JHF 6.2: 1

The Journal of Historical Fictions
published by the Historical Fictions Research Network

Volume 6, Issue 2: “The Refiguration of Clytemnestra through Ekphrasis: Female Historical Revisionism in Jennifer Saint’s Elektra (2022), Susan C. Wilson’s Clytemnestra’s Bind (2023), and Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra (2023)” by Helena Gayoso (University of Balearic Islands), pp. 2-44, 2025

DOI forthcoming

Abstract: This paper contributes to the study of classical reception in contemporary women’s writing by examining the reimagining of Clytemnestra in three recent works of historical fiction: Elektra (2022) by Jennifer Saint, Clytemnestra’s Bind (2023) by Susan C. Wilson, and Clytemnestra (2023) by Costanza Casati. It argues that refiguration functions as a central strategy by which these authors engage with classical representations of Clytemnestra, using them as the basis for their female-centred revisionism. The analysis focuses particularly on the role of notional ekphrasis, expressed in imagined encounters with frescoes, as a vehicle for such refiguration. Drawing on Laura Mulvey’s concept of the female gaze, the study identifies three distinct visual approaches to engagement with these frescoes: the Spartan, the maternal, and the murderous gaze. This analysis highlights the central role of ekphrasis in enabling a form of female historical revisionism that reshapes the classical tradition while maintaining a reconciliatory dialogue with ancient sources. The visual narrative arising from these multiple, yet interconnected, gazes frames the authors’ contributions as cumulative accretions that enrich and preserve the complexity of Clytemnestra’s agency within the classical paradigm. 

Keywords: Classical Reception, Refiguration, Notional Ekphrasis, Fresco, Clytemnestra, Female Historical Revisionism 

The Refiguration of Clytemnestra through Ekphrasis: Female Historical Revisionism in Jennifer Saint’s Elektra (2022), Susan C. Wilson’s Clytemnestra’s Bind (2023), and Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra (2023)

1.             Refiguring Clytemnestra: Feminist Reception and the Historical Novel 

In recent years, Greek and Roman myths, as transmitted through classical sources, have re-emerged as a prominent thread in contemporary literary fiction^[1]. Increasingly, novelists are reimagining such narratives from the perspectives of characters who have historically been marginalised, silenced, or even vilified. This growing body of reinterpretations often adopts feminist frameworks, engaging with third-wave feminist discourse and reflecting contemporary gender politics, particularly in the context of the #MeToo movement. Clytemnestra has emerged as a figure of central interest in this context. Her story has been reimagined in a notable corpus of recent works^[2], aligned with a growing body of scholarship in feminist classical reception studies. This study contributes to ongoing discussions on contemporary women’s engagements with the classical tradition from feminist perspectives, as advanced by scholars such as Fiona Cox (2011, 2018), Elena Theodorakopoulos (2012) Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos (2013a, 2013b, 2019), Emily Wilson (2019), Emily Hauser (2017, 2025), Isobel Hurst (2019, 2020), Natalie Haynes (2020, 2023), Daniel Nisa and Rosario Moreno (2023), among others.

This article contributes to feminist classical reception studies by examining how Jennifer Saint’s Elektra (2022), Susan C. Wilson’s Clytemnestra’s Bind (2023), and Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra (2023) reimagine the myth of Clytemnestra by means of the genre of historical fiction. Refiguration^[3], defined as “the adaptation of a legend or myth by the addition of new features” (Hardwick 14), serves as a central narrative strategy by which these authors rework classical sources that shape the myth of Clytemnestra, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Electra, to underpin their feminist, female-centred reinterpretations. This concept is especially apt for Clytemnestra, whose myth has been shaped by multiple ancient treatments and is therefore particularly open to reworking. This is particularly evident in their exploration of events that precede those depicted in Iphigenia in Aulis^[4]. Thus, the novels of Saint, Wilson, and Casati can be viewed as prequels to the narratives found in Homeric epic and Athenian tragedy.

Central to this process of refiguration are the protagonists’ ekphrastic encounters with frescoes, which not only place Clytemnestra within a reconstructed Late Bronze Age milieu but also endow her with interpretative agency, contributing to the construction of a more multifaceted character. To support this argument, the article first looks at these novels within a broader lineage of Clytemnestra’s reception, highlighting how the rise of female historical revisionism marks a significant new phase in the retelling of her myth. Reception theory frames this contextualisation, given that the field understands genre as a barometer of cultural transformation and shifting interpretative horizons. The discussion then turns to ekphrasis itself, analysing how these novels uniquely deploy imagined ekphrastic encounters with frescoes as a means of handing Clytemnestra narrative control, articulating her voice and story, and challenging negative portrayals. In this respect, ekphrasis functions as a dynamic site where classical reception intersects with female historical revisionism.

Understanding contemporary receptions of Clytemnestra requires a comparison with earlier feminist portrayals, particularly those that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. As Kathleen Komar notes, Clytemnestra became a central figure for feminist critics and writers during this period, often celebrated as “the feminist cause par excellence” and “the story of female struggle” (Komar 51; own translation). What drew attention to her was not only her status as a victim of patriarchal violence — most notably, the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia— but also her refusal to remain silent within that system. She publicly confronts Agamemnon, asserts her political will, and enacts a violent reversal of power, thereby dramatising the possibility of female resistance. In this way she joined a wider pantheon of mythological women, from Medea to Antigone, who were reclaimed by feminist authors and critics as figures of transgression. Clytemnestra’s voice and actions disrupted not only the patriarchal order within the myth but also the male-dominated literary canon that transmitted it, making her an especially provocative emblem for second-wave feminism. By embodying women’s rage, articulating female speech in a public forum, and rewriting the narrative of silence and submission, she became an archetype through which feminist writers could imagine resistance to both mythic and cultural authority.

The shift from second-wave feminist appropriations of Clytemnestra to her recent refigurations in historical fiction underscores the novelty of the current reception of her myth. Portrayals from the 1970s and 1980s typically emphasised gender politics without engaging deeply with historical context. In contrast, recent novels adopt the conventions of historical fiction. While still shaped by feminist concerns —including those influenced by movements such as #MeToo^[5]—, these works situate Clytemnestra’s story within a hybrid reconstruction of the Late Bronze Age, blending archaeological imagination with myth and memory. The turn to historical fiction as a genre is therefore significant for understanding the contemporary reception of her character. Reception studies approach classical reception not as the passive transmission of fixed meanings but as a dynamic and historically contingent process in which “meaning is always reali[s]ed at the point of reception” (Martindale 3). In other words, classical texts acquire new significance in response to the values, assumptions, and interpretative frameworks —the cultural horizon^[6]— of their receiving contexts. Reception studies regard shifts in cultural horizons as “a significant indicator of cultural change” (Hardwick 5). As Hardwick emphasises “[r]eception studies […] participate in the continuous dialogue between the past and the present and also require some lateral dialogue in which crossing boundaries of genre is as important as crossing those of time” (Hardwick 4). This dynamic can be seen in the reception of Clytemnestra, where genre conditions her reconfiguration in two main respects. First, genre serves as a site of negotiation in which shifts in cultural horizons are registered through the reinterpretation of earlier traditions and sustained intertextual engagement with classical genres —especially epic and tragedy— that provide the frameworks against which Clytemnestra’s representation is continually reconfigured. Second, genre also acts as a formative force: each genre brings distinctive conventions and interpretative possibilities that shape how her figure can be reimagined. In particular, the modern genre of historical fiction introduces a different set of narrative and ideological expectations —privileging realism, psychological depth, and historical contextualisation— through which Clytemnestra’s character is reconfigured for contemporary audiences.

This study follows Hardwick’s assertion that “later receptions need to be considered in comparison with their source texts, so source texts need to be compared with the material which they themselves refigured and with other ancient treatments of the theme” (Hardwick 14). Accordingly, this paper proceeds in three stages: first, it surveys representations of Clytemnestra in ancient literature, focusing on the narrative and ethical frameworks established by epic and tragedy; second, it considers the theoretical role of ekphrasis in shaping visual and narrative meaning; and finally, it analyses how contemporary historical novels engage in intertextual dialogue with these classical forms, deploying visual art as a means of revising or contesting Clytemnestra’s portrayals.

2.             Clytemnestra in Ancient Sources

Clytemnestra first appears in Homer’s Iliad, where she is not a well-developed character but a moral counterpoint within the male heroic code. Agamemnon evokes her by comparing her to his war prize, Chryseis (Homer B.1 151-154^[7]), where she is shaped by the values of “the male dominated poetic genre of heroic epic” (Wilson xlvi). In the Odyssey, her role becomes more prominent but remains filtered through male voices. Emily Wilson observes that her narrative of betrayal and murder “invites us to read Odysseus’ slaughter of the suitors in terms of pre-emptive self-defence” (Wilson 42), instrumentalising Clytemnestra to reinforce male heroic conduct and the dangers of female disobedience. The dramatic conventions of vengeance shape Clytemnestra’s actions in Greek tragedy, which often cast her as a transgressive woman rather than a fully developed subject^[8].

Aeschylus’ Agamemnon presents Clytemnestra as a transgressive and commanding figure, described by Haynes as “the ultimate bad wife” (Haynes 148). Although the play bears Agamemnon’s name, it is Clytemnestra who dominates the stage morally, politically, and theatrically, ruling Argos in his absence. She presides over both the domestic (oikos) and civic (polis) spheres, announcing Troy’s fall through the beacon chain she devised —a striking demonstration of her strategic foresight. Her authority is exercised in public: she directs the chorus, manages household and civic affairs, and prepares to murder Agamemnon in vengeance for Iphigenia’s sacrifice. Clytemnestra presents this act as divinely sanctioned justice, embodying mêtis (μῆτις) —a form of strategic intelligence that combines foresight, rhetoric, and deception— which shapes both her murderous plot and her theatrical staging, including the crimson tapestries that lure Agamemnon into hubris (hybris). Though she acts alongside Aegisthus, he remains subordinate to her power. Claiming kratos (κράτος), she positions herself as Agamemnon’s nemesis (νέμεσις), destabilising traditional gender and civic hierarchies without instituting a new moral order. Crucially, Clytemnestra’s rhetoric —central to her mêtis— is employed by Aeschylus to vilify her. Beneath a linguistic façade, the dramatist conceals her true intentions (Aeschylus 587–614); language functions as a persuasive snare (Aeschylus 905–913), deployed to manipulate her interlocutors (Aeschylus 885–894). As the embodiment of Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, she openly deceives others (Aeschylus 942). This very quality of mêtis is precisely what contemporary revisionist authors tend to revalue and amplify through the visual language of ekphrasis in their novels.

Critical scholarship has long recognised the Aeschylean Clytemnestra’s radical implications. Decades before second-wave feminism, R P Winnington-Ingram (1948) identified the threat she poses in occupying male spaces of power, interpreting her ambition and envy as reflections of cultural anxieties about female political agency. Building on this, Froma Zeitlin’s structuralist analysis (1985) highlighted the significance of the Amazonian archetype in shaping Clytemnestra’s character and its inherent challenge to patriarchal norms. Helene P Foley (2001) highlights her public speech, ritual manipulation of civic codes, and self-authored justice as acts of female self-narration. Nancy S Rabinowitz (1993) frames her as a figure who asserts gendered power through language, law, and spectacle within a male-dominated system. From the 1970s onwards, feminist readings transformed Clytemnestra into a potent symbol of resistance. As Edith Hall notes, “she represents a challenge to patriarchy unparalleled in Greek tragedy” (Hall 54-55), a view that deeply influences contemporary reinterpretations in the novels analysed here.

While these interpretations foreground her challenge to patriarchal order, subsequent scholarship has refined the analysis, locating her threat not only in gender but also in cultural and symbolic terms. Zeitlin represents an influential stage in this trajectory, emphasising gender as the central axis of Clytemnestra’s otherness. Zeitlin’s influential feminist reading of Agamemnon (1978, 171) frames the Oresteia’s conflict as a male/female binary, where Clytemnestra’s threat is primarily rooted in her gender. She argues the trilogy “places Olympian over chthonic on a divine level, Greek over barbarian on the cultural level, and male above female on the social level” (Zeitlin 149), reducing Clytemnestra’s otherness chiefly to her womanhood. Edith Hall expands this perspective, demonstrating how tragedy situates her disruption within a wider cultural discourse of barbarism. Hall’s Inventing the Barbarian (1991) further demonstrates how tragedy constructed Athenian identity by defining the ‘barbarian’ as irrational, unfree, and culturally inferior, reinforcing Athens as a civilised polis. Hall observes that “the woman who gets out of hand may, however, not necessarily be a barbarian herself; among the most powerful women in extant tragedy is undoubtedly Aeschylus’ Clytaemnestra” (Hall 203). Employing “the vocabulary of barbarism” (Hall 204), Hall associates Clytemnestra with a “barbarian flatterer of monarchy” (Hall 205) and notes that her disruptive traits —“femaleness, barbarism, luxury, and hubris”— are entwined in the same semantic complex, representing all that Greek manhood must reject (Hall 206). Although scholars such as Zeitlin and Hall have explored Clytemnestra’s gender and power, they overlook her origin as the daughter of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, and sister of Helen. I argue that this Spartan lineage is central to understanding how Clytemnestra is othered in the Oresteia —not only as a woman in a patriarchal world but as a cultural outsider within the Athenian tragic imagination.

To substantiate this claim, we must situate Clytemnestra within ancient representations of Spartan women. Yet before turning to these portrayals, it is important to note that the evidence is fragmentary and mediated, and several scholars have pointed out that this historical reality is difficult to verify with certainty. Richer observes that “literary sources on Sparta rarely originate from the city itself”^[9]. Russell remarks that “[t]he myth is of even more importance, historically, than the reality” (Russell 112), and Robin Lane Fox describes a “Spartan mirage”^[10] that “colour[s] […] surviving evidence (Fox 70).

Although the evidence is fragmentary, later sources nonetheless attest to the persistence of an image of Spartan women as unusually visible and powerful. Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus describes how maidens “exercise[d] in running, wrestling, casting the discus, and hurling the javelin,” to promote strength for motherhood and civic contribution (Plutarch 14.1, 246-247). Fornis adds that Spartan women experienced “only partial seclusion” and possessed “a voice in public life” (Fornis 270-271) despite lacking formal political roles. These qualities often stood in contrast to Athenian gender norms and may have contributed to the construction of Spartan women as unruly or threatening.

While Plutarch and other later accounts testify to the persistence of Spartan women’s distinctive social position, a closer contemporary voice is found in Aristotle, whose reflections more directly illuminate the anxieties that may also underlie Aeschylus’ construction of Clytemnestra. In A Treatise on Government, Aristotle reveals that in Lacedemonia “the power is in the hands of the women” as they enjoyed more rights, freedoms, and liberties than those in other Greek city-states. Spartan women exercised property control, with Aristotle noting, “near two parts in five of the whole country is the property of women” and they often inherited large fortunes, as “everyone is permitted to make a woman his heir.” He further notes that the disproportionate power and authority wielded by Spartan women during the Classical period led to “the end of government and the prosperity of the city” (Aristotle B.II Ch IX).

Aristotle’s views on Spartan women parallels Aeschylus’ depiction of Clytemnestra, whose excessive ambition and unruly behaviour precipitate the collapse of Agamemnon’s rule and of Mycenaean civilisation. Aristotle links Sparta’s decline to “the abusive position that, in his view, women held, as well as the manifest weakness of Sparta resulting from its lack of men —its oliganthropia” (Richer 135), a condition Clytemnestra perpetuates by murdering Agamemnon. For the decade that Agamemnon was away fighting at Troy, she governed the kingdom, serving as a fictional representation of Aristotle’s gynocracy, or government of women.  What initially appears as a domestic danger, thus, evolves into a direct challenge to the political, social, and cultural foundations of Athenian society. Finally, Clytemnestra personifies “the savagery of past wars and feuds” (Fagles 13), representing a form of justice rooted in an eye for an eye, in her own words, an “[a]ct for act, wound for wound!” (Aeschylus 1555). This perpetuates a cycle of bloodshed, crime, and violence —a barbaric justice that the Athenians sought to eradicate. Thus, viewed in the light of historical perceptions of Spartan women, Clytemnestra’s character— her command over both oikos and polis, her mêtis and dolos, as both the agent perpetuating Agamemnon’s hubris and the executor of nemesis— can be understood not merely as the female other, but as a culturally resonant embodiment of Spartan ‘otherness.’ Crafted by male playwrights for male audiences, the portrayal of Clytemnestra powerfully embodies Spartan distinctiveness that fundamentally challenges the ideological foundations of Athenian identity. She is not simply a domestic threat but a challenge to the very foundations of the Athenian state.

If Aristotle’s critique reveals how Spartan women were imagined as a civic danger, the intensity of this perception becomes clearer when placed against the historical backdrop of Athens’ rivalry with Sparta. The Oresteia was composed in a political climate where anti-Spartan sentiment was intensifying, and these associations would have resonated strongly with Athenian audiences. The Athenians’ defeat of the Persians ushered in a period characterised by “the expression of optimism as well as artistic genius” (Fagles 13), which shaped the political, social, and cultural atmosphere —a period that came to an end with Sparta’s triumph in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). The rivalry between Athens and Sparta, the principal adversaries of fifth-century Greece, continued to fuel antagonistic discourses even after Sparta’s victory in the Peloponnesian War, a political and military rivalry which was echoed in the artistic landscape as it “led Athenian dramatists to make frequent references to Sparta in their works” (Richer 13). In this historical context, Aeschylus conceived the Oresteia as anti-Spartan state propaganda, aligning with Ephialtes’ policies that “shifted Athenian aristocratic support away from conservative Sparta towards Argos” (Collard xix), a traditional rival of Sparta. 

If Clytemnestra suffers due to her Spartan identity, Aeschylus (like Homer) glorifies Agamemnon for his Mycenaean origins, reflecting how fifth-century BCE Athenian politics —and, by extension, its poets— celebrated the Mycenaean past as a precursor to Athenian civilisation. This link between fictional Mycenae and real Athens is supported by the idea that “tragic poets found ways to link the commonest themes of myth […] with the political phenomena of contemporary Athens,” where “particularly male heads provided parallels and scenes for the real-life city’s chief concerns, stability and morality” (Collard xvi). Though not a true hero in the Iliad, Agamemnon is praised with epithets such as “great Agamemnon,” “lord of men,” “a mighty man,” and “the great commander” (Homer B.1 228), leading the largest force to Troy and being “favoured by gods and born the child of fortune” (Homer B.1 227). In Oresteia, despite his murder by Clytemnestra —suggesting limits to his impunity— Aeschylus portrays Agamemnon as a victim, his murder symbolising both the dangers of female autonomy and archaic justice. In Eumenides, Athena urges the Furies to abandon “their age-old deterrence of all wrong, especially of the murder which is the most destructive of civic and political stability” (Collard xix). The Furies and Clytemnestra embody this primal justice, while Orestes’ acquittal marks a shift to a more ‘civilised’ legal order based on forgiveness and institutional process —mirroring the formation of Athens’ Council of the Areopagus. 

After examining the evidence supporting the parallel between Clytemnestra as an embodiment of hostility towards Sparta, the interpretation of the Oresteia should not be reduced to a simplistic recognition of the Furies and Clytemnestra’s “crucial role in society before the creation of formali[s]ed legal proceedings for ensuring that people maintained a civili[s]ed moral code” (Haynes 277). Instead, the absolution of matricide functions as a form of propaganda that exalts Athens, emphasising its civilising and dominant values, while simultaneously casting other political, cultural, and legal systems —such as Sparta’s— in an excessively negative light. From this analysis, it is not so far-fetched to argue that the supposed moral superiority of Athenian justice, particularly its so-called civilising ethos, as embodied by the recent establishment of the Council of the Areopagus, not only glorifies the law of the father, further elevating Agamemnon, but also results in the demonisation of Clytemnestra. Her death becomes necessary within the play as it mirrors the broader eradication of so-called barbaric and archaic legal systems outside of it. 

In contrast, historical fiction transcends these constraints by locating Clytemnestra’s motivations within a sociopolitical context rooted in the Late Bronze Age, reimagining her within the world evoked in the Iliad. While Clytemnestra is not actually a historical figure and exists solely in mythological and literary sources, historical fiction allows authors to imagine her shaped by the cultural and political dynamics of her era. 

While Philomela is not part of the Clytemnestra mythos, her story offers a classical model of female agency through visual expression. For modern authors engaged in feminist historical revisionism, Philomela’s tapestry becomes a mythic precedent for using ekphrasis to represent trauma, silence, and resistance. Philomela, the daughter of King Pandion of Athens, features prominently in Book VI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where her myth reaches its most complete form in antiquity. After her brother in-law Tereus raped her and cut out her tongue to silence her, Philomela famously wove a tapestry that narrated the assault and sent it to her sister, Procne. This act of non-verbal storytelling sparked a chain of vengeance: Procne, enraged, killed their son Itys and served him to Tereus as a grotesque meal. When Tereus discovered the truth and pursued the sisters with an axe, the gods intervened —transforming Procne into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale. As Ovid writes, “[s]till my revenge shall take its proper time, / And suit the baseness of your hellish crime” (Ovid B.VI 229). Philomela is transformed into the nightingale, whose song is a perpetual lament, and becomes emblematic of silenced female suffering transmuted into aesthetic form. Her tapestry, an ekphrastic object, stands as a mythic precedent for women’s use of visual language to reclaim agency in the face of violence. The story of Philomela thus provides not only a mythic archetype of female resistance through visual narrative, but also a conceptual bridge to the modern use of ekphrasis as a critical mode in feminist historical revisions of the Clytemnestra myth within the novels analysed. The following section lays the theoretical groundwork for analysing how ekphrasis operates within female historical revisionism, specifically in the reimagining of the Clytemnestra myth in three contemporary historical novels: Clytemnestra, Elektra, and Clytemnestra’s Bind.

3.             Ekphrasis and its Critical Landscape: Towards Feminist Revision

It is within this generic and ideological shift —from epic and classical tragedy to feminist historical revisionism— that the use of ekphrasis emerges as a key interpretative strategy. The term ekphrasis—from Ancient Greek ἐκ (“out of”) and φαίνω (“to bring to light,” “to make visible”) (Liddell and Scott 427; 1653)— has long functioned as a central literary and rhetorical device, though now commonly regarded as a “genre” or “trope” (Webb 7). Leo Spitzer famously defined it as “the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art” (Spitzer 207), a formulation that has shaped modern discussion. Ruth Webb highlights its roots in antiquity and argues in “Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern” (1999) that classical ekphrasis did not originally refer exclusively to visual artworks. In ancient rhetorical theory —especially within the progymnasmata (preliminary exercises in rhetoric)— Theon, Hermogenes, and Aphthonius defined ekphrasis as any vivid description (enargeia) designed to evoke the subject in the eyes of the audience, whether it be a person, place, event, or imagined object.

Though its original scope was broad, ekphrasis came to be strongly associated with literature, particularly epic poetry. As John Hollander notes, “[o]ne thinks immediately of Homer’s shield of Achilles, Hesiod’s shield of Heracles, and dozens of epigrams in the Greek Anthology” (Hollander 4). Jaś Elsner calls Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad “the paradigm for the entire tradition” (Elsner 3), while Webb evocatively terms it “the grandmother of all ekphraseis” (Webb 10). 

A W Heffernan similarly observes that ekphrasis is “as ancient as the description of the shield of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad” (Heffernan 1) and asserts that “[t]he canonical specimens of ekphrasis [are] to be found in the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante” (Heffernan 7). Pioneering scholars, however, have expanded such the historical boundaries by identifying earlier non-Greek examples: George Kurman (1974) explores Gilgamesh’s dreams as ekphrastic similes; Karen Sonik (2021) highlights the affective description of Gilgamesh’s body in Gilgamesh and Akka; Irene Winter (1981) aligns Assyrian reliefs with royal narrative; and J Cale Johnson calls Mesopotamian Tigi hymns “quintessentially ekphrastic” (Johnson 14). These examples suggest that vivid, imaginative description —ekphrasis in all but name— existed well before Homer. 

The current challenge lies not simply in contrasting ancient frameworks with the proliferation of modern definitions^[11], nor just in mapping the multiplicity of contemporary interpretations^[12], but rather in grappling with what Neil Murphy calls “the contentious nature of the discourse surrounding ekphrasis” (Murphy 126). Heffernan’s influential definition of ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (Heffernan 3) has been foundational, although it was later criticised —even by Heffernan himself (2019)— for being overly narrow. W J T Mitchell, meanwhile, frames the word-image relationship as inherently paragonal: a power struggle reflecting “fundamental contradictions of our culture” and shaped by specific “interests and powers (Mitchell 44). Yet recent critics have rejected this antagonistic model. Drawing on Murray Krieger’s broader conception of ekphrasis as illusionistic description (1992), scholars such as David Kennedy and Richard Meek (2019) reframe the ekphrastic moment as an affective, intersubjective encounter between text and image. As Laurence Petit argues, “verbal literacy and visual literacy no longer compete, but function together in a true ‘alchemy of the word and the image’” (Petit 320). While Kennedy and Meek acknowledge the “dialectic between these two models,” they emphasise collaboration, affect, and intersubjectivity (Kennedy and Meek 3).

This conceptual flexibility helps explain the resurgence of ekphrasis in contemporary fiction. Renate Brosch observes a recent “upsurge of ekphrasis in popular novels” (Brosch 403), and Neil Murphy (2024) links this trend to broader engagements with visual culture. Far from being eclipsed by digital media, ekphrasis has in fact gained new relevance in what Mitchell terms “the pictorial turn” —the cultural shift from word to image (Mitchell 3). While Jay David Bolter (1996) argues that digital media may reduce the need for verbal mediation, Gabriele Rippl (2018) contends that the multimodal literacy of contemporary readers sustains the prominence of ekphrasis.

A persistent limitation in modern ekphrastic theory, however —and the focus of this study— is its 

gendered legacy. Heffernan notes that the word-image dynamic is “often powerfully gendered”   representing “a duel between male and female gazes, the voice of male speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening, of male narrative striving to overcome the fixating impact of beauty poisoned in space” (Heffernan 1). Mitchell remarks that “the treatment of the ekphrastic image as female other is a commonplace” (Mitchell 17) identifying this as “an overdetermined feature in a genre that tends to describe an object of visual pleasure and fascination from a masculine perspective, often to an audience understood to be masculine as well” (Mitchell 17). This tradition, in Heffernan’s terms, constitutes “masculine ekphrasis” (Heffernan 46). Suzanne K. Langer’s provocative remark that “there are no happy marriages in art —only successful rape” (Langer 86). echoes this view. In “The Politics of Genre” Mitchell examines Lessing’s Laocoön, noting that Lessing viewed “paintings, like women, [as] ideally silent, beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to the sublime eloquence proper to the manly art of poetry” (Lessing 109). 

Yet even within this tradition, moments of resistance arise. Mitchell admits: “[a]ll this would look quite different […] if my emphasis had been on ekphrastic poetry by women” (Mitchell 181), acknowledging that a shift in gender perspective —ekphrasis by women— would radically reframe the discourse, though he does not pursue the point. Heffernan similarly concedes, “[w]e have traced a genealogy of ekphrasis that is predominantly male,” and attempts to establish an “alternative genealogy” (Heffernan 46). However, he confines this to female weavers —Philomela and Arachne— mediated through male-authored texts. Moreover, his analysis, particularly in the chapter “Weaving Rape,” centres on depictions of sexual violence. While he suggests that such images “invoiced by ekphrasis challenge at once the controlling authority of the male gaze and the power of the male word” (Heffernan 7) and may offer a “radical alternative to the pictures of still unravished beauty,” they also expose how little agency women are afforded. In Heffernan’s model, feminine ekphrasis often constitutes a form of protest expressed through violent imagery: “violated women speak in and through pictures of violation” (Heffernan 89). 

It was not until the late 1980s and 1990s that critics and writers began to fully explore the potential of ekphrasis for feminist intervention. After centuries of masculinist frameworks identifying “time and language as male, and space and picture as female” (Loizeaux 80), feminist scholars reclaimed ekphrasis as a site of resistance. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, drawing on Griselda Pollock, defines feminist ekphrasis as “that strain of modern ekphrasis by women that recognizes the power of a sexually charged, male tradition of looking, takes it on, and challenges its gendered dynamics” (Loizeaux 81). In “On Art Objects and Women’s World” Jill R Ehnenn analyses ekphrastic prose and poetry by Vernon Lee, Graham R Tomson, and Michael Field, highlighting how these authors were “quite conscious of woman’s role as art object and the various functions of that role” (Ehnenn n.p.) using ekphrasis as a vehicle for feminist critique. 

This paper contributes to the growing scholarship on feminist ekphrasis by examining its role as a vehicle for classical reception. While literary engagements with frescoes are well established, their recurrence in contemporary rewritings of the myth of Clytemnestra offers a rich basis for comparative analysis. As Kinloch cautions, feminist ekphrasis is more than a critical tool; she argues that “poems about art are inevitably metapoetic in nature” (Kinloch 23). Building on this idea of ekphrasis as inherently metafictional —not merely descriptive but also self-reflexive— I argue that in these novels, it functions as a mode of feminist revisionism. It reconfigures classical sources and reframes the reception of Clytemnestra through the lens of historical fiction. More specifically, I examine how these texts use feminist ekphrasis to unleash the genre’s subversive potential. Jerome de Groot describes this as the capacity to “quarrel with particular historical narratives” and “reinsert communities into the past, rescuing them from the marginal positions to which they have consciously been consigned” (de Groot 148). In this respect, feminist ekphrasis emerges as a dynamic site of reception, aligned with Hardwick’s definition of reception as “a field for the practice and study of contest about values and their relationship to knowledge and power” (de Groot 5). 

Hollander’s term “notional ekphrasis” —the verbal representation of imaginary art (Hollander 4)— applies directly here. Frescoes, emblematic of Mycenaean visual culture, provide a particularly fitting medium for such representation. As Janice L Crowley notes, “fresco painting is an art that the Mycenaeans made their own” (Crowley 270). At the same time, she cautions that the surviving material is “extremely fragmentary,” and that reconstructions “need to be treated with extreme caution” (Crowley 270). Similarly, Sara Immerwahr (1983) and Charles Gates (1999) emphasise the ideological complexity of frescoes, which often depict elite figures and blur distinctions between mortals and deities. 

It is precisely this fragmentary and ambiguous nature that makes frescoes so productive for feminist historical fiction. These texts frequently seek to inhabit gaps in the historical and mythological record, offering alternative perspectives on marginalised or silenced figures. Because of their fragmentary condition and pictorial character, frescoes often lend themselves to acts of speculative reconstruction and narrative intervention. Their placement within domestic or ritual spaces —such as the gynaeceum or the megaron— also foregrounds questions of gender, spatial power, and visuality. As Sarah J. Giffin argues, Late Bronze Age frescoes can act as “active agent[s] upon a passive viewer,” capable of “affecting the emotions of human observers” and “incorporating the viewer into the narrative” (Giffin 1). Contemporary authors harness this immersive and affective potential to construct ekphrastic scenes that foreground questions of gendered gaze, historical recovery, and the politics of representation. 

Crucially, these ekphrastic encounters are not neutral descriptions but gendered acts of looking, foregrounding visuality and narrative control. They engage with Laura Mulvey’s concept of the ‘female gaze,’ first articulated in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) and revised in 1981, as a challenge to the patriarchal dominance of the male gaze. Now extended beyond the world of film, this concept informs literary criticism by demonstrating how female perspectives reshape narrative structures and modes of representation. In these novels, the female gaze reclaims both visual and narrative authority for Clytemnestra. Ekphrastic engagements with frescoes activate a constellation of gazes —the Spartan, the maternal, and the murderous— which together construct a polyphonic and polyvocal subjectivity. These interwoven gazes articulate a complex female consciousness by way of three focalised perspectives. The Spartan gaze shapes Clytemnestra’s early identity through ideals of Spartan womanhood, anchoring her in her polis’s martial and political ethos. The maternal gaze, central to her contemporary reception, stresses maternity as a defining factor, recovering her first marriage to Tantalus, the death of her firstborn by Agamemnon, and reworking Iphigenia in Aulisto emphasise maternal grief and embodied motherhood. It also reframes her fraught relationship with Electra —notably antagonistic in Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Electra— as one of care and protection. Finally, the murderous gaze highlights her calculated agency —overlooked in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon— and recasts her as the narrator of her own story. Together, these gazes form a layered feminist ekphrasis that reimagines her myth as a site of visual, emotional, and political resistance.

4.             The Roles of Ekphrastic Encounters in Contemporary Retellings on Clytemnestra

These ancient portrayals of Clytemnestra, shaped by tragedy, politics, and perceptions of Spartan otherness, continue to influence her reception in contemporary literature. However, recent historical novels move beyond symbolic demonisation to explore how cultural background and social systems inform female agency. Among them, Casati’s Clytemnestra (2022) engages directly with ancient representations but reinterprets Spartanness not as a sign of excess or political danger, but as the foundation of the protagonist’s psychological and moral complexity.

Building on these cultural associations of Spartan womanhood —as politically visible, socially mobile, and culturally distinct— Casati reimagines Clytemnestra as a historically situated woman shaped by the dynamics of the Late Bronze Age. In doing so, she integrates visual and narrative strategies —particularly through ekphrastic encounters— to reframe Clytemnestra’s agency and legacy in ways that depart from classical models.Drawing on Agamemnon as a primary source for characterisation and plot, Casati devotes a substantial portion of the novel —thirteen out of thirty-five chapters— to Clytemnestra’s early life in Sparta. This fictional past expands her identity as a Spartan princess and humanises her within a historically grounded framework. What Aeschylus demonises as a source of transgressive power, Casati reclaims as the basis for strength, emotional depth, and political self-possession.

Casati’s reconstruction of Sparta draws on the historical and cultural representations of Spartan women outlined above, as seen in the frescoes exhibited in the megaron where “the painted figures are running, hunting and fighting” (Casati 19). But Casati’s historical engagement goes beyond merely channelling feminist revisionism and reinterpreting Clytemnestra’s myth. Casati stresses Clytemnestra’s Spartan identity to justify, explain, and provide a plausible reason for the most difficult aspects of the Clytemnestra we encounter in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. For instance, Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon, emphasising her strength (Aeschylus 1403-1407). Casati, however, reframes this strength not as a masculine trait but as a natural outcome of her rigorous Spartan training. Casati portrays her violent actions (Aeschylus 1338-1400) against those who have wronged her as extensions of her hunting prowess. Similarly, Casati reinterprets her ambition (Aeschylus 1452) and desire to wield the political kratos of Mycenae —condemned by the chorus as disruptive when exhibited by women— as a logical consequence of her position as the eldest heir to the Spartan throne. The tragedy of Clytemnestra’s forced marriage to Agamemnon, who embodies the patriarchal nature of Mycenae, becomes even more poignant when contrasted with the relative freedoms she enjoyed as a Spartan woman. 

The idealised Spartan past begins to feel more like an illusion than a viable future after her first marriage to Tantalus^[13], with whom she has her first child —an aspect largely overlooked in the sources, except in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, where she confronts Agamemnon with reproach: “you married me against my will, and took me with violence, by killing my former husband Tantalus; and you dashed by baby living to the ground, tearing him violently from my breast” (Euripides 1148-1150). On her wedding night, unable to sleep, Clytemnestra visits the main hall, where “she finds Penelope in the megaron, admiring the frescoes.”

Penelope’s fascination with the frescoes and her wish to have painted them herself reflect her desire to narrate her story through artistic expression, much like the Homeric Penelope in The Odyssey, who weaves Laertes’ shroud to delay the suitors and maintain control over her narrative (Homer B.19 142-149). In contrast, Clytemnestra’s interpretation of the frescoes focuses not on creation, but on reflecting past aspirations, as she imbues them with her childhood dreams: “[s]he looks at the warrior women tossing their hair as they attack a boar and remembers when she spent hours staring at them as a child, wishing to be like them” (Casati 47). This childhood memory, framed on the threshold of her transition from girlhood to womanhood, marks the loss of youthful illusions about her future.

The contrasting interpretations of the same fresco that Penelope and Clytemnestra’s gazes reveal underscore Casati’s strategy in characterising Clytemnestra through contrasts with other figures^[14]. This opposition between Penelope and Clytemnestra belongs to a longstanding tradition in their reception, with writers and scholars portraying Clytemnestra as the antithesis of Penelope. Critical discourse has historically cast them as opposing ideals of womanhood, reducing them to stereotypes: Penelope as passive, loyal, and faithful, Clytemnestra as manipulative, vengeful, and corrupt. This dichotomy arises from Agamemnon’s speech in Book 11 of The Odyssey, titled “The Dead” in Wilson’s translation (Homer B.11 404-462), where he contrasts Penelope’s virtues with Clytemnestra’s negative legacy. However, rather than reinforcing this reductive binary, this particular ekphrastic encounter —the characters’ engagement with and interpretation of the frescoes— redefines both figures by focusing not on their virtues through the male gaze, but on their control over their own narratives. Penelope expresses her agency through artistry, specifically weaving, highlighting the connection between the Latin words textus (text) and texo “construct with elaborate care; plait (together); weave” (Latdict n.p.). In contrast, Clytemnestra’s agency is rooted in decisive actions, such as the murder of Agamemnon, prioritising her own truth —revealed to the reader throughout the novel— over public opinion or moral judgment. Casati exemplifies this aspect of her personality by presenting a Clytemnestra who is fully aware of the misinterpretations surrounding her and actively contrasts them with her own truth, reclaiming her narrative in the process. As Clytemnestra reflects at the end of the novel. “She has been called ‘proud,’ ‘savage,’ ‘single-minded,’ ‘mad with ambition,’ ‘a murderess.’ She has been called many things […] You will be despised by many, hated by others, and punished […] But it doesn’t matter. She was there. She knows songs never tell the truth” (Casati 400-402).  

Upon her arrival in Mycenae in The Iliad, Clytemnestra is unmoved by the grandeur of Hera’s favourite city (Homer B.4 66-68), described as “rich Mycenae” (Homer B.7 234) and “rich in gold” (Homer B.11 58). Casati portrays how the contrast between Mycenae’s splendour and her own grief profoundly unsettled Clytemnestra: “[t]he frescoes of the Spartan megaron are nothing compared to this. But then, Mycenae is the richest city of all their lands” (Casati 162). Her bedroom features “beautiful carved chests for her clothes, and bowls and tripods. An axe hangs near the window, painted doves and butterflies flying around it.” While these images exalt the power of Agamemnon and Mycenae, Clytemnestra’s portrayal not only demystifies the power of the king and the city through the eyes of the victim, but also reinterprets them as symbols of suffering, serving simultaneously as a means by which she can articulate her emotional turmoil: “She looks at every image and bright colour, at the lies they tell. This is my life now. Everything I love is gone. She will never see Tantalus again. She will never rock her son to sleep. Grief streams inside her” (Casati 163).

Apart from sanitising Clytemnestra’s myth and characterisation by means of her Spartan background, the ekphrastic encounters with frescoes upon her arrival in Mycenae position Clytemnestra as a victim of Agamemnon. Agamemnon has ordered the painting of the wall in her bedroom, and Clytemnestra notes that “[t]he paint of the frescoes on the walls is still wet.” Paradoxically, “[t]he images must be meant to remind her of Sparta,” as “[a]nemones have been painted around large windows, and a river framed by tall reeds flows in front of her bed” (Casati 162). Whether Agamemnon intentionally had the frescoes painted to torment her by reminding her of everything she has lost and intensifying her trauma, or if it is merely a coincidence, it is undeniable that the anemones will serve as a daily reminder of Tantalus. On the day they met, Clytemnestra was wearing anemone earrings, and this connection deepens her desire for revenge. 

Another example of ekphrasis as a vehicle for female resistance and interiority appears in Clytemnestra’s first night with Agamemnon, depicted in Casati’s novel as a violent and traumatic event with overtones of rape. During this encounter, Clytemnestra’s attention shifts towards the frescoes on the walls, a movement that marks the beginning of a significant ekphrastic moment. She “feels her body resisting, trying to draw back, so she focuses on the torches that brighten the frescoes on the walls, the painted fish and birds. When she feels pain, she tries to imagine being the painted nightingale by the door” (Casati 164). This visual fixation —particularly on the nightingale— echoes the myth of Philomela. The connection between Clytemnestra and Philomela is both intentional and fitting^[15]. Like Clytemnestra, Philomela’s tale is one of sexual betrayal, savage violence, the desecration of familial ties, and eventual vengeance. She also symbolises the silenced and violated woman, hidden away and muted by the very man who assaulted her. 

As discussed earlier, the myth of Philomela underpins the visual and thematic symbolism in Casati’s Clytemnestra, where the fresco of the nightingale echoes Philomela’s tale —not just as a symbol of trauma, but as a latent promise of revenge mediated through art. Agamemnon might have created the fresco, but it is Clytemnestra who reinterprets it, assigning it personal and emotional significance. In doing so, she enacts a form of ekphrastic reappropriation: the image becomes a vessel for her pain. Like Philomela’s tapestry, which tells the story of what words cannot capture, for Clytemnestra the fresco becomes a medium of imaginative escape and self-recognition. Moreover, the invocation of Philomela’s revenge— “[B]ut she got her revenge first. Philomela had killed the man’s son, boiled him, and served him as a meal” (Casati 164)— frames this ekphrastic moment not simply as symbolic resistance, but as the germ of retribution. Ekphrasis thus mediates between pain and vengeance. 

Crucially, this scene crystallises the way ekphrasis works throughout the novel: not merely as artistic description, but as a transformative narrative strategy that lets us access Clytemnestra’s inner life. Like Philomela, she cannot articulate her trauma openly; instead, she redirects it into silent, symbolic forms. However, one should not interpret this silence as passivity. Rather, it becomes the terrain where mêtis —her celebrated cunning— is reconfigured. Aeschylus most powerfully articulates this aspect of her character in Agamemnon, though it remains present, if more restrained, in other classical tragedies that recount her story. She manoeuvres within a world that denies her voice, relying on calculation as the only available form of power. Casati’s novel preserves this political astuteness, yet through ekphrasis, reframes mêtis as something more than just strategic manipulation. In private, her intelligence becomes introspective, emotionally resonant, and grounded in lived experience. Ekphrasis thus works to counterbalance —not soften— her cunning, revealing its psychic cost and its origin in pain and survival. Far from rewriting her image, the novel complicates it: ekphrasis becomes both a site of trauma and a subtle form of narrative resistance, expanding Clytemnestra beyond the confines of the public mask and into a fuller, more humanised subjectivity.

Susan Wilson’s Clytemnestra’s Bind (2023) is the first instalment of her trilogy on Clytemnestra. While Casati dedicates the first thirteen chapters of her novel to Clytemnestra’s youth, Wilson devotes the opening volume of her trilogy to an in-depth exploration of Clytemnestra’s psyche, spanning the period from her marriage to Tantalus to the death of Iphigenia. In contrast to Casati, who conveys her feminist stance through a hybrid historical narrative that blends myth and reality to highlight the status of women in Sparta, Wilson elaborates on Clytemnestra’s narrative with remarkable historical precision^[16]. In this novel, the shared suffering of women under patriarchy is poignantly illustrated by the figure of the farmer’s wife, who appeals to Agamemnon for justice after her neighbour murders her husband, claims her as his wife, and deprives her of her livelihood. Her plight finds a visual parallel in “a fresco on the north wall, of women watching from the windows of a besieged palace while warriors fought on a red hill above.” This imagery encapsulates her vulnerability, as “[t]hose women might as well have been the farm wife” (Wilson 191), rendered powerless in the face of pervasive male violence. 

From Clytemnestra’s perspective, the fresco forges a link between the farmer’s wife and figures like Helen and Clytemnestra herself, both “waiting for the sons of Atreus to snatch us from our chosen husbands” thereby suggesting a universal and cyclical pattern of female subjugation. The final comparison, likening the frescoed women to “grains of sand on the shores of Troy” (Wilson 191), broadens this connection, associating the farmer’s wife not only with Helen and Clytemnestra but also with other female victims of Agamemnon’s actions and the war machine. Figures such as Cassandra and the Trojan women similarly fall victim to the militaristic structures that Agamemnon perpetuates. 

However, victimhood is not exclusive to women or to ‘the female gaze’; it extends to all of Agamemnon’s victims, including Aegisthus, a rightful contender to the throne of Mycenae who becomes Clytemnestra’s lover. In Wilson’s novel, the frescoes of ‘slain beasts and sword-broken men’ emphasise the oppressive nature of the palace, where the characters hold “no real power, only the warmth of our titles” (Wilson 88), reinforcing their victimhood within a power structure. 

Wilson’s historical realism emphasises Clytemnestra’s portrayal as a typical woman of the Late Bronze Age, constrained by the societal norms of her time. While Wilson’s commitment to historical realism places Clytemnestra firmly within the societal roles of a Late Bronze Age woman —primarily as mother and devout religious figure— this does not preclude a feminist reading. Rather, by means of the ekphrastic encounters with frescoes, Wilson reveals how these roles express Clytemnestra’s autonomy and agency within her historical context. 

A notable innovation in Wilson’s interpretation is the introduction of birth control as a key theme. Upon arriving in Mycenae, Harmonia, Clytemnestra’s closest companion, “proposed a visit to the herbwife,” as Clytemnestra explains: “I might not be ready in body and mind to carry Agamemnon’s child. I was young” (Wilson 57). The herbwife’s name, Eritha, echoes Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth and labour, signalling an intentional invocation of Bronze Age fertility themes. Her depiction of Eritha finds a plausible basis in Mycenaean society itself. Barbara Olsen’s seminal study, Women in Mycenaean Society — “a study of the women of Mycenaean Greece as they appear in the administrative documents of Late Bronze Age Greece: the Linear B tablets of the thirteen  and fourteen century BCE” (Olsen 1)— reveals that a distinct category of women emerges in the tablets from Pylos: religious officials. These women, Olsen writes, “enjoyed a high level of visibility and economic autonomy.” Priestesses “held slaves, both male and female, and acted as supervisors to other free personnel,” and they also “exercised control over property, including shrines and their contents,” as well as “leased land,” which made them the only women “with attested access to land holdings.” Importantly, they are the “only women who are not recorded in terms of either their marital arrangements or fecundity” (Olsen 255), suggesting that their identities were primarily shaped by cultic function rather than domestic roles.

In this context, Eritha’s temple, her ritual space, and her authority over women’s bodies evoke not just later Athenian midwives but also these historically attested Mycenaean priestesses. Wilson’s Eritha, then, is not merely a modern feminist anachronism, but a speculative embodiment of a real, if exceptional, figure within Bronze Age society —one in which “religious practice functioned as the sole locus where ideologies of economic restriction and subordination were superseded by the requirements of cult” (Olsen 255). Although Wilson bases this moment on Bronze Age religious imagery, her depiction draws more from suggestive resonance than from firm archaeological evidence— inviting a closer look at what is not known about Mycenaean women’s reproductive agency. Olsen also demonstrates that women in both Pylos and Knossos primarily undertook childcare and domestic work. In Pylos, for instance, Olsen highlights “the role of the workgroup women in their status as primary child-care providers, responsible for all underage offspring regardless of their sex” (Olsen 103), while in Knossos she finds that “women also functioned as the primary child care providers of their society” (Olsen 76). These administrative records offer a picture of women’s economic and caregiving roles but reveal no direct evidence of reproductive decision-making or agency. The suggestion that Harmonia encourages a visit to the herbwife to prevent pregnancy alludes to abortion practices not actually documented in the Mycenaean Bronze Age. Given these evidentiary gaps, Wilson imaginatively reconstructs this aspect of women’s experience by employing frameworks derived from classical Athens, where medical practitioners mainly understood fertility control —including abortion— in terms of female physiology and domestic medicine. As Laura Pepe notes, “there was no Athenian law banning abortion since, in ordinary circumstances, abortion was something private that affected only the oikos” (Pepe 59). Scholars such as Lesley Dean-Jones (1994) in Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek illustrate that classical Greek medical texts regard abortion as a practical treatment aimed at restoring bodily balance and preventing harm, rather than a moral transgression. Helen King (1998), in Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece, argues that Hippocratic^[17] physicians justified abortion primarily on health grounds, permitting its use to protect the mother’s life and wellbeing without universal ethical condemnation. Similarly, in Greek and Roman Medicine (2006) King emphasises the pragmatic nature of abortion in Greco-Roman medicine, where concerns for safety and practical outcomes were paramount within medical practice.

Yet in Clytemnestra’s Bind, Wilson reimagines the question of fertility not merely as a practical concern but as a deeply moral and emotional dilemma. Clytemnestra’s decision is not only about bodily management —it is about consent, trauma, and the haunting prospect of bearing a child into a violent legacy. This reframing invites modern readers to interpret her visit to Eritha not just through historical precedent, but through contemporary discourses on bodily autonomy, resistance, and reproductive ethics. Moreover, considering that, according to Pepe, “the head of the oikos was obliged to take internal measures against any woman who chose to abort without proper consent” (Pepe 59) in classical Greece, the depiction of Clytemnestra’s autonomous decision in the novel constitutes a marked departure from historical convention.This narrative shift stresses female agency in a context traditionally dominated by patriarchal control, thereby challenging historical assumptions and highlighting the enduring relevance of debates on reproductive rights today. 

Upon entering Eritha’s space, Clytemnestra walks into “an altar-filled courtyard and into a waiting room decorated with frescoes of maternity. A painted clay idol of the Lady of Childbirth occupied the centre of the room, on a plinth between two stuccoed benches” (Wilson 58). The idol’s central place and iconography evoke the visual power of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, contrasting the public, patriarchal sphere of the palace with a secluded, feminine space that holds its own symbolic authority. Frescoes in the following chamber represent a stylised female life cycle: “from graceful maidens dancing at shrines, to heavy-breasted mothers nursing infants, and stout crones teaching granddaughters to weave” (Wilson 59). These visual tropes reinforce a conventional vision of womanhood as reproductive and domestic —but the context disrupts that vision. These images articulate a prescribed, linear progression of female existence, with the roles of virgin, mother, and elder marking key stages. 

The true purpose of Clytemnestra’s visit to Eritha —preventing her pregnancy and challenging traditional roles—, however, extends beyond resisting the prescribed roles that society imposes on women or consciously disrupting the violent legacy of the Atreid bloodline. Most significantly, through Clytemnestra’s gaze and her story, an alternative use of the place is revealed. The offerings to the idol of childbirth, adorned with “gold and bronze armlets” and a “necklace heavy with beads of carnelian, amber, and blue lapis” (Wilson 58), bears this out. These offerings, left by women who visit the practitioner, not only signify acts of reverence but also suggest a desire for agency over reproductive outcomes. 

The images and idols within this feminine space, while ostensibly idealising and reinforcing the traditional roles of women, also serve as veils for female resistance, transforming them into protective symbols that assert a degree of agency over reproduction in a cultural context where male-dominated kinship structures and household priorities often shaped women’s reproductive roles. Just as the city of Mycenae symbolises the domain of the wanax and the male public sphere, this sanctuary represents a space for women —offering refuge where they can assert agency and challenge societal norms. This subversion is evident early on in the chapter, when Clytemnestra reflects that it is “better to consult with a woman who specialised in women’s bodies than the palace herbcutters who cared more about men’s wounds than women’s bleeds” (Wilson 57). 

The narrative then shifts to Clytemnestra’s relationship with her daughters, Iphigenia and Electra. Wilson conveys the tension between Clytemnestra and Electra through their differing responses to the palace frescoes. Aware of Agamemnon’s violent history and social impunity — having killed “Iphistus and Tantalus with his own hands,” as well as causing the deaths of “her father through the shock of losing both daughters to the House of Atreus,” and her mother “through grief for [her] father” (Wilson 161)— Clytemnestra attempts to protect her daughters from the suffering that may result from defying gender roles. Recognising Electra’s defiant nature, she reflects: “in a few years she’d marry, and her husband would expect a wife, not a little boy.” This awareness prompts her to shape a domestic environment that upholds traditional feminine ideals: “[t]he girls now occupied separate rooms, decorated at my orders with frescoes of girls engaged in such suitable activities as carding and spinning wool, gathering saffron, and dancing for the goddesses,” hoping Electra would “learn to tolerate her lot,” as Clytemnestra had (Wilson 193). However, Electra “saw [my italics] more than [Clytemnestra] wanted” when she “glared at the fresco of two women working at a loom.” Her stark rejection —“I don’t want to be a woman. Women are sluts” (Wilson 194)— signals both her resistance to prescribed gender roles and her rejection of her mother’s authority. Motivated by her deep attachment to Agamemnon, Electra’s attitude sets the stage for Wilson’s reinterpretation of the matricide portrayed in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Electra. 

Both Wilson and Casati invoke the Demeter and Persphone myth —Wilson more explicitly, Casati more subtly— framing Clytemnestra’s loss within a divine maternal narrative. In Wilson’s version, the myth is historicised through the figures of Mater Theia and the Spring Maiden, interpreted as precursors to Demeter and Kore, thus grounding the myth in the Mycenaean cultural and religious context. This mythological framing transforms the fresco into a visual manifestation of personal grief within a universal narrative of maternal suffering. However, the comparison does not offer comfort. While Kore’s cyclical return alleviates Demeter’s sorrow, Clytemnestra’s loss is irrevocable. Deprived of closure, Clytemnestra channels her grief into vengeance —not only to avenge Iphigenia but to reclaim agency within a shattered world. Unlike Demeter, whose mourning leads to renewal, Clytemnestra’s unrelieved sorrow perpetuates violence, culminating in the murder of Agamemnon and the collapse of patriarchal order. Her tragedy thus lies in grief transfigured into destruction. 

Chapter twenty-two of Jennifer Saint’s Elektra exemplifies the murderous gaze, which offers a detailed description of the palace bathroom at Mycenae where Clytemnestra commits her crime. The tone she adopts mirrors that of an art critic describing a painting: “[e]verything is ready. When I go into the bath chamber, the scene is set” (Saint 223). This language invites an interpretation of the passage as an ekphrastic encounter with the setting itself. Clytemnestra describes the crime scene as “a dizzying array set to overwhelm the senses.” “Every polished marble surface in the room is crowded with [flowers]” (Saint 224). Their “heady fragrance” and “the heavy perfume spilling from their lolling heads” (Saint 223) evoke a sense of overwhelming sensuality. Her meticulous control over the situation, and consequently, her sole responsibility in the murder of Agamemnon, are further underscored by her intimate care for the flowers: “I cut them myself, I bring them here every day, examining each bloom for any sign of wilting” (Saint 223). The significant presence of the flowers in the scene is not accidental; rather, it is a deliberate choice by the author to highlight the interplay between appearances and underlying intentions. While the flowers symbolise beauty and life, they also represent decay, serving as powerful symbols that mirror her facade of a loving wife, which conceals the murderous resolve she harbours beneath.

The flower imagery, combined with the sensuous atmosphere of the bath chamber, strongly recalls Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), a hallmark of Victorian Classicism. This visual parallel may not be merely incidental; rather, it suggests a deeper aesthetic and conceptual affinity between Alma-Tadema’s painting and Saint’s depiction. Both works explore a tension between beauty and excess, pleasure, and danger, eliciting a similarly conflicted emotional response from their audiences. More significantly, the intertextual resonance between them reflects what Cormac Newark terms ‘nested reception’ or “the representation of one work of art within another” (Newark 165). This layered mode of engagement highlights how authors embed their works within a network of cultural memory and artistic lineage. As Newark elaborates, such instances “hint at the different histories —social, cultural, institutional— that fiction encompasses,” revealing the critical potential of nested reception “in which works of art, as well as generating their own reception, play an important part in representing —hence reflecting and propagating— the reception of others” (Newark 166). In this sense, Saint’s evocation of The Roses of Heliogabalusdoes not merely reflect the earlier work but, as Newark emphasises, “inflects the reception of [the] original” (Newark 170), transforming its legacy through reinterpretation and recontextualisation. 

In The Roses of Heliogabalus, the young Roman emperor Elagabalus (203-222 CE) hosts an extravagant banquet. Initially, the opulence of the scene —characterised by a cascade of rose petals, classical surroundings, and vibrant colours— captivates the viewer. However, the overwhelming presence of petals unsettles the composition’s initial beauty. An image once symbolising wealth and beauty now reveals a horrifying truth: the guests are suffocating under the growing layers of petals, their impending death concealed by what once seemed an innocent display of indulgence. Both Tadema’s painting and Clytemnestra’s setting lead their audiences from an initial sense of beauty and pleasure to the eventual revelation of horror and tragedy. In The Roses of Heliogabalus, the beauty of cascading petals gives way to suffocation; while Clytemnestra’s alluring setting masks her deadly intentions. Both works deceive through beauty, exposing tragedy beneath the surface. Through ekphrastic mediation —where visual representation meets verbal revelation— the narrative exposes the hidden motives of Clytemnestra and Elagabalus. The contrast between the audience’s initial unawareness and the sudden revelation of a painful truth generates tragic irony, aligning the viewer or reader with the victims. This immersive experience enables the audience to partially grasp what the victims might have felt upon the realisation of their fate. Thus, both the viewer and the reader become complicit in the manipulation of the scene, victims of the power and control these figures exert over the narrative. 

While Tadema’s painting requires additional explanation to fully grasp its concealed meaning — since, without context, it is difficult to perceive the scene as a crime— Clytemnestra’s true intentions are revealed through an ekphrastic encounter with a fresco she has commissioned for one of the bathroom walls, “the only space in here that is not lined with ledges of flowers.” This fresco also plays with dualities and layered meanings, echoing the dynamics foreshadowed by Clytemnestra’s staging of the scene. Initially, Clytemnestra reveals that she designed the fresco to give the Atreides line “a glorious life.” In her words: “I had told the painter to show only the victories, the events that elevated my husband’s family above all others.” She explains: “[t]he deeds of the House of Atreus are rendered there. The divine Olympians, thronging our hall, ready for the feast of Tantalus. How they honour our palace. […] Their beautiful, golden faces shine from the plaster; the artist I had commanded had given them glorious life” (Saint 224). 

Just as the roses in Tadema’s painting conceal a darker truth, the fresco here takes on an additional layer of significance, revealed not in simple visual engagement, but by language —specifically, through the subversive power of irony and the double meanings embedded in Clytemnestra’s words. This linguistic strategy enables her to expose the falsehoods represented by the images, unmasking their true significance hidden behind an aura of glory. The fresco’s surface —much like the apparent victories of the Atreides— presents a glorified narrative, concealing the violent and tragic history of the family. 

A clear example is the so-called “feast of Tantalus.” Tantalus’s most infamous transgression was the murder of his son Pelops, whom he served up as a meal to the gods in a cruel attempt to assess their omniscience. The gods, however, immediately recognised the sacrilege and refused to partake in the meal. Demeter, distracted by the disappearance of her daughter Persephone, inadvertently devoured Pelops’s shoulder, becoming the only victim of Tantalus’s feast. The reference to the “feast of Tantalus” not only highlights the legacy of familial violence within the House of Tantalus, to which the Atreides belong, but more significantly, it allows the author to reframe Clytemnestra’s myth within two distinct representational dimensions. This reframing goes beyond associating Clytemnestra’s story with that of Agamemnon’s downfall or his hamartia. On one interpretative level, the narrative presents Clytemnestra —like the other women of the Tantalid lineage— as a collateral victim of the men’s barbaric actions, positioning her as another tragic figure within this cursed family, defined by the profound loss of her daughter, Iphigenia. Clear victims of this narrative are Hippodamia and Aerope. Hippodamia, married to Pelops, inadvertently becomes implicated in her father King Oenomaus’ death when Pelops competes in a chariot race to win her hand (Gantz 540-545). Atreus accuses his wife, Aerope, of having an affair with Thyestes and conspiring against him —a betrayal that prompts Atreus to murder Thyestes’s children and serve them to him at a feast in an act of revenge (Gantz 545-550). More crucially, the myth of Tantalus reinforces Clytemnestra’s association with Demeter, situating her act of vengeance within a divine framework of maternal retribution. Like Demeter, Clytemnestra avenges the deaths of her children through an act of vengeance. 

Building on her initial, superficial description of the fresco, Clytemnestra begins to encode a deeper meaning into the image —not through subtle irony, which only those familiar with the sources and mythology surrounding the House of Atreus might understand, but through linguistic negation. Apophasis reveals an alternative narrative: 

Not the slaughter of the infant, nor the revulsion of the gods. […] From Tantalus, to Pelops, so the fresco moves on to Atreus and Thyestes, who murdered their own brother Chrysippus in their struggle to rule. The painting shows Atreus taking the crown of Mycenae, but not the children of Thyestes boiled and carved up and fed to their father by their own uncle. It shows Agamemnon rising to the throne, his wife and three daughters about him, but no sunrise slaughter (Saint 224). 

Saint establishes the dialogism and intertextual relationship with her main hypotext —the Agamemnon— primarily through language. The rhetorical strategies of apophasis and irony facilitate an inverted ekphrasis —not a direct description of the image, but rather the revelation of an alternative, hidden vision. Ekphrasis enables Clytemnestra to resignify the fresco, not as a symbol of glory but as one of brutality. It also allows her to inscribe her own experiences as a victim within the grand narrative of Agamemnon’s myth, this time from her first-person perspective. In doing so, she recovers other marginalised voices, such as that of her daughter Iphigenia, with the ‘sunrise slaughter’ serving as a direct reference to her murder by Agamemnon to secure favourable winds for Troy. 

It is essential to highlight the crucial difference in effect between Tadema’s painting and Clytemnestra’s ekphrastic encounter. In her final interaction with the fresco, Clytemnestra’s connection to Iphigenia reveals her vulnerability: “I stroke my daughter’s painted hair and the upward curve of her lips. I hope that, among the gloomy shadows of the Underworld, she knows what I will do for her, and that, in the dark, she will smile again.” This moment humanises Clytemnestra and is further emphasised as she reflects on a time before tragedy overtook her life, when she was “a carefree girl swimming in the ocean before I ever knew of the House of Atreus at all” (Saint 225). 

Clytemnestra’s peace at the end of the ekphrastic encounter, captured in the phrase “[a] strange calm settles about me, a certainty that holds me fast to my course” (Saint 225), marks a cathartic moment. Agamemnon’s death enables her to free herself from his narrative, seek justice, and attain the peace she wants. This engagement allows the reader not only to witness but also to participate in the catharsis, offering a redemptive reimagining of Clytemnestra’s myth and encouraging a reassessment of her story from a new perspective. 

5.             Conclusions: ‘Female Historical Revisionism’ 

By deploying ekphrasis, these novels generate a layered visual narrative that gives voice to Clytemnestra’s interiority and articulates multiple, interlocking gazes. Rather than offering a stable interpretive frame, visuality becomes a source of tension —exposing identity, agency, and knowledge as contingent, partial, and shaped by the gaze.

The frescoes place Clytemnestra firmly within a Spartan cultural and political context, projecting her identity as a warrior princess. Yet this projection is revealed as an unstable mirage —ekphrasis here is more ‘real’ than the historical reality she inhabits, which fractures when she marries Agamemnon. The visual realm also becomes a space where marginalised female experiences emerge. Scenes invoking the herbwife’s domain, for instance, gesture towards both traditional female roles and subversive reproductive agency. The general vision is aligned with the historical roles of women as a space of fertility and nurture, while women recognise its hidden function as a place for abortion and embodied resistance. This dual legibility mirrors the authors’ treatment of classical sources: the same text or image yields multiple readings, depending on who sees, and how. 

At key moments, ekphrasis does not illuminate but deceives. The retelling of Iphigenia in Aulis uses imagery saturated with gold —symbols of Agamemnon’s domain— and overwhelming heat to disorient Clytemnestra and obscure the truth. The gaze remains hers, but she is blinded by the ideological weight of the imagery, unable to interpret the signs. Ekphrasis here exposes the visual field as ideologically loaded. Her misreading underscores the tragic limits of perception within a patriarchal world. 

Nested reception mediates the relationship with the source through interrelated mythic narratives. Intervisual echoes across mythic figures —Philomela, Demeter, Aerope, Semele— construct a genealogy of female pain, silence, and resistance. These connections situate Clytemnestra within a collective experience that reorients her myth through shared themes of gendered suffering and endurance. Similarly, acts of vengeance, such as the murder of Agamemnon, take shape through complex visual layering. Rather than flattening her actions into symbolic revenge, the bath scene — invoking the painting The Roses of Heliogabalus— frames her violence through a network of interlinked mythological and aesthetic references. 

Clytemnestra’s mêtis further benefits from ekphrastic expansion. These novels frame her strategic intelligence not as cold calculation, but as a form of embodied cognition shaped by emotional complexity. Ekphrasis exposes this internal conflict, allowing her cunning to register as both deeply human and politically charged. She actively chooses this aspect of her personality, rather than having it imposed on her by a narrator seeking to demonise her. 

This analysis underscores the central role of ekphrasis in enabling female historical revisionism that reworks the classical tradition while maintaining a reconciliatory engagement with ancient sources. Rather than presenting contradictory narratives, the authors’ contributions take the form of additions that build on classical material. In this context, ekphrasis functions not by changing the main events of myth, but by offering a visual counterpoint that adds depth to the portrayal of figures such as Clytemnestra. Specifically, the imagined frescoes act as interpretive layers, bringing to light the emotions and motivations that classical texts leave unspoken. As a result, notional ekphrasis broadens the tradition from within, allowing a fuller picture of Clytemnestra’s agency while remaining grounded in the classical framework. More broadly, the use of ekphrasis offers a reflection on the nature of reception. Just as images take on new meanings depending on how they are viewed, myths also shift through acts of reinterpretation. In this sense, ekphrasis becomes a reconciliatory model of reception: a way of re-seeing tradition through openness, variation, and a feminism that engages with rather than rejects the past. 

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^[1] See Clark 2024, Arl 2024. 

^[2] She assumes a central role in Clytemnestra: The Mother’s Blade (2017) by Victoria Grossack and Alice Underwood,  Clytemnestra’s Last Day (2017) by Montana Katz, A Thousand Ships (2019) by Natalie Haynes, Daughters of Sparta (2021) by Claire Heywood, A Spartan’s Sorrow (2022) by Hannah Lynn, Elektra (2022) by Jennifer Saint, Clytemnestra (2023) by Costanza Casati, and Clytemnestra’s Bind (2023) by Susan Wilson. Her story also resonates more peripherally —though no less significantly— in recent works including Emily Hauser’s Golden Apple Trilogy (2018), Luna McNamara’s Psyche and Eros (2023), Claire North’s Homeric retellings Ithaca (2022) and House of Odysseus(2023), The Last Song of Penelope (2024), Pat Barker’s The Voyage Home (2024) and J. Susanne Wilson’s The Death and Life of Iphigenia(2025). 

^[3] The field of classical reception studies employs a range of strategies through which ancient texts and myths are reinterpreted. Lorna Hardwick’s vocabulary for reception studies catalogues these approaches a s including —but not limited to— acculturation, adaptation, analogue, appropriation, authentic, correspondences, dialogue, equivalent, foreignization, hybrid, intervention, migration, refiguration, translation, transplant, and version. Hardwick emphasises that these categories are often fluid and overlapping, with concepts operating in tandem or even becoming interchangeable in practice (Hardwick 9-10; see also “Appendix”).

^[4] Although Euripides’ tragedy was composed after Aeschylus’ Oresteia, its narrative chronology precedes the events of

Agamemnon in the latter work.

^[5] See Edith Hall, “Mythical Retellings: Reimagining the women of Greek Myth,” British School at Athens, streamed

live on November 6, 2023, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKVuPTk9gIM.

^[6] The cultural horizon refers to the set of cultural values, assumptions, and interpretative frameworks that shape how readers understand and give meaning to a given text in a specific historical context. This concept is adapted from Hans Robert Jauss’s notion of the “horizon of expectation” (Jauss 1982), which describes the anticipations and interpretative norms audiences bring to a text. In the ancient Greek world, an analogous concept is paideia, the system of education and cultural formation that shaped classical thought and reception.

^[7] All citations from classical source texts refer to verse numbers as they appear in the modern English translations listed in the Works Cited.

^[8] See Winnington-Ingram 1948; Millett 1970; Zeitlin 1978 

^[9] Three works contain references to Sparta: Herodotus’ Histories, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and Xenophon’s Hellenica. These are all works from the Classical period. 

^[10] The term Spartan mirage refers to the distorted and idealised perception of Sparta, where people have elevated the myth of its social, political, and military systems above historical reality. Politicians, philosophers, and other commentators have used this constructed image throughout history as a model of a utopian state, often reflecting their own agendas rather than the complexities of Spartan society. 

^[11] Ruth Webb questions the coherence of the term ekphrasis, noting the extent to which its definition has been reshaped to suit individual critical agendas: “one is tempted to ask whether there is in fact a single phenomenon that can usefully be called ‘ekphrasis’” (Webb 7). 

^[12] For a detailed account of the development of ekphrasis from Homer to contemporary authors like Margaret Atwood, see Sofie Behluli and Gabriele Rippl’s “Ekphrasis: Intermedial and Anglophone Perspectives” (2024). For more recent critical reassessments of the term considering late twentieth and early twenty-first-century cultural shifts, see David Kennedy and Richard Meek’s volume Ekphrastic Encounters: New interdisciplinary essays on literature and the visual arts (2019), as well as the 2018 special issue of Poetics Today. 

^[13] According to Gantz (Gantz 548-549), a lesser-known version of the myth recounts that Clytemnestra first married Tantalos and had a child with him, both of whom Agamemnon killed before forcibly marrying her. Euripides presents this account in Iphigenia at Aulis, where he implies rather than states Agamemnon’s motive. Later mythographers, including Apollodoros and Pausanias, recount this tradition, identifying Tantalos as a son of Thyestes, though Pausanias omits the child. 

^[14] In this novel, the author develops Clytemnestra’s character through contrasts with key figures. The author juxtaposes her with Odysseus in terms of mêtis (cunning intelligence). In relation to Leda, the narrative emphasises their roles as women, with Leda symbolising submission and Clytemnestra resisting subjugation. The novel contrasts her rationality and empiricism with the prophetic visions and spiritual authority of Calchas, highlighting her preference for reason over divine insight. The text depicts her in a dualistic relationship with Agamemnon, exploring this through the application of the Homeric hero’s areté (virtue or excellence) in the sense of compassion towards Clytemnestra. 

^[15] Other writers have employed the myth of Philomela to recast the figure of Clytemnestra —for instance, by Thackeray in Vanity Fair. See Dibattista’s “The Triumph of Clytemnestra: The Charades in Vanity Fair” (1980).  

^[16] Wilson argues: “I have striven to portray as authentic and rich a Mycenaean culture as possible by drawing on scholarship and archaeological evidence. To fill in the gaps, I have referred to other Bronze Age cultures and later Greek sources, using my imagination to create something plausibly Mycenaean” (Wilson, Google Docs direct message to author, January 10, 2024).

^[17] The Hippocratic Corpus is a collection of medical texts attributed to Hippocrates and his followers from ancient Greece (fifth to fourth century BCE). It covers a wide range of medical topics, including ethics, diagnosis, and treatments. Regarding abortion, the Hippocratic Corpus contains early written thoughts on the practice. In the Hippocratic Oath, the author says: “I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion” (Hippocrates 299). However, this contradicts other Hippocratic texts which describe abortive remedies or actions that cause abortion. This contradiction has sparked a large amount of scholarly debate over what exactly the Oath means and how it fits with actual medical practice. For a detailed discussion of the various interpretations regarding the Hippocratic Oath’s prohibition on abortive pessaries and its apparent contradictions with other Hippocratic texts, see Pepe 42. 

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