Book of the Week

Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes

Recommended by JMcL

In Greek myth, the box (or jar) Pandora opens contains all sorts of evils and terrors. At first glance, the same could be said of this book: within it are characters who seethe with murderous intent and incestuous desire, figures of fatal beauty and petrifying ugliness, sorceresses and seducers, villains and victims.   

Classicist and broadcaster Natalie Haynes uses the stories of ten well-known women from Greek myth to explore the ways in which classical culture represents the female. Should we really blame Pandora for the ills she unleashed? Why do we care more about Oedipus than his mother/wife Jocasta? Was it Helen’s fault that Troy fell? Haynes suggests we think carefully before leaping to conclusions.  

Her investigation of the myth of Medusa is a good case in point. Literally weaponised - first by Perseus, and most recently by Trump in his campaign against Hillary Clinton - the unfortunate gorgon is rarely seen as a sympathetic figure. Haynes challenges this. Why is Medusa’s own suffering (raped by Poseidon, disfigured by Athene) ignored, in order to present her as a monster? How is she any less monstrous than Laius, Oedipus’s father, who mutilated his own son, and left him for dead? Is Medusa really that different from King Midas? She turns everything to stone, and he turns everything to gold - but he doesn’t get molested or beheaded for it. 

Ultimately, Haynes argues, it’s a question of perspective. The myth looks at the world from Midas’s point of view, but it only looks at Medusa from the outside, and reflects a world, like ours, where violence against women can be presented as normal: ‘everywhere from newspaper headlines to the walls of art galleries and museums … The name of Cellini’s statue [of Perseus and Medusa] may be Perseus Triumphant, but it’s only a triumphant image if you associate yourself with Perseus.’

This is a brilliant and inspiring book, that tackles profound and serious questions, as well as offering a crash course in classical art and literature. Haynes is a passionate advocate for the playwright Euripides, and the depth and complexity that he gives his female characters: her virtually line by line analysis of Medea makes you want to go off and watch the play immediately (and thanks to the National Theatre's digital theatre site, you can).  Her interpretation of his Hippolytus as an 'object lesson in divine malevolence' is equally intriguing.  

The late, great Helen McCrory as Medea

Alongside her analysis of well-known texts, Haynes scours the classical canon for less familiar depictions of her heroines, such as the fragment of a Sophoclean Helen of Troy, who attempts to obliterate her own beauty by driving pencils into her cheeks: ‘that she uses the precise tool which poets and scribes have used to create her myth, to tell her story kindly and unkindly, fairly or unfairly, is especially poignant. The greatest beauty the world had ever known, trying to take away the cause for all those words written about her, using the object which wrote them.’

Haynes is also, as she puts it, a dedicated 'pot-reader', and makes extensive use of the paintings on Greek wine jars and vessels from a vast range of museums and galleries to illuminate the characters and issues she discussses (and the magic of the internet allows the reader to access them too, pandemic or no pandemic).  

Pandora's Jar is extremely entertaining as well as enlightening. Haynes’s tone is generally ironic (‘showing his customary calm reason, Heracles asks no questions but simply kills Hippolyta and takes her belt’) and she is bracingly undazzled by heroes. Theseus in particular comes off very badly - ‘his lovers, most famously Ariadne, are abandoned, his wife Phaedra takes her own life, his mother is enslaved in retribution for his actions’ - but Perseus doesn’t do much better. 

She’s equally unimpressed by classical gods and goddesses: 'anyone who spends time with Athene in almost any story told about her will struggle to see her as a cheerleader for other women. Her most enduring fondness is not for a woman at all, but for Odysseus. And he is hardly the hero you would wish your sister to marry, unless your sister had bullied you relentlessly as a child.’

The book isn’t just aimed at classicists. Haynes always connects the stories she analyses to modern myths exploring similar themes or archetypes - for instance, by comparing the Amazon warrior Penthesilea to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or looking at Medea’s murderous revenge through the prism of Beyoncé taking a baseball bat to a line of cars (what’s worse, looking jealous or crazy?). 

Helen of Troy leads her to stories of men whose good looks cause catastrophe, such as Joseph (even more handsome than his amazing technicolour coat) or Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and to wonder why there aren’t more of them: why should fatal beauty be a particularly feminine attribute? Pandora’s box (or jar) itself opens up an even wider exploration of stories that deploy the box-that-shouldn’t-be-opened trope - from 50s film noir Kiss Me Deadly via The Twilight Zone to Pulp Fiction.

The world of Greek myth is often more Westeros than Percy Jackson, and Haynes makes a strong case for the problematic consequences of translations which have softened the brutality and darkness at the heart of many myths - such as the ‘abduction’ of Persephone - simply through their choice of vocabulary. We are, as she points out, ‘reading euphemisms’. Obviously, no one wants young readers to be traumatised by their first encounter with the classical past, but Haynes wonders why, in myths which are filled with violence, it’s the violence against women that is removed in order to make Greek heroes into uncomplicated adventurers.

This, together with many other pertinent questions, is at the heart of Haynes's exploration of Greek mythography.  Ultimately, she argues, although there's no denying that Greek culture was patriarchal, unequal and often misogynistic, it's wrong to conclude that female characters are merely peripheral figures in Greek myth: rather, this is often a consequence of how their stories have been written and re-written over subsequent millennia. 

Playing Penelope, and unravelling the layers of their narratives, is both illuminating and essential: 'we do not live in a world of heroes and villains, and if we believe we do, we should really consider the possibility that we haven’t thought about things properly. We cannot hope to make sense of our stories or ourselves (myths are a mirror of us, after all) if we refuse to look at half of the picture. Or - worse - don’t even notice half of it is missing. This book is an attempt to fill in some of the blank space.'  Highly recommended.