Feminist literary revisionism and the #MeToo movement

Abstract

In the years since the #MeToo movement began, there has been a resurgence of feminist retellings of ancient myth. Novels such as Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018), Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships (2019) and Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne (2021) form a cohort of books regularly appearing on bestseller charts and award shortlists. This paper traces the rising popularity of contemporary feminist revisions of classical myth and explores the ways in which such works utilise myth to depict modern concerns. Revisionary mythmaking is defined against other retellings of traditional literature, such as biblical narratives and fairytales, locating the appeal of classical myth in the “origin-figure” of Penelope, Queen of Ithaca and wife to Odysseus. Identifying Barbara Clayton’s A Penelopean Poetics (2004) and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) as two works – one theoretical, one creative – that expound the methodology of feminist revisionism, this paper demonstrates how the feminist revisionist mode presents writers with a rich and rewarding vehicle for engaging with the #MeToo conversation, particularly when mining the material of classical myth. This paper also argues for examining novels over short stories and poetry collections because of the form’s connections to and emergence from the epic.