Transformational Theories: North American Women Writers and Their Revisions of Homeric Epic

Scholars have scrutinized Gwendolyn Brooks, Eudora Welty, H.D., Margaret Atwood, and Louise Glück individually and collectively, in various combinations, for their use of classical myth and feminist revisionary processes. Historically, these writers studied Latin or Greek at a time when learning a classical language was seen as a rigorous, masculine way of training the mind. Many of these writers also imbibed the ideas of male mentors who sought to reorder a war-torn world by reestablishing ancient writers and narratives as fresh literary models. This study, which focuses on Brooks' “The Anniad,” Welty's “Circe,” H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Atwood's You Are Happy and The Penelopiad, and Glück's Meadowlands , groups these women together because they are writing after the Second World War; responding to Homer by reanimating and refiguring his Helen, Penelope, or Circe; and converting the epic into other, sometimes experimental genres. More importantly, though they are reworking Homeric plots and characters, the writers deploy Ovidian metamorphoses in their retellings. I argue the trope of transformation, because it sympathizes with victimhood and overturns power dynamics, specifically interests women writers and guides their engagement with the classical tradition. By attending to the trope of transformation in Homer-inspired texts, we can produce a variety of necessary readings: how women foreground the female body under duress and in metamorphosis; engage in textual and genre transformations of the epic; transform male influences and their attendant literary theories; transform actual and literary landscapes by mythologizing them; and finally study the realities of class and race hierarchies in their retellings of the Odyssey and white women's roles in shifting and renegotiating their positions and the positions of the disenfranchised in power schemas. Transformation, whether overt or subtle, is as much at work in women's classically inspired novels, poetry collections, and short stories of 1949 as it is in the twenty-first century.