Contemporary Rewritings of Greek Myth

In the past few years there has been a surge in contemporary rewritings of Greek Myth: transforming these well-known tales into a form consumable by reading a novel. To name but a few, these include Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, a retelling of The Iliad from the point of view of the voiceless women involved in the war, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, telling the story of Odysseus’ wife Penelope from The Odyssey, and also of the twelve hanged maids, David Vann’s Bright Air Black, a revisioning of Medea, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Natalie Haynes’ The Children of Jocasta, both rewritings of Sophocles’ Antigone, which is the third play in the Oedipus trilogy.

The question that remains to be answered: Why is there the need to return to Greek Myth? Surely, after years of being told over and over, do we really need to hear the same stories time and time again? Yet, there is a timeless element to these stories. It seems that Greek Myths are tales that can be retold without people ever really becoming bored of them, as there are so many different ways of adapting them.

The adaptation of the Greek Myth into the novel is certainly a fresh way to encounter the tales being told. In the case of the books mentioned above, all of them are told from the points of views of women. Arguably, they are feminist retellings of myth: women’s voices have, for different reasons, been silenced in the ‘original’ tales. For instance, take Natalie Haynes’ The Children of Jocasta. Haynes rewrites part of the Oedipus trilogy – Oedipus Rex and Antigone – in order to enable Ismene, Antigone’s sister, and their mother, Jocasta, to have a voice. In Sophocles’ version of the myth, in which Antigone decides to bury her brother against state order to not to do so – Ismene disappears halfway through the play and is not heard from again. On the other hand, Jocasta has hardly any speaking lines in Oedipus Rex. Rewriting the tales as a novel enables their perspectives of the story to finally be heard.

Greek Myth, and indeed all myth, has a certain malleability that continues to be remoulded. Predicting how these tales will be adapted in future years to come is difficult to envisage, but simultaneously exciting. If you are interested in reading more about myths that have been adapted into the novelistic form, you can find some suggestions here.