificed her daughter like an animal’ (Haynes, 2021, p.162). Costanza Casati establishes Agamemnon as the antagonist
decisively in her 2023 retelling Clytemnestra, which follows Clytemnestra as she grows as a Spartan princess into the queen of Mycenae. Casati guides the audience throughout the novel, experiencing Clytemnestra’s horrors and heartbreak alongside her, clearly defining her motivations against Agamemnon (Casati, 2023). Casati illustrates a Queen unapologetic in her fury, encouraging the audience’s empathy towards her as a complex character, a bereaved mother, a skilled queen and an avenging force. Casati encourages her readers to explore Clytemnestra beyond the murder of Agamemnon, ‘revisionist authors do not alter the outcome of Agamemnon’s fateful reunion with his wife, but they do shift the focus from Agamemnon to Clytemnestra.’(Marshall, 1999). The female gaze in this retelling addresses why the murder of Agamemnon is regarded as a more horrific act than the sacrifice of Iphigenia in male dominated narratives, questioning previous patriarchal treatment of female characters
An article by Anderson (1932) analysing the character of Clytemnestra in the plays The Choephoroe and The Eumenides, addresses the patriarchal narrative and preferential treatment of male characters in Greek mythology. Anderson comments on the narrative warping by playwrights, forcefully shifting the audience’s perceptions of characters to their preferred stance, ‘The poet’s art is concerned with swinging sympathy towards Orestes so that deliberate matricide will be a believable crime.’ (Anderson, 1932). This narrative framing is present in most ‘heroic’ myths, the narrator fixates on the perspective of the ‘hero’and does not address their surrounding characters or the consequences of their actions. This practice leads the narrator to twist the myth in favour of the (male) ‘hero’, for example in The Eumenides Clytemnestra’s wraith invokes the Furies to avenge her murder by her son Orestes, the Furies adhere because matricide was morally wrong inAncient Greece. The Furies saw no issue with Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon as he was her husband and had ordered the murder of Iphigenia, their daughter (Aeschylus, 1975). Theplaywright halts the Furies’pursuit of Orestes and eventually clears him of blame, ‘Through bitter human experience it has come to pass that the blood-hounds of the chthonic matriarchate are leashed as domestic watch-dogs to guard the laws upholding an orderly patriarchal society.’ (Anderson, 1932). The consequences of his vengeful actions are paused and absolved, but there was no consideration of absolution for Clytemnestra as a woman who pursued vengeance.
Examining women in Greek mythology, the creation myth of Pandora is one that should be considered, perhaps due to its potential impact on the portrayal of other women in myth (as it is suggested that ‘she was the Ur-woman, the woman from whom all women are descended.’
(Haynes, 2021, p.23). Hesiod originally refers to Pandora as ‘Kalon Kakon-a beautiful evil’ (Dunn, 2024, p.1) however this translation was originally “a good bad”, this was later changed to ‘beautiful evil’in an English translation. As Haynes summarises ‘the good quality becomes visual, the bad quality becomes moral’(Hay Festival, 2022) perpetuating the concept that any female actions are inherently, intentionally meant for disruption to the male population. Haynes’ analysis expresses how this imagery of a ‘beautiful evil’ is continued in artwork and other mistranslations such as Erasmus’ attempt in the sixteenth century to translate Hesiod’s myth into Latin. Here, pithos-Jar was mistranslated as puxos-box thus implying that the releasing of everything inside was a purposeful action. Haynes discusses how these ideas of purposeful malice from women become ‘firmly embedded in the collective artistic consciousness.’ (Haynes, 2021, p.9) and distort portrayals of that character for years Haynes’ feminist reanalysis of female characters such as Pandora, combats misconceptions of the male gaze in mythology.This perceived slight was readily embraced by male artists and writers who exacerbated this version of Pandora intentionally unleashing everything but hope into the world, framing her character as a harbinger of trouble. ‘In the past decade we have seen a huge number of art-historical “corrections” take place’ (Hessel, 2022, p.5), by feminists working to counteract patriarchal assumptions. Haynes discusses how the motivations of Pandora have been deliberated and assigned to her myth for years by scholars and artists alike, however she expresses that ‘Whatever motives we attribute to her are ours, and ours alone.’(Haynes, 2021, p25).Thisconcept should bekept inmindwhenever addressing content from theancientworld, Hesiod’s myth provides no reasons for Pandora opening the jar; there are no definite characterisations from myths, only their depicted actions, theoretical motivations have been assigned retrospectively, and thus are open to reanalysis and change.
Feminist retellings enable the exploration and analysis of controversial and complex women in mythology, beyond patriarchal portrayals. Characters such as Medea and Circe who conveyed ‘the dangers a powerful woman implied to a paternalistic society’(Vasillopulos, 2014) such as Athens, the perspective of which informed subsequent masculine retellings. Characterisations of thesepowerful womenvarygreatly,dueto therangeof interpretations, contextsandsocieties that have employed their narratives. These characterisations are influenced by the sources that inform the interpretations of the creators, therefore we must acknowledge how ‘liberties will always be taken in order to tell a storyin away that[…] entertainsan audience’(Albert, 2024b, p.50), whenever addressing narratives that have survived so long. Interpreting anything from the ancient world is also impacted by the translation used, a field which has a ‘legacy of male
translators which female translators have worked against and subverted by decentering the patriarchal story of The Iliad.’ (Saint, 2024). The necessity of the female gaze regarding Homeric translations is explored in Saint’s (2024) overview of female translators, and how their work combats detrimental and biased portrayals of women in Homeric poetry by male translators who disregard Homer’s poetic in favour of ‘bombastic language’ (Saint, 2024). Therefore, readdressing complex characters such as Medea and Circe through a feminist lens enables modern audiences to appreciate aspects of their characters disregarded by male narratives. Acknowledging the protective elements of Circe, how she protects the women on her island from potential threats (Rivera-Herrans, 2022). The alternative applications of Medea’s powers for healing, ‘a pharmakos and a teknophonos, a person of magical healing, harm and homicide’ (Pomeroy, 1975). Their existence in the space between mortality and divinity as descendants of the titan Helios, how their heritage separates them from mortal morals, informing modern audiences of how their mythological contexts may have influenced their approachto narrativedilemmas.Thefemalegazeallowsaudiencesto contemplatewomen in myth as more than their depicted actions, however violent (recognising how male characters are permitted violent actions without such condemnation; Odysseus, Theseus, Diomedes, Hector etc.).
Fearsome Women
The role of monsters in classical mythology was complex, they embodied fear, representing unyielding aspects of the wild world, that became vulnerable as they were anthropomorphised.
‘For the Greeks, monsters embodied a variety of fears: the potential of chaos to overcome order, of irrationality to prevail over reason, the potential victory of nature against the encroaching civilisations of mankind; the little understood nature of the female in contrast to the male.’ (Asa Simon Mittman, Dendle and Routledge, 2016, p.103).
We see personifications of the wild world throughout mythology; the pantheons of gods, the foundation myths of different city-states, in the monsters and heroes that appear across countless narratives. The ambivalent nature of monstrosity allows monstrous characters ‘to embody very different roles and perform diverse functions’ (Del Lucchese, 2019) tailored to the perils associated with specific areas across the ancient world through myth. ‘The Greek myths repeatedly present monsters being conquered by gods and men; the force of order, reason, civilisation and patriarchy inevitably prevail in Greek thought.’(Asa Simon Mittman, Dendle and Routledge, 2016, p.113). Analysing the role of female monsters in mythology displays the patriarchal bias throughout their portrayals. It is indicative of the male gaze that the women who represented specific dangers present in ancient Greece were hunted down and defeated by “heroes”, whilst the male gods who presided over these dangers and arguably caused more damage were acclaimed and worshipped.
‘the Greeks regularly identified women with the wildness of nature- defined by the Greeks as whatever existed beyond the boundaries of an ordered civilisation- it is not surprising to find that a very large portion of monsters in Greek mythology are female.’ (Asa Simon Mittman, Dendle and Routledge, 2016, p.105)
The discordance between the portrayals of dangerous male and female figures in mythology is indicative of a patriarchal society that idolised men in power and framed formidable women as monstrous to diminish their influence. Harpies, for example were ‘consistently associated with the idea of storms, of great speed and of disaster’ (Smith, 1893), whilst Zeus, ruler of the Olympians, the ‘Thunder-Bringer’ (Rivera-Herrans, 2021), an epithet for his association with lightning, was regarded with respect and deference (Greek Mythology, 2024a). Similarly, Scylla and Charybdis are personifications of the unforgiving nature of the sea, they are
described as an ‘immortal devastation, terrible, savage, wild,’ (Homer, Odyssey, B12 Lines 125-133), representing the dangers present to mariners in the ancient world, specifically that of whirlpools and hidden reefs which could tear ships apart. Whilst the god Poseidon, who wreaks devastation throughout the Odyssey and holds dominion over the sea and earthquakes (Homer and Rieu, 2003), maintains the worship and reverence of mariners, who devoted offerings and temples to him (Greek Mythology, 2024b) despite similar monstrous displays of power.
Female monsters ‘belong to the category of the abstract influences of evil, which included the Gorgons [and] the Sirens’ (Smith, 1893). Homeric portrayals of the Sirens express them as a powerful group, ‘creatures who spellbind any man alive’ (Homer and Rieu, 2003, Book 12), their thrall is rendered useless only when completely blocked out. Murgatroyd suggests that Homer’s dichotomous portrayal of the Sirens in the Odyssey reflects the nature of the ocean; beautiful, mysterious and a source of mystery, but simultaneously deadly, overpowering and treacherous. ‘Homer makes his Sirens at once attractive and repulsive’ (Murgatroyd, 2013, p.45), we see the horror connected to a death at sea through the Sirens appearance, a lack of burial in ancient Greece, if a body was lost to sea meant they were doomed to never enter the underworld. Fear was conveyed through groups of monstrous women in Greek mythology, we see the threat presented to a patriarchally dominated society by women’s collective power, ‘Monsters often arise from the desire to domesticate and thus disempower what a culture finds threatening.’ (Asa Simon Mittman, Dendle and Routledge, 2016, p.104). These groups of powerful and dangerous women; the Harpies, the Sirens, the Furies, the Fates, the Maenads, the Gorgons, and Scylla and Charybdis all have the support of others like them, they represent the male dread of women realising and weaponizing the influence they possess over society (Vasillopulos, 2014). For example, the maenads’ sparagmos (ritual dismemberment) of male characters such as Pentheus and Orpheus (Albert, 2024a), in Euripides’ Bacchae, portrays the terrifying capability of women empowered by divine wrath. ‘Euripides’ play, as E. R. Dodds observed, was‘arehandlingofathemefamiliar togenerationsofAthenianplaygoers.’(Weaver, 2009), there are several depictions of the sparagmos of Pentheus on surviving pottery (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2) that present the enduring evidence of mythological women capable of extreme violence and strength. Euripides’tragedies consistently portray women as formidable, where other playwrights such as Aristophanes, frame the notion of women with power as absurd. His Lysistrata, a 411BCE, Athenian Comedy, depicting the women of Greece withholding sex in a bid to end the Peloponnesian war. Plays into hisAthenian male audiences’
prejudicesby ridiculing theconcept of powerful women, such asthosein earlier mythsdepicted in figures 3.1 and 3.2.
Early depictions of female monsters illustrated them with animalistic features; Harpies and Sirens were portrayed as human-avian hybrids in Greek art, with fierce talons andfemale faces (Smith, 1893). Figure 3.3 exhibits a gorgon sculpture with avian and serpentine attributes. Haynes (2023) suggests that the wide mouth and lolling tongue early Gorgons are depicted with suggest they are making a deafening noise like thunder, that their serpentine hair is often portrayed around their head emulating a lion’s mane, and some depictions of the Gorgons present them with tusks akin to boars. Haynes emphasises the importance of recognising genuine dangerous elements of the ancient world in these depictions that were embodied and communicatedthroughmonstersin mythology. ‘Monstrosity, though, doesnot inherentlymean they were violent’(Albert, 2024b, p.34), the gorgoneia ‘a stone head portraying the face of the Gorgon, often surrounded by writhing serpents, [fulfilled] decorative and apotropaic functions’ (Giallongo and Forster, 2017), it was inherently protective, the terrifying features were defensive in nature and aimed outwards. This defensive purpose evokes the brutality of Medusa’s death, affording those invoking her image the protection she was denied. Haynes (2021) describes Perseus’decapitation of Medusa as she slept, and how he fled from her sisters
Stheno and Euryale as they chased him, consumed by grief and rage. The perpetuating cycle of ‘heroes’defeating these embodied fears, encourages an element of violence against women, particularly in mythological circumstances (see figure 3.4). The continued use of her head by Perseus is, when we examine it, a prolonged abuse of her body and extreme removal of her agency. There is an unsettling reality in the concept of the aegis, in the dissonance between her and the tool she is made into (defensive though it may be, appearing as a shield or breastplate, (Albert, 2024b)).Addressing Medusa’s myth through thefemalegaze, Perseus isthemonstrous character, preying on Medusa as the only mortal of the three (Hesiod’s Theogony), ‘killed not because she posed a threat but because she was, simply killable’ (Albert, 2024b, p.14), and continuing to cause havoc with her decapitated head for his own gain (Haynes, 2022).
‘Hesiod’s deeply sympathetic version of her story is the perfect introduction to her most ancient forms because, as we’ll see time and time again, there is no ancient Greek evidence of violence committed by a living Medusa or her Gorgon sisters.’(Albert, 2024b, p.40)
What ‘happens to her is not the entirety of her narrative’ (Hayward, 2024, Appendix A, p.41), Medusa is a dichotomous character, not solely the gorgoneia nor gorgon. She occupies a distinctive role in her portrayals and interpretations, simultaneously a monster, a sister, a mother, a victim and a force beyond comprehension. It is this multifaceted nature that has led to so many iterations of her myth and vast portrayals investigating her character. This aligns with the analysis by Albert (2024b).
‘In nearly every version of her story, and in many visual representations, Medusa’s death results in the birth of her children, Pegasus and Chrysaor. […] An inherently tragic moment; Medusa never gets to meet her children, and they never get to meet their mother.’(Albert, 2024b, p.51)
The immense tragedy of Medusa’s death in both circumstance and consequence is not considered by patriarchal narratives, as it is explored by the female gaze; the wrenching empathy for the fear, the grief and the horror of Medusa resonates within feminist interpretations of her myth. ‘I only knew Medusa as a monster. I had not thought she had ever been anything else. The stories of Perseus did not allow for a Medusa with a story of her own.’ (Saint, 2022, p.16). Encapsulating the impact of the male gaze on collective impressions of female narratives, especially those from classical mythology.
‘In Greek Mythology, female monsters, who are savage and animalized women, personify the opposite figure of the Greek man, the figure of the Other […] not only their appearance but also their behaviour […] Femmes fatales, savage women and female monsters share several characteristics, which find a precedent in the first woman. These common attributes are beauty, sensuality, cunning, deceit and connection to death.’(Hontanar Pérez, 2021)
The contrast between portrayals of gorgons as animalistic (as seen in figure 3.3) and humanoid depictions (as seen in figures 3.5 and 3.6) evidences the breadth in interpretations of Medusa’s myth. Figures 3.5 and 3.6 are both sculptures of Medusa from the male gaze, displaying Medusa’s head as a trophy and Medusa herself as a depiction of ‘contemporary beauty standards’ (Stankovic, 2024); any reinterpretations of myths can provoke a response from audiences. Medusa as such a multi-faceted character is ‘simultaneously a symbol of misogyny and feminism’ (Albert, 2024b, p.15), her mortality which made her vulnerable to Perseus has similarly subjected her to the male and female gaze alike throughout the centuries, whilst her immortal sisters have maintained both their animalistic features and immunity to extreme interpretations of their nature and character.
Conclusion
This dissertation set out to analyse the significanceof the femalegaze in classical literature and artwork, exploring how the female gaze has shaped contemporary interpretations of said classical sources from a modern feminist perspective. By assessing the differing portrayals of women in classical mythology by the male and female gaze, this dissertation has ascertained the necessity of women’s perspectives in classical research and representations to countervail persisting patriarchal portrayals of women depicted in classical myths. Addressing the realities and drawbacks of surviving classical sources, this dissertation sought to highlight the necessity of contextual awareness when approaching surviving material from ancient Greece. It is by understanding the intentions (or lack thereof) of sources alongside their surrounding influences, that we can most accurately assess the impact of previous interpretations on our current understandings of classical material. This is further discussed in Boardman’s (2016) analysis of surviving Greek art and understanding of contextual relevance. Through critical analysis of these sources and the implications of their context, this dissertation assesses the purposeful portrayals of female characters through themale gaze. To appropriately acknowledge how classical sources, of a patriarchal period, left little room for the female gaze to be depicted. The works of contemporary feminists are beginning to address this imbalance of perspectives regarding Greek mythology. However, there will likely always be an imbalance because of predominately patriarchally inclined histories. This dissertation evaluates how contemporary, feminist retellings inspired by these literary and artistic sources, allow the female gaze to be considered outside of traditional male-dominated narratives. Examining the creative space women have generated to analyse and contemplate female characters from classical mythology, providing new insights to a previously androcentric field. With the intention of interesting contemporary audiences in exploring classical mythology and women in myth, beyond the boundaries constructed by patriarchal perspectives. Evaluating the significance of the female gaze in classical depictions of women in mythology, by utilising the variety of information available to modern researchers. In order to comprehensively analyse how women were portrayed in ancient sources (by men), how women are portrayed in contemporary retellings (by women) and the depictions of mythological female characters in classical and contemporary art. As understanding the works in the terms they were devised, enables a more accurate overview of how intention and bias influence societal interpretations of women in mythology. As detailed in Seymour’s (2018) evaluation of authorial intention.
Further research on this topic could be pursued, deconstructing individual myths (the classical and contemporary artwork and literature connected to them), from a modern feminist perspective. Reassessing individual portrayals of mythological women from their ancient contexts to modern depictions, would be an interesting avenue of investigation, based on the conclusions of the broader research conducted within this dissertation.
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Appendix A
Dissertation Interview with Anwen Kya Hayward M.A. (5th November 2024)
Edited Transcript
5 November 2024, 10:56am
DeeAtkinson (Student) 4:59
Hello
Anwen 6:58
Hello
DeeAtkinson (Student) 7:09
Just to let you know this is currently recording. If that's alright with you and it's being transcribed.
Anwen 7:10 Yeah, that's fine.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 7:22
Awesome. Thank you.
First of all, thank you so much for agreeing to come to the interview. It means a lot and I'm really grateful.
Anwen 7:30
That's OK.
Thanks for asking.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 7:34 Is it right if we jump right in?
Anwen 7:36
Yeah.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 7:37
Awesome. So, first question is, how important do you believe reanalysis is referring to translations, archaeological finds and assumptions made by previous scholars on material and the themes that surround the ancient world?
Anwen 7:54
So yeah, I think obviously pretty important.
I think the main thing that makes that kind of reanalysis sort of vital to the ancient world is the fact that when you look at so much of the material that we currently have on the ancient world, so much of it is essentially just a reconstruction of ancient Greece. That was made by upper middle class, straight, rich, white men in the 18th and 19th centuries.
So I think when we're reanalysing things now. What it's allowing us to do is kind of unpick the biases and the assumptions that we sort of take as fact now.
I think it's very easy to assume that the version that we're kind of fed of the ancient world is the accurate one, because it's the one that we've had for the past 200 years. But obviously that in itself is a reinterpretation.
So I think in reanalysing the actual source materials and looking at them without kind of the or as little of the lens as possible, that we've had over the past 200 years, I think. Is rather important.
Otherwise, we're having a very narrow conversation.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 9:05
How necessary do you believe that the reclamation of agency for women within narrative retellings of myths is to both the classical community in terms of scholarly material and to the general public?
Anwen 9:18
Yes.
Yeah. So, I had a little think about this for like this is one of the questions where when I read it, I was like, oh, I know exactly my answer to that one. And then I kind of dug into it a little bit more. And I was like.
I mean, if we're talking specifically about the reclamation of agency, I do think it's. Afairly thorny question. Because I think.
If we frame the conversation solely in terms of agency, we sort of run the risk of kind of going down a more kind of girl boss, feminism. Does that make sense?
DeeAtkinson (Student) 9:57
Yes.
Anwen 9:57
I was thinking kind of specifically, I was thinking about the myth of Persephone, and I was thinking about the sort of recent spate of retellings of her myth which framed her story as a romance.
So you have all of these retellings like Lore Olympus was the first one I could think of, but I know there's also lots of kind of self-published romance novels that do the same thing where you're following Persephone, who's kind of suffering under, like, an overbearing mother.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 10:12
Yeah.
Yes.
Anwen 10:28
And in order to escape that kind of archetype of the stranglehold that her mother has on her, she decides to go into the underworld.
And she kind of falls in love with, like, the Dark Prince of Hades. And I understand the kind of impetus for these retellings.
But I think that the problem that I have with those ones is that it sort of frames Persephone’s agency as the only part of her narrative that's important.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 10:58
Yeah.
Anwen 10:58
And that should be reclaimed. And I think that that sort of ties in with an overarching culture of, like, silencing victims and not talking about victimhood and the way that victimhood can be inherently disempowering.
But there are also ways to kind of reclaim agency after having experienced victimhood. So I think that was kind of the point I wanted to kind of bring to, that is I do think it's important to reclaim agency.
But I also think it's important to acknowledge that agency being kind of temporarily removed or somebody experiencing kind of a loss of agency doesn't mean that they're like their story's not important or shouldn't be told.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 11:45
Yeah.
It's acknowledging how losing that agency does make up the myth. And it's a sort of vital part of it.
Anwen 11:52
Yeah, exactly.
And I do fully understand that kind of telling a version of the myth where that doesn't happen is appealing because it sort of allows.
Aless triggering version of the myth, obviously, for a lot of people, which is entirely valid, but I do think it kind of suggests that being a victim is like.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 12:07
Yeah.
Anwen 12:18
Is taboo in a way that I think is actually kind of quite problematic. Quite discouraging in itself.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 12:25
Yeah. So, I also feel like a lot of these retellings specifically of Persephone. I'm so glad you brought her up because. One of the earlier versions of the myth is about Demeter rather than solely focused on Hades and Persephone, they are somewhat ancillary characters to what is sort of her search.
Anwen 12:46
Hmm.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 12:49
And her refusal to go along with anything. That triggers well, what is essentially the seasonal shift in the myth, I think. Is lost a lot of the time in these retellings. So yeah,
I'm glad you brought her up because a lot of them are looking more at the relationship or lack of between Hades and Persephone, and not all framing the relationship between Demeter and Persephone as less than which I think it's moving away from sort of.
Anwen 13:28 Yeah.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 13:33
The bond between them as women rather than and focusing on more of the sort of sexual relationship between Hades and Persephone.
Anwen 13:46
Yeah. And it also just kind of reduces Demeter into this inherently misogynistic, like, overbearing mother archetype, right? Where her entire role in the myth is to suppress her free thinking, sexually liberated daughter Persephone, which is in itself. I mean, like I say, misogynistic.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 14:03
Yeah.
If we do have time at the end, I have a couple of questions about the bonds between women, but I'll do the list of questions first.
Anwen 14:08
Yeah, that's fine.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 14:14
Which will probably link back to that conversation if you don't mind.
So obviously you're kind of an expert in Medusa and the myths surrounding that. I've read a little bit of your novella, which just the way that you frame it and look at her. Well, sort of, unapologetically.
Her perspective was, I think, really interesting as a narrative view and the retelling, the way that she sort of conducts herself when approached by a threat. I really.
I haven't seen that presented in that way before, which I thought was awesome. But regarding Medusa as a character and a symbol, do you think that the transformation of her myth from the ancient world to the current period reflects how women are more actively investigating women as characters in their own right, rather than how they are in relation to the myths?
Anwen 15:15
Yes, I think so.
I think it's again.
It's one of those questions where it's kind of like a yes or no, because I think that obviously within the ancient world, her narrative has already kind of like changed so much because you have, like, the version in history. And then you have the kind of extended version of that within it, which is obviously the version that we all know best.
The version where you know she becomes a victim of rape by Poseidon and is transformed. And there's obviously so many other versions of the myth that if you look at the ancient sources exist, but the one that I think has lingering, kind of, cultural resonance is definitely the version in which she's a victim.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 16:00
Yeah.
Anwen 16:01
And if you look back at sort of like, I mean even kind of all the art that was being reproduced during the Renaissance and the past kind of few 100 years, of reception of Medusa, that has been the enduring myth.
And I don't think that's just because it of like women relating to it.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 16:14
Yeah.
Anwen 16:19
I think it kind of also.
For me, I think it sort of falls into the kind of like endurance of like the fallen woman trope that has been really popular in, you know, male-authored, male-centred fiction over the past kind of few 100 years, like thinking of sort of Fantine and les Mis. And like Tess of the D'urbervilles, where you have these characters who are violated.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 16:40
Yeah.
Anwen 16:44
By men and then their narrative becomes about how, vice has, like, ruined a woman. Man's vice and not her vice.
There's not really that much of, like, a narrative distinction. It's just kind of like this is what vice can do.
So I think that there's definitely, historically there has been that playing into the reason that this myth is so popular. But I do definitely think that within the past, I mean, I would say literally like 20-30 years particularly, I do think you're seeing more women, kind of looking at the narrative and saying like, well, maybe she's more than just like a foreign woman. You know, like maybe the fact of what happens to her is not the entirety of her narrative, but more about what that happening actually says about the event itself. Does that make sense?
DeeAtkinson (Student) 17:38
Yes.
Anwen 17:39
Like the fact that we have a greater understanding of how women are oppressed and victimized by patriarchal male violence, I think reframes how we view that already popular myth.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 17:52
Yes
Thank you.
Anwen 17:57
That's OK.
I'm kind of like thinking it out in my head at the same time so.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 18:02
I fully understand. And just, I find especially when talking to experts in the field and people who have done so much research and have had time to think through multiple options. It's so interesting to just hear how you frame things and how you think things through and how that sort of creates like not an argument but an answer. I find it really helpful.
Anwen 18:25
That's good.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 18:28
Are there any surviving works from the ancient world being architectural, sculptural, pottery or plays that you find inspires your work? Or you would like to research further in the future?
Anwen 18:39
Yes, They are kind of unrelated to Medusa, unfortunately.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 18:43
It's more than ok. any application to such a wide range of women's mythology.
Anwen 18:50
Well, I mean, for me, I'm always really interested in the little fragments that we have left of things. So particularly the kind of fragment that over the past few years, I've always returned to and been like, I wish we had more is theAeschylus’MyrmidonsThe one in which Patroclus is talking about showering Achilles thighs with like 1000 kisses and for me I think that fragment kind of encapsulates so much about what we. Are currently finding interesting about reception of classical myth because it's this tiny little fragment that doesn't really say much in and of itself. But when you put it into like a broader conversation about reclaiming queer narratives as an example. And what, just reframing that one little kind of tiny fragmentary quote can say about how that entire myth of likeAchilles, Patroclus, the Trojan War. How that might have been perceived in a different way to the sort of like hyper masculine like Troy version.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 19:55
Yeah.
Anwen 19:56
And obviously, like we have kind of modern receptions of that myth, like The Song of Achilles is like the obvious one.
But yeah, for me it's just like looking at these tiny little fragments and kind of using them to like piece together a different version of the ancient world to the one that I think has, again since like the 19th century, been the one that we've kind of been spoon fed to believe. It's like, no, this is this is how it was. There's only one version of it. And we're realizing now obviously that that's just not true.
And kind of on the same note, I think I'm also really interested.
In particularly, the myths in Ovid’s metamorphosis, because that's the text that I looked up for my, when I was writing Here The World Entire, the Oresteia and also for my masters, I looked at metamorphosis a lot.
And the myth that really stuck out to me as being potentially really fruitful for, kind of both, academic analysis and also literary narrative retellings, was the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, whose name I've never heard said aloud.
If I mispronounce it, I apologize.
But that's the myth of the two girls.
If this is born as, like identifies as a female and is raised as a boy. And her family get her engaged to a local young girl, and the two of them fall in love.
But Ianthe doesn't know that Iphis is a girl, she thinks that she's a boy. And so Iphis prays that she can, I think the way she sort of frames it is not to be transformed into a man.
She specifically asks that something happen to make their union natural.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 21:48
Yeah.
Anwen 21:49
And so what happens is that Iphis is transformed into a boy and then it becomes like a kind of heteronormative relationship and they can get married and it's fine.
And I personally find that myth really, really interesting for further deep kind of analysis because on one hand you could obviously read that through like the narrative of kind of like trans and queer studies because you have this myth of, like, somebody who is assigned female at birth, transitioning and becoming a man.
But then you also have this kind of quite repressive conservative reading of it.
Where there's a queer girl, and in order to have her relationship with another girl become like natural as the text puts it, she has to become a man.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 22:35
Yeah.
Anwen 22:36
Yeah. So, I personally found that myth really like I could talk about it for ages because it's there's so much in it that you can kind of like all these little roots, you can chase them and it's not a particularly well known myth. I thinkAli Smith did a retelling of it. In the early 2000s.
Can't remember, I think it's called. Girl, it's called Girl Boy or something like that. I'm not sure exactly. I would recommend.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 23:05
Yeah, for sure.
Adding onto the reading list. I think that's really interesting. Because I've been looking a lot of fragmentary evidence that's specifically like the parts that and trying to explain in a dissertation, that what we have is such a small sort of selection of what would have been available.
Anwen 23:16
Oh, OK.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 23:32
And that the context of all those works and all of those like surviving narratives would have been incredibly different in the ancient world.
To what, or how we read them today?
Specifically, I was looking at like gemstone fragments with embossed work on them, and how those would have been.
Those were later edition to artistic work, and they only started showing images once they got sort of a foothold in how to carve them. But of men so.
Like essentially hearing that you are also fascinated with these, little ones that we have of versions of myths that would likely had a much larger, I'm going to say fanbase.
That's the wrong word, but in in the ancient world and sort of would have been more well known. This better way of phrasing it.
Anwen 24:31 Fanbase.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 24:32 Yes.
Yeah, that's really helpful.
There is a lot that we don't know and that you constantly think if only we had more of this, it would have enlightened us a little bit more to what the situation and what the reception of it would be is what I'm looking at a lot at the moment is the original,
Sort of reception by the audience, who would have seen it first or listened to it first is just the fact that they couldn't record back then is really.
Cool. Thank you.
//
You wrote an article in 2020 ‘ looking back at Medusa’ and you used a phrase that I'm currently using in my dissertation. That “myth as a narrative form cannot be accurately said to have an original version”. Have you found that the range or lack of source material different authors and artists use as inspiration affects the outcome of their work and their own narrative perspective?
Anwen 25:50
Yeah. So this was one when I was kind of reading the question. I was like, oh, I can definitely think of some examples that I probably will not directly give because I'm like, I don't want to get blacklisted. But no, I've definitely read some retellings and actually I think the Persephone romance retellings are I'm going to use these as my example of those.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 26:14 Ok.
Anwen 26:15
Because I think there's definitely some retellings out there where you can tell that the author kind of has, like, one idea of what the myth is, and they were like, well, I'm going to just subvert it.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 26:24
Yeah.
Anwen 26:28
I'm going to change something in that myth and it doesn't really matter what that change is, but it's going to be different.
And like I think like for the record, I think that's kind of that's fine because obviously historically like myths have been retold and retold and retold, and all the different versions that we have, even from the ancient world, we don't necessarily know exactly what that change was kind.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 26:35
Yeah.
Anwen 26:52
Of supposed to sign post. I mean, we can.
We can analyse it from the benefit of hindsight. You know, we can look at the kind of.
The Oresteia trilogy.
We can look at the ways that that myth was changed byAeschylus and the politics ofAthens at the time, and we can say, oh clearly this is this is being used to commentate on the political reforms.
But you know it, it is speculation.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 27:16
Yes.
Anwen 27:17
All of which is to say, I think that.
It's fine to change myths however you want, because myths are inherently malleable. But I also definitely think that if you're going to retell a myth and you want that retelling to kind of like actually commentate on something and or you want your kind of version of that myth to be particularly meaningful, I think it's definitely fruitful to read as many existing versions of that myth as you can.
More so, so that you know the ways in which that myth has been used already.
And the ways in which other writers or kind of ancient figures might have changed particular key elements of that myth, and what that myth might be saying.
So I mean, to use Medusa as the kind of obvious example because that's the version that I've written.
The version that I particularly use when I was writing. My version was obviously the Ovid version. But I also looked at the version that Hesiod tells. Kind of. That's, I suppose our oldest existing version of the myth.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 28:30
Yeah.
Anwen 28:32
So I looked at that and I found it interesting the ways in which it's really clear that Ovid is like playing off that version because you have in his head you have Medusa and Poseidon kind of nebulously, like lying together. It's not like super clear, at least in the translations that I've read. Whether or not that is consensual or violent. But I think there's obviously room to interpret it as being a nonconsensual act.
So for me, I found it interesting that we sort of view Ovid's version as being like. Acomplete kind of retelling.
And we often view of it as like deviating completely from his kind of like Hesiod’s source myths. But actually when you go back and look at the older versions that we still have. He's still drawing from an existing well.
And to me, I think I found that really interesting because it kind of cements Medusa's narrative a little bit more for me.
Like it makes the version that we sort of still have and retell something more than just like one Roman's fan fiction.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 29:39
Yeah.
Anwen 29:41
Harder to phrase it a different way, but.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 29:44 It's so accurate.
Anwen 29:52
Yeah. So, I suppose just which is a very long way of saying I think just being aware of the kind of nuances of a myth I do think makes for a more.
I guess just like a more creative, fertile retelling.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 30:07
Yeah.
Are there any myths or translations that you would like to comment on in terms of how women are portrayed within that myth?
That can also include artworks that you've seen or like very specific sources that might not be mainstream, essentially?
Anwen 30:40
Yeah. I mean, for me maybe.
Kind of a boring answer because my answer for this one would definitely be Madea. I think for me one of the most interesting, like ancient texts that I read.
Kind of in preparation for just retelling myths in general, was Euripides version of Medea. Because I know it's like it's kind of the version of Medea. So, it's obviously the best kind of known one.
It's adapted really frequently, so if it's boring, I do apologize, but.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 31:11
No.
Anwen 31:13
For me, I just found it really interesting because I think it would be really easy.
To assume that the play itself would like, treat Medea as this kind of heinous, evil villain who doesn't have any kind of motive for what she does because she's a woman in a patriarchal society, the play is being originally performed in the patriarchal society. It's written by a man.
And Medea does commit kind of like the ultimate taboo for a woman in that she transgresses in the motherhood sphere and she kills her children.
But I've always been really surprised at how much, sort of empathy and, I guess sympathy that the play itself actually extends to Medea because you do have the chorus who obviously, they're not exactly like the moral compass, you know that that's going a bit far.
But I think the chorus kind of is there to shift the audience's thinking. And to sort of frame what they're supposed to be thinking and feeling about the events they're seeing, and even the chorus is like, yeah, she's had a hard time.
So it's not justifying her actions by any means, but I've always found it interesting that yeah, like I say with within that play itself, Medea is kind of humanised to an extent that I think. Many female characters, even in, like modern retellings, they're just like, oh, Medea was an evil witch who killed her children.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 32:45
They miss out on the nuance of it?
Anwen 32:49
Yeah, exactly.
And I think for the nuance to be present in this ancient text, I think is really interesting.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 32:55
Yeah. Furthering what you were saying about the chorus. And the sort of narrative framing that the playwright uses through that.
There's an article that I was looking at about the portrayal of Clytemnestra in, I think the Eumenides and the Choephoroe, which I don't know whether I'm pronouncing correctly, but that's the playwright uses the chorus to very strongly direct sympathy to Orestes.
Anwen 33:29 Yeah.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 33:30
And essentially just remove any of Clytemnestra’s or her wraith in that play.
Anwen 33:39
Yeah.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 33:39
Her logical points that she and the Furies were electing to show, and the playwright uses the chorus to shut that down and very forcefully shift the narrative onto Orestes’favour.
Do you find that in a lot of your experience of like looking at myths that there is sort of a dramatic shift at one point or the other?
Because in Medea it's not dramatic, we've sort of, the chorus is generally always essentially touching base with Medea, and like checking in on.
Anwen 34:17
Yeah.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 34:18
Do you find that happens a lot in other plays that you've read, or like adaptations of that?
Anwen 34:23
Well, I mean, kind of hilariously, the only the other ancient play that I'm more familiar with is the Oresteia trilogy because I wrote my master's dissertation on that trilogy. So I know that one fairly well, though I haven't read it for a long time. But yeah, I definitely.
I looked at the kind of climactic catharsis in ancient plays, a little bit for that. And yeah, I found it really interesting, particularly in.
In the treatment of Clytemnestra in that one the way that the chorus is not only kind of like judging her and sort of specifically saying like, no, she's the bad guy. Here they are also quite literally saying like she is behaving like a man.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 35:13
Yeah.
Anwen 35:13
You know that there are all these points where they're saying, the reason that what she's done is so bad is not just because she's killed her husband, which is, you know.
Kind of the ultimate transgression as a wife. She's also putting herself into this masculine role.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 35:30
Yeah.
Anwen 35:30
So I definitely found it interesting the way that the kind of climactic point of that, that narrative in particular, was gendered.
And also I suppose similar similarly in a Orestes’narrative where you have the Furies who are sort of like the, I guess, irrational kind of female spirits of rage, and how that you, if you wanted to, you could sort of tie that into.
The idea of like feminine rage in general.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 35:58
Yeah.
Brilliant. Thank you.
Sorry, I'm that's the end of the list of questions. If you're still ok to answer a few more?
Anwen 36:17 That's ok.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 36:19
On the note of the Oresteia and looking at sort of the House of Atreus, do you have any commentary on sort of the treatment and reception of Helen and that sort of, because obviously, Helen, both from Sparta originally.
And how it’s strongly feminine in the way that a lot of the Greek city states weren't.
I feel not in the way that they were.
Well, they had a closer sort of treatment to the male counterparts than most other city states at the time. Any comments on how they were presented in place and in essentially the Homeric epics?
Anwen 37:09
I think it's interesting, especially in kind of modern receptions of those epics, because obviously nowadays we don't necessarily view them as being anything other than Greek.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 37:22
Yeah.
Anwen 37:22
So we don't really have a kind of like idea of the sort of cultural differences that you would have had between like Sparta and Crete andAthens like we don't really kind of cement that so.
I mean, even looking at things like, you know, the film, Troy, everybody kind of like dresses
the same.
There's not really an understanding that that they come from like different places. It's all just kind of flattened into like a homogeneous kind of ancient Greece.
But yeah, it's definitely interesting to think about how the idea of them as being from a state where women had like marginally more agency.
Might treat or might change how the narrative views them because. I suppose.
Kind of thinking out loud, Helen's decision to leave her husband is obviously like one of the kind of ultimate transgressions that a wife that a wife can commit.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 38:19
Yeah.
Anwen 38:22
And obviously the extent to which that is actually her own agency is kind of debatable.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 38:27
Yeah.
Anwen 38:28
Interesting that in most modern retellings of it, it's very much like her decision.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 38:35
Yes.
Anwen 38:36
Which again I think is an interesting conversation to have about how like modern retellings are like. Yeah, but having agency is, you know, is the important thing because ultimately, like, the fact that she didn't have a choice is also something that I think is overlooked a lot now.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 38:51
Yeah.
Anwen 38:52
But yeah, definitely interesting and not something I've actually really previously considered. Whether or not the narrative might be kind of judging her differently because she's from Sparta.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 39:04
In terms of the extent of her agency, I studied classical civilizations for Alevel and for GCSE and a lot of our work was on divine intervention and a lot of the versions that we went through and discussed was of Helen and howAphrodite, sort of. Manipulates the relationship between her and Paris and sort of. It's very much behind the scenes of like all the action.
But a lot of the Homeric epic that we have currently, I think it's the Penguins classics version. That translation lends a fair bit of time in one of the books to that sort of relationship between Aphrodite, Helen and Paris.
She is part of the relationship in that, do you find there's a lot of well? I'm planning a lot with the more modern translations, and like retellings that the idea of the divine intervention isn't as strong. Do you have any comments on that?
Anwen 40:16
I agree, I have actually genuinely thought about this question myself before, and I've come to like a few, like, different conclusions of it.
And I think it's firstly because, as a society in general, we tend towards kind of atheism or agnosticism, or at least a version of kind of theism where, like we have agency.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 40:39 Yeah.
Anwen 40:39
So I mean, even in kind of Christianity, like ultimately the decision comes down to you like you're the one that has to kind of decide to live the correct way.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 40:50 Yes.
Anwen 40:51
And I think that, for that reason, because we don't personally have an understanding of like our lives being shaped by this kind of like divine power. I think modern retellings shy away from that because it would inherently be a less relatable story.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 41:05 Yeah.
Anwen 41:07
And I also think that it's largely just because the characters that were usually kind of aligned with like morally in the narratives, in the modern retellings, are the mortals and the people who are making these decisions. And if we're going to be reading a story that kind of like follows, modern narrative convention having what they did it because the gods told them to is like, really, narratively unsatisfying.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 41:32
Yeah.
Anwen 41:33
From what we're conditioned to expect from a narrative.
So I'm trying to think of any modern retelling that I've read recently in which divine intervention is like a key component of the narrative. And I'm coming up slightly blank. I'm sure there are some.
I'm sure that that it's not kind of completely dead, but.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 41:56
But it is, It has fallen out of the narrative, which I think. Well, a lot of the reading of the original myth, it contributes so much to sort of the dichotomy of the characters.
And a lot of that is like, the retellings are amazing, but they do sort of glance past, I feel, divine intervention.
Which make up a lot of the source material that I presume they were working off.
Anwen 42:32
Yeah, definitely. And like I say, I think a large part of that is just because our kind of on the ground characters are the people that that we're spending time with in these retellings. So to have stuff happening kind of off page that is shaping the narrative in like a divine sense, I think just in the context of a modern novel would just be difficult to kind of structure.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 43:07
Looping back to the earlier conversation about the bonds and relationships between women and how those are presented and not presented in myth and retellings, because I'm finding a lot of the sources I'm looking at from ancient Greece and the subsequent times after that. That the relationship between women and whether that's familial or sort of the idea of unity between women has only really come into the narrative in more recent retellings, it's very hard to find expressions of, say, sisterhood or just familiarity outside of like a couple of them. Which the most I can think of is.
Oedipus’daughter's in the relationship between them, I struggle to find a lot of them between Andromache and Hecuba in the Iliad, I can't find a lot of the sort of bonds between women. In the well, not the original, because obviously there is no original, but in ancient portrayals, do you have any input on it?
Anwen 44:44
And I always just assume that's kind of because the men are so heavily centred in the older, the ancient sources that we have because they're so much about like the hero. About sort of like masculine narratives where you have a man doing this and he goes here and he does this and then he meets a woman and maybe she helps him. But then ultimately, he does everything.
So I think there's just not much room for there to be a narrative about females. And sisterhood because there's literally not space in the narrative. It doesn't create that space for them.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 45:19
Yeah.
Anwen 45:20
And because it's just not the function of the myth, which is very much like the man story. I mean, even if you're looking at kind of versions of Medusa. I mean what I would term Medusa's myth, if you're looking at that, it's never Medusa's myth. It's always either, such as in metamorphoses. It's like the section where Perseus is telling his story.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 45:43
Yeah.
Anwen 45:44
And then he gives Medusa's back story. Kind of like as an aside. Or you have the version in Hesiod where Medusa is just like one tiny event in this long chain of like cosmic happenings.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 45:56
Yes.
Anwen 45:57
So yeah, I think this this idea of like a woman's myth is just new. Comparatively.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 46:05
Yeah.
And continuing on from that, one of the sort of most fleshed out. Like sort of sisterhoods is theAmazons. And obviously there was a fascination with them from ancient Greek artists and Greek narratives.
Do you?
Well, I've sort of theorized that that might be because male narrators are sort of unwilling or unable to expand on close female relationships outside of the context of battle and war, and so having that sort of middle ground to then expand on sort of unfamiliar territory would probably be where they went for. Well, that was sort of. Familiar ground to then explore the unknown narratively. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Anwen 47:04
I mean, I think it makes sense because I suppose that the idea of what a woman's narrative would be kind of in an ancient context.
So much of the narratives are very much like about not just men doing things, but about like actions that are coded masculine. Does that make sense?
DeeAtkinson (Student) 47:23
Yes.
Anwen 47:25
So it's not just about like men going from Ato B, journeying and adventuring. It's about the fact that the things that are happening are very much like, these are things that men do. So I think the idea, I mean I'm thinking about the recent retelling. Psyche and Eros by Luna McNamara.
Which obviously is like a complete kind of divergent from the source myth in that psyche herself is like very much kind of the adventuring character, which I know the souls myth is kind of similar in that she herself is like the kind of focus of that story.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 47:46
Yes.
Anwen 48:06
But she's given a much more, masculine role in the retelling, in a way that I think is really interesting.
And also I'm thinking about.
Oh gosh, I can't remember the author's name, which is really bad. The Orphia and Eurydicius is a retelling that came out last year. I can't remember the author's name, but it basically is a gender swapped version of Orpheus and Eurydice where Orphia is a woman.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 48:32
Yeah.
Anwen 48:36
So his character is a woman and she is the one who journeys into the underworld. And it's really interesting to see how that version of the myth when the genders are swapped. Some of the original kind of gender roles are definitely maintained so.
The way that the journey is shaped is very different because it's a woman undertaking it. But it's still kind of like the, quote un-quote, Hero's Journey, which I find interesting.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 49:09
It's interesting.
I will also add that to the reading list.
Anwen 49:11
Yeah, it came out in Australia. I think it's an Australian one.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 49:14
Yeah.
That's super interesting.
That is me out of out of question.
Is there anything that you'd like to expand on or just ramble about for a couple of minutes?
Anwen 49:36
I think the only other thing that I was thinking about in relation to the Medusa question was because I know you mentioned Medusa as a symbol.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 49:45
Yes.
Anwen 49:46
And I just wanted to, I guess, mention really, really briefly about how I kind of personally feel that in particular the gorgonian image is used nowadays, because I actually only discovered like relatively recently that the Versace symbol is a Medusa head. Which I've always found really kind of weird and also interesting because to me it really represents the commodification of what is literally the kind of severed head of if we're going by the popular version, the severed head of a rape victim.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 50:15
Yeah.
Yes.
Anwen 50:26
And for me, I just kind of feel like that almost encompasses the discussion because you have this really high end fashion brand using this symbol.
Which is completely divested of all context, all meaning and then on the other side you have this I guess trend is kind of the wrong word.
But you know what I mean.
The trend of retellings of these myths, which are dedicated to giving women their voices back, and I think for me it's just interesting to see the dichotomy of how the imagery is used in a kind of commercial capitalist sense, and then the things as.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 50:50
Yes.
Anwen 51:07
Narrative actually means to people. So yeah, I just find that interesting.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 51:14
Yeah, I had no idea.
I know that it's obviously been used for women’s shelters and that is sort of a protective
element.
I had no idea that it was used by a fashion brand.
Anwen 51:25
It's Versace logo so people have it on their sunglasses.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 51:29
Oh.
Never noticed that.
Yeah. No, that's really interesting. Sorry, another pop-up question.
Anwen 51:42
Yeah, go for it.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 51:44
In terms of Natalie Haynes, who was the author of Pandora's Jar, She was giving a talk at a Hay Festival a couple of years ago, and she commented on how the Gorgons as a like as they're depicted in earlier sort of artworks. They are very animalistic and they have a lot intertwining elements.
And she was looking at sort of the root of the words and how they were and was essentially talking about how they were likely first thought up as.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 52:27
These figures to encapsulate the wild world and sort of the fair surrounding that. Do you have any thoughts on how?
We've sort of gone from that trio embodying this unknown fear to Medusa being singled out as this lone figure, and I know that she's singled out as the mortal one of her sisters. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Anwen 52:56
Yeah, I do.
I think firstly it's kind of, to me. I've always just assumed that's because it's easier to make a symbol of a singular thing.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 53:08
Yeah.
Anwen 53:08
So I think that kind of goes with the physical symbol as in the actual image of the Gorgon's head, but also just the things that Medusa's story and narrative kind of stands for as a symbol. I think that her story is kind of.
Inherently a little bit more resonant if she is kind of taken in isolation.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 53:31
Yes.
Anwen 53:31
I know that there's a retelling called Medusa’s sisters by Lauren Bear. I think that's her name. I haven't read that, but I know that that is kind of like a sort of reclamation of the sisterhood narrative.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 53:45
Yeah.
Anwen 53:45
I think also it's interesting to look how the Gorgons depiction in general changed from being not just multiple Gorgons who are animalistic, but also. To being an attractive woman's face, where the only real physical difference is the snaky hair. I think it's interesting.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 54:04
Yes.
Yeah.
Anwen 54:14
That even her kind of image was like beautified, and I guess to an extent, especially in some modern contexts, sexualized.
I definitely think that's interesting, but yeah, to go back to the sisters thing, I do kind of think it's just because Medusa is the one that is at the heart of the narrative.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 54:36
Yeah.
Anwen 54:37
So to have the multiple gorgons, I think kind of confuses the narrative.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 54:51
Yeah, no, I can see that it's. I think it's an interesting process. I think all of the processes they all had to go through to sort of become what they are and what they're known as is really interesting.
But in particular, just seeing how people and other translations and sort of modern impact in the fact that each era was modern at that time has, affected the myth, essentially.
Anwen 55:21
It's interesting looking at Medusa in particular, because have you read the book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan?
So that's a medieval text.
I can't remember which century it was written in, but it's quite an early medieval text and it's this medieval woman, Christine de Pisan. And she's basically sort of for this section.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 55:39 Yeah.
Anwen 55:47
She's kind of retelling the stories of, like, historical and mythic women, and she specifically mentions Medusa but in her version of the myth is very different because in her version Medusa doesn't petrify men because she's so ugly. She petrifies men because she's so beautiful and it's her, like, astonishing beauty that turns men to stone. And that is ancient version that she's drawing on from that.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 56:12 Yes.
Anwen 56:16
I don't remember what the ancient version is. Unfortunately, it's a Roman version I think. But yeah, to me it's interesting because this idea of Medusa as being. I mean, I don't want to go the Freudian route because I hate Freud so much, but.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 56:34
Yes. He’s the worst.
Anwen 56:36 Is the worst.
But this idea of Medusa like petrifying men because she's beautiful rather than because she's, monstrous. I think is really interesting. Especially when you look at, this is really random, but I was watching an episode of. Ink master that American tattoo reality show.And they had.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 57:00 I've seen that one, yes.
Anwen 57:02
they’re so bad, but they had an episode where their challenge was Medusa tattoos. Which is why I watched it. I'd like to add I don't just love ink master. But it was really interesting because all the men who were doing their Medusa tattoos, they were just so sexualized that you have these Medusas where, their head is not the main part of that tattoo.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 57:21
Yeah. No.
Anwen 57:27
Like not at all.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 57:29
Like it's not a portrait. It is a full body tattoo, yeah.
Anwen 57:33
Yeah, exactly.
And I found that really interesting because obviously that Medusa is such a kind of enduring symbol, especially to women of like survivor-hood and female solidarity. But then, conversely, she's also this kind of, I guess, forbidden fruit figure for men. This kind of, ultimate, femme fatale. And I just find that so interesting because I just.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 57:54
Yes.
Anwen 58:00
I'm so kind of divested from. That context, in which her figure is used. That whenever I see, I'm just like, oh yeah. That is also a reception of her character.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 58:13
When you're examining all these different things and you look at how removed it becomes from the context?
It is quite like I hadn't considered that and I'm not sure you should have.
Anwen 58:30
Yeah, like, where are you getting this image of her from?
DeeAtkinson (Student) 58:34
Yeah.
I want to say thank you so much, this has been incredibly helpful and I really appreciate hearing your thoughts on everything. So just thank you again for agreeing to the interview.
Anwen 58:54
Oh, thank you for asking, because I don't get the chance to like, rant about Medusa anymore.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 58:59
Always welcome. Absolutely. Always welcome.
Anwen 59:03 Thank you.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 59:04
Thank You.
DeeAtkinson (Student) stopped transcription
Appendix B
Dissertation Interview with LivAlbert B.A. (9th December 2024)
Edited Transcript
9 December 2024, 05:57pm
DeeAtkinson (Student) 4:37 Hello.
Just a reminder that this is a recorded and transcribed interview.
Liv 5:36 Hi. Yes.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 5:41
Thank you so much for agreeing to the interview. I really appreciate it.
Liv 5:48
Very happy too. Thank you for asking.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 5:51
Cool. Is it right with you if we just jump straight into the questions?
Liv 5:55
Yeah, absolutely.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 5:56
Brilliant. I've got a few extras that I might ask at the end if we have time. If that'll be all right with you.
Liv // So yeah, no problem.
DeeAtkinson (Student) // Cool.
So first question, in your experience of reviewing multiple versions of myths, are there any notable differences in translations that you look at that have caught your attention or that you feel you'd like to comment on exactly?
Liv 6:40
It's a hard thing to comment because I feel like the answer is just like yes. I mean, it's one of those things, right, where every translation can be different.
But yeah, I mean that's like the number one thing. I think I have learned is the way that these translations can vary and can entirely influence the way that the stories are told.
So I mean, with me these days, you know, eight years into doing this in such extensive detail, I tend to try to read as multiple translations. I tend to try to go towards newer translations, ideally those by women because we get this entirely different perspective.
On the texts and a very different kind of, a version of a story where.
It's funny trying to talk to people about that sometimes because they think like, oh, translation should be pretty objective.
Like absolutely not.
I just try to find people who I would be most interested in reading their take on the translation. But definitely everything varies so much.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 8:11
That's brilliant.
Thank you.
Yes, I've read so many different versions of so many different things and so I was just wondering as you have so much experience with it.
On how much bias, essentially on the translators end or not even bias. Just personal outlook will change, version to version is just insane so.
Liv 8:38
Yeah, well, it is biased, but I think it's biased.
Not necessarily in a bad way in just like a very human way in that how humans interpret everything is always going to be biased on personal experience and knowledge and education. And all these things just don't necessarily, you know, do good or bad for the translation but just affect it. You know, like it's always going to be affected regardless of kind of what's coming out.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 9:07
Can you describe your process of reviewing and choosing versions of myths from the many existing variations?
How you cut down on which ones that you feel you want to talk about?
Liv 9:22
Yeah. I mean, in terms of versions and variations, I find these days, I don't cut down. I just like over explain.
But at the same time, you know, because I work primarily with Greek sources and because I work primarily with the mythology itself.
I mean there are variations but not to the degree where it's too often that I have to, pick from multiple detailed versions, because that's also the frustration with Greek sources is that they tend to be either incredibly fragmentary or they just tend to not go into detail on characters, even if we wish they did.
And of course, it's like a bazillion different reasons for that, but I just find it most interesting to look at all the different versions and what they are, why they differ, and just kind of like,
you know, imagine what might be happening.
I do try to tend towards the oldest, I really love everything from the classical period prior. But at the same time, of course, so much is coming from later as well.
So I like to pick apart what I can and just share as many different versions with people as possible, because I think that's the thing that gets left out of people learning mythology, often is that there are so many different versions, unless you.
Studying it academically, like you just tend to pick up a book and think like this is the Greek myth period, and like that isn't really a thing.And I'm most interested in sharing. How and why that isn't really a thing with my listeners?
DeeAtkinson (Student) 10:55
Yes, I think it definitely comes across.
Liv 10:59
Thank you.
I'm a bit excessive at this point, but I love it.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 11:03
It's classically appreciated, I think just as somebody who is researching so much and having to read so much, having somebody who's so very passionate about the subject go into that much detail. You're just like, yes.
Liv 11:18
Yeah, well, that's what I keep getting.
Is like nobody's telling me not to keep doing it that way. So I'm, you know, thrilled to keep, doing it exactly how I want to, which is just as much detail as humanly possible.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 11:42
Do you find a difference in responses to your podcast? Depending on which depictions and versions and like the characters you choose? So, for example, if you're telling a myth or retelling a myth, that centres. I mean, I know that this is.
Primarily what you focus on, but looking at the women and sort of the female perspective? Rather than examining the male hero of the myth, do you find that that creates a difference in responses?
Liv 12:23
Not so much anymore. And I'm still kind of surprised by that. I think. I think maybe it's something to do, like partially that you know the podcast title is what it is like.
I think I weed out like a particular type of guy who might be mad or, you know, the people who aren't necessarily looking for, you know, like a more kind of entertaining and detailed version.
And I but I am.
I don't get a lot of people who are annoyed with my representations. I mean, it's also in large part that like.
Podcasts up until recently were like Spotify, added comments like didn't really have too much of ways to interact directly with an episode.
I realized I answer all of this and I might get a lot on my YouTube, but my wonderful producer, Michaela, handles my YouTube and I like to pretend it doesn't exist because it's where people feel free to be mean and I don't want to read it. So she. Does because it's not her voice, so she doesn't care.
So that's all to say, like outside of YouTube that I just I have live in wonderful, blissful ignorance.
I really don't.
You know, every once in a while, somebody will. Especially now that Spotify has enabled comments, somebody will listen to an episode from like eight years ago and then, like, correct me. And I'm like, Yep, like you're right. I was wrong.
It it's been 8 years like I don't know how relevant this still is kind of thing. Yeah, it's like, well, now you're not telling me anything new at this point. When I've been doing this for three weeks.
Sure, I didn't know everything.
But yeah, so no, I mean.
I really don't get.
I don't get that much reaction to that.
I think people are just generally interested in in hearing those stories and you know, every once in a while people are mad and they just think I'm complaining about how women were treated.
But I just ignore those because if you want to complain about that then like this is not the show for you.
You know, so.
But you know it's definitely not as like constant as I could have always expected should be because of how ****** men are on the Internet.
///
DeeAtkinson (Student) 15:27
So do you find that your portrayal of myths and commentary on the mix, classical information sort of more accessible to your fan base and sort of the listeners who are tuning in, who might not have that much experience going into classics?
Liv 15:45
Yeah, that's my favourite thing to do is to like. I mean it's interesting because I only have a B.A. and it's very old, so I don't really consider myself part of like any kind of realm of academic study, you know, in the traditional sense.
But still you know I find it interesting to look at it from the most detailed and contextual standpoint. And I do think that like I was saying earlier with like, you know versions and
things like I think that for most people who aren't studying it formally. This is really one of the few places where you can get an introduction to like exactly what makes a myth and what doesn't.
And like you know, all the different things that go into it because so many people just think, oh, it's the story from the ancient world. But there's just so much more than that. And so interesting to know how much more they are than that.
I'm going to like I just talked around so much that I barely remember your question, but I think I answered it.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 17:00
In your experience, do you enjoy conversing and collaborating with classicists and like mythology enthusiasts to explore the role of characters and myths to sort of?
Just.
Not conceptualized but.
Liv 17:28
No, I think I know what you mean.
Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting that you phrased it that way too, because I have found that I don't come to myths in the way that a lot of people do, who listen to my show. You know I don't.
I don't find I don't come to them as to the characters as characters so much as concepts, and I think it's most interesting to look at.
So I don't find that I come to most of the mythological characters as characters as we would see them now in fiction and things like that. Or as fully fleshed characters. I don't want, I don't like thinking of them in that way.
As if they were.
Fictional characters, I suppose, and I don't really like thinking about them as if they were real because you know they weren't.
But I really like to come to the characters and myth and look at them more in the context in which they were created.
Why this character is created and what it says about the time and the people and the stories they were exploring and the parts of the world they were exploring through those characters. Because I really prefer to go at it from a deeper, a closer connection to what the ancient world was creating at the time.
And they weren't conceptualizing these characters as fully fledged individuals who had complex, you know, back stories and histories. That's not the purpose they served. And so I think it's really interesting when other people do it. And I love that so much fiction exists. But I also love that my show gets to be something else from that, where that isn't how I go about it. I am much more interested in what they meant to the ancient world and what they said about the ancient people versus like the individual characters themselves in the stories, and if in the Iliad those characters are much more fleshed out, and so I'm very interested in them as fleshed out characters, like if the characters fleshed out in myth for some reason then that's great, but I don't seek ever to flesh it out beyond what exists in the sources.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 20:08
100% yeah.
It's mostly. I really appreciate your opinion on it because obviously there is so much. There are so many retellings that we can find essentially acknowledging context about what we know and what we don't know and what that says about everything else. And then looking at these retellings and going from there, what they’ve looked at.
Liv 20:53
Yeah. Well, yeah, I think it's interesting to think.
Think of the retellings as completely separate things, as like modern people, you know, kind of mirroring and imitating what they did in the ancient world, and it. So it's like the characters that are explored in modern retellings are obviously inspired by the ancient world, but like they are.
Not the ancient characters and I just. I like to keep that really separate in my mind, purely because I'm a nerd who just like, wants all of that.
But like you know it it it's. Yeah, it's an interesting thing.
Because they are so, so different.
But it's really.
Unless you're really deep in this world, like it's kind of hard to explain. Like what? You know what makes that so different?
///
DeeAtkinson (Student) 22:32
Yeah. Do you find that advocating for the women in these meds from a feminist sort of stands opens more avenues for conversations in terms of a lot of what we have existing sort of analysis of the ancient world is from a male perspective.
Do you find that there's a lot to be said on the topic of looking at it from a feminist perspective?
Liv 23:24
Yeah, absolutely.
And I just even you saying that made me think and it connects back to an earlier question of like the when I do get kind of bad reactions or like you know negative or I don't know whatever kind of reactions I do often or at least I.
Did you know kind of earlier on in the show, like hear from a lot of people who and by people, I mean, they were almost certainly men or women who are, you know, really deep in the patriarchy but.
Who really like who? Really, truthfully, think?
That like, because like it's just the way it was back then. So it's like, oh, the women just like this was them.
And it's this idea that they just think that, well, that's the ancient world.
Like there's no reason to look at the women because the women didn't matter. In the ancient world.
I'm sure no one would put it as bluntly, but that is ultimately what that argument often comes across as, is this idea that just because the women weren't writing the stories, they didn't matter, and we don't need to look at them.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 24:20
Yeah.
Liv 24:26
And obviously that's absurd and ridiculous. And so I'm more than happy to absolutely repeatedly prove it wrong over and over because it's so interesting to imagine. What else might have existed or could have existed alongside what we do have and just doesn't survive purely because.
It wasn't a particular man that, you know, 500 different people had to determine. That's conserve their work over 2000 years or whatever, you know, doesn't mean that stuff didn't exist.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 25:05
Yeah, I think a lot of the time I'm looking at how insane it is that literature especially survived the way it has.
Especially considering I well, it's it keeps coming up in my work that a lot of the oral history and oral tradition between women in their communities and it just documented and it's just insane to me.
Liv 25:33
Yeah.
The stories they must have told.
They absolutely must have had completely different versions of everything. To what we had, and they must have like thought about everything so differently. But they were only allowed to talk to each other about it, and if they did write it down, it just didn't survive.
You know, even Sappho, who everyone respects, is this incredibly important woman in the ancient world like no one chose to preserve her stuff. For the most part it it's entirely sheer dumb luck that that we have so much of it.
So i, it's such a good example of, well, if we have this much Sappho from pure random luck of papyri, imagine what did exist, what women did write down even, and we don't have it, let alone what they didn't write down.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 26:28
Yes, exactly.
What do you believe myths tailored to women in the ancient world would have looked like? If more information had survived from the classical world.
Liv 26:50
Yeah, I like to imagine that they thought of things in a similar way to the way I present it.
Like how Zeus is always ****** everyone.
Like, probably there were women who were like, this is bad I am afraid of this. This is a tragedy, whereas the versions we have are like, he lay with her or he like wrapped her away.
I've had multiple times over the years where people have tried to correct me on the word rape because in a lot of older contexts it is presented as like kidnapping, abduction and so I've had people message me or e-mail me and be like you're talking about it like as if rape was always what it is today, but that word just meant abduction and it's like.
It meant abduction because the fact that they were sexually assaulting them was imply. It obviously the reason why the words are synonymous is because the words are synonymous, you know.
So I like to think that women, looked at a story of Zeus or, you know, Apollo. And the men writing the stories down like don't get it because they're not at risk. And all these things.
I think about that a lot, just the way that they almost certainly saw the gods as predatory, like Euripides acknowledges, the predatory nature of Apollo in a play. And so if he was able to put it on a stage and be likeApollo was a ******, he's bad. And also still a God that we worship, then certainly women were talking about it all the time.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 28:42
Yes.
So just as a continuation of that, do you think that there was a cautionary or would have been a cautionary element in terms of what women shared amongst themselves rather than this glorification of all these male ideals that were sort of portrayed through the Iliad, a lot of the time.
Liv 29:12 Yeah.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 29:13
I've got a very specific source that I'm referring to in terms of in my dissertation that's about the death of Priam on a vase painting, […]
Even in where they are clearly the victims, they're still sort of pushed to the side in terms of this, what they're presented as in this artwork.And I just think that's very telling of how even back then it was very much about the glory of that action. And then secondary, it was about the brutality of the action, how that affected people.
Liv 30:08
Yeah. I mean, I think that the stories would have held a kind of cautionary nature and I just want to clarify, I don't think necessarily that that like real women would have been afraid of Apollo, right?
I don't necessarily think that that was like aa threat that people felt, but I do think that those. Yeah, but the myths still served as this cautionary tale about men and masculinity, and all of that.
They do that regardless of, you know what sources survive.
It's just about how you interpret them, right because the myths are always going to be there, always representative of, human nature, beyond the story itself. They're not about gods up in the sky coming down and assaulting humans like they are about the nature of humans.
I think that's an interesting example because Vase paintings are in themselves receptions of an ancient story from so much earlier, right?
And so I think, there's so many ways to look at it. But I think in the Iliad, just so specifically, I am really interested in the fact that the text itself is not about the glory of war and it’s about glory to an extent, but it is like equally about the horrors associated. And yeah, I mean, at least in the Iliad versus the odyssey, there are a lot of women who do serve different roles.
Obviously, there are women in the Odyssey who serve important roles, too.
But the Iliad is so interesting.
But I more think that people's interpretation of the Iliad, both in the ancient world and today, make it more about the glory of war than the surviving text necessarily is, which is like a whole other interesting thing.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 32:13
It is just such a an awesome study of human nature, I feel just in general and in terms of, it is no matter how much we know would have been based off of an actual war that might have happened or anything, but getting a snapshot of the way those conversations would happen and interactions between people would go. Was interesting.
Liv 32:44
And then how they viewed something like a terrible, like world changing war. It’s really, I think it, you know today it's so hard.
Especially in the Western world of, this glory of war.
It's revolting and like they want to harken back to the Iliad and make it seem like it's always been about that.
But if you actually read it with a brain and any kind of real appreciation of what is actually happening in the text, it is not about war being good, is it?
It is about how war happens and how it is awful for everybody on both sides and I think that's so much more interesting than looking at it. Is this, big, exciting, yeah, like war action movie.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 33:53
Do you have a favourite myth and why is it your favourite?
Liv 33:59
I think I am incapable of having a favourite myth like if I got to ask this often or varied forms of it and if I have to pick it's Medusa.
But I think that I just think it's also interesting for all these different reasons.
And I just want to know all of it all of the time, you know. But I just like, I feel like I don't have a specific favourite.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 34:18
Yeah.
Liv 34:20
Yeah, I don't really have favourites so much. I mean, I guess Medusa, really. Is if I have to have a favourite.
I just appreciate all of it for what it is and why and yeah. Clearly, I love this and I'm not going to say the last word because it now just sounds like a catch phrase.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 37:31
What is your opinion on foundation myths for cities?
I'm finding a lot that, especially with my research and talking to people about my research, that there's a lot of retrospective grouping about ancient Greece as a whole, and there's not much about how the sort of intercity state relations were and how customized to each region myths were.
Do you have any comments on that?
Liv 38:06
Yes I mean, it's so interesting because, you're right.
I mean, ancient Greece is this one thing, and 90% of the time it's like, no, this was just stuff in Athens.
It's valid, but it's just Athens and so I mean, yeah, I don't have so much to say beyond it's important that we remember all of these different places were, distinct places. And they had no concept of a unified country, them or anyone else like that. That wasn't a thing.
So it was just this sort of shared culture and often shared stories. But aside from what we do have in certain places or you know, I think Pausanias is such a fun source to look at, stuff like that because he gives us all of these different things that we wouldn't otherwise know about other city States and you know, not texts sources, but he gives us.
Temple had all of this stuff on it and it ultimately says something very specific about, you know, this one region and what they might have believed as compared to, say, Athens, where, we have such an explicit and famous founding myth and everything in Athens is so fleshed out that we just kind of conceptualize it as the whole of Greece.
Whereas you know, it was just so different everywhere. And it's so many different time periods. And there's just no unified anything.
And while a lot of people find it frustrating, I think it's the most interesting part about all of this is just the way that, we don't know anything and that's cool.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 39:47
Yeah, it's like the more I dive into everything I'm like, I could write a separate dissertation on each paragraph that I'm working on.
Liv 39:52
Oh yeah, that's what my podcast is basically. That's why every episode is like 5 to 6000 words. It's because every time I open a book I could be like, well, I guess I'm going to be lost in this forever.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 40:04
Yes.
So do you find it interesting that female monsters represent very specific or for example, the harpies and the sirens and so on.
Charybdis, they all represent quite specific dangers that were present from the wilderness essentially in the ancient world.
Whilst they're sort of regarded as these very monstrous figures to be avoided. They’re very antagonistic, in a lot of myths, whilst the gods generally who hold dominion over these sorts of wider ranges are given temples and worship and sacrifices, do you have any comments on that sort of interplay and portrayal of men versus women?
Liv 41:07
Yeah, yes.
I mean, I think I already had so much to say, but then researching for the Medusa book just kind of made me rethink everything.
I actually cut out a whole section that I just couldn't get to fit in there about how the word nymph just means girl, but it got assigned to this like very specifically sexualized subset of deities who's entire role for the most part is to like, just be the playthings of gods, and then we got nymphomaniac from that. And you think like that word meant girl like it didn't have any kind of sexualization until later people read it and so I think and I think that the fact that like almost all of those monsters are women says a lot.
And I think it also like, this is me getting like really deep into speculating about the patriarchal nature of this stuff, but.
I think that really characters those really specifically like maybe less so. The harpies and the sirens, but like Scylla and Charybdis.And then I'm thinking Medusa, I think that they so clearly represent women who are beyond the patriarchy who, do not fall into its web, its control, all of these things they represent.
I think they represent a lot of fear that men had of women who actually had freedom and actually were where they just weren't living outside the realm of men essentially, right? Like you know, people love this idea that Medusa was this big scary thing. And it's like, no, all she was, was a woman who didn't associate with men and who, men couldn't have sex with, that's what she represented. And then it turned into this story of the inherent fear that men had of women who they couldn't subjugate, who they couldn't control.
They're terrible monsters and everyone should avoid them, or were they just women that you did not have control over and, what does that mean?
DeeAtkinson (Student) 43:25
Yes.
We've got time for I've. I've got two more questions for you, if you don't mind.
Liv // Let's do it.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 46:27
So I'm looking at the contrast between what we have now in terms of female monsters and what was presented in earlier myths, and I'm finding a lot that there's been a separation from collective groups into singular figures.
Do you have any comments on why that may have happened and why that's sort of the turn it's taken? So, for instance with the Gorgons they were originally three sisters and now they've been singled out and it is rare. Less rare now that there's a lot of retellings and people are looking at the earlier myths that she was one of three and she was not singular, but she's sort of been singled out and created as this one defining monster. And finding also with collective groups like theAmazons, they variety and sort of different way. Meanwhile, in a completely reverse of what's been preserved, and I think in present knowledge.
Is that singular huntresses and female warriors, such asAtalanta. Yeah, that they've sort of faded into the background essentially. Do you have any comments on that whole process?
Liv 48:25
I don't know if I have any creative comments beyond, that's just the nature of the patriarchy and the threat of a strong woman like I think Medusa being singled out from her gorgons is so explicitly tied to the fact that she was the one that men could control.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 48:41 Yeah.
Liv 48:42
They were able to break her and use her and turn her into a weapon instead of what she was. And so, I think that making her singular it erases the fact that there were two that they couldn't, and it forces us to forget that there were these other strong women who the men failed to take down, you know. And I think that applies to theAmazons too. I feel like the Amazons having so much, they've almost become like the opposite. They're so collective now as just theAmazons that they have become singular. And we've lost, you know, clarifying who you mean, all of these different Amazonian Queens, right?
They’ve kind of become one instead of all of their different natures, even in myths. You know, there's a lot of back and forth about with Heracles, you know, the difference between Antiope and Hippolyta, and like conflating the two and, forgetting Penthesilea entirely. They’re just theAmazons now.
It's just this one concept versus these individual women, Queens like divine beings.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 50:04
I find it so interesting that they are, directly descended from Ares and that element seems to be forgotten or not mentioned and I'm just like this is the war God and the power of these women.
Liv 50:13 Yeah.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 50:19
That, and the myth in which they're attacking the walls of Athens and they set up their city outside.
Liv 50:27
They take over Athens. They sack Athens in the myth and it's yeah, lost completely.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 50:35
Successfully and that doesn't seem to be expanded upon enough I feel.
Liv 50:42
Yeah, because in the end, you know, Theseus does, defeat them because of course he does. Because the man has to, but at the same time, you can't really tell that story and be like Theseus did, but barely.
Definitely forgotten it also though.
I mean in defence of, you know that story broadly, it doesn't survive in any kind of real text version and any details.
So that's also, in large part the issue is that you know there isn't a story you can sit down and read that tells that story from the actual ancientAthenians of the time.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 51:26
Yeah, there's no connecting sources.
Liv 51:31
Yeah, there's just like, I mean, there's so much visual sources and so many material sources, but there's just not a text source that you can go to.
So it does make it hard even for me.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 51:43
Yeah.
So final question, I am specifically looking at one part in my essay. I was listening to another episode of your podcast that you did in October. Regarding the process of tearing people limbs limb from limb.
Liv 52:02 OK.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 52:25
Yeah, that really reminded me of, how Dionysus essentially embodies his powers, he becomes sort of, in order to fulfil his divine wrath.
Allows or encourages these societal constructs that the women are all under to just vanish and to essentially go beyond what would probably happen without them in general, he pushes it further.
Do you have any comments on the way that he's framed, because I feel he's quite a different form of God, that his wrath is quite a palpable thing and it's what divine punishment is based off of in retellings?
Liv 53:17 Mm hmm.
Yes, I think that's a very interesting question and to me it all, it makes me think of is just what I now think about a lot and didn't used to. And I like to remind listeners too that the plays are plays right.
And I think that's so interesting. The plays are not mythological sources.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 53:38
Yes.
Liv 53:43
The plays are receptions of typically mythological sources that are not surviving.
You know, we don't have a version of that story that's in any detail prior to this play, and this play was written for all these other reasons we don't know.
We'll never fully understand all these things going on in a playwright’s head and all of these concepts he might have wanted to explore. So, to me Dionysus is an embodiment of what Euripides was imagining when it came to his people and the divine and God's broadly, because it's his, it was produced after his death.
And he was not living in Athens. It was such a specific time.
So I think it's more interesting to look at Dionysus as Euripides’Dionysus and what it says about him.
I mean, I do think that it's a great representation of Dionysus, even based on the ancient sources, but it is more interesting to me, to look at.
This is a retelling like any other, it's just that it was, 400 years after.
The stories were really developing and that, it's so interesting in a completely different way.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 55:06
Yes. And the fact that all these plays, especially with Euripides, I'm finding that their dramatisations of a concept of a myth, which is like.
Liv 55:19
Amovie version.
That they're a movie version of a story, and that means they're valid in their own way. But it means that they're a movie version of a story. Yeah.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 55:22
Yeah.
And someone kept playing to a primarily male audience. They are too, they are to provoke a reaction and create, as with any play, essentially is to an evoke an emotional reaction, whatever it may be from your audience.And I feel like it does get lost.
Liv 55:42 Mm hmm.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 57:12
Well, that fulfils all of my questions for today. Thank you so much.
I really appreciate you taking the time to answer all these questions.
Liv 57:28
No, I'm happy to.
This was really fun. Thank you.
DeeAtkinson (Student) 57:36
Well, thank you again. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you. Bye.
Liv 57:52
Bye.
DeeAtkinson (Student) stopped transcription