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Nov. 23rd, 2017 01:57 amOn tumblr tonight, I keep seeing posts about The Song of Achilles. Last year, I tried to read it and got a good part of the way through. It had some really wonderful prose and a kind of emotional energy that I wish I knew how to put into writing. Ultimately, the reason I just couldn't be bothered to recheck it and finish it, though, was the casual misogyny. The book is written by Madeline Miller, a woman. Probably a very intelligent woman who knows a lot more about cultural and social context than I do. However, regardless of what she is emulating or attributing to Patroclus as a character, the fact remains that the story exists to be anachronistic, idealized m/m romance.
The thing that made it super uncomfortable, in the end, was how Achilles's mother was vilified over and over for her own rape and forced-marriage and her response to it. It is basically like that is her super-villain origin story, and it's so cheap and stupid. Not only that, but the narrative for her and any women who matter at all to the plot (as far as I read) is so oversimplified just to provide a richer backdrop for Achilles to shine against. Patroclus's mother is presented as having been mentally ill or developmentally disabled. Achilles's mother is evil and only has a twisted, selfish love for her son. The serving girls with whom the teenage boys around Patroclus start sexually experimenting with while he is learning to pine for Achilles are doe-eyed and compliant and boring and submissive. And it just goes on and on and on. One instance of it might honestly seem a little justifiable or sympathetic for what is going on in Patroclus's mind, but there comes a point where he is being absolved again and again and again for this dismissal of women and their motives simply because he is, in the narrative, presented as very gay.
It also doesn't seem coherent with the sensitive, emotional character Patroclus is supposed to be in the story. It's just this afterthought that creates an overall feeling of the only interesting thing in the world being Achilles. However, it's so mean-spirited toward women and indifferent or reverent toward men that it becomes obvious that this is the push of something in the narrative a little bit bigger than Patroclus's somehow sexual orientation-justified hatred of all women regardless of their motivation and failure to imagine them as anything but weird societal nuisances to keep him from getting it on with Achilles in a cave.
I really wanted to like that book. I still adore passages from it. But I am so bitter.
The thing that made it super uncomfortable, in the end, was how Achilles's mother was vilified over and over for her own rape and forced-marriage and her response to it. It is basically like that is her super-villain origin story, and it's so cheap and stupid. Not only that, but the narrative for her and any women who matter at all to the plot (as far as I read) is so oversimplified just to provide a richer backdrop for Achilles to shine against. Patroclus's mother is presented as having been mentally ill or developmentally disabled. Achilles's mother is evil and only has a twisted, selfish love for her son. The serving girls with whom the teenage boys around Patroclus start sexually experimenting with while he is learning to pine for Achilles are doe-eyed and compliant and boring and submissive. And it just goes on and on and on. One instance of it might honestly seem a little justifiable or sympathetic for what is going on in Patroclus's mind, but there comes a point where he is being absolved again and again and again for this dismissal of women and their motives simply because he is, in the narrative, presented as very gay.
It also doesn't seem coherent with the sensitive, emotional character Patroclus is supposed to be in the story. It's just this afterthought that creates an overall feeling of the only interesting thing in the world being Achilles. However, it's so mean-spirited toward women and indifferent or reverent toward men that it becomes obvious that this is the push of something in the narrative a little bit bigger than Patroclus's somehow sexual orientation-justified hatred of all women regardless of their motivation and failure to imagine them as anything but weird societal nuisances to keep him from getting it on with Achilles in a cave.
I really wanted to like that book. I still adore passages from it. But I am so bitter.
