All the Violet Tiaras E-Book

Jean Menzies

• Herausgeber: 404 Ink
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Inklings
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 102

Beschreibung

For a period in time that gave us Sappho and the love affair of Achilles and Patroclus, the Ancient Greek relationship with queer folk is more complicated than at first glance. Tales as old as antiquity persevere, whether the goddess of love Aphrodite, Tiresias, the prophet who spent time as both man and woman, or the infamous Heracles. But, what can these ancient stories offer our contemporary world?Historian Jean Menzies dives into the world of queer retellings and the Greek myths being told anew by LGBTQ+ writers. From explorations of gender and identity across millennia, to celebrating queer love in its many forms, All the Violet Tiaras invites readers to discover the power to be found in remaking these myths, time and again, carving a space for queer stories to be told with all the complexity and tenderness they deserve, with a goddess or two for good measure.

Leseprobe

All the Violet Tiaras

Published by 404 Ink Limited

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All rights reserved © Jean Menzies, 2024.

The right of Jean Menzies to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

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Please note: Some references include URLs which may change or be unavailable after publication of this book. All references within endnotes were accessible and accurate as of November 2023 but may experience link rot from there on in.

Editing: Heather McDaid

Typesetting: Laura Jones-Rivera

Proofreading: Heather McDaid & Laura Jones-Rivera

Cover design: Luke Bird

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Print ISBN: 978-1-912489-84-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-912489-85-5

404 Ink acknowledges and is thankful for support from Creative Scotland in the publication of this title.

All the Violet Tiaras

Queering the Greek Myths

Jean Menzies

For Jen Campbell,

who heard me.

Contents

Content note

Spoilers

Introduction

Chapter 1: New Stories in an Ancient Form

Chapter 2: Still Relevant

Chapter 3: Re-queering the Greek Myths

Conclusion

References

About the Author

Content note

While generally focusing on the positive, this book does include references to and discussions of homophobia, transphobia, erasure, and other prejudices against LGBTQIA+ folk, including mentions of conversion therapy in chapter two, and misogyny and the alt-right in chapter three. There are also brief mentions of sexual violence when recounting certain myths.

Spoilers

All the Violet Tiaras includes spoilers for the novels and myths featured (if you can spoil a myth). A list of works discussed in depth in each chapter:

Chapter 1: New Stories in An Ancient Form

Hold Your Own by Kae Tempest

Goddess of the Hunt by Shelby Eileen

Great Goddesses by Nikita Gill

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

The Song of Us by Kate Fussner

Chapter 2: Still Relevant

Orpheus Girl by Brynne Rebele-Henry

Midnighter and Apollo by Steve Orlando and Fernando Blanco

This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron

Variations on an Apple by Yoon Ha Lee

Pickles for Mrs Pomme by Susan Parr

Chapter 3: Re-queering the Greek Myths

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Herc by Phoenicia Rogerson

No Gods, No Kings by Maya Deane

Outrun the Wind by Elizabeth Tammi

The Virgin Brides by Aimee Hinds Scott

Introduction

By the age of thirteen, there were two things I knew with absolute and unwavering certainty: I was bisexual, and I was in love with Greek mythology. Strangely enough, those two things had more in common than you might expect. For me, they were both rather private traits. The former because I feared the judgement and potential ostracism of my peers; the latter because I didn’t know anyone else who shared my interests. A child of the nineties and noughties, I attended a pretty bog-standard comprehensive school in Scotland where the term ‘Classics’ – a subject area traditionally focused on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, their languages, history, literature, archaeology, and beyond – meant absolutely nothing to me.1 There was no Latin or Ancient Greek department and my history classes seemed to begin and end with the Highland Clearances (a slight exaggeration but also a pretty good summation of what it felt like to teenage me).

Instead of telling my friends how much I fancied Aphrodite, I sat alone in my room reading Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, in which the author imagines Homer’s Odyssey from the perspective of the hero’s wife Penelope, and wishing she would run away with one of her maids (not because Odysseus was a man, but because he was a misogynist). I crushed on the god of war Ares, played by Kevin Smith, and the goddess of love Aphrodite, played by Alexandra Tydings (who, side note, has since come out and become a lesbian icon in her own right), in Xena: Warrior Princess; because why should a girl have to choose? And I filled stacks of notebooks from WH Smith with my own stories of Amazon warriors and adventures to the underworld.

Now, decades later, there is something else I unequivocally know: the Venn-diagram of classical myth nerds and those who identify as members of the LGBTQIA+ community has, if not the appearance of a perfect circle, a whole lot of overlap. It turns out that thirteen-year-old me was never as alone as she thought, and nowhere is this more evident than in the ever-expanding sub-genre of classical myth retellings. Whether it be through the retelling of ancient queer love affairs as old as, well, antiquity, or the gender-flipped reimaginings of traditionally heteroromantic tales, classical retellings have become a popular space for modern LGBTQIA+ readers and writers to explore both queer joy and queer struggles. But why? Why do we continuously gravitate to these stories? Why do we look to the past for something we need in the here and now?

These are questions I have grown only more curious about as I delve deeper into the world of ancient myth. While, like many, I’d briefly come out of and quickly returned back to the closet a number of times by the time I turned eighteen, I had also found the confidence to try my hand at a classical studies degree – lack of secondary classics education be damned. I even went as far as to take on a PhD where I demonstrated the ways in which Athenian orators politicised the mythological sexual assault of women in their speeches, to bolster the image of Athens while othering non-Greeks. Still, I have always been drawn back to where it all began. The retellings. I have been able to watch first-hand over the years as the landscape of classical myth has been transformed by LGBTQIA+ mythology nerds, including myself. Yet, one of the most fascinating parts is that antiquity itself was not exactly the queer haven we might like it to be, or think it is when we read books like The Song of Achilles where the love affair of Greek heroes Achilles and Patroclus is celebrated.

Antiquity was rife with restrictions when it came to sexuality and gender expression. They might have looked different from what we are familiar with from living through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or growing up wherever you might call home, but they were nevertheless there. Men and women had certain roles they were expected to fulfil within society, and these defined the sexual and romantic freedom that they had (or did not have). Women’s sexuality was defined by its usefulness to men, whether as wives or sex workers, and sex between men came with its own social hang-ups including perceptions of penetration as effeminate or uncivilised (although that’s not to say it wasn’t going on). While I will touch on some of these nuances, this book is not about the history of sexuality or gender in antiquity; these are expansive topics that countless scholars have wrestled with over the centuries. For those who would like to learn more I have included some further reading at the end.2

Not only are sexuality and gender in ancient Greece complex topics, Classics as a subject has traditionally been the domain of a conservative elite – not exactly the first the group I think of when I picture LGBTQIA+ activists and allies.

Despite these caveats, however, antiquity also gave us Sappho, the sixth century poetess who wrote of the love between women, and Achilles, the mythological Greek hero who loved a man named Patroclus; Artemis, the virgin goddess of chastity, childbirth, and the hunt, and Tiresias, the mythological prophet who spent time as both a man and a woman – historical and mythological figures within whom queer folk continue to see themselves reflected back. Can our modern concepts of sexuality and gender identity be directly transposed onto the ancient Greeks or their myths as they understood them? You know what, I don’t know. The academic in me says of course not, as it implies that concepts of gender and sexuality are fixed. But did queer people not exist in antiquity too? People whose gender and/or sexuality occupied a space outside of the normative, according to both ancient and modern standards? Duh! Of course they did. So, I use the term queer throughout this book to refer to these ancient myths, not to apply these terms to the ancients but to signify how we understand them today, as well as their relevance to modern lives. Because that’s what All the Violet Tiaras is really about: how thousands of years on from the ancient Greeks themselves, writers have continued to retell these myths with modern audiences and experiences in mind, and how readers have been able to connect with themselves and others through these retellings.

What do I mean by a mythological retelling? So far, I’ve used the word ‘retelling’ because it’s easy. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t mean to imply that every single work discussed in this book is a straightforward, point by point, repetition of the ancient myths themselves, with a few details changed. Some tow that line, certainly, while others take a more modern approach, and others still are connected to their ancient counterparts simply by names or themes alone. ‘Retelling’ means many things to many different people. Here it simply means a story, poem, or novel that takes inspiration from or makes conscious allusion to the ancient Greeks and their incredible mythology.

Which brings me to my first history lesson of this book, specifically a brief history of classical mythology retellings. It is important to understand that mythology has always been malleable, open to interpretation, and used by individuals and groups across time to say different things. The ancient Greeks themselves understood their myths as such. A great number of classical myths that have survived from antiquity in fact possess a number of different, if not contradictory, versions within the historical record. Take, for example, the god of love Eros who, according to Hesiod, is a primordial being who came into existence long before the Olympians (Theogony 116ff), yet in later sources is the son of the Olympian goddess Aphrodite (see the Eros of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica). This can be difficult for those first coming to the subject to wrap their head around, because instinct sometimes compels us to seek out a definitive version, as if there is such a thing.

Ancient Greece was not a homogenous society that remained in stasis until the medieval era. Those we now think of as ancient Greeks spanned more than a millennium of history and were made up of various city-states with their own traditions, laws, and senses of identity, whether they be Athenian, Spartan, Corinthian, Theban, Lesbian, or beyond. Naturally, time and place both influenced the way in which myths were represented and interpreted, not to mention the motivations of individual authors and the conventions of different genres.

During the first chapter of my PhD thesis, The Politicisation of Sexual Assault in 4th Century Athens, I discuss in part the way in which the myth of Procne and Philomela changes and takes on new meanings over the centuries.3 Long story short, Procne asks her husband Tereus to bring her sister Philomela to visit them in Thrace. Tereus goes to get Philomela but on their way back he sexually assaults her and cuts out her tongue. Eventually, Procne learns about what Tereus did and she and her sister kill Procne and Tereus’ son, Itys, and feed him to his unsuspecting father. All three are subsequently turned into birds by the gods. When the myth of Procne and Philomela is referenced in the work of the fifth century Greek tragedian Aeschylus (as just one example), it is as a vehicle for describing madness, irrationality, and uncivilised behaviour, in which both women are criticised for their actions (Agamemnon 1140ff, and Suppliants 63ff). On the flip side, the orator Demosthenes presents these women as admirable examples of Athenian bravery in his public funeral speech a century later (Funeral Speech 28). Two more contrasting interpretations I can’t imagine. Sure, a few things had to be changed, added, or pushed to the side for Demosthenes’ version to work, including discarding any mention of infanticide, but, because of these changes, and the fourth century Athenian positioning of itself as a state that protected its women from sexual violence, it did work.