Rewriting the Myth of AtalantaCross-Dressing and Gender Equality in Emily Hauser’s For the Winner

  1. Daniel Nisa Cáceres 1
  1. 1 Universidad Pablo de Olavide
    info

    Universidad Pablo de Olavide

    Sevilla, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02z749649

Journal:
Amaltea: revista de mitocrítica

ISSN: 1989-1709

Year of publication: 2024

Issue: 16

Type: Article

DOI: 10.5209/AMAL.87904 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openOpen access editor

More publications in: Amaltea: revista de mitocrítica

Abstract

This article studies Emily Hauser’s For the Winner (2017), a contemporary reimagining of the myth of Atalanta. This novel belongs to a women-authored literary mode that gives prominence and a voice to classical female characters and myths. Close examination of the politics of cross-dressing, as well as how Atalanta’s mythic identity is reconstructed as a heroine undaunted by gender lines reveals that Hauser’s approach constitutes a central site for ascribing meanings of determination, agency, and gender equality, thus culturally repositioning the male-centredness of her canonical representations and providing a feminist reinscription of the myth.

Bibliographic References

  • -Apollodorus. The Library. Vol. I: Books 1-3.9. Translated by James G. Frazer, Harvard UP, 1921.
  • -Barringer, Judith M. “Atalanta as Model: The Hunter and the Hunted.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 15, no. 1, 1996, pp. 48-76. https://doi.org/10.2307/25011031
  • -Carlà-Uhink, Filippo. “‘Between the human and the divine’: Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Graeco-Roman World.” TransAntiquity: Cross-dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Ancient World, edited by Domitilla Campanile, Filippo Carlà-Uhink, and Margherita Facella, Routledge, 2017, pp. 3-37. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315673844-1
  • -Clark, Matthew. Exploring Greek Myth. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
  • -Coupe, Laurence. Myth. Routledge, 1997. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203888087
  • -Cox, Fiona. Aeneas Takes the Metro: Virgil’s Presence in Twentieth Century French Literature. Legenda, 1999. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351199032
  • -Cox, Fiona. Sibylline Sisters: Virgil’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Oxford UP, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582969.001.0001
  • -Cox, Fiona. Ovid’s Presence in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Oxford UP, 2018.
  • -Cox, Fiona and Elena Theodorakopoulos, editors. Homer’s Daughters: Women’s Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Oxford UP, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198802587.001.0001
  • -Craft-Fairchild, Catherine. “Cross-Dressing and the Novel: Women Warriors and Domestic Femininity.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 10, no. 2, 1998, pp. 171-202. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecf.1998.0007
  • -Filo, Gina. “Spermatique issue of ripe menstrous boils”: Gender Play in Donne’s Secular Lyrics.” Philological Quarterly, vol.95, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1-23.
  • -Franco Durán, María Jesús. El mito de Atalanta e Hipómenes: Fuentes grecolatinas y supervivencia en la literatura española. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2016.
  • -Gellar-Goad, T. H. M. “Sex and Gender, Race and Orientalism in Steve Moore’s Hercules Comics.” The Modern Hercules: Images of the Hero from the Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century, edited by Alastair J. L. Blanshard and Emma Stafford, Brill, 2020, pp. 630-649. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004440067_030
  • -Gualberto Valverde, Rebeca. Wasteland Modernism: The Disenchantment of Myth. Universitat de València, 2021.
  • -Handel, George Frederic. Atalanta, London, 1736.
  • -Hauser, Emily. For the Most Beautiful. Transworld (Penguin), 2016.
  • -Hauser, Emily. For the Winner. Transworld (Penguin), 2017.—. For the Immortal. Transworld (Penguin), 2018.
  • -Hauser, Emily. “When Classics Gets Creative: From Research to Practice.” TAPA, vol. 149, no. 2, 2019, pp. 163-177. https://doi.org/10.1353/apa.2019.0022
  • -Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Emily Wilson, Norton, 2017.
  • -Hunter, Richard. Apollonius of Rhodes: Jason and the Golden Fleece (The Argonautica). Clarendon, 1993.
  • -Jeannerod, Mark. “The Mechanism of Self-Recognition in Humans.” Behavioural Brain Research, vol. 142, no. 1-2, 2003, pp. 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0166-4328(02)00384-4
  • -Justman, Stewart. “‘I am what you made me’: The Fabrication Metaphor and Its Significance.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol.30, no. 4, 1997, pp. 79-93.
  • -Leporini, Nicola. “The Transculturation of Mythic Archetypes: Margaret Atwood’s Circe.” Amaltea: Revista de mitocrítica, vol. 7, 2015, pp. 37-55.
  • -Lope de Vega y Carpio, Félix. Obras completas de Lope de Vega, vol. 8, edited by Manuel Arroyo Stephens, Turner, 1994.
  • -Lord Raglan. “The Hero of Tradition.” Folklore, vol. 45, 1934, pp. 212-231.
  • -MacCullough, Anna. “Gender Transformations in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.” Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient Novel, edited byMarília P. Futre, Marilyn B. Skinner, and Froma I. Zeitlin, De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 235-247. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110282047.235
  • -Mansfield, Katherine. “The ‘Ambiguous Sex’: Cross-Dressing Heroines in Sensation and New Woman Fiction.” E-rea, vol.16, no. 2, 2019, pp. 1-44. https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.7561Mayor, Adrienne. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World. Princeton UP, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.36169
  • -McConnell, Justine and Edith Hall, editors. Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989. Bloomsbury, 2016. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474256278
  • -Moreno Soldevila, Rosario. “Travestismo.” Diccionario de motivos amatorios en la literatura latina (Siglos III a.C.-II d.C), edited by Rosario Moreno Soldevila, Universidad de Huelva, 2011, pp.426-431.
  • -Nikolaou, Paschalis. “Introduction: Angloclassical?” Synthesis: An Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, vol. 12, 2020, pp. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.25255
  • -Nisa Cáceres, Daniel. “‘Be My Trew Mistres Still, Not My Faignd Page’: Truth and Disguise in Donne’s ‘Elegy 16 ’.” Atlantis, vol. 26, no. 1, 2004, pp. 37-47.
  • -Nisa Cáceres, Daniel and Rosario Moreno Soldevila. “La mujer vestida de hombre en el teatro de Shakespeare y Lope de Vega: articulación e implicaciones de un recurso dramático.” Neophilologus, vol 86, 2002, pp. 537-555. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1019681228004
  • -Nisa Cáceres, Daniel and Rosario Moreno Soldevila. “‘A dream within a dream’: liminalidad y creación poética en Lavinia de Ursula Le Guin y El silbido del arquero de Irene Vallejo.” Cuadernos de Filología Clásica. Estudios Latinos, vol. 40, no. 2, 2020, pp. 345-366. https://doi.org/10.5209/cfcl.73012
  • -Nisa Cáceres, Daniel and Rosario Moreno Soldevila—. “Hopes Woven in Smoke: Reimagining Virgil’s Aeneid in Irene Vallejo’s El silbido del arquero.” Neophilologus, vol. 106, no. 2, 2022, pp. 267-282. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-021-09721-6
  • -Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Stephanie McCarter, Penguin, 2022.
  • -Plate, Liedeke. Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294639
  • -Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. 1965. HarperCollins, 2004.Amaltea16_ART02_SEGUNDAS.indd 8Amaltea16_ART02_SEGUNDAS.indd 827/2/24 13:5927/2/24 13:59
  • -Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Exploration of Myth. Translated by Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman, Robert Brunner, 1952.
  • -Ronk, Martha. “Locating the Visual in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol.52, no. 2, 2001, pp. 255-276. https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2001.0036
  • -Shakespeare, William. As You Like It, edited by Agnes Latham, Routledge, 1993.
  • -Weissman, David. Agency: Moral Identity and Free Will. Open Book Publishers, 2020. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0197
  • -White, John J. Mythology in the Modern Novel: A Study of Prefigurative Techniques. Princeton UP, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400871780
  • -Wixson, Christopher. “Cross-Dressing and John Lyly’s Gallathea.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 41, no. 2, 2001, pp. 241-256. https://doi.org/10.2307/1556187Amaltea16_ART02_SEGUNDAS.indd 9Amaltea16_ART02_SEGUNDAS.indd 927/2/24 13:5927/2/24 13:59