When COVID was new and social distancing was new and quarantine was new, I read a lot. That, I feel, was how I coped. Other people’s words, other people’s worlds, something to take my mind off of things. Fiction carried me away from reality and I took refuge in retellings. I picked up The Song of Achilles, by Madeleine Miller. I read it out loud to my wife before bed. While I downloaded the text on my Kindle, it seemed important to put away the other screens, to turn off the television, to have someone else’s words and some other time come across the page. There, the retelling of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus broke open. Their relationship opened to the queer one that can so clearly (to me, someone who is queer) be read into Homer’s Iliad. (In Caroline Alexander’s translation of the Iliad, Patroclus is “my beloved companion” to Achilles. Which begs the question: how could they not be gay?) I felt as though my own story, my own kind of love existed through time and within the Classics. In these retellings, I felt some comfort when so much else in the world was (is) uncertain. This was where it started: with The Song of Achilles. After that, I read Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, then Ursula K. LeGuin’s Lavinia. In these retellings, I found the voices of female characters that had been silent for most of history. I started to wonder about these retellings: how do these representations of women, the retellings of these classics from the woman’s POV fit into the larger landscape of fiction about women and LGBTQ+ people? How do these fictional stories about women tell the truth about the lives of women?
Despite the novels themselves taking place around the time of the Trojan War, the stories are surprisingly contemporary. I constantly asked myself the question: is it surprising that they are so contemporary, or is that part of the point? The stories of women’s lives have not changed that much. The Silence of the Girls tells the story of Briseis, Achilles’ war prize, from Briseis’ POV. She did not speak in the Iliad, but played a key role: when Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles, Achilles refuses to fight for a while. As Barker writes: “I was the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh, yes, I’d caused it – in much the same way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dog fight.” Barker compares Briseis to things in order to create an understanding of her situation as a slave, as a war prize, as a woman whose body is used for sex. Even as she does this, it seems not at all impossible to see that the ways in which women have been things for so long, to see that the ways in which women have been silent for so long, is not that far from what women experience today: will we believe a woman who speaks out about sexual assault? Here, in The Silence of the Girls, Barker is creating a voice, a life for a young woman who previously only had a few lines of the Iliad to call her own.
Lavinia takes a kind of poetic look at women and their stories. Lavinia is the wife Aeneas takes once he arrives in Italy, after the Trojan War is over. In fact, the Aeneid itself ends with Aeneas taking Lavinia as his wife, and the death of one of Lavinia’s suitors. Lavinia herself has no lines. In Le Guin’s novel, she actually speaks to the poet, Vergil, who has traveled back in time. The poem has already been written, and yet here the poet is with Lavinia, for whom many men fight, and whom Aeneas eventually wins. But, conversing with Vergil, Lavinia seems to have a chance at explaining her side of the story to her author of the Aeneid himself, who fears, for only a moment, that he has gotten the story wrong by leaving Lavinia’s voice out of it.
Nicola Beauman, in A Very Great Profession, makes one observation: “For it is indeed a truism of literary history that the ‘modern’ is in fact only an echo of what is already there; novels that are too far before their time do not see.” I read Beauman in between The Silence of the Girls and Lavinia, and this book made me wonder about novels in the other direction. If writers in the present retell stories from history, thousands of years later, do we, in our contemporary world, think that they are long overdue? It will not surprise you that I think the answer is yes. I also think that there is far more than an echo in our contemporary time of what has been there forever. While these stories do hold interpretations of literature using our present standards and cultural understandings, isn’t that part of the point? That, when it comes to women and other minorities, the way that we think about them hasn’t really changed that much.
In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland writes: “The stories of women are paved over by others’ narratives so often that we rarely get to hear about how things went from their perspectives, from the inside.” While it is particularly necessary to pay attention to the stories of women, I think we can insert other minorities here: LGBTQ+ people, POC, etc. Shapland is not the first person to write about this situation of women’s representation in writing. Virginia Woolf theorizes about this lack of women’s writing about woman and her experiences from her point of view in A Room of One’s Own, “Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction.” Woman in fiction is different from woman in non-fiction, or in reality. What difference it makes when the writers are women, telling women’s stories. Woolf is making the argument that women do not have a voice in fiction. Or the voice they have has been written by men. Men write all these novels and stories about women, but women are not interested in writing novels and stories about men. There is lack of representation. Women are all over poetry, serve as inspiration, as Woolf also points out, and yet they don’t really have voices. They exist as told by men. This fits somewhere with these stories, The Silence of the Women, Lavinia, Wake, Siren, even The Song of Achilles. These women writers (Miller, Barker, Le Guin, McLaughlin) are putting this idea into practice: they are on the inside, telling the stories of women and others who have been kept silent.
As I see these connections between these authors, I still wonder: what is missing in between The Iliad, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses and Virginia Woolf? What is missing in between Virginia Woolf and contemporary writers like Shapland, Barker, Le Guin, Miller, and McLaughlin? Is this an issue of influence? We need the voices of women and minorities now more than ever, we need to hear their voices and read their stories.
I also wonder about these retellings in terms of my own projects. Since I was twenty one or two, I have worked on a story that retells the myth of Daphne and Apollo. I wonder about the importance of retelling this myth from not only Daphne’s perspective, but from other women of the Metamorphoses, the links between all of the women there are rooted in moments that have become familiar to women even today: pursuit, rape, consent, silence. These same themes that are prevalent in the retellings of Miller, Barker, Le Guin, and McLaughlin.
Alexandra Sladky 