Mythology, Religion, and Women’s Liberation: An Archetypal Reading of Three Contemporary Greek Novels

Abstract

This paper uses as a starting point Annis Pratt’s concept that “the novel per- forms the same role in women’s lives as do the Eleusinian, dying-god, and witchcraft rituals,” providing the reader with “the potential for personal transformation” through its archetypal pat- terns. Specifically, it explores three contemporary Greek novels that deal with women’s libera- tion and development and employ ancient mythology and Christian religion motifs to enhance their messages and narrative structure. First, it looks at feminist author Lena Divani’s novel The Women of Her Life (1997), which relates intertextually to Dante’s Purgatory and bridges 13th century Christian imagery with the personal purgatory of a woman trying to understand herself and her life beyond social prescriptions. Christian imagery as well as ancient Greek mythol- ogy motifs plays a central part in the awakening process of the female protagonist in Eugenia Fakinou’s The Great Green Sea (1987)—a story about an artist who reproduces Byzantine icons and embarks on a journey of self-growth. While Fakinou and Divani draw symbols from ancient Greek and medieval Christian traditions, anti-feminist and atheist Lili Zografou op- poses and rejects the Orthodox doctrine—especially its moral teachings—in both her fictional and non-fictional writing and, inspired by studies on matriarchal societies, promotes women’s power, sexuality, and self-sufficiency, thus elevating the feminine almost to the state of a cult. Her novel Love Arrived One Day Late (1994) is presented as a counterpoint to the works intro- duced earlier, followed by concluding remarks on the adoption of religious ideas and symbols by different female writers in their literary projects, fostering women’s search for authenticity and self-realization.