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starladyBeutner, Katherine. Alcestis. New York: Soho Press, 2010.
I was inspired to read this book bycoffeeandink, whose enthusiastic review made me quite interested in it. Alcestis is a gorgeous book, undoubtedly, and I salute Beutner for her vision and her achievement both as a classicist and as a woman. But I still liked Jo Graham's Black Ships (see M and I trade our reviews of that book in this thread) better.
There's another book that does similar things to Beutner and Graham, namely Barry Unsworth's The Songs of the Kings, that I also really like; Unsworth's book deals with the sacrifice of Iphigeneia by her father Agamemnon to bring the Achaian fleet to Troy, and at some point while reading Beutner's book I realized that the idea of a father sacrificing his daughter on the altar like a calf was perhaps a little less shocking to the ancient Greeks than we might find it today, since in ancient Greek society women were little better than chattel anyway; Beutner's book brings the reality of that to grinding, choking life. Alcestis' life begins in death, with her mother's passage in childbirth, and continues as her older sister Hippothoe is also snatched away by illness (when Alcestis meets her grandmother Tyro in the underworld the other woman asks baldly, "Illness or childbirth?" as if there were no other way for a woman to die). Even when women do not die their relationships remain subject to the whim of men; Alcestis never sees her other sister Pisidice after Pisidice's marriage, and their father Pelias nearly forbids her marriage until he is bested by Alcestis' husband Admetus, whose triumph is a gift of his lover Apollo.
I saw less of the redemptive or respite in Alcestis and Admetus' relationship thancoffeeandink; I didn't like Admetus to start with, and when he asked his aged parents to take his place in death, an entreaty to which Alcestis ultimately responds, my dislike was cemented. (I think my response to Admetus, and to similar characters such as Hollin Parry in Magic Under Glass, is an impulse to hold them to the highest standards of the patriarchy by which they profit undeservedly.) So Alcestis, whose life was a kind of living death, goes down to death half-living, and in death finds life, in the form of a love affair with the girl-goddess Persephone.
For all that they are treated as valuable objects at best and breeding livestock at worst, the women of Alcestis' world are her world; it's the female relationships that matter almost entirely for real emotional connection, even though with whom the women have those relationships is determined by men's agency in their lives. Ironically, then, Alcestis' most important female and sexual relationship, with Persephone, lasts for only three days before Heracles comes to reclaim Alcestis for the living, and unlike Apollo's relationship with Admetus, it cannot continue. It's interesting too to realize that in Alcestis' vocabulary 'woman' doesn't mean so much 'a female person' as it does one who is powerless; this is thrown into high relief when Admetus, beseeching Apollo, seems womanish in Alcestis' eyes in his relation to the god.
Oh, the gods. One of the things I loved best about Graham's book was her skillful mixing of actual history with the archaeological record, the epic tradition and myth; Beutner takes a more straight-up mythic interpretation, but takes that to its logical, terrifyingly capricious conclusion. After her marriage Alcestis reflects on her existence:
I was inspired to read this book by
coffeeandink, whose enthusiastic review made me quite interested in it. Alcestis is a gorgeous book, undoubtedly, and I salute Beutner for her vision and her achievement both as a classicist and as a woman. But I still liked Jo Graham's Black Ships (see M and I trade our reviews of that book in this thread) better. There's another book that does similar things to Beutner and Graham, namely Barry Unsworth's The Songs of the Kings, that I also really like; Unsworth's book deals with the sacrifice of Iphigeneia by her father Agamemnon to bring the Achaian fleet to Troy, and at some point while reading Beutner's book I realized that the idea of a father sacrificing his daughter on the altar like a calf was perhaps a little less shocking to the ancient Greeks than we might find it today, since in ancient Greek society women were little better than chattel anyway; Beutner's book brings the reality of that to grinding, choking life. Alcestis' life begins in death, with her mother's passage in childbirth, and continues as her older sister Hippothoe is also snatched away by illness (when Alcestis meets her grandmother Tyro in the underworld the other woman asks baldly, "Illness or childbirth?" as if there were no other way for a woman to die). Even when women do not die their relationships remain subject to the whim of men; Alcestis never sees her other sister Pisidice after Pisidice's marriage, and their father Pelias nearly forbids her marriage until he is bested by Alcestis' husband Admetus, whose triumph is a gift of his lover Apollo.
I saw less of the redemptive or respite in Alcestis and Admetus' relationship than
coffeeandink; I didn't like Admetus to start with, and when he asked his aged parents to take his place in death, an entreaty to which Alcestis ultimately responds, my dislike was cemented. (I think my response to Admetus, and to similar characters such as Hollin Parry in Magic Under Glass, is an impulse to hold them to the highest standards of the patriarchy by which they profit undeservedly.) So Alcestis, whose life was a kind of living death, goes down to death half-living, and in death finds life, in the form of a love affair with the girl-goddess Persephone. For all that they are treated as valuable objects at best and breeding livestock at worst, the women of Alcestis' world are her world; it's the female relationships that matter almost entirely for real emotional connection, even though with whom the women have those relationships is determined by men's agency in their lives. Ironically, then, Alcestis' most important female and sexual relationship, with Persephone, lasts for only three days before Heracles comes to reclaim Alcestis for the living, and unlike Apollo's relationship with Admetus, it cannot continue. It's interesting too to realize that in Alcestis' vocabulary 'woman' doesn't mean so much 'a female person' as it does one who is powerless; this is thrown into high relief when Admetus, beseeching Apollo, seems womanish in Alcestis' eyes in his relation to the god.
Oh, the gods. One of the things I loved best about Graham's book was her skillful mixing of actual history with the archaeological record, the epic tradition and myth; Beutner takes a more straight-up mythic interpretation, but takes that to its logical, terrifyingly capricious conclusion. After her marriage Alcestis reflects on her existence:
I lived as we all did, with a constant edge of fright. Caring for strangers improved your chances; having children worsened them, though children were needed to uphold the glory of the Achaeans, to carry our ways over the mountains and sea. Children would succor you when you grew old, if you were lucky enough to grow old, if they hadn't knifed you first. Snakes became wood, wood became snakes, girls became trees. A sea or a river might rear up as a dripping god and seize a girl in watery arms, as my grandmother had been seized. Only a year or so ago I had heard of a giant swan that had seized a woman from the ground and coupled with her in the sky in full view of her people, the woman screaming and the swan's wings buffeting the air. The woman had birthed a monstrous egg from which two small children had stepped, perfect in every way. They were beautiful children, yes, and they were hers. And yet they were the swan's, and they would make the woman think of the swan, of Zeus, every time she saw them. Always she would think of the egg pushing out of her body, the inexorable, smooth force of it. The thought made me shiver in horror and envy. I was right to be afraid.In so many ways this is a world well lost, and there are hints even in the novel that the great war at Troy is coming, when the Achaeans will be winnowed before the walls, dragging down the foundations of their society with the city of Ilium. One thinks of Helen of Troy, one of those two children born from the swan's egg, who was also a faded solar goddess incorporated into the mythscape later--there are a few hints of it in the text of the Iliad, as well as in the Hittite tradition. Whether human or mortal, women are trapped; Alcestis' temporary escape only brings home the reality of her confinement.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-20 01:48 (UTC)I'm intrigued that you recommend Unsworth's novel; my one experience of him was Morality Play, which I pretty much hated, and think of as epitomizing a certain type of novel that Doesn't Get the Middle Ages. It also didn't inspire me to believe he could do well by female characters. But you imply otherwise for this Songs of the Kings, yes?
I've never heard that Helen of Troy was a faded solar goddess; how fascinating! And I always thought that there were four children who came from the swan's egg--Helen and Castor and Pollux and Clytemnestra. Must be a variant version.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-20 01:57 (UTC)Yes, Helen is a faded solar goddess. I don't know much more than what I said in the review (it came up for about five minutes in my Homer class once); it's something I've always meant to look into. Hell, the Hittite half of the epic tradition is something I've meant to look into a lot more.
Castor and Pollux were also twins; now that you mention it I think there are variations in which they're related to Helen and Clytemnestra. The trick with both sets of twins/siblings is that one is mortal (Clytemnestra and Castor, I think) and one is immortal (Helen and Pollux).