Finding Feminism in Mythic Reversals

Guest Post by Judith Starkston –

Creating feminist novels from the reinterpretation of Greek myths has grown into a significant subgenre in recent years. A recent perusal of my local indie bookstore’s display of popular books revealed several such titles. These novels take on issues such as shaming and villainizing women for the “sin” of being violated or refusing to be silent. Why this strong connection between feminism and Greek myth? 

Two of my novels are in this trend, and I wanted to explore what draws so many authors to base their women-focused novels, counterintuitively, in these patriarchal ancient stories. Consider the archetypes of Greek mythology that underpin our society’s definitions of what heroic versus monstrous behavior, and who should have power and voice within society.  

So many of our foundational beliefs came from these definitions and norms, infused for centuries into our culture, so if we want to uproot those assumptions—genuinely change them—we must turn the myths on their heads. Altering these age-old models by reinterpreting myths shocks the cultural system. As a storytelling process, it goes to the core of who we are and what we unthinkingly accept. For a novelist, the goal is finding a medium that reaches into hearts and minds in an organically transformative way without preaching. Mythic retelling often works that way. 

Let me look at two notable examples of Greek myth retellings to explore the ways they invert archetypes.

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes  

Natalie Haynes’s Stone Blind, a retelling of the Perseus and Medusa myth published in 2022, is a good start. Perseus, the usual ostensible hero, is summarized by Athene late in the novel as “quite cowardly and stupid . . . He’s more the kind of person who doesn’t learn anything.” It’s true that the goddess is motivated to portray him in the worst possible light at the end since she wants to steal Medusa’s head from him for herself. Her point is that he isn’t worthy of it. But interestingly, in Haynes’s telling, Athene isn’t worthy of Medusa, either.  

We’re told at the very start of the novel, “the hero isn’t the one who’s kind or brave or loyal. Sometimes . . . he is monstrous.” Haynes flips the myth. Medusa with her snake-covered head is a person we care about, a person who loves and sacrifices for others’ well-being. As Haynes said in a 2022 interview with The Bookseller, Stone Blind is “an attempt to retell the story of a woman who was viciously abused and assaulted and to see her neither as a monster, nor as a victim but as a person.” 

Why is she cursed and punished by Athene? Because Medusa had the gall to be raped by Poseidon inside Athene’s temple. The goddess shames the victim and thus participates in the crime against a woman as much as Poseidon. Haynes creates a deep attachment to Medusa in chapters showing her mortal childhood with her Gorgon sisters and thus gives power to this reversal of the usual definitions. We know who’s the true hero. We know Athene’s cruelty and Perseus’s violence and incompetence are the true monsters. Haynes’s novel jolts our assumptions about heroism and undermines society’s characterization of the “monstrous” woman. 

Circe by Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller’s 2018 Circe is one of the most widely read of these feminist myth retellings. She also uses our expectations of myth to startle her readers into feminist sympathies and understandings. While in Circe the primary theme—to be human is more meaningful than to be immortal—is a Homeric, universal theme rather than a directly feminist one, Circe’s centrality to the tale, rather than Odysseus’s, and her rise to independence and power without the blessing of the male gods who think they control her life, place this novel at the heart of the feminist trend.  

The gods treat Circe with the arrogant self-absorption and dismissal that is present in the worst of human male treatment of women. In Miller’s take, the gods have a divinely amplified version of this failing. For example, Helios, Circe’s sun god father, in his obsidian halls “believed that the world’s natural order was to please him.” He’s a study in bad fathering and of judgment led astray because of misguided assumptions about women. One of the key turns of the book’s development involves rape and revenge for rape. Circe takes the epic poets to fault as part of the larger portrayal of men’s attitude toward women. Circe recollects hearing, years after Odysseus has left, a sung version of her meeting with him, “the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword. . . Humbling women seems to be a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”  

Other Examples

Many other Greek myth retellings create similarly effective feminist versions that turn the myths upside down. Sometimes retellings rework tradition by giving voice to silenced women. This is true for Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, told by many women, Greek and Trojan, which she says is “the story of all of them.” Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls puts this idea straight into the title. My own two Trojan War novels, Hand of Fire and Achilles’s Wife, give marginalized women the main character role, Briseis and Deidamia, and in doing so, show them as compassionate leaders and, in Deidamia’s case, the mother of a dubious traditional hero, Neoptolemus.  

In a 2025 article in Cherwell, Oxford’s student newspaper, Hannah Becker asked why we are so obsessed with Greek myth retellings. She says, “Myths offer structure in the chaos – not moral clarity, but continuity. Their archetypes persist precisely because they are so elastic . . .” I would suggest that our obsession today may arise because writers are purposely reversing the myths, not pushing their elasticity. It’s not continuity we crave but a break from old cultural assumptions, and so we reverse the mythic tales to reflect a new set of attitudes we want to shock into life in our collective belief system. 

References

Stone Blind, Natalie Haynes, 2022, HarperCollins 

“Natalie Haynes on challenging patriarchal historical narratives and championing female voices,” Interview with Alice O’Keeffe, July 1, 2022, The Bookseller, https://www.thebookseller.com/author-interviews/natalie-haynes-on-challenging-patriarchal-historical-narratives-and-championing-female-voices 

Circe, Madeline Miller, 2018, Little, Brown and Company 

A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes, 2021, HarperCollins 

The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker, 2018, Doubleday 

Hand of Fire, Judith Starkston, 2014, Bronze Age Books 

Achilles’s Wife, Judith Starkston, March 2026, Bronze Age Books 

“Why we’re obsessed with Greek Myth Retellings,” November 12, 2025, Cherwell, https://cherwell.org/2025/11/12/why-were-obsessed-with-greek-myth-retellings/