Top 10 goddesses in fiction
What springs to mind when you think of the word “goddess”? Divine feminine energy? Mother Earth? Ancient Greek women wafting around in white dresses causing mischief ? “Domestic goddesses” or “sex goddesses”? Or even Anastasia Steele’s exuberant “inner goddess” who spends a lot of Fifty Shades of Grey salsa-ing and pole-vaulting in excitement about her romantic escapades? (Each to her own.)
There are two definitions of the term – 1. a female deity, and 2. a woman who is powerfully attractive and beautiful. Wrapped up in the word’s broader associations are lots of fun attributes (Beauty! Allure! Meddling!), alongside more tricky inferences about what our culture assumes to be the ultimate feminine qualities (Beauty! Allure! Meddling!)
In our book You Goddess! we look at supernatural women’s stories from around the world to see how the stereotypes both hamper women and provide us with inspiration. Along the way we came across brilliantly varied examples of how goddesses have been approached in fiction, sometimes revelling in the divine spotlight and sometimes in more background roles. Here are 10 of them:
1. The Goddess Chronicle by Natsuo KirinoNatsuo Kirino has written several excellent crime novels and her feminist take on a creation story from the eighth-century Shinto text, the Kojiki, retells the story of the goddess Izanami. Like many goddesses across different world religions, Izanami is a deity of both creation and destruction. In an incident that recalls other troublemaking women in creation narratives (see Eve and Lillith), she causes a hooha by not accepting her husband Izanaki’s precedence over her, and Kirino mirrors her vengeful anger with the story of another woman’s maltreatment.
2. Circe by Madeline MillerThis magnificent story of the famous witch goddess from Homer’s Odyssey was shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s prize for fiction. It is both hugely enjoyable, showing the very male classical epic from a female point of view, and profoundly affecting in its depictions of the trials of immortality. This book is the closest you can get to experiencing what it might really be like to be a goddess, with all its benefits and sacrifices.
3. Nudibranch by Irenosen OkojieBritish-Nigerian Okojie’s wildly weird short-story collection has at its centre the extraordinary tale of a heart-devouring (literally and metaphorically), shape-shifting sea goddess named Kiru, who comes ashore on a small island inhabited by eunuchs with the intention of falling in love. After each (disappointing) encounter with a potential lover, she eats their hearts and transforms into a different alluring woman.
It’s a brilliantly strange metaphor for female beauty as an empty or hollow construct. The collection is unsettling, magical, transporting, unforgettable.
4. Gods Behaving Badly by Marie PhillipsThis is a joyfully comic modernday novel where several Olympian gods and goddesses are now living in Hampstead (Aphrodite works on a sex chatline and Artemis is a dog-walker). When they tangle with mortals Neil and Alice things go awry, as they often do when deities and humans mix. Neil has to use Angel tube to get into the underworld to save Alice, and sort out a problem caused by the Greek gods’ famously predatory attitude towards women.
5. Ragnarok by AS ByattThis is a useful counterpoint to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s also brilliant interpretation of the ultimate battle of the Norse gods, which features Cate Blanchett as a breathtaking embodiment of the goddess of death, Hel. Byatt’s version is a little more faithful to the original account in the Icelandic Edda. A child evacuated to the countryside during the second world war discovers a book of Norse myths and is drawn into the story of the fall of Odin, Thor et al. The mother goddess Frigg (from whose name we get Friday) is a key player (she makes a crucial mistletoe error; haven’t we all). Byatt sees the gods’ complicity in Ragnarok as a timely reflection of the way we are destroying our own planet through our abuse of the environment.
6. Ms Militancy by Meena KandasamyThis collection of poems by the acclaimed author of When I Hit You is uncompromising and approaches figures from ancient Hindu literature with subversion. Her preface Should You Take Offence is indicative of the book’s mission: “Your myths put me in my place. Therefore, I take perverse pleasure in such deliberate paraphrase … I do not write into patriarchy. My Maariamma bays for blood. My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s lap. All my women militate.”Her poems Random Access Man and Princess-in-Exile imagine a different version of Sita, the long-suffering wife of Rama, who is central in the epic poem the Ramayana. Exhilarating.
7. Boxers by Gene Luen YangThis graphic novel follows a boy called Little Bao from Shandong who becomes a leader in the Boxer rebellion of 1900 against foreign influence in China. In their struggles, his comrades are inspired by martial Chinese deities but his friend Mei Wen becomes associated with the gentler Guan Yin, who is known as the goddess of mercy. Guan Yin developed from the male Buddhist bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara but in most of east Asia is now honoured as a goddess.
8. The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned DaviesIn You Goddess! we use “supernatural female” as a definition of goddess and this allows us to include the story of Blodeuwedd, who was created out of flowers by a wizard as a wife for his friend, but who kicks over the traces and finds her own partner. Bloeuwedd appears in this medieval collection of Welsh stories. The first English translation was published in the 19th century by the linguist, gogetter and driver of the Welsh renaissance, Lady Charlotte Guest. This 2007 translation by Sioned Davies is a fantastic contemporary version. In the past Blodeuwedd has been taken as a cautionary tale about adultery, but to modern readers she appears as a floral rebel breaking free from male control. Sadly things don’t end well for her and her metamorphosis from vegetable to human ends with her wizard enemy turning her into an owl. She lives on as the inspiration for Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.
9. American Gods by Neil GaimanThere are many deities to choose from in Gaiman’s masterful imagining of a conflict taking place across contemporary America between the gods of ancient religions, led by Mr Wednesday (Odin), and new gods like Media and Technical Boy. Key goddesses who interact with the protagonist Shadow Moon as he follows Mr Wednesday are the Egyptian cat goddess Bast, Easter (the Anglo-Saxon spring goddess Eostre) and Mama-ji (the Hindu goddess Kali).
10. Paradise by Toni MorrisonParadise is the story of a group of women living an unconventional existence together in a convent who are attacked by men from the nearby town. There’s no overt goddess in the book, although one of the characters, Pallas, is named after the Greek goddess Athena and the leader of the convent, Consolata, demonstrates supernatural healing abilities. Some readers have seen connections between Consolata and the Candomblé sea goddess Yemanjá, who is herself associated with the Virgin Mary. Paradise is an endlessly thought-provoking novel, which swirls with themes that are pertinent to any discussion around goddesses: independent female power and the suspicion it raises, women’s archetypal roles and the tensions between religious traditions.
• You Goddess! Lessons in Being Legendary from Awesome Immortals by E Foley and B Coates is published by Faber & Faber. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.