I'm so confused by all the so-called feminist retellings that reduces these women to reactionary rather than proactive. They claim to be "giving voices" to these female characters... but they strip the women of agency they had in their original story. Like you said, they're no longer making their own choices. The men were the ones who made them do the bad thing. And it displays a lack of understanding for how women have found ways to achieve power throughout the years. Lady Macbeth is a brutal character, who verbally abuses her husband to make him do what she wants, only to realize she bit off more than she can chew. The "men bad, women good" aspect of so many of these stories also drives me up the wall. Because it's over simplistic, and disingenuous. I also love your point about women throughout history finding love. And what a disservice it is to erase that. I think erasing it from history (both real and literary history) makes it harder for us to move beyond the toxic gender dynamics people say they want to correct.
completely agree! lady macbeth is not a nice person and she does really bad things. sometimes women are bad and that's a fact of life! and yes to your last point too about it being harder to move beyond toxic gender dynamics! if anything it reinforces a strict gender binary
@@nataliereads.mp4 The channel Kate Alexandra did a fantastic video about the problem with Greek Mythology retellings, which talks specifically about how so many of the retellings we see become so popular nowadays often misrepresents how stories like the Illiad actually portrayed Helen. One of her points I really liked was how Penelope is a character who is defined be inaction... But that's because, just like her husband, she uses guile, and trickery. To ignore that is to ignore who Penelope is, and her strengths.
A great example of this is House of the Dragon, though it’s an adaptation not a retelling. The writers set out to make a feminist story that’s anti patriarchy and somehow made all the female characters incompetent and completely passive at every turn. ☹️
@@songweretson I really struggle with this. Because on the one hand, yes, there are stories of women who through guile, trickery and even seduction manages to achieve power or further their goals. But the main difference is that in about 90% of myths and stories the women are stationary and largely inactive (Penelope is at Ithaca, Circe is on her island) while the men are out and about achieving miracles and heroic deeds while at the same time evolving as people. Even with the addition of Helen of Troy's perspective and portrayal it is still, to me, yet another lament of a (the prominent woman of a story's) woman's impotence to affect the situation. And while yes you could say the same of King Priam here, that does what? Put Helen on the same level of sidelining as Priam? While that is interesting conceptually it still just instills a resentful disinterest in me that women in these stories are so inactive, are told to be so clever or so this and that and yet nothing is shown for it. We praise Penelope yet Odysseus is the far more storied and interesting character. Who does exciting and incredible things while also overcoming and having interesting personal developments. In so many stories women are the sidelined and least interesting characters, helpless observers and damsels (see Perseus' mother and Helen and Cassandra) or at best in many modern stories the supporting sidekick. (And this is not even getting into the internal and social misogyny of subtle trickery and especially seduction being seen as inferior, weak and cowardly acts of power to the more physical, violent ones of men.). Are there any stories like the one of Odysseus but of women instead? Of complexity, agency AND action without falling into some tired and deadbeaten trope of a horse? Never read Macbeth, mostly into the discussion of greek myth and retellings.
"this idea that women need external corruption to reach the same level of moral complexity men are born with" 👏👏👏 the books where we felt sorry for maligned female villains were cool but we're ready for women to be evil too now please
OH MY GOD YOU'RE RIGHT! The animated barbie movies were peak feminine fantasy, they were so fun. I don't like that the trend of Greek Feminist retellings is now spilling over to the other parts of classic literature, most of the time they miss the point so bad, like painting demeter as an obstacle for persephone and hades love or thinking circe is a girlboss for SAing Odysseus, then there's cases like this book where they try to fix what wasn't broken.
The take ‘I’m giving her a voice, giving her agency’ is…. Endlessly funny in the case of Lady Macbeth. Like yeah, that’s what her problem was! She didn’t make ENOUGH decisions!
The book was viciously anti Scottish, and the bit at the start where she claims period accurate spelling, is garbage. The bit that really made me angry was calling one of the witches Gruoch. That’s the name of the real MacBeth’s queen. I’m not sure when MacBeth is supposed to be set, the real Macbeth was king of Scotland from 1040 - 1057. As for Ava Reid’s version, who knows, because she claims Æthelstan is king of England, he ruled from 925-937. If you want a great retelling of Macbeth that focuses on the real history and makes lady Macbeth a real character I would recommend Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid
“feminist retellings” that actually make things worse for the main female protagonist for no reason are so common and like. and for what? i remember i gave “ariadne” by jennifer saint a try, because ariadne is one of my favorite mythological characters, and for whatever reason saint decides to take this rare mortal woman in greek mythology who actually gets a happy ending after going through suffering, and take that happy ending away from her to make an incredibly flimsy “feminist” point of “sometimes men… are bad….” like yea no fucking shit there’s already a figure in ariadne’s story to make that point with WITHOUT actively choosing to make her relationship with her husband toxic and unfulfilling.
i haven't read this book but i genuinely can't understand the motivation behind making ariadne's entire life a tragedy when dionysus actually falls in love with her unlike every other god in greek mythology (slight exaggeration i remember you eros) and theseus is already basically the worst guy in all of greek mythology so you don't even need to change the actual myth to make the men are bad point in the first place. he's literally already an objectively horrible person. why drag dionysus into this too. why can't ariadne have a nice life
Omg yes i hated that book!!! Ariadne was one of the few mortal women who turned a god because Dionysus asked Zeus to turn her immortal, and she also was part of his cults with the maenads, so imagine my disappointment when the author made her the equivalent of a stay at home wife who was scandalized by his religious rites with the maenads..... Just why? Weird choice... And her life ends just like that, in tragedy ... Jennifer Saint you CHOSE to do that! Lmao
something about all these modern feminist retellings changing the story so that the protagonist character is sexually assaulted is.... far more sexist than whatever was going on in the originals. it's the female protagonist version of fridging men's wives. sexual assault is a horrible thing and doing it to your characters for literally no reason apart from making them tough or crazy or evil or whatever is just bad writing. it flattens the character and it just makes them way less interesting. lady macbeth is one of my favourite shakespeare characters and that's honestly because she is just kind of unhinged. she's so into murder that when her husband says he's not going to kill someone she goads him into it and insults his masculinity. and then she goes crazy with guilt. it's so interesting to see characters who didn't have some kind of horrible thing happen to them doing evil. almost like everyone doesn't need a tragic backstory. and frankly it's just stupid that authors of feminist retellings constantly go out of their way to make the women these passive characters who can never do any wrong and only end up in whatever situation they are in because they were reacting to some other terrible thing that happened to them. women can be evil too. unironically. to pretend otherwise is just gender essentialism. but for some reason all the women in retellings are trapped by their circumstances and writing undergraduate women's studies theses about it instead of having a personality.
BARS on the feminist retelling part 👏👏! I find it so odd that often the first thing the writers do in these retellings is to take away the female characters' agency and when creating nuance for them, they instead create excuses or reasonings that so often ends up just taking away all the nuance the original had... In some way it is a symptom of sexism that these female characters' aren't allowed to be messy and have their issues without giving them SA trauma or apologizing their behavior with reasoning that just makes them seem a more reactive character instead of an active one as the original may have been :/
the stripping away of the nuance thing is so real. reminds me of when people try to absolve Azula from ATLA of all blame ( she was a traumatized 14 yo, she did nothing wrong, it was all Ozai or Ursa or even Iroh to blame, she should've had a redemption arc even if she expressed zero remorse for any of her actions, etc.) like god forbid we have a complex and nuanced female villain in media.
great video !!!! definitely feeling the feminist (actually not that much) retellings fatigue. it's all trying to seem progressive without doing anything remotely progressive
As a historian that specialized in the ancient period, the reason why Greek mythological women are so fascinating to me is because they were created by the very misoginistic/patriarcal greek society, and they make me question what was the real role that regual real women had. Because they imagined such complex character that go against what we thing women should be in patriarcal society. Yes, Penelope the archetipical "good wife", but she is also ruling an island by herself and using triks that equated her to her husband. Medea is often qualify as villain, but the narrative never punishes her for her actions. Most of them have this small (or not so small) contradictions that make you wonder how was live for real women, as they seem to be soo much more that we are lead to belive. This is why I prefer the original sources, but I understand that retellings are way more accesible to a general public, so I wish they had more of neuance understanding of the stories that they are telling. Great video!
absolutely!! tysm for your perspective. I’m currently a grad student in classics, so maybe i have a bias, but i completely agree with you! the originals very often just have so much more culture and context and characterization, sometimes the modern retellings feel like a stripped down version. ty for watching 🤍
Such an interesting point! I took a classics mythology class in college, and Medea was one of my favorite characters. She murdered her own children to get revenge on her husband, and that kind of wickedness is just so rich and fascinating on a character level. It’s like, a corruption arc or something, and women deserve cool corruption arcs too! It’s what I keep hoping to get out of these retellings.
many of these retellings tend to have a very generalized/bioessentialist idea of womanhood, where it ends up being even more regressive by p much saying "a Woman Story is always about a woman being abused by the men in her life", it reduces their lives to the most painful points, and often individualizes that suffering bc they'll have no important women in their lives to lean on, and of course no compassion from *any* of the men..... i love seeing what stories look like from different characters' perspectives but it has to actually be concievably the same story
yeah absolutely -- i had a section at the beginning of the video talking about how her magic only applying to men reinforces bioessentialism, but i ended up cutting it out!
This reminds me of the & Juliet advertisements saying “What if Juliet didn’t end it all over a man?” as if also Romeo didn’t end it all over a woman. It was such a weird way to make R&J feminist that it just gave me the ick. Especially since it glosses over the very real issues of suicide. Idk maybe the actually musical is pretty good but I never saw it and probably never will 🤷♀️.
From what I heard, & Juliet is a jukebox musical which their nothing wrong with jukebox musicals, but their like no original songs it's all just covers under a Broadway label
29:10 Yes! That’s what I noticed as well: all these people in those “patriarchal societies” (fictional or based on our world) that have such a modern knowledge of feminism and oppression with terms/verbiage I will bet was not around at the time that I just cannot suspend my disbelief enough to take the critique at face value. Especially when the feminisms is only reserved to the “heroic” characters and all the antagonists are comically sexist so we can point at them and say “Look at him! How evil!” Which I hate because it means we see sexism as this conscious, deliberate act only bad people are capable of instead of a part of our society that anyone can perpetuate and often is much more subtle than men saying women should just be baby makers etc. That’s my issue. Because it presupposes that sexism (and bigotry as a whole) is something bad people opt into, is clearly identifiable, and will be “defeated” if you prove them wrong or “girlboss” enough. This portrayal is especially harmful because them any rhetoric or discussion about sexism is just about morals and who is the better person instead of an (introspective) analysis of the relationship women have with men and that even good meaning people can perpetuate harmful beliefs if left unchecked. Sorry for my rant, but it annoys me because that is exactly the attitude that allows men to get away with so much shit because they can point at the moustache twirling sexists and say “See! I’m not like that. I couldn’t possibly be sexist” while ignoring that they live in a culture that is so saturated with bigotry of all types that identifying it means actually examining things you never questioned before.
I haven’t finished the video yet but as someone who has read another Ava Reid (A Study in Drowning) I wanted to add something I observed in that book when I read it. You mention that Macbeth is described as this hulking, strong man and is also portrayed as an agent of the patriarchy and evil, and that’s something I noticed (and didn’t like) in A Study in Drowning. There were two “types” or man there: the big, hulking, hairy guy and the slim, unthreatening, “Feminist King” (as in a perfect feminist who just appeared in the apparent 18th century whateverland that is otherwise super patriarchal) not that I even mind that he is a feminist, but it struck me as odd how the “hairy, big, huge” guys are all evil and SAers but the pretty “nor typically manly” guy is a perfect feminist, while again the “big men” are SAers (the both of them, lol). Especially with how often their hairy forearms were referenced and how threatening and big they are. Imo, Ava Reid has done some surface level study of feminism (at least that’s how I felt it) but hasn’t ventured into more nuance beyond that. Just how the one Lord is so comically sexist but yet so flimsy that by the end the issue is just resolved. My point being that I have become tired of these supposed “feminist retellings”, because rarely do they venture outside of the idea that woman = good and man = evil, which, ironically enough, only helps reinforce the idea that women cannot be nuanced or complicated characters.
YUP that’s exactly the two types of men in this book: macbeth vs her actual love interest who is somehow centuries ahead in how he views women. that’s upsetting to know that she has been using that binary in other works, i’ve heard good things about A Study in Drowning so i thought maybe it would be better in that regard. and you are SO right that it only reinforces sexist ideas.
@@nataliereads.mp4 I did enjoy A Study in Drowning as a novel but as a feminist critique it was garbage, sorry. My main issue was that she presented all these problems but failed to adequately address/resolve them in the narrative. What especially bugged me (and minor spoiler) is that she just let the MCs xenophobia run unchecked, with a short acknowledgment that it was not her best move, but alas. In A Study in Drowning there were these two countries and they are at war, so the people of her country hate the others, right? The love interest (Feminist King) had a parent from the other country and therefore has a foreign last name, which she finds out pretty early and is a reason why she distrusts him and thinks he is evil. Like she comments how he must be there to spy on them or is trying to destroy their cultural heritage for his “homeland”. She eventually realises that he is not evil and not trying to destroy their country, but I don’t feel like it was ever adequately addressed. What i would have enjoyed more was her realising (and not like 50% into the book when she finally thinks that maybe calling him a foreign traitor is not fair) that he, like her, has to deal with prejudice and barriers, even if for his nationality and not gender. It would have been an interesting way to contrast the two and offer a nuanced critique, but nope. (I don’t know if she ever actually apologises beyond a “sorry for insulting you” but it’s been a while, so it could be. I was just reminded of that when you explained the way she wrote about Scottish people in Lady Macbeth. Anyway, I could rant about this book for hours (and I did, my poor mom lol) but I shan’t bother you anymore.
This video reminds me of a post I saw where it said “what they don’t show you in medieval novels” and it was just facts about medieval societies that showed that despite its massive flaws it wasn’t just death and sadness and tragedy everywhere and that peasants weren’t entirely helpless and then “what they do show you: unnecessary violence against women” In the end both of these type of stories in the end take away all the agency women had, even if it wasn’t much to begin with, to make them reactionary to the world around them. As a woman these stories make me feel insulted by how afraid they are to show flaws and make a character unsympathetic. Women are people, we all make mistakes and can sometimes be unsympathetic. I don’t like feeling frail. This video has even reconsidered me to think some things on how I write some of my women characters, so thank you so much
I really feel you on how we characterize the past and how honestly annoying these narratives are - as if joy was invented once women could get their own credit cards
After reading Jennifer Saint's Ariadne and now this, I think I am officially done with these "feminist" retellings. Saint had no message, no angle, no ANYTHING new to her version of the story, and Reid completely disregarded the original character she was supposedly exploring. It's a shame bc I would be very interested in a book about Hera, who is like never the main character in stories she's involved in. But I have no faith in the current market to give me something worthwhile.
I really enjoyed reading Circe and was so excited to see Ariadne had her own character study novel, even if it was by a different author. I 100% agree with you. It just felt like a rehashing of mythology with just a different teller. It was so disappointing to me
Also just wanted to comment a lot of these retellings honestly feel white privileged feminism. I dunno I just seen this a lot. There was even the movie Queenie where a slave owning woman tells her daughter ((her fiance had a baby with a slave)) that the black women slaves were put into their lives so they wouldn't have to please the dark urges of men or something on those lines.
I enjoyed Lady Macbeth having not read the original and no inkling of what the original story was. That being said, I loved the discussions within this video essay. They were ideas and perspectives I had not considered before. Why do the majority of us feel that the evil nature of a woman must be justified by vengeance? Why can’t a WMC be inherently evil, for pleasure, for entertainment, or just for the sake of it? I also read Cersei having no idea that in the original story she was not assaulted.
You hit the nail on the head with this retelling. I LOVE Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth and all the ways she rails against society’s understanding of womanhood, and I’ve always related to that frustration, so I was so excited for this entire book which I expected to lean into her agency, her ambition, and her fury. And I loved the Wolf and the Woodsman, so I was so excited, but this retelling was the exact opposite of what I hoped. I enjoyed parts of it, but it was far from the thing I expected.
thank you for sharing your thoughts on this book! i was so excited to read this as a fan of Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid (however, i DNF'd A Study in Drowning) and a Macbeth stan. i love your point about how Lady Macbeth uses gendered language especially in her iconic soliloquy but it does feel reductive to confine? her to the social and gender norms during that time in Reid's book. Lady Macbeth is such a complex and active character - one of my favorites from Shakespeare! i absolutely despise "feminist retellings" that box women into the "good feminine demure Madonna" archetype. women, just like everyone else, can be complex, nuanced, and it's okay to have strong women who do "wrong" things! such a tragedy to drop the ball with a character that can be explored in a dedicated novel bec there's so much substance in the source material :( tl;dr i support women's rights and wrongs! lol
This is an incredible video and I'm glad you touched on the topic of SA and how it's almost become this cheap gimmick for writers to use in their so called "feminist" retellings
im so glad i found this video! i study social anthropology and specialize in ancient civilizations and i love classic literature as well. being able to read classic and apply cultural context and understand to them really enhances my reading experience, so when i see these retellings like circe and tsoa i get SO frustrated. its not that i dont believe they cant be retold, but its not often done in a meaningful way that takes into account the context of the time period its based in. yeah madeline miller has a classics degree, but that doesnt mean she understands the anthropological aspects of classic literature. i think thats where a lot of these retellings fail. i also think the need to coddle women and make them out to be weaker then they are is a huge problem in these books as well edit: i realize what i said about studying classics can be taken incorrectly but and i understand theres a level of understanding context and history involved but i mean on more a nitty gritty in depth level like someone would have studying anthropology or history
yeah, I think she made a lot of choices to sanitize and rewrite the story to appeal to a modern western audience, which I don't agree with :/ she's definitely an educated woman, but I don't think she does a fantastic job balancing context/historicity, like you said, with modern interpretation. her treatment of sa is weird to me, and her achilles has changed the public perception of the iliad to a truly unrecognizable degree lmao
I didn't read the title properly and thought this was about the film Lady Macbeth but I'm glad I ended up watching the full thing as I felt you touched on all the points I think about these retellings. I tend to avoid these types of novels as I feel they have a distain or just lack of knowledge about the original novels, and only look at it through really basic surface level lenses, as you put much better than me. I was always drawn to Macbeth because of the interesting relationship between the two, like both of them are driven by poisonous ambition and its actually quite refreshing to see a female character in an active role in stories not driven by revenge, maybe the author decided to add more pain and suffering to Lady Macbeth's backstory to make it seem acceptable to audiences that struggle to relate to female characters? I feel like I'm just repeating all your points but I really agreed with them x Also the bit about the half English good guy is so funny as somebody who's from Britain but not English like in any folk tale from Ireland/Scotland/Wales that would be a bad sign.
it's a small part but the story of that random greek man dying for his daughter and you talking about the positive individual relationships within these oppressive systems really got me. great video!
ty! i wasn't sure if i should keep that part in bc it felt a little off topic, but it was really powerful to me! the fact that this woman who lived in ~400 BCE probably never got to know how much her dad was willing to sacrifice for her, but I as a woman in 2024 do! that love transcends time. it exists, and it matters. women have always experienced love!
Thank you for touching on the characterization of Macbeth himself! In the original there are actually layers to his thoughts of morality and descent into corruption. Here he is just a Big Violent Evil Man. The way BOTH characters were so degradingly reduced and stripped of any nuance and character… I love Reid’s writing and love her original stories, but this was not it.
ahhh such an excellent video! Especially love the point of women having to have something bad for them to act morally "incorrectly" which inherently gives them less complexity than the male characters who can do whatever they like. let women be evil again!! such a smart video and I'm shocked by how small this channel is, very excited to watch every single one of your videos now!!!!
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that the book would reflect on Macbeth the play or character since that’s kind of the marketing of it. Maybe you’d enjoy it more if you didn’t know, but if the text isn’t benefited by a comparison to the text, it feels like a flaw to not use a completely new premise/name instead of using the name and recognizability as a jumping off point.
yeah i fear that’s my thought too :( i really don’t understand why she didn’t just write a completely original work! she’s a very well established author with a lot of fans, she definitely would have been able to sell it without the macbeth comparison! i feel like maybe she shot herself in the foot with the macbeth of it all.
@@nataliereads.mp4 the part you mention where she’s not even Scottish just kind of shows the absolute disinterest she had to make this loyal, which yeah, she could have just done her own thing. But I guess even with the fanbase, it wasn’t what a publisher wanted to sell? Maybe? Idk
This video was one of the best things I’ve ever seen. Congrats. I know this must have taken a long time, but this was incredibly well thought through and executed!
This is the first video I’ve seen of yours and I really enjoyed it!! I’ve had a lot of issues with “feminist retellings” lately just stripping agency away from female characters. It happens so frequently it’s genuinely disheartening, and it’s disappointing to hear this is just another one of those examples. Especially because of how affected I was by Lady Macbeth in the Shakespeare play when I first read it in high school. She was such a fascinating and tragic character. Have you read Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik? It’s a retelling mashup of a handful of fairytales. It’s my favorite book of all time, with some of my favorite female characters in any media I’ve come across. They’re fully realized people, all with different strengths and flaws and sympathetic motives. They’re beautifully imperfect individuals, and have full agency over their choices despite living in a patriarchal society. They take action, they don’t just sit around and wait for action to come to them, even if it turns out the actions they take maybe weren’t the best because they’re only human. The narrative gives them grace while simultaneously holding them accountable. And the relationships they have with the men in their lives (romantic, familial or otherwise) are intricate and multifaceted and meaningful, but don’t define any of them. (Also my girl Miryem is unapologetically Jewish and it’s SO rare to find fantasy books with Jewish leads, she means the world to me.) Spinning Silver has raised the bar of writing empowered female characters so high for me and no other author has been able to clear it lol. I will forever continue my search though.
I really appreciate your commentary on this! Your video got the point I think some others missed, even in critical reviews of Lady Macbeth. What people need to understand is that Shakespeare's portrayals of women were already progressive For The Time. He consistently put female characters into important roles that had agency in the plot, which was not at all a given. Lady Macbeth is already one of the best examples, but I also love Volumnia, Coriolanus's mother, who is explicitly the real heroine of Coriolanus. That's not to say that there's nothing to criticize or analyze from a feminist lens, of course. When I went to see Much Ado About Nothing without reading it beforehand I was shocked and upset by Leonato telling his own daughter Hero that she should die for adultery (it was a really good performance 😅 and when I say 'upset', I mean emotionally affected, not that I thought this plot point shouldn't have been included in the play). There is sort of a criticism against that in the play in that of course Hero is innocent, but it never says that if Hero actually had been adulterous that Leonato shouldn't have denounced her. It's just so strange to me that this feminist retelling thing tends to target where it's not needed? As you said, they add violence where it isn't as if that's all that's needed to give female characters depth. I wish more retelling authors would take a Margaret Atwood approach and limit themself to including acts of violence and misogyny where there is a historical basis for it. It would be a much more effective story if authors didn't act like all women are or must be victims and 100% justified all the time, or that men always act as villains and abusive monsters 100% of the time (except the one Good One who might be the love interest). I would like this story a lot more if they acknowledged that men and women could have good individual relationships under patriarchy, and that patriarchy *would still be a problem.* For example if it showed Macbeth and Lady Macbeth having a good or even decent relationship, even if they don't romantically love each other, and had Macbeth as a generally well-intentioned character who still might hurt her by reinforcing her limited role as a woman in society. And in arranged marriages it's ridiculous to act like every single one of them must have been horribly abusive. Some were and I'll never deny that many women in history have been systemically hurt by men, but it's not useful to act like men were never nice or supportive to women either, or that women never found their own power within their situations. Hundreds or thousands of years ago, people were still people, just like they are today.
It’s oxymoronic to call it a “feminist retelling” if women really want to be empowered they would write their own stories instead of bastardizing and reusing the stories written by the men they supposedly hate so much. It’s both tragic and comical.
I really like your point about women only being allowed to act bad if it is response to a man wronging them - it is a form of stripping of agency as you say. Women are deep and complex. This is also seen in House of the Dragon - the changes to Alicent from book to show. Sometimes we want evil women in fiction!
i can definitely see that for hotd! i haven't read the book, but the female characters (esp alicent and rhaenyra) are very reactionary, not proactive. they just deal with the consequences of the men's actions!
Thank you! These are issues I've had with many retellings and also historical novels these days. I love strong, interesting female characters that exist within their own time but still pushes back against the ways she is trapped.
Thank you so much for making this Video!! I got this book two weeks ago and it’s been burning a hole into my shelf since I finished it-I got tricked my the blurb and cover 😔- I hate it. I have been reading “feminist retellings” for the past 5 years and so many of these points are accurate and have been on my mind! So many of these books feel like a YA(like 13) simple introduction to feminism but with SA and unnecessary torture porn. I’m tired of reading about these women losing what little agency they already had.
thats a great point! for a lot of them, the writing style and complexity does feel kinda YA/younger in demographic, but the inclusion of sa and extreme violence is so adult??? it's a weird combination of oversimplification and over-violence.
This is such an intelligent, nuanced take! I really appreciated your perspective on the book and the reductive feminist retelling trend we're seeing right now. You slayed this.
A feminist retelling that’s actually good (not a book though) is Six the Musical. Though it’s more a historical retelling than a retelling of an old text
you really hit the nail on the fuckin head with "they're trying to do a feminist retelling without doing any of the work" and it also explains why all the hunger games knock-offs failed to say anything significant--- you can't deconstruct something you don't understand i think leaning too far into a kind of "perfect feminism" where the heroine can do no wrong is what leads to the lack of agency. they're scared of having a flawed or unlikeable character. or maybe it's actually "perfect victimhood" that has them believing their heroines can't be worthy of sympathy unless they are the perfect victim.
I think these authors wanna start with the base of "she's just a normal girl", then heap tragedy on them to "explain" why they become evil women or to make the pure heroines more morally gray and jaded. I also feel like there's an aspect of being award bait? Like how Oscar bait movies are so dark and heavy?
aside from everything else you said, which is all good and valid...do people really think there's no subtext in shakespeare? have they...listened to him???
Lady Macbeth being one of the most proactive female characters of all time and they do a retelling to “give her a voice “??? Like im sorry but giving Lady macbeth a voice in the original ended up with a kill count and a civil war, i think you can’t outdo that 😭
This is exactly how i felt about a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice that I found in my college's literary journal. They cap it off by saying that "in all the versions of the story, do you recall Eurydice asking to be rescued?" and this is preceded by Eurydice joyfully committing suicide because she is being "Stalked" by Orpheus. Garbage story written in the cringiest manner possible.
thats a great point! I thought about that too when reading Natalie Haynes' essay on Eurydice in her book, Pandora's Jar! Overall really enjoyed the book, but she did mention the lack of agency on Eurydice's part and how she may not have wanted to be saved-- but my thing is, isn't that an empowerment in itself? That she had someone who loved her enough that he didn't even need to ask, didn't even hesitate to save her? I don't think thats a lack of agency at all-- her social relationships resulted in someone being willing to put themselves in danger for her sake, that's agency! thats empowerment! love is not anti-feminist!
just to start off it feels really icky to portray scottish history in a way that erases actual scottish women from the story. (also im pretty sure the whole play was part of a flatter the queen strategy that shakespeare had going on and the person that did actually macbeth in was supposedly someone who the queen at the time was descended from?)
I dont understand why Ava Reid Lady Macbeth was so bad. I especially hated the anti scotish rethoric given Ava Reid past work Juniper & Throne was critical of xenobia well this book reeked of it.
No literally, this can apply to a good 50% of retellings. imo Ariadne was the worst offender bc in the most widely accepted versions of the myth she ends up in a happy relationship with dionysus after having a rlly hard life and ends up a goddess. But the retelling decided that NO!! Instead, he abuses her as well and her sister kills herself and ariadne just dies at the end?? and the entire time she didn't really do anything, like you said, things just happen _to_ her.
I’m trying to phrase this really carefully, because I feel like this is an excellent commentary and I don’t want to see that I am “what abouting” your video. What I will say is as a fan of Ava Reid, I view her stories as more works of trauma than feminist retellings. I can’t find info on whether or not the author was SAed but these themes are always extremely present in her work, and it reads as a survivor working through trauma more than a plot based story where SA happens. Juniper and Thorn for example is BARELY related to the original fairy tale. I wouldn’t consider her work “feminist,” for many of the same reasons you bring up here. Her main characters are often victims of circumstance and society, not active players in thier stories, but that is by choice and again, related to the trauma of being assaulted. I wonder how much of the issue is marketing and the way we discuss novels for social media sound bites instead of really delving into nuance.
no worries! happy to have a productive conversation! i do agree about the marketing - i feel like i saw a quote where she described this as feminist, but i might have to come back later to give you a source? but definitely the marketing is responsible for a lot of the issues i had with this book!
I believe when she was getting criticized for how sex is handled in Juniper and Thorn, there was discussion about how she's a victim of CSA but I could be misremembering something
Idk, I still find this being a story of abuse to also be questionable. It sort of implies that the only reason Lady Macbeth is evil is BECAUSE she was SA’d, which personally leaves a bad taste in my mouth. That’s just my opinion though, if other survivors find power in it then way more power to them
Uhhh I personally would prefer to know explicitly if the book is a "feminist retelling" or an "abuse cinematic universe entry" because that's kind of a nasty thing to spring on someone.
I think retellings can be fine but I don’t get the point of giving a voice to characters who already very much have a voice, are these authors even familiar with the original texts or do they just assume that just because something is old it must be treating female characters badly? Also it looks like feminism = women can never do anything bad.
I'm so confused by all the so-called feminist retellings that reduces these women to reactionary rather than proactive. They claim to be "giving voices" to these female characters... but they strip the women of agency they had in their original story. Like you said, they're no longer making their own choices. The men were the ones who made them do the bad thing. And it displays a lack of understanding for how women have found ways to achieve power throughout the years. Lady Macbeth is a brutal character, who verbally abuses her husband to make him do what she wants, only to realize she bit off more than she can chew.
The "men bad, women good" aspect of so many of these stories also drives me up the wall. Because it's over simplistic, and disingenuous.
I also love your point about women throughout history finding love. And what a disservice it is to erase that. I think erasing it from history (both real and literary history) makes it harder for us to move beyond the toxic gender dynamics people say they want to correct.
completely agree! lady macbeth is not a nice person and she does really bad things. sometimes women are bad and that's a fact of life!
and yes to your last point too about it being harder to move beyond toxic gender dynamics! if anything it reinforces a strict gender binary
@@nataliereads.mp4 The channel Kate Alexandra did a fantastic video about the problem with Greek Mythology retellings, which talks specifically about how so many of the retellings we see become so popular nowadays often misrepresents how stories like the Illiad actually portrayed Helen. One of her points I really liked was how Penelope is a character who is defined be inaction... But that's because, just like her husband, she uses guile, and trickery. To ignore that is to ignore who Penelope is, and her strengths.
i’ll for sure check it out! ty!
A great example of this is House of the Dragon, though it’s an adaptation not a retelling. The writers set out to make a feminist story that’s anti patriarchy and somehow made all the female characters incompetent and completely passive at every turn. ☹️
@@songweretson I really struggle with this. Because on the one hand, yes, there are stories of women who through guile, trickery and even seduction manages to achieve power or further their goals. But the main difference is that in about 90% of myths and stories the women are stationary and largely inactive (Penelope is at Ithaca, Circe is on her island) while the men are out and about achieving miracles and heroic deeds while at the same time evolving as people.
Even with the addition of Helen of Troy's perspective and portrayal it is still, to me, yet another lament of a (the prominent woman of a story's) woman's impotence to affect the situation. And while yes you could say the same of King Priam here, that does what? Put Helen on the same level of sidelining as Priam? While that is interesting conceptually it still just instills a resentful disinterest in me that women in these stories are so inactive, are told to be so clever or so this and that and yet nothing is shown for it.
We praise Penelope yet Odysseus is the far more storied and interesting character. Who does exciting and incredible things while also overcoming and having interesting personal developments.
In so many stories women are the sidelined and least interesting characters, helpless observers and damsels (see Perseus' mother and Helen and Cassandra) or at best in many modern stories the supporting sidekick. (And this is not even getting into the internal and social misogyny of subtle trickery and especially seduction being seen as inferior, weak and cowardly acts of power to the more physical, violent ones of men.).
Are there any stories like the one of Odysseus but of women instead? Of complexity, agency AND action without falling into some tired and deadbeaten trope of a horse? Never read Macbeth, mostly into the discussion of greek myth and retellings.
"this idea that women need external corruption to reach the same level of moral complexity men are born with" 👏👏👏 the books where we felt sorry for maligned female villains were cool but we're ready for women to be evil too now please
Exactly!
The whole ex wives being the witches locked away thing… Barbie Magic of the Pegasus did it better
LOLLLL
@@nataliereads.mp4 I have seen that Barbie film. One of my favorites. I definitely agree.
OH MY GOD YOU'RE RIGHT! The animated barbie movies were peak feminine fantasy, they were so fun. I don't like that the trend of Greek Feminist retellings is now spilling over to the other parts of classic literature, most of the time they miss the point so bad, like painting demeter as an obstacle for persephone and hades love or thinking circe is a girlboss for SAing Odysseus, then there's cases like this book where they try to fix what wasn't broken.
The take ‘I’m giving her a voice, giving her agency’ is…. Endlessly funny in the case of Lady Macbeth. Like yeah, that’s what her problem was! She didn’t make ENOUGH decisions!
LMAO yes, lady macbeth, famously silent and subservient!
The book was viciously anti Scottish, and the bit at the start where she claims period accurate spelling, is garbage. The bit that really made me angry was calling one of the witches Gruoch. That’s the name of the real MacBeth’s queen.
I’m not sure when MacBeth is supposed to be set, the real Macbeth was king of Scotland from 1040 - 1057. As for Ava Reid’s version, who knows, because she claims Æthelstan is king of England, he ruled from 925-937.
If you want a great retelling of Macbeth that focuses on the real history and makes lady Macbeth a real character I would recommend Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid
“feminist retellings” that actually make things worse for the main female protagonist for no reason are so common and like. and for what? i remember i gave “ariadne” by jennifer saint a try, because ariadne is one of my favorite mythological characters, and for whatever reason saint decides to take this rare mortal woman in greek mythology who actually gets a happy ending after going through suffering, and take that happy ending away from her to make an incredibly flimsy “feminist” point of “sometimes men… are bad….” like yea no fucking shit there’s already a figure in ariadne’s story to make that point with WITHOUT actively choosing to make her relationship with her husband toxic and unfulfilling.
i haven't read this book but i genuinely can't understand the motivation behind making ariadne's entire life a tragedy when dionysus actually falls in love with her unlike every other god in greek mythology (slight exaggeration i remember you eros) and theseus is already basically the worst guy in all of greek mythology so you don't even need to change the actual myth to make the men are bad point in the first place. he's literally already an objectively horrible person. why drag dionysus into this too. why can't ariadne have a nice life
Omg yes i hated that book!!!
Ariadne was one of the few mortal women who turned a god because Dionysus asked Zeus to turn her immortal, and she also was part of his cults with the maenads, so imagine my disappointment when the author made her the equivalent of a stay at home wife who was scandalized by his religious rites with the maenads..... Just why? Weird choice...
And her life ends just like that, in tragedy ... Jennifer Saint you CHOSE to do that! Lmao
something about all these modern feminist retellings changing the story so that the protagonist character is sexually assaulted is.... far more sexist than whatever was going on in the originals. it's the female protagonist version of fridging men's wives. sexual assault is a horrible thing and doing it to your characters for literally no reason apart from making them tough or crazy or evil or whatever is just bad writing. it flattens the character and it just makes them way less interesting.
lady macbeth is one of my favourite shakespeare characters and that's honestly because she is just kind of unhinged. she's so into murder that when her husband says he's not going to kill someone she goads him into it and insults his masculinity. and then she goes crazy with guilt. it's so interesting to see characters who didn't have some kind of horrible thing happen to them doing evil. almost like everyone doesn't need a tragic backstory.
and frankly it's just stupid that authors of feminist retellings constantly go out of their way to make the women these passive characters who can never do any wrong and only end up in whatever situation they are in because they were reacting to some other terrible thing that happened to them. women can be evil too. unironically. to pretend otherwise is just gender essentialism. but for some reason all the women in retellings are trapped by their circumstances and writing undergraduate women's studies theses about it instead of having a personality.
BARS on the feminist retelling part 👏👏! I find it so odd that often the first thing the writers do in these retellings is to take away the female characters' agency and when creating nuance for them, they instead create excuses or reasonings that so often ends up just taking away all the nuance the original had...
In some way it is a symptom of sexism that these female characters' aren't allowed to be messy and have their issues without giving them SA trauma or apologizing their behavior with reasoning that just makes them seem a more reactive character instead of an active one as the original may have been :/
exactly 🤍 ty for watching!
the stripping away of the nuance thing is so real. reminds me of when people try to absolve Azula from ATLA of all blame ( she was a traumatized 14 yo, she did nothing wrong, it was all Ozai or Ursa or even Iroh to blame, she should've had a redemption arc even if she expressed zero remorse for any of her actions, etc.) like god forbid we have a complex and nuanced female villain in media.
great video !!!! definitely feeling the feminist (actually not that much) retellings fatigue. it's all trying to seem progressive without doing anything remotely progressive
exactly! sometimes it feels like it’s just a marketing ploy. ty for watching!
As a historian that specialized in the ancient period, the reason why Greek mythological women are so fascinating to me is because they were created by the very misoginistic/patriarcal greek society, and they make me question what was the real role that regual real women had. Because they imagined such complex character that go against what we thing women should be in patriarcal society. Yes, Penelope the archetipical "good wife", but she is also ruling an island by herself and using triks that equated her to her husband. Medea is often qualify as villain, but the narrative never punishes her for her actions. Most of them have this small (or not so small) contradictions that make you wonder how was live for real women, as they seem to be soo much more that we are lead to belive.
This is why I prefer the original sources, but I understand that retellings are way more accesible to a general public, so I wish they had more of neuance understanding of the stories that they are telling.
Great video!
absolutely!! tysm for your perspective. I’m currently a grad student in classics, so maybe i have a bias, but i completely agree with you! the originals very often just have so much more culture and context and characterization, sometimes the modern retellings feel like a stripped down version. ty for watching 🤍
Such an interesting point! I took a classics mythology class in college, and Medea was one of my favorite characters. She murdered her own children to get revenge on her husband, and that kind of wickedness is just so rich and fascinating on a character level. It’s like, a corruption arc or something, and women deserve cool corruption arcs too! It’s what I keep hoping to get out of these retellings.
many of these retellings tend to have a very generalized/bioessentialist idea of womanhood, where it ends up being even more regressive by p much saying "a Woman Story is always about a woman being abused by the men in her life", it reduces their lives to the most painful points, and often individualizes that suffering bc they'll have no important women in their lives to lean on, and of course no compassion from *any* of the men..... i love seeing what stories look like from different characters' perspectives but it has to actually be concievably the same story
yeah absolutely -- i had a section at the beginning of the video talking about how her magic only applying to men reinforces bioessentialism, but i ended up cutting it out!
This reminds me of the & Juliet advertisements saying “What if Juliet didn’t end it all over a man?” as if also Romeo didn’t end it all over a woman. It was such a weird way to make R&J feminist that it just gave me the ick. Especially since it glosses over the very real issues of suicide. Idk maybe the actually musical is pretty good but I never saw it and probably never will 🤷♀️.
i haven’t heard of it! but i agree, weird marketing that fundamentally misunderstands the source material :/
From what I heard, & Juliet is a jukebox musical which their nothing wrong with jukebox musicals, but their like no original songs it's all just covers under a Broadway label
29:10 Yes! That’s what I noticed as well: all these people in those “patriarchal societies” (fictional or based on our world) that have such a modern knowledge of feminism and oppression with terms/verbiage I will bet was not around at the time that I just cannot suspend my disbelief enough to take the critique at face value. Especially when the feminisms is only reserved to the “heroic” characters and all the antagonists are comically sexist so we can point at them and say “Look at him! How evil!” Which I hate because it means we see sexism as this conscious, deliberate act only bad people are capable of instead of a part of our society that anyone can perpetuate and often is much more subtle than men saying women should just be baby makers etc. That’s my issue. Because it presupposes that sexism (and bigotry as a whole) is something bad people opt into, is clearly identifiable, and will be “defeated” if you prove them wrong or “girlboss” enough. This portrayal is especially harmful because them any rhetoric or discussion about sexism is just about morals and who is the better person instead of an (introspective) analysis of the relationship women have with men and that even good meaning people can perpetuate harmful beliefs if left unchecked.
Sorry for my rant, but it annoys me because that is exactly the attitude that allows men to get away with so much shit because they can point at the moustache twirling sexists and say “See! I’m not like that. I couldn’t possibly be sexist” while ignoring that they live in a culture that is so saturated with bigotry of all types that identifying it means actually examining things you never questioned before.
wow well fucking said
I haven’t finished the video yet but as someone who has read another Ava Reid (A Study in Drowning) I wanted to add something I observed in that book when I read it. You mention that Macbeth is described as this hulking, strong man and is also portrayed as an agent of the patriarchy and evil, and that’s something I noticed (and didn’t like) in A Study in Drowning. There were two “types” or man there: the big, hulking, hairy guy and the slim, unthreatening, “Feminist King” (as in a perfect feminist who just appeared in the apparent 18th century whateverland that is otherwise super patriarchal) not that I even mind that he is a feminist, but it struck me as odd how the “hairy, big, huge” guys are all evil and SAers but the pretty “nor typically manly” guy is a perfect feminist, while again the “big men” are SAers (the both of them, lol). Especially with how often their hairy forearms were referenced and how threatening and big they are. Imo, Ava Reid has done some surface level study of feminism (at least that’s how I felt it) but hasn’t ventured into more nuance beyond that. Just how the one Lord is so comically sexist but yet so flimsy that by the end the issue is just resolved.
My point being that I have become tired of these supposed “feminist retellings”, because rarely do they venture outside of the idea that woman = good and man = evil, which, ironically enough, only helps reinforce the idea that women cannot be nuanced or complicated characters.
YUP that’s exactly the two types of men in this book: macbeth vs her actual love interest who is somehow centuries ahead in how he views women. that’s upsetting to know that she has been using that binary in other works, i’ve heard good things about A Study in Drowning so i thought maybe it would be better in that regard. and you are SO right that it only reinforces sexist ideas.
@@nataliereads.mp4 I did enjoy A Study in Drowning as a novel but as a feminist critique it was garbage, sorry. My main issue was that she presented all these problems but failed to adequately address/resolve them in the narrative. What especially bugged me (and minor spoiler) is that she just let the MCs xenophobia run unchecked, with a short acknowledgment that it was not her best move, but alas. In A Study in Drowning there were these two countries and they are at war, so the people of her country hate the others, right? The love interest (Feminist King) had a parent from the other country and therefore has a foreign last name, which she finds out pretty early and is a reason why she distrusts him and thinks he is evil. Like she comments how he must be there to spy on them or is trying to destroy their cultural heritage for his “homeland”. She eventually realises that he is not evil and not trying to destroy their country, but I don’t feel like it was ever adequately addressed. What i would have enjoyed more was her realising (and not like 50% into the book when she finally thinks that maybe calling him a foreign traitor is not fair) that he, like her, has to deal with prejudice and barriers, even if for his nationality and not gender. It would have been an interesting way to contrast the two and offer a nuanced critique, but nope. (I don’t know if she ever actually apologises beyond a “sorry for insulting you” but it’s been a while, so it could be. I was just reminded of that when you explained the way she wrote about Scottish people in Lady Macbeth.
Anyway, I could rant about this book for hours (and I did, my poor mom lol) but I shan’t bother you anymore.
This video reminds me of a post I saw where it said “what they don’t show you in medieval novels” and it was just facts about medieval societies that showed that despite its massive flaws it wasn’t just death and sadness and tragedy everywhere and that peasants weren’t entirely helpless and then “what they do show you: unnecessary violence against women”
In the end both of these type of stories in the end take away all the agency women had, even if it wasn’t much to begin with, to make them reactionary to the world around them. As a woman these stories make me feel insulted by how afraid they are to show flaws and make a character unsympathetic. Women are people, we all make mistakes and can sometimes be unsympathetic. I don’t like feeling frail.
This video has even reconsidered me to think some things on how I write some of my women characters, so thank you so much
thats so interesting!
and thank you for this thoughtful comment :)
I really feel you on how we characterize the past and how honestly annoying these narratives are - as if joy was invented once women could get their own credit cards
After reading Jennifer Saint's Ariadne and now this, I think I am officially done with these "feminist" retellings. Saint had no message, no angle, no ANYTHING new to her version of the story, and Reid completely disregarded the original character she was supposedly exploring. It's a shame bc I would be very interested in a book about Hera, who is like never the main character in stories she's involved in. But I have no faith in the current market to give me something worthwhile.
I really enjoyed reading Circe and was so excited to see Ariadne had her own character study novel, even if it was by a different author. I 100% agree with you. It just felt like a rehashing of mythology with just a different teller. It was so disappointing to me
Also just wanted to comment a lot of these retellings honestly feel white privileged feminism. I dunno I just seen this a lot. There was even the movie Queenie where a slave owning woman tells her daughter ((her fiance had a baby with a slave)) that the black women slaves were put into their lives so they wouldn't have to please the dark urges of men or something on those lines.
I enjoyed Lady Macbeth having not read the original and no inkling of what the original story was. That being said, I loved the discussions within this video essay. They were ideas and perspectives I had not considered before. Why do the majority of us feel that the evil nature of a woman must be justified by vengeance? Why can’t a WMC be inherently evil, for pleasure, for entertainment, or just for the sake of it? I also read Cersei having no idea that in the original story she was not assaulted.
You hit the nail on the head with this retelling. I LOVE Shakespeare’s Lady MacBeth and all the ways she rails against society’s understanding of womanhood, and I’ve always related to that frustration, so I was so excited for this entire book which I expected to lean into her agency, her ambition, and her fury. And I loved the Wolf and the Woodsman, so I was so excited, but this retelling was the exact opposite of what I hoped. I enjoyed parts of it, but it was far from the thing I expected.
thank you! i’m also a huge fan of the original, this was a really disappointing way to change the character imo
thank you for sharing your thoughts on this book! i was so excited to read this as a fan of Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid (however, i DNF'd A Study in Drowning) and a Macbeth stan. i love your point about how Lady Macbeth uses gendered language especially in her iconic soliloquy but it does feel reductive to confine? her to the social and gender norms during that time in Reid's book. Lady Macbeth is such a complex and active character - one of my favorites from Shakespeare! i absolutely despise "feminist retellings" that box women into the "good feminine demure Madonna" archetype. women, just like everyone else, can be complex, nuanced, and it's okay to have strong women who do "wrong" things! such a tragedy to drop the ball with a character that can be explored in a dedicated novel bec there's so much substance in the source material :( tl;dr i support women's rights and wrongs! lol
ty for your comment and perspective! 🤍 i have never read ava reid, but i have heard good things about her other work so i might give it a shot!
I loved ASID but I totally get why it’s not everyone’s thing. Juniper and Thorn is on my TBR
This is an incredible video and I'm glad you touched on the topic of SA and how it's almost become this cheap gimmick for writers to use in their so called "feminist" retellings
thank you!
im so glad i found this video! i study social anthropology and specialize in ancient civilizations and i love classic literature as well. being able to read classic and apply cultural context and understand to them really enhances my reading experience, so when i see these retellings like circe and tsoa i get SO frustrated. its not that i dont believe they cant be retold, but its not often done in a meaningful way that takes into account the context of the time period its based in. yeah madeline miller has a classics degree, but that doesnt mean she understands the anthropological aspects of classic literature. i think thats where a lot of these retellings fail. i also think the need to coddle women and make them out to be weaker then they are is a huge problem in these books as well
edit: i realize what i said about studying classics can be taken incorrectly but and i understand theres a level of understanding context and history involved but i mean on more a nitty gritty in depth level like someone would have studying anthropology or history
yeah, I think she made a lot of choices to sanitize and rewrite the story to appeal to a modern western audience, which I don't agree with :/ she's definitely an educated woman, but I don't think she does a fantastic job balancing context/historicity, like you said, with modern interpretation. her treatment of sa is weird to me, and her achilles has changed the public perception of the iliad to a truly unrecognizable degree lmao
I didn't read the title properly and thought this was about the film Lady Macbeth but I'm glad I ended up watching the full thing as I felt you touched on all the points I think about these retellings. I tend to avoid these types of novels as I feel they have a distain or just lack of knowledge about the original novels, and only look at it through really basic surface level lenses, as you put much better than me.
I was always drawn to Macbeth because of the interesting relationship between the two, like both of them are driven by poisonous ambition and its actually quite refreshing to see a female character in an active role in stories not driven by revenge, maybe the author decided to add more pain and suffering to Lady Macbeth's backstory to make it seem acceptable to audiences that struggle to relate to female characters?
I feel like I'm just repeating all your points but I really agreed with them x Also the bit about the half English good guy is so funny as somebody who's from Britain but not English like in any folk tale from Ireland/Scotland/Wales that would be a bad sign.
it's a small part but the story of that random greek man dying for his daughter and you talking about the positive individual relationships within these oppressive systems really got me. great video!
ty! i wasn't sure if i should keep that part in bc it felt a little off topic, but it was really powerful to me! the fact that this woman who lived in ~400 BCE probably never got to know how much her dad was willing to sacrifice for her, but I as a woman in 2024 do! that love transcends time. it exists, and it matters. women have always experienced love!
I haven't read this book and I never will. I love the og Shakespeare Lady Macbeth SO MUCH and I cannot stand what Ava did with my girl!!
Thank you for touching on the characterization of Macbeth himself! In the original there are actually layers to his thoughts of morality and descent into corruption. Here he is just a Big Violent Evil Man. The way BOTH characters were so degradingly reduced and stripped of any nuance and character… I love Reid’s writing and love her original stories, but this was not it.
ahhh such an excellent video! Especially love the point of women having to have something bad for them to act morally "incorrectly" which inherently gives them less complexity than the male characters who can do whatever they like. let women be evil again!! such a smart video and I'm shocked by how small this channel is, very excited to watch every single one of your videos now!!!!
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that the book would reflect on Macbeth the play or character since that’s kind of the marketing of it. Maybe you’d enjoy it more if you didn’t know, but if the text isn’t benefited by a comparison to the text, it feels like a flaw to not use a completely new premise/name instead of using the name and recognizability as a jumping off point.
yeah i fear that’s my thought too :( i really don’t understand why she didn’t just write a completely original work! she’s a very well established author with a lot of fans, she definitely would have been able to sell it without the macbeth comparison! i feel like maybe she shot herself in the foot with the macbeth of it all.
@@nataliereads.mp4 the part you mention where she’s not even Scottish just kind of shows the absolute disinterest she had to make this loyal, which yeah, she could have just done her own thing. But I guess even with the fanbase, it wasn’t what a publisher wanted to sell? Maybe? Idk
This video was one of the best things I’ve ever seen. Congrats. I know this must have taken a long time, but this was incredibly well thought through and executed!
thank you!!!! 🤍🤍
This is the first video I’ve seen of yours and I really enjoyed it!! I’ve had a lot of issues with “feminist retellings” lately just stripping agency away from female characters. It happens so frequently it’s genuinely disheartening, and it’s disappointing to hear this is just another one of those examples. Especially because of how affected I was by Lady Macbeth in the Shakespeare play when I first read it in high school. She was such a fascinating and tragic character.
Have you read Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik? It’s a retelling mashup of a handful of fairytales. It’s my favorite book of all time, with some of my favorite female characters in any media I’ve come across. They’re fully realized people, all with different strengths and flaws and sympathetic motives. They’re beautifully imperfect individuals, and have full agency over their choices despite living in a patriarchal society. They take action, they don’t just sit around and wait for action to come to them, even if it turns out the actions they take maybe weren’t the best because they’re only human. The narrative gives them grace while simultaneously holding them accountable. And the relationships they have with the men in their lives (romantic, familial or otherwise) are intricate and multifaceted and meaningful, but don’t define any of them. (Also my girl Miryem is unapologetically Jewish and it’s SO rare to find fantasy books with Jewish leads, she means the world to me.)
Spinning Silver has raised the bar of writing empowered female characters so high for me and no other author has been able to clear it lol. I will forever continue my search though.
ty for watching!! 🤍🤍 and no i haven’t read it! but it sounds great, i’ll put it in my tbr!
I really appreciate your commentary on this! Your video got the point I think some others missed, even in critical reviews of Lady Macbeth. What people need to understand is that Shakespeare's portrayals of women were already progressive For The Time. He consistently put female characters into important roles that had agency in the plot, which was not at all a given. Lady Macbeth is already one of the best examples, but I also love Volumnia, Coriolanus's mother, who is explicitly the real heroine of Coriolanus. That's not to say that there's nothing to criticize or analyze from a feminist lens, of course. When I went to see Much Ado About Nothing without reading it beforehand I was shocked and upset by Leonato telling his own daughter Hero that she should die for adultery (it was a really good performance 😅 and when I say 'upset', I mean emotionally affected, not that I thought this plot point shouldn't have been included in the play). There is sort of a criticism against that in the play in that of course Hero is innocent, but it never says that if Hero actually had been adulterous that Leonato shouldn't have denounced her.
It's just so strange to me that this feminist retelling thing tends to target where it's not needed? As you said, they add violence where it isn't as if that's all that's needed to give female characters depth. I wish more retelling authors would take a Margaret Atwood approach and limit themself to including acts of violence and misogyny where there is a historical basis for it. It would be a much more effective story if authors didn't act like all women are or must be victims and 100% justified all the time, or that men always act as villains and abusive monsters 100% of the time (except the one Good One who might be the love interest).
I would like this story a lot more if they acknowledged that men and women could have good individual relationships under patriarchy, and that patriarchy *would still be a problem.* For example if it showed Macbeth and Lady Macbeth having a good or even decent relationship, even if they don't romantically love each other, and had Macbeth as a generally well-intentioned character who still might hurt her by reinforcing her limited role as a woman in society. And in arranged marriages it's ridiculous to act like every single one of them must have been horribly abusive. Some were and I'll never deny that many women in history have been systemically hurt by men, but it's not useful to act like men were never nice or supportive to women either, or that women never found their own power within their situations. Hundreds or thousands of years ago, people were still people, just like they are today.
macbeth has always been my favourite shakespeare play and... yeah i'm gonna pass
probably for the best lol, the ideal audience for this book is honestly someone who has never even heard of macbeth
It’s oxymoronic to call it a “feminist retelling” if women really want to be empowered they would write their own stories instead of bastardizing and reusing the stories written by the men they supposedly hate so much. It’s both tragic and comical.
This is pretty much everything I've ever wanted to say about this genre; thank you.
I really like your point about women only being allowed to act bad if it is response to a man wronging them - it is a form of stripping of agency as you say. Women are deep and complex. This is also seen in House of the Dragon - the changes to Alicent from book to show. Sometimes we want evil women in fiction!
i can definitely see that for hotd! i haven't read the book, but the female characters (esp alicent and rhaenyra) are very reactionary, not proactive. they just deal with the consequences of the men's actions!
A friend of mine was mortified at the significant changes made. She hated it.
Thank you! These are issues I've had with many retellings and also historical novels these days. I love strong, interesting female characters that exist within their own time but still pushes back against the ways she is trapped.
Thank you so much for making this Video!! I got this book two weeks ago and it’s been burning a hole into my shelf since I finished it-I got tricked my the blurb and cover 😔- I hate it.
I have been reading “feminist retellings” for the past 5 years and so many of these points are accurate and have been on my mind! So many of these books feel like a YA(like 13) simple introduction to feminism but with SA and unnecessary torture porn. I’m tired of reading about these women losing what little agency they already had.
thats a great point! for a lot of them, the writing style and complexity does feel kinda YA/younger in demographic, but the inclusion of sa and extreme violence is so adult??? it's a weird combination of oversimplification and over-violence.
Your point from around 15:00 was so on point!!
This is such an intelligent, nuanced take! I really appreciated your perspective on the book and the reductive feminist retelling trend we're seeing right now. You slayed this.
tysm!!! 🤍🤍🤍🤍
A feminist retelling that’s actually good (not a book though) is Six the Musical. Though it’s more a historical retelling than a retelling of an old text
i haven’t seen it but i’ve heard great things!!
you really hit the nail on the fuckin head with "they're trying to do a feminist retelling without doing any of the work" and it also explains why all the hunger games knock-offs failed to say anything significant--- you can't deconstruct something you don't understand
i think leaning too far into a kind of "perfect feminism" where the heroine can do no wrong is what leads to the lack of agency. they're scared of having a flawed or unlikeable character. or maybe it's actually "perfect victimhood" that has them believing their heroines can't be worthy of sympathy unless they are the perfect victim.
I think these authors wanna start with the base of "she's just a normal girl", then heap tragedy on them to "explain" why they become evil women or to make the pure heroines more morally gray and jaded. I also feel like there's an aspect of being award bait? Like how Oscar bait movies are so dark and heavy?
Haven't read, just really like the content and think it's very nuanced, commenting to help the algorithm
appreciated!
aside from everything else you said, which is all good and valid...do people really think there's no subtext in shakespeare? have they...listened to him???
Lol french people as a rule would be way more biased against English people than Scottish. Maybe not in the 1000s, idk, but definetly today 😂
This Lady Macbeth adaptation is following the same footsteps as Rosaline.
Lady Macbeth sounds like it should have been a Bluebeard
Lady Macbeth being one of the most proactive female characters of all time and they do a retelling to “give her a voice “???
Like im sorry but giving Lady macbeth a voice in the original ended up with a kill count and a civil war, i think you can’t outdo that 😭
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing
ty for watching 🤍🤍🤍
This is exactly how i felt about a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice that I found in my college's literary journal. They cap it off by saying that "in all the versions of the story, do you recall Eurydice asking to be rescued?" and this is preceded by Eurydice joyfully committing suicide because she is being "Stalked" by Orpheus. Garbage story written in the cringiest manner possible.
thats a great point! I thought about that too when reading Natalie Haynes' essay on Eurydice in her book, Pandora's Jar! Overall really enjoyed the book, but she did mention the lack of agency on Eurydice's part and how she may not have wanted to be saved-- but my thing is, isn't that an empowerment in itself? That she had someone who loved her enough that he didn't even need to ask, didn't even hesitate to save her? I don't think thats a lack of agency at all-- her social relationships resulted in someone being willing to put themselves in danger for her sake, that's agency! thats empowerment! love is not anti-feminist!
just to start off it feels really icky to portray scottish history in a way that erases actual scottish women from the story. (also im pretty sure the whole play was part of a flatter the queen strategy that shakespeare had going on and the person that did actually macbeth in was supposedly someone who the queen at the time was descended from?)
I dont understand why Ava Reid Lady Macbeth was so bad. I especially hated the anti scotish rethoric given Ava Reid past work Juniper & Throne was critical of xenobia well this book reeked of it.
No literally, this can apply to a good 50% of retellings. imo Ariadne was the worst offender bc in the most widely accepted versions of the myth she ends up in a happy relationship with dionysus after having a rlly hard life and ends up a goddess. But the retelling decided that NO!! Instead, he abuses her as well and her sister kills herself and ariadne just dies at the end?? and the entire time she didn't really do anything, like you said, things just happen _to_ her.
ty for watching! 🤍 and i agree! idk why so many of them take being passive to be the way to make the story more feminist, but it makes no sense
I'm glad I didn't buy this one. I loved Lady Macbeth in the original, so I'm sure I wouldn't like this retelling
im not into Shakespeare and don't know anything about Macbeth and still didn't like it. I didn't;t really like Roscilla
I’m trying to phrase this really carefully, because I feel like this is an excellent commentary and I don’t want to see that I am “what abouting” your video. What I will say is as a fan of Ava Reid, I view her stories as more works of trauma than feminist retellings. I can’t find info on whether or not the author was SAed but these themes are always extremely present in her work, and it reads as a survivor working through trauma more than a plot based story where SA happens. Juniper and Thorn for example is BARELY related to the original fairy tale. I wouldn’t consider her work “feminist,” for many of the same reasons you bring up here. Her main characters are often victims of circumstance and society, not active players in thier stories, but that is by choice and again, related to the trauma of being assaulted. I wonder how much of the issue is marketing and the way we discuss novels for social media sound bites instead of really delving into nuance.
no worries! happy to have a productive conversation! i do agree about the marketing - i feel like i saw a quote where she described this as feminist, but i might have to come back later to give you a source? but definitely the marketing is responsible for a lot of the issues i had with this book!
I believe when she was getting criticized for how sex is handled in Juniper and Thorn, there was discussion about how she's a victim of CSA but I could be misremembering something
Idk, I still find this being a story of abuse to also be questionable. It sort of implies that the only reason Lady Macbeth is evil is BECAUSE she was SA’d, which personally leaves a bad taste in my mouth. That’s just my opinion though, if other survivors find power in it then way more power to them
Uhhh I personally would prefer to know explicitly if the book is a "feminist retelling" or an "abuse cinematic universe entry" because that's kind of a nasty thing to spring on someone.
I think retellings can be fine but I don’t get the point of giving a voice to characters who already very much have a voice, are these authors even familiar with the original texts or do they just assume that just because something is old it must be treating female characters badly? Also it looks like feminism = women can never do anything bad.