Contemporary Takes on Classical Violence and Enslavement

Most literary works about violence against women, whether they’re depicting fictional crimes or historical ones, focus on individual victims. This makes sense for crime fiction, but it’s inadequate for considering systemic violence.

I’ve been reading a set of works that, in fiction and drama, move beyond personal stories to construct broader narratives about how women’s bodies become sites of violence. I’ve just started reading a recently published play by Leahdawn Helena (L’nu), Stolen Sisters, about Beothuk women and girls, and their devastating experience of colonization. Later this week I’ll write about how a range of contemporary works by Indigenous authors are attending to the continuity of violence against Indigenous women and girls as part of the long disaster of colonialism in Canada.

But most of the works I’ve been reading turn to classical women and their experience of wartime violence. And I recommend, with caveats, a scholarly(ish) study by Emily Hauser that’s being published this week, Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World Through the Women Written Out of It.

Hauser considers how recent archeological discoveries, including DNA evidence and facial reconstruction, are, literally, fleshing out our knowledge of ancient women’s lives, and she juxtaposes this research with her own takes on key figures, including Briseis and Helen of Troy, combining textual analysis and gender studies. She’s treading, here, in the formidable footsteps of Natalie Haynes, and works like Pandora’s Jar, as well as Haynes’s spirited efforts to make classical studies more accessible. Some nuances are flattened, and there are some oddities (research from the 1990s is referred to as being from “the past few years”–but classicists likely take a longer view than I do).

Pat Barker’s 2018 novel The Silence of the Girls examines the events of The Iliad from the perspective of women, with much of the novel narrated by Briseis, whose home is destroyed and loved ones massacred before she is taken hostage and enslaved to Achilles. She’s then handed over to Agamemnon, after Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel over another captive, Chryseis.

I have mixed feelings about the novel, which uses contemporary idioms in a manner that tends to unsettle the work’s status as historical fiction. Emily Wilson, writing for The Guardian, praises Barker’s achievement and the novel’s “very clear feminist message about the struggle for women to extricate themselves from male-dominated narratives.” And Wilson herself, of course, has contributed to this effort with her recent translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad, where sexual violence against women is conveyed with more nuance than in previous translations. Judith Thurman’s New Yorker discussion is helpful: “[Wilson]’s ‘folk poetics,’ as she calls them, are a reproach to predecessors who have “turned a great poem into a hard one,” or into a poem of their own. She rejects historical reënactments that ‘archaicize’ Homer’s diction—“he didn’t sound archaic to the Greeks” . . ..”

Other recent examples include Madeline Miller’s Circe and several subsequent novels, the novella and theatrical versions of Atwood’s Penelopiad, multiple works by classicist Natalie Haynes, and Emily Hauser’s Golden Apple Trilogy.

Of the ones I’ve read, I’ve been most impressed by Haynes’s Stone Blind, her powerful take on Medusa.

But none of the novels, as impressive as they are in conjuring up the lives of near-silent female figures from Greek myth, have had the impact on me of Canadian playwright Erin Shields’s work.

Shields’s If We Were Birds is stunning. She re-imagines Ovid’s characters as a means of addressing women’s suffering over the past century of wars and conflicts.

And now in Ransacking Troy, she brings together Clytemnestra, Penelope, and a band of Grecian women who “defy the odds and bravely set sail for the shores of Troy, determined to end the conflict themselves.” I’m looking forward to this fall’s Stratford production.