The Song of Achilles came to me in a time where I did not have access to many stories that centered queer love. It also met me at a point where I was willing to cling to any form of queer history, as much as a touch of queerness in societies past, even so much as a whisper. Even fiction. It was never something I had been taught, nor did I know where to seek it out. While this is not a piece of queer history, to engage with a work that finds part of its renown for the willingness to retell, or better said, reaffirm, a story which could have originally meant for there to be passionate, war-spurring romantic love between two well-known male figures in some of the earliest work in the western canon, meant the book earned a significant piece of personal adoration. Only compounding my love for the story was Madeline Miller’s craft. Her prose I remember reading in awe, struck so keenly by the lyricism of her rhetoric that I was all but compelled to read her second book, Circe, which remains an all-time favorite, and I intend to continue following her work.
A lesson I have learned as a lover of books, especially in my adult years, is the necessity for consuming media critically. I say this to justify the few negative criticisms that I’d decided to deep-dive into for the sake of this project, done despite my own personal fondness. There is a time and a place where enjoyment without analysis is appropriate, in fact there are many. However, even for those pieces of media we’ve consumed and hold dear, it’s important to be conscious of the symbology, themes, imagery, and motifs that are utilized, especially when those things misrepresent and harm. For example, by no means is there an unrealistic expectation for women in Ancient Greece to have been upheld as pillars of authority and respect. Based on historical context, one can expect quite the opposite. That dynamic of disempowerment is present in how the women of the Iliad operate, and through virtue of her attempt to be as faithful as possible with her intimate knowledge of these original works, Miller enshrines that dynamic. The question then is why? What is the purpose? When there are other things—characters, relationships (sexual and otherwise), entire backgrounds—that have been altered or imagined for the sake of the adaptation, why then was there not more an effort to humanize its female characters? With Miller as talented a writer as she is, there isn’t any doubt such a thing could have been accomplished without even changing the plot. I as an individual have no reservation asserting and observing such criticism, neither does it hinder my ability to enjoy the literature. For others that conclusion may be different, and that’s okay. Ultimately what I hope to get across here is that I prefer nuanced engagement with work I love, and The Song of Achilles is no exception.
This closer examination brings me to the topic of queer form. Who is The Song of Achilles by? Who is The Song of Achilles for? In discussions of queer form and the stickiness of representation both in the exact text and the metatextual, these are important considerations when taking in a book that has been lauded for its inclusion of a gay romantic and sexual relationship between Greek legends. My thoughts on Miller as its author have been largely explored in the page titled for her, but the desire to extrapolate more of my thoughts has led me to this conclusion: The Song of Achilles is not queer form. The story contains queerness, captures it in the multi-millennia-long debate concerned with its presence in the exact text and its implications, but it fails to serve a queer audience. As Miller herself said,
I did not deliberately set out to tell a deliberately “gay” love story; rather, I was deeply moved by the love between the two characters—whose respect and affection for each other, despite the horrors around them, model the kind of relationship we all can aspire to. (“Q & A”)
The sentiment is admirable, even kind, some would say idea, but what is means is that the novel was not written for any sake of queerness. Instead, based on well-earned pride for her education and work in ancient literature, Miller is a classicist, writing for the sake of and in faith to the original epic. This is, by all accounts and standards, a respectable and far surpassed goal. Miller has successfully exposed a new generation of readers to a work that is, frankly, inaccessible without extensive previous knowledge of the time and adjacent myths that contextualize the characters and their actions in the story. She’s done this all while honoring the belief held as long as Plato if not longer that there was more than platonic camaraderie between two men. Even without the intention to write for a queer audience, without the goal to give a stage to the lives of specifically queer identities and actions, I hold a respect for what’s been achieved in this beloved work of art.
Works Cited
"Q & A with Madeline Miller." Madeline Miller, 2019, http://madelinemiller.com/q-a-the-song-of-achilles/.