My Most Ambitious Story Yet: A Guest Post by Jennifer Saint
How do you write a book about the life of the most fearsome goddess of all? From Ariadne to Elektra and Atalanta, Jennifer Saint knows how to write about complicated Greek women — and Hera is her most recent challenge. Read on to discover why Jennifer wanted to write this book and the perspective she hopes to change of this complex figure.
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Hera: A Novel
Hera: A Novel
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Hardcover $28.99
Olympus isn’t big enough for both of them. A goddess relegated to domesticity, her husband set on becoming a tyrannical ruler — this is Hera like we’ve never known her before.
Olympus isn’t big enough for both of them. A goddess relegated to domesticity, her husband set on becoming a tyrannical ruler — this is Hera like we’ve never known her before.
Taking on a goddess as the protagonist for my fourth novel was a new challenge, and Hera is not just any goddess – she’s the wife of Zeus and the Queen of Mount Olympus. I knew that this was going to be my most ambitious story yet. But I also knew it felt important to shine a spotlight on Hera: a complicated, flawed and challenging deity with immense power and importance in the ancient world.
Hera is known primarily for her jealousy and spite. In Homer’s Iliad, she orchestrates the annihilation of the Trojans with a bloodlust that even Zeus remarks on as being excessive. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we see Hera as a vengeful force, continually punishing the women that Zeus assaults. In Euripides’ tragedy Heracles, we see how Hera pursues the hero relentlessly, inflicting a terrible madness upon him just because he has the misfortune to be an illegitimate son of Zeus. When we see Hera as a persecutor of women and children (her first attack on Heracles is when he’s a baby and she sends two snakes to kill him), it’s hard to imagine writing a feminist novel about her.
However, these stories of Hera come with a hefty dose of misogyny. They’ve been told to us throughout history by men, and Hera falls all too easily into the tired, sexist tropes of a nagging wife or spiteful stepmother – archetypes that flatten and reduce her multifaceted nature.
Because what we have to remember about Hera is that she’s married to Zeus – the ultimate in toxic masculinity, a god who exemplifies the worst of the patriarchy. And she was forced to marry him – something she repeatedly refused – when he tricked her by transforming himself into an injured bird so that he could catch her off guard and assault her. She becomes the goddess of marriage – even though her own is so unhappy – and has to endure her husband continually undermining the entire institution by being endlessly unfaithful, humiliating her over and over again and threatening her with violence when she stands up to him. It’s a terrible, soul-destroying relationship that Hera is stuck with for eternity.
She truly has no escape, and nowhere to vent her fury and her pain except on those who are weaker than she is.
And because we see her represented as this resentful wife, trapped in a miserable domestic sphere in the heavens, it’s easy to forget the other myths about Hera. Hera fights in battles against Titans and giants; she’s a warrior queen as well as mother to Greek mythology’s most fearsome monster – a fire-breathing snake-fingered creature named Typhon. Hera is the ultimate survivor: from divine wars to an abusive relationship, she never surrenders. I didn’t want to soften Hera’s edges or redeem her from the terrible things she does, but I wanted to show everyone that there is so much more to this powerful, fascinating goddess than we’ve been told. I hope readers enjoy the discovery!
