I grew up aspiring to a “classical education” where I would read all the tomes of great thinkers from the Greek poets to the French Enlightenment, in their original languages of course. I didn’t achieve this (not only because I failed at teaching myself Latin) and my ambitions have changed. To be clear, I think versing yourself in these books is a wonderful way to exercise your mind and engage in western traditions. But as I grew and came to see what was missing from those stories—me. It’s been reported that only 0.5% of history is about women’s stories, which is why I’m loving the more contemporary retellings of classic stories from the point of view of women in books like I Am Cleopatra, Fates and Furies, and She Never Told Me About the Ocean. Medea is hardly an ignored character in literature, but the upcoming publication of No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes coincides perfectly with my hunger to learn more about the past without feeling erased by it.
From One Voice to Many
I’m well acquainted with the choral narration of some Greek stories—it’s actually something I’m using in Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard, the book I’m finishing up right now—but telling Medea’s story from within an anonymous mass of voices would defeat the point. Instead, she provides myriad individual voices in No Friend to This House. The story is almost entirely told from the alternating points of view of women, including Alcimede, Aphrodite, Hypsiple, Hera, Glauke, and, of course, Medea.
What this means is that we see the events of the book almost entirely through the eyes of these women. Which is a switch, for sure. We see the power of the goddesses in lines like, “The men’s impossible quest would become possible once they had Artemis’ advice.”
We also see how live continued outside the heroic quests: “So the women did as they always did when their menfolk were away: tended to their homes, their children, their livestock, and tried not to think about the spears and arrows of the Thracians piercing their beloved flesh.” We see possibilities where the women cope so well that the men might not be welcome home at all if they misbehave, as is the case with the Lemnians. And we are inside the conspiracy between these wronged women and the Thracian slave women their husbands tried to replace them with.
The Power of Perspective
Most of these are told in third person, but some (including Kleite, Erato, Chalciope, and Medea) burst into the narrative with a first person perspective. This is sometimes jarring, but it allows for characters like Kleite to speak for themselves for once.
“Did you just try to miss out on my part of the story? Why? No, don’t tell me, I already know the answer. It’s because no one remembers my name. That’s right, I’m just glossed over every time.” Kleite, No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes
I appreciated the sentiments of these interjections, but the forcefulness of the shift sometimes made them feel like they were serving the conceit of the book more than the narrative itself (even if I was glad to have the stories they contained). There are others, though, where this intimacy with even minor characters offered a poignancy that would otherwise be missed, as in the testimony of Theophane mother of Chrysomallos (the sheep with the golden fleece):
“So they killed him, they cut his skin from his warm body, and they kept it as a trophy. No one thinks it matters because he was only an animal and they are nothing. And no one thinks I matter because I am nothing too. Just the mother of a miracle that men chose to see as a thing.” – Theophane, No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes
It’s Medea’s narration where this first person perspective feels most essential. Because she doesn’t enter the book until the correct chronological place, it’s easy (especially if you’re as rusty on this story as I am) to forget how important she is.
“I’m aware that this is how I’ve been portrayed by many people. You will no doubt pride yourself on your independence of mind, and believe that the impressions you have of me, the conclusions you have reached about me are all your own. You are astute, observant, analytical. You couldn’t have your assumptions swayed by prejudice.” – Medea, No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes
It’s not an understatement to say that this direct access to Medea’s thoughts are critical to the success of the book.
Feminism Writ Large
Unpacking and challenging old ideas is difficult. They are deeply ingrained and also so many people are at so many different stages of learning. This is what made Lessons in Chemistry appeal to so many women of my mother’s generation and yet appear quaint to women of mine. This means that some of the lines ring very true to me and what I’ve seen women experience, like this from Medea near the end of the book:
“I needed to be clever but not too clever, to fit in but not too well, to be popular but not more than him, to be Greek but never Greek enough, to be his wife but still out of reach. I believed I could change and adapt sufficiently to hold him, and it never occurred to me that this would not—could not—be enough.” – Medea, No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes
And others, as when the Peliades describe Medea as “sweet as honey dripping from the comb…None of us could believe it, when we found out who she was and what she’d done,” that set up an enmity between the women that made me uncomfortable. This enmity makes a certain sense given the cultural divisions, but there was also a current of androcentric jealousy that I wish we could move beyond.
All of this to say that I enjoyed the story of this book and the way it made me think.
If you are interested in exploring Greek myths from a gynocentric angle pre-order a copy of No Friend to This House from Bookshop.org before it’s released on March 10. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.
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