SNAKES ALIVE! Whatlinks Medusa to Beyoncé and WonderWoman?
Pandora’s Jar Natalie Haynes
Swinging a baseball bat, Beyoncé sings: ‘What’s worse, looking jealous or crazy?’ The Hold Up music video shows a woman betrayed by the man she loves. Medea – who murders her husband’s lover, then her own children – asks herself the same question in Euripides’ play, first staged in 431 BC. Medea’s reaction to infidelity is so drastic, so enduringly taboo, that most modern productions depict her as mad. But, Natalie Haynes emphasises, she is not.
Such striking pop-cultural references make for a refreshing take on Greek mythology. Little wonder, for Haynes has forged a career reinvigorating the classics. In Pandora’s Jar, her second non-fiction book, she unravels ten women’s myths – the conflicting versions, the echoes throughout history – forcing us to re-evaluate figures we thought we knew.
Myths change over time, with each reimagining reflecting contemporary values. To the Ancient Greeks, war was not unequivocally bad. Indeed, they were so fascinated by the Amazons, ‘war-loving’ female warriors, that only Heracles appears in more vase paintings. Unlike individualistic male heroes, the Amazons’ power is tribal. However, when reinterpreted in the 2017 film Wonder Woman, they are markedly conflictaverse, until – in a feminist inversion of hero tropes – one woman saves humankind while her male lover dies.
Stories are a matter of perspective, and mythological women’s are often overlooked. Many storytellers have been content to leave the female psyche unexamined – but thank Zeus for Euripides, who ‘wrote more and better female roles than almost any other male playwright who has ever lived’. Complex, dangerous characters such as Clytemnestra and Phaedra are all the more astonishing when you consider that they would have been performed by male actors, probably watched by all-male audiences.
Haynes has a stand-up comedy background, and her wry wit leavens these grisly tragedies. Her irreverence – Kronos eats his children and ‘fails a basic fatherhood test’ – has the ring of affectionate family teasing: that’s how intimately she knows and loves her subject. Alongside the laughs are rigorous analysis and ethical wrangling, as she considers the dilemmas posed by mythology.
I, Claudius author Robert Graves gets short shrift for the misogynistic distortions of his retellings, while classic children’s versions accentuated the malice we now associate with Pandora’s jar-opening antics (the apocryphal ‘box’ can be traced to Erasmus’s Latin translation). In fact, Pandora was created by
Zeus to wreak earthly havoc in revenge for Prometheus’s theft of fire. She can hardly be blamed for fulfilling her destiny. If I’m ever prosecuted, I’d like Natalie Haynes to defend me. She argues persuasively, carving out space for women denied a voice (Medusa), overshadowed (Jocasta) and unjustly condemned (Helen of Troy). She explores feminist literature reclaiming mythological narratives – Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Eurydice – and matches entertainment with
erudition, discussing Greek linguistic nuance alongside historical context. If anything, I could have done with more of the latter to offset all the myth.
Agile, rich, subversive, Pandora’s Jar proves that the classics are far from dead, and keep evolving with us.