Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(41)

If Diana’s decision to involve herself in a war to try and protect the underdogs has echoes of Penthesilea, Steve Trevor’s arrival on Themyscira is also reminiscent of another one of our ancient Amazon stories. He might well remind us of Heracles arriving to try to claim Hippolyta’s war belt, but this too is given a modern twist. Rather than deliberately landing on the Amazon island in pursuit of an object, he crash-lands in the sea nearby. It is only Diana’s intervention which saves his life, otherwise he would drown. There has been a shift in power – there is no suggestion that Steve would be any match for Diana in combat – and a reversal in emphasis: we don’t follow Steve as he embarks on a quest to gain Amazon assistance. This is not his story. Instead we follow Diana, the Amazon, whose life is interrupted by the arrival of a man in jeopardy. It is her choice to intervene and save him, her choice to accompany him to London and then to the trenches, her choice to pursue Ares and save innocent lives. She is protected by divine or superpowerful armour – just as Penthesilea was – and she does not hesitate to risk her own safety for the humans she finds caught up in the war.

But unlike ancient versions of Antiope, Penthesilea and Hippolyta, Diana – the thoroughly modern Amazon – does not die. Not only does she survive both the war and the film, there is a further contemporary twist on the expected narrative. She herself is revealed to be the Godkiller; the sword she wields is nothing more than a sword. And while her final battle is underway, it becomes clear that someone must divert a vast supply of poison gas which will otherwise kill countless civilians. In this Amazon story it is the male hero, Steve, who dies, sacrificing his own life to save others. Just like her ancient counterparts, Diana has fallen in love with the man who came to Themyscira, and he loves her too. But their relationship does not cost her her life. They are both willing to sacrifice their happiness to save humanity, but he dies and she lives.

This development in the role of the Amazon – that she might survive her brush with a male heroic narrative by having her own heroic narrative – is a marked change. And (with almost no exceptions in our ancient sources) it is an extremely recent one too. In 1955, Robert Graves published a poem entitled ‘Penthesilea’. It was the same year that he published his Greek Myths, so he was certainly immersed in his source material. His Penthesilea is dead at the start of the poem, and her injured body is the recipient of necrophilia by line four. Achilles’ behaviour provokes gasps, groans and indignation from onlookers, but apparently he does not care, because he is ‘distraught with grief’.47 The grief is presumably provoked by his ‘love of that fierce white naked corpse’. Thersites, an onlooker, issues an ‘obscene snigger’ and Achilles kills him ‘with one vengeful buffet to the jaw’. It’s a fury ‘few might understand’, but Penthesilea ‘paused to thank him/For avenging her insulted womanhood/With sacrifice.’

It is a slight poem, but nonetheless grindingly unpleasant. Penthesilea has lost everything about her which made her heroic, a warrior, powerful. She’s just a corpse which someone defiles, and this revolting behaviour is then described as love. Still, at least her ghost gets to thank a man who died for mocking this: truly, which of us wouldn’t feel our insulted womanhood had been avenged by a man sniggering?

The poem is a succinct illustration of the way female characters in Greek myth have been marginalized by writers in the (relatively) modern world: ancient writers and artists had no problem with a warrior queen who could fight and kill men, whose prowess on the battlefield was equal to any man’s and superior to most. It’s only in later sources that the suggestion of love between Achilles and Penthesilea appears at all. And even then, that is to add a romantic element to their battle; to connect it, perhaps, to the stories of Hippolyta and Heracles, Antiope and Theseus.

The morphing of love into sexual degradation in this story is a recent phenomenon, and the total erasure of life and character is a depressingly modern shift too. The poem may have Penthesilea for its title, but she is scarcely human in its depiction. Read about her in ancient sources and you get a sense of who she might be, how she might fight, what she might like to wear: basic indications of her character. Read about her in Graves and she is simply a white, naked, abused body, with a dash of post-mortem Victorian modesty to disguise the total failure (or even attempt) to conjure an actual person. It is not the only time a twentieth-or twenty-first-century writer has purported to tell the women’s story from Greek myth while in fact making it all about a male character, but it is one of the more egregious examples.

If we are looking for contemporary recreations of Amazon warriors, then Wonder Woman has a Californian counterpart who matches her in courage, strength and skill: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not only is Joss Whedon’s Buffy the physical and mental match for any vampire – male or female – but she also possesses a highly unusual characteristic in any fighter: she is funny. Wit isn’t a characteristic traditionally prized among warriors. They tend to be valued for strength, speed or courage. The wise-cracking fighter is a modern phenomenon, which has really come into its own with the rise of the superhero movie. Cinematic fighters were once strong and silent – Clint Eastwood, John Wayne – or occasionally would allow themselves to be the butt of the joke for the greater good (Christopher Reeve’s geeky Clark Kent, all fingers and thumbs).

The vast majority of action heroes are male, and (since the demise of screwball comedy) so are most characters who have funny lines in films of almost any genre. Buffy broke a lot of rules when she appeared in Sunnydale, California, as the Chosen One, ready to fight to save the world, but also ready to try out for the cheerleading team.