It’s very fashionable at the moment to rewrite Greek Myths. Perhaps Margaret Atwood began it with The Penelopiad, her 2005 rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey from the point of view of its central female protagonist. Or maybe it was Mary Renault, with her fictional interpretations of Theseus in The King Must Die, (1958) and The Bull from the Sea (1962). Or perhaps it has always been so. Certainly, the trend has grown significantly since the publication of Madelaine Miller’s incredibly successful novels, Song of Achilles (2011) and Circe (2018), not doubt aided a little by Stephen Fry’s Mythos (2017).
Why are these retellings so successful? They are, of course, good stories to start with. There is no need to worry about plot, any originality must lie in the reimagining. Historically, originality was not rated as highly as it is today. Homer’s tales were popular precisely because everyone knew what was going to happen. The same is true of the chivalric romances of King Arthur. As T. S. Eliot noted in his 1922 essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, “No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”
Still, why rewrite these myths and why now? There is a suggestion that many women writers adopt this form in order to give a voice to the silenced women found in these stories, as a feminist statement. Sometimes this works, sometimes not, it seems to me. But my focus here is a 2017 novel by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, House of Names, which retells the story of the Oresteia. The three narrators of the novel are Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra. Notably, not Agamemnon or Aegisthus, the other male leads. Tóibín has noted his interest in what happens when women speak and the novel certainly explores this. Clytemnestra has a powerful voice that simultaneously demonstrates her personal agency and her precarious position in this deeply patriarchal society. Electra is similarly constrained. Throughout, the spectre of their daughter/sister, Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father to raise a wind to get his armies to Troy, haunts all the narrators as they search for closure.
Tóibín’s Orestes is as trapped as his mother and sister. Much of the novel focusses on filling in the lacuna: what happens to Orestes following the murder of Agamemnon, before his return to bring justice to his family, if indeed, it is justice in the end. Orestes is perhaps a rather feminised character here, often manipulated by those who surround him, inviting all kinds of other questions about what it means to be a man, both in ancient Greece, and indeed, in the twenty-first century. The story remains a great story. The inflections produced by the rewriting draw out the subtleties of the original, remaking it for the modern world, and perhaps showing us that people don’t really change that much after all.