#...y'know what would be a funny cultural artifact? a 'feminist retelling' of Antigone

[mumblingsage]

#anyway I thought silence of the girls was phenomenal#and I wish people would stop calling it the bad art to song of achilles’s good art#THE TWO BOOKS ARE DOING DIFFERENT THINGS#and silence of the girls says some pretty important shit

Wait wait sorry post derailed people are doing that? People are putting Madeline Miller against Pat "Regeneration Trilogy" Barker and saying Barker is the worse of the two? As ART?

I actually enjoy Miller's writing on both a prose level and a makes-me-feel-emotions-about-fictional-people-to-pass-the-time level (I see various criticisms and they make sense to me, but don't fundamentally affect my enjoyment) but she just isn't Barker. I don't think it's literary snobbishness to say Barker is doing and accomplishing more advanced and more relevant things than Miller, in part because she is trying to, in part because she has decades more experience and research under her belt.

I'm not sure if Miller will catch up in time or, again, if she truly wants to. Miller does lyrical romantic tragedy wonderfully, Circe has some baby fangs coming in as feminist retelling (if OP of this post wants to turn me into a pig for being too generous here, fair), but ultimately she is constrained in a way Barker isn't by a drive to write sympathetic good guys and detestable bad ones (additionally, to reward virtue and punish wickedness). That drive will always limit your ability to write about history or oppression and violence.

i also think 'agency' gets totally misused when people talk about the feminist retelling tm. because you can actually have a feminist story in which the lead women do not have a lot of agency because it has been removed from them. like if someone was for example writing about a woman in ancient greece or the enslavement of the women of troy. it is in fact feminist to talk about historical (sexual) violence and oppression against women