Author: drewstarsaroundmyscars

Having just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, I wanted to do a bit of a dive into her biography to understand why she chose to write this novella. Interestingly, the inception of this project did not come from personal passion or interest, but from a challenge.

In Atwood’s own words, she describes the story in a 2005 issue of Publishers Weekly. A book publisher, Canongate Books, had decided to make a ‘Myth Series’ that would pull together tons of authors to write novella retellings of mythology from all over the world. Atwood sets the scene in Edinburgh, caught unawares “pre-coffee” at a cafe by Jamie Byng, the ‘Hermes’ of Canongate. Atwood was “ensnared” by the idea, and agreed to write a story for the project. Yet, she struggled to do so. Her early attempts (looking at Norse and Native American myth) failed spectacularly, and it was the dread of looming deadlines and her agent’s refusal to let her pull from the project that prompted the genesis of The Penelopiad: “Desperation being the mother of invention, I then started writing The Penelopiad. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.” 

This is fascinating to me. I feel like so many mythology retellings are born of passion, of an author’s love for a character and compulsion to do them justice. The fact that The Penelopiad was something Atwood stumbled upon, was pretty much forced into, changes how I view the text. While I think it is still a notable work of literature, it does make Atwood’s nuanced and sometimes unsavory approach to Penelope’s character more understandable. As she says herself, “As every writer knows, a plot is only a plot, and a plot as such is two-dimensional unless it can be made to come alive, and it can only come alive through the characters in it.” The plot is pretty much set within a retelling – there’s only so far you can move within a framework set thousands of years ago – so Atwood really had to attach herself to the characters. I think she did a great job with the maids’ side of the story, looking at the gruesome and unjust treatment of those lower-class women, but her portrayal of Penelope (particularly her weirdly misogynistic hatred of Helen) is unjust to the source material. I can see how in some ways it makes Penelope more ‘human,’ but I feel that this misunderstanding of Penelope may stem from the fact that this was not a passion project, rather something she stumbled into. If she ‘doesn’t know’ why she started the story, then how do we approach where it did go?

An underlying assumption in the first book of Underneath the Bough is that Love adheres to the ancient Greek conception of it. To the Greeks, Eros (or Cupid) is an outside force that acts upon a person; love is inescapable and imposed upon a person, not something you choose. This theory of love is central to the way the poems approach Cupid as a character and the love of the speakers. 

Most ancient Greeks thought of emotions in general as an outside force that acts upon a person, rather than coming from within (as we think of it today). Aristotle sees emotions as responses to external stimuli acting upon an individual. This is clearly explained by how the Greeks saw their gods – Ares brings anger, Aphrodite brings love, the Furies physically attack those who are guilty. Ancient deities were often seen as transferring XYZ emotion to a person; your emotions were not always your fault. This is clearly evident in stories of Love and Desire – so many myths follow the stories of people struck with lust/love for something perverse or unattainable, yet unable to stop themselves from feeling because it was brought on by an outside force. Think of Poseidon cursing Pasiphaë to fall in love with a bull to create the Minotaur, Phaedra falling for her stepson Hippolytus, or Cupid cursing Apollo to fall for the nymph Daphne. So many stories have Cupid striking down people with his arrows of uncontrollable desire, symbolizing love as an outside force thrust upon a person.

With the context of knowing Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper were classically trained and pagan themselves, it is not a stretch to assume they knew of these stories. Furthermore, it can be assumed that they understood Cupid, and therefore Love, as an external force, uncontrollable and unescapable. They put this version of Cupid in their poems. 

 

Let us swell the praise of him

Who is tyrant of the heart,

Cupid with his flaming dart!

 

Pride before his face is bowed,

Strength and heedless beauty cowed;

Underneath his fatal wings

Bend discrowned the heads of kings;

Maidens blanch beneath his eye

And its laughing mastery;

Through each land his arrows sound,

By his fetters all are bound. 

 

With this underlying assumption about Love, the rendering of this character in Michael Field’s poems becomes all the more sinister. While the speaker is giving praise to him, the threat of his power is emphasized. Cupid is a being that conquers all, kings and maidens alike. “Pride” must bow before him, as he is able to overcome and hijack all sense of self and identity. His arrows ‘bound’ individuals in an inescapable trap – reason cannot overcome it. In this section of the poem, Cupid seems almost like a wicked, corrupt figure, one who laughs at the misfortune he causes. This is pretty in line with many classical stories we have about Cupid, who wields immense power with little responsibility. In contrast, the poems make the figure of Death, or Thanatos, into a more benevolent figure, deeply in contrast to how we see Love and Death today.

The speaker in the poem knows to be weary of Cupid, to stay on his good side. They also seem to be announcing that we are all equally humble at the hands of Cupid. Love is an equalizer. In this way, one could argue that homosexual love is just as inescapable as heterosexual love. This could connect to the relationship between Katherine and Edith, as they almost seem to be saying that homosexual love is not a choice. 

Since my primary text (The Aeneid) is from literally centuries ago, I struggled a bit for this blog post to construct an author biography. Very little survives aside from Virgil’s published works — his biography has to be constructed through allusions by his contemporaries, ancient lost biographies, and popular legend. Publius Vergilius Maro, or as we know him, Virgil, (~70 BCE – 19 BCE) was born to a farming family in northern Italy; though little is known about his family, they must have been relatively well-off because they provided him with an education that eventually led him to Rome. According to a lost biography by Servius, he was a relatively shy, closed-off man, who devoted himself to studying philosophy and writing poetry. 

Virgil lived through a particularly unsteady period in Roman history: he saw both the first and second civil war, the murder of Julius Caesar, the death of the Republic, and the beginning of what we know as the Roman empire. During this period of mass upheaval, he wrote the Eclogues and Georgics, pastoral poems about the beauty of Italy and the proper life of a farmer. However, he pivots from pastoral poetry to The Aeneid, an epic poem that set out to reflect the foundation of Rome, its connection to the new emperor (Octavian/Augustus), and to unite a divided Rome. Begun around 29 BCE, The Aeneid has its foundations in the period when Augustus took power and became the princeps of Rome (aka the emperor). One of Virgil’s contemporaries, Sextus Propertius, says Augustus himself commissioned Virgil to write the epic, and common legend says he was the only poet Augustus saw as up to the task. It’s hard to completely believe this story however, since so much of our evidence is contradictory and our modern conceptions of his biography are largely based on hearsay and legends. 

For this blog post, I want to focus on the pressure placed on Virgil to present the perfect epic. If it’s true that he was the poet chosen out of many famous and talented poets at the time (figures such as Ovid, Horace, and Catullus), would this work be expected to be proof that he was ‘the best’? Maybe that’s why, according to tradition, he only wrote three lines of the poem a day — reworking and perfecting each word and phrase. Virgil spent over ten years on the epic, and died before he was finished with it. Legend says he was largely unsatisfied with it, and it was awaiting many revisions; apparently, Virgil wanted the epic to be burned after his death, and only by the grace of Caesar Augustus was it saved and published. If Virgil struggled that much with this work — with the words, the message, the impact — how do we approach what survives?

I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume Virgil was under a lot of pressure — he had the emperor looking to him, his fellow poets, and, presumably, the entire Roman nation who had begun to see him as a national poet. His contemporary, Sextus Propertius, wrote “Make way, ye Roman writers, make way, ye Greeks! Something greater than the Iliad is coming to birth” (Elegies, II.34.64-65). Everyone waited to see what Virgil would come up with; it’s almost as if the entire weight of the nation was on his shoulders. When Virgil did share his work, either through letters to fellow poets or an alleged reading of a few books to the imperial family, he prompted excessive emotion and praise. Yet, Virgil didn’t seem very satisfied with what he had, continually revising his work and apparently calling for its destruction on his deathbed. 

I think this history, whether it be real or mythological itself, provides an interesting lens through which to read The Aeneid — from its inception, this work had a imperially-sanctioned message: to construct the foundation of the empire and help shape its values going forward. Virgil knew the weight this work held, for him as an artist and for the country. The way in which he chose to present empire and imperial values — what I will explore in my thesis — was deeply intentional. He also had a specific audience he was writing for: the emperor and those looking to define what Rome would become after all that upheaval.

 

Works Cited:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/virgil

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Virgil

Propertius. Elegies. Edited and translated by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 18. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Ia. 3-5 secondary sources or theoretical works

Fulton, Helen. “Origins and Introductions: Troy and Rome in Medieval British and Irish Writing” in Celts, Romans, Britons: Classical and Celtic Influence in the Construction of British Identities, edited by Francesca Kaminski-Jones and Rhys Kaminski-Jones, Classical Presences, Oxford, 2020.

Hardie, Philip. The Last Trojan Hero: A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid, London, I.B. Tauris, 2014.

Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton University Press, 2021.

Rajsic, Jaclyn. “The Brut: Legendary British History” in Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500; edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler, pp. 67-84, 2019. 

Alexandra, Kate. “The Problem with Greek Myth Retellings.” Youtube, 24 April 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tL3Pbc_zhU&t=3s.

Carson, Anne. “Introduction: Elektra.” An Oresteia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, pp. 77-83.

Porter, James I. “Reception Studies: Future Prospects.” A Companion to Classical Receptions, edited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2008.

Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Norton, 1995, pp. 33-49. 

Spacciante, Valeria. “Circe, the female hero. First person narrative and power in Madeline Miller’s Circe.” Classical Receptions Journal, vol. 16, 2024, Oxford University Press, pp. 405-418.

Suzuki, Mihoko. “Rewriting the ‘Odyssey’ in the Twenty-First Century: Mary Zimmerman’s ‘Odyssey’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘Penelopiad.’” College Literature, vol. 34, no. 2, 2007, pp. 263–78. 

Szmigiero, Katarzyna. “Reflexivity and New Metanarratives. Contemporary English-language Retellings of Classical Mythology.” Discourses on Culture, vol. 20, no. 1, Dec. 2023, pp. 85-108.

Tatum, James. “A Real Short Introduction to Classical Reception Theory.” A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, vol. 22, no. 2, Fall 2014, Trustees of Boston University, pp. 75-96.

Zajko, Vanda. “‘What Difference Was Made?’: Feminist Models of Reception.” A Companion to Classical Receptions, edited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2008.

Ib. Primary sources

Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Translated by Ted Huge, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004.

Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Canongate Books, 2018. 

Barker, Pat. The Voyage Home. Penguin Books, 2024.

Casati, Costanza. Clytemnestra. Sourcebooks Landmark, 2023. 

Haynes, Natalie. A Thousand Ships. Harper Collins, 2021. 

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Saint, Jennifer. Elektra. Flatiron Books, 2022.

II. One academic journal

Journal Vergilius, published by The Vergilian Society. Accessed at https://www-jstororg.dickinson.idm.oclc.org/journal/vergilius1959

Classical Receptions Journal, published by Oxford University Press.

* I checked the 2019-2024 issues, found only a few articles that were relevant * 

Helios, published by Texas Tech University Press.

III. 1-3 key words 

epic, heroes, translatio imperii

Reception/adaptation theory, retelling, feminism

IV. Accompanying essay

For my thesis, I want to focus on how literature has shaped empires, specifically how many empires have established a Trojan descendance to create a national identity that’s based on a manipulated mythos. By hijacking this story of the Trojan War and manipulating it to their literary needs, authors have made these historical losers into the fathers of empire, whether the Romans, English, or Franks. Right now, my ideas and choices for primary texts are a bit far reaching, so I’d like to explore options and narrow down to what provides the most for close reading. 

In most cases, the Trojan ancestor is a refugee, fleeing from the fall of Troy and looking to establish a new home, a new Troy. The ancestor is usually a heroic figure (like Aeneas or Brutus) and has a clear value and moral system that reflects what is important to each culture. Furthermore, it may be interesting to see how these texts juxtapose the Trojan hero and his values with the ‘local’ peoples as a way to justify further colonization and empire. Right now, all I know is I want to look at these stories and their connection to Troy and understand why authors did this, and the impact it had on the larger conception of each ‘nation.’

For this reading list, I first spoke with Professor Mastrangelo. We mainly talked about The Aeneid, but he recommended two secondary texts of scholarship (Philip Hardie and David Quint) that explore how epic and empire are intertwined. Understandably, we mostly talked about The Aeneid and the ways it works to make Aeneas the model Roman, as well as someone quintessentially non-Greek. I then spoke with Professor Kersh to confirm that this was a good route of inquiry, and I finally spoke with Professor Skalak, who really pushed me in the medieval route and introduced me to the term translatio imperii, or the medieval concept that the authority of empires is translated from one to another, creating a sort of lineage for the transfer of power.

I originally thought of exploring the Brutus story in Geoffrey of Monmouth, but Professor Skalak recommended Layamon’s Brut, which is an English version of the story. I’m having trouble finding a translation of it from Middle English, but I put an academic article about it on my list to learn more. She also recommended looking at ‘Trojan sections’ of Gawain and the Green Knight and Le Morte D’Arthur, which were highly influential in the period. I’m hoping to get a more basic overview of the period and then decide where to dive in.

My main questions will be: What was translatio imperii? How popular and influential was the idea? Why was Troy chosen specifically as the ‘original’ empire? Why make the ‘losers’ into your ancestors? How did having precedent/ancestry give authority to an empire? What’s the significance of this ‘national literature’ making these connections?

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UPDATE:

After some research and realizing my original topic was too large and history-based for this thesis, I have switched my topic to modern feminist mythology retellings. In particular, I have narrowed my scope to one mythological story that includes and highlights multiple women: the Clytemnestra saga, which includes Cassandra and her daughter Elektra and can connect to her cousin Penelope and sister Helen. The texts I have chosen center one of each of these women as the protagonist. This family of women from the time of the Trojan War have been revisited in modern retellings, and I want to know why. Why does the 21st century have an interest in putting previously marginal female characters into the spotlight, and what do they use these myths to say/reflect on in our own society?

My plan is to approach these texts and see how accurately and humanly they present these tales: are they anachronistic? Do the women act simply as mouthpieces for modern thought? Are certain women villainized while others revered? What ‘type’ of woman is seen by a modern audience as worthy of a voice? Are these tales really ‘feminist’? Furthermore, I want to explore how texts within the same mythological corpus interact with each other: does one portray Cassandra as insane and another as tragic? Is Clytemnestra a complex, understandable character or simply a crazy murder? Is Helen the slut who destroyed Troy or a woman filled with regret? I definitely want to explore the nuances within these texts, both ancient and modern.

Throughout the first third of Beloved, Sethe is continually described by her iron-eyes and iron-will. One of her most common descriptors, I believe Morrison uses this adjective to depict how Sethe has had to close herself off to the world (and love) for her own survival. 

The earliest chronological mention we have of this description is: “Sethe was thirteen when she came to Sweet Home and already iron-eyed” (Morrison 12). As the reader learns more about Sethe’s childhood, separated from her mother and taken care of by other young children, one can understand how she comes to see the world as harsh and unforgiving. “Iron” brings up connotations of toughness, strength, and unbreakability, but also dullness, emptiness, and imprisonment. The complexity of this word does exactly what, I argue, Morrison wants it to do – makes you see Sethe as a strong woman who has endured many hardships, but also as someone who has been forced to hide herself away and become closed off to people in order to survive. Eyes are the window to the soul, and Sethe’s soul is hardened and closed-off. And understandably so.

The narrative mentions how “in all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers,” which means that to get too close to anyone was a risk you could not take (27). To love someone, even your own children, is a danger to yourself and them — Baby Suggs says she “could not love” and “would not” (28). Even with these lessons having made her iron-eyed, Sethe was lulled into a false sense of security at Sweet Home, coming to love the other men and her husband, having her own children, and feeling relatively settled. She lost most of that “iron-eyed,” or closed off, quality as she lived there, and she calls her past self “reckless” and says “a bigger fool never lived” because of it (28).

Since she started to “lean on” others, losing the mental walls against love she had built, the schoolteacher’s assault was even more violating and destructive. Morrison says that “What he [the schoolteacher] did broke three more Sweet Home men and punched the glittering iron out of Sethe’s eyes, leaving two open wells that did not reflect firelight” (11). The rape and humiliation caused by the schoolteacher killed Sethe’s fire, her determination, and her humanity, leaving her feeling hallow and broken. He stripped her of the last mental defense she had, and what resulted was a total violation of her body and her soul. All of the good qualities of iron were ‘punched out,’ leaving only the dull, closed off parts.

When Paul D finds Sethe 18 years later, he remarks that “now the iron was back but the face, softened by hair, made him trust her enough” (11). Away from the horrors of the schoolteacher, though still struggling with it in her memory, Sethe has softened some of that iron and let love back into her life, which Paul D calls “very risky. For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love” (54). She lives in a sort of middle ground – letting her walls fall, opening herself up to love, but remaining weary. After the cruelty inflicted on her, she had to rebuild that iron, rebuild those walls she put up, to survive.

I believe that the significance of the iron-eyes is to reflect on the measures taken by slaves to survive in the cruel world they inhabited. This weariness of the world forms a kind of mask and barrier between her and the outside world, reflecting her position as a slave, only able to watch and not act. She’s locked inside herself with iron chains of her own making to protect her soul, though this also means she can be trapped in there, struggling with her own memories and thoughts. 

In my Classical Studies seminar, we listened to President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Speech to analyze the argumentative and rhetorical strategies he used. I thought it would be interesting to analyze his speech with the focus of blog post #2 in mind: repetition and word choice.

What stood out to me the most when listening to the speech and reading the transcript was the repetition of the word “pledge.” President Kennedy uses it 7 times, more often than any other specific word. One of our critical readings, “President Kennedy’s Inaugural Address” by Burnham Carter Jr., notes that “pledge” is associated with happy contexts, such as “swearing allegiance to the flag, making a gift to the church or other charity, drinking to a friends health, and even in the marriage ceremony” (Carter 36). 

I want to suggest that the word “pledge” is also distinctly American and reciprocal, in comparison to synonyms like “oath” or “promise.” We’re all taught that we pledge allegiance to the American flag. Pledge carries connotations of loyalty, faith, and duty. On the other hand, swearing an oath usually exists within legal contexts, connected with swearing an oath in court or during an inauguration. Additionally, as Carter notes, “promise” evokes the cliché of empty promises and is a bit less rigid in its connotations. The word choice here was deliberate – a pledge seems unbreakable and everlasting, something we make to our country and, in turn, our country should make to us. We pledge allegiance to the flag, and therefore the presidency, and here President Kennedy is pledging allegiance to us. 

But let’s dive beyond the word itself into the context in which it is used in the speech. Kennedy begins his speech by utilizing the word towards American allies and other countries. He extends a pledge of support and allegiance to all those who are fighting for liberty, fighting against the powers of colonial control, and fighting against communism. In other words, he pledges to those who share American values, even if they may not live within our borders. In this way, he expands the pledge of loyalty and service the country makes to Americans to a wider “us,” an us that includes South American countries, those in poverty, and those fighting the U.S.S.R. He furthermore emphasizes the solemnity of a pledge when he says “to those nations who would make themselves our adversary, we offer not a pledge but a request.” Those not a part of “us” are not awarded the same word choice, the same loyal bond; instead they are relegated to a request, a one-sided question rather than a reciprocal promise.

At the end of the speech, Kennedy really reinforces that a pledge, which he has deliberately and consciously repeated throughout his address, is a two way street – both parties must uphold their end of the bargain. With our allies, that means we pledge support while you pledge a commitment to liberty. For the people, it means pledging allegiance to your country while it pledges allegiance to you. It carries connotations of fighting for one another, of sharing the same values, of working towards whatever you pledge to do. I think Kennedy plays into this idea of a reciprocal pledge when he utters the now-famous phrase “ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.”

Works Cited:

Carter, Burnham. “Kennedy’s Inaugural Address,” College Composition and Communication, vol. 14, no. 1, Feb 1963, pp. 36-40). https://www.jstor.org/stable/355297.

Speech transcript: https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/inaugural-address

The film makes it abundantly clear that Lisa and Jeff’s relationship is at an impasse – divided on the subject of marriage and how to reconcile the demands of their jobs and lifestyles. While the film’s dialogue emphasizes the incompatibility of their lifestyles (a glamorous, pampered life of a magazine editor vs the rugged, difficult life of a photographer), the visual elements contrast their ideological rift on the subject of the future through the portrayal of Lisa’s movement vs. Jeff’s inertia. 

In Lisa’s first scene, after the cliche, slow-motion romantic kisses, Lisa’s true nature is revealed through her movement around the apartment. Confined to his wheelchair, Jeff is a very stagnant figure, content with watching out his window at the world passing by. On the other hand, Lisa is in almost constant motion, turning lights on, visiting different parts of the apartment, shedding and donning layers of clothing and accessories. In comparison, Jeff sits in the dark, stays by the window, and wears the same pajamas throughout the film. While she at first matches his slower energy, leisurely going around the apartment turning on lights, when Lisa remembers that she prepared a dinner, she jumps and begins frantically moving around the apartment. The camera tracks her movement in one continuous shot as she disrupts Jeff’s equilibrium, inviting new people into the apartment and moving around furniture to create a makeshift table. She rearranges Jeff’s space, and there is no later shot of her putting it all back the way it was, as the film does for Stella every time she massages Jeff. Unlike the predictability and status quo of Stella, Lisa is independent enough to do what she wants, taking charge of the space and the shot.

It’s ironic that even though Jeff is an adventure photographer, traveling the world and capturing destruction on film, during the course of the film he is static both physically and emotionally. Confined to his wheelchair, Jeff cannot move around the space of his apartment, content to watch out the window, wear the same clothes day after day, and not move from his stationary spot. This mindset is reflected in his thoughts towards his relationship with Lisa, where he wants to keep things the way they are, refusing to jump into the next step: marriage. On the other hand, Lisa, who is spoken of as a rich socialite uncomfortable with adventure and travel, is actually the one who is in motion, running around Jeff’s apartment and pushing him toward the future, their future. During their fight, this chasm in opinion is revealed: Jeff asks, “Couldn’t we just keep things status quo?” and Lisa responds, “Without any future?” (30:50 – 31:05). Lisa disrupts Jeff’s status quo, and his discomfort with this fact is an evident sore point in their relationship.