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A New Look at an Old Villian

Author: Jennifer Saint

Hera – the raging goddess of marriage – is a much-hated figure from Greek mythology. While it is her husband, the mighty Zeus, who tricks and rapes his way through both mortals and goddesses, it is Hera that catches our ire. Shouldn’t she, we reason, be gentler, know better, and stop perpetuating a vicious culture of victim-blaming? Shouldn’t her vengeance, her impotent rage, be directed towards the one who really deserves it (her philandering husband) instead of in fits of jealousy towards his often-unwilling paramours? Well . . . author Jennifer Saint says . . . maybe Hera is plotting Zeus’ downfall and maybe her piquant ill-will towards his unwary lovers is part of a greater, more wide-ranging scheme. What if Hera is herself a victim – both goddess and subjugated woman – and what if she is ready to take a stand?

It begins with Hera, a wild and happy goddess who flits along the rivers and into the woods for brilliant dalliances. This is a Hera who is free, who is happy, and conversely, who is engaged in a battle alongside her brother to defeat the evil Cronus and win the throne of Olympia. Here, she is a needed equal and still very much herself. That’s before the war ends, before Zeus turns, and before she finds herself forced out of the role of sister/equal into the role of wife and the ironic position of goddess of marriage. That’s when her bond breaks and when she starts plotting revenge.

The rest of the story follows her attempts on Zeus, and while she is finally relatable, she is no heroine. Like the other gods and goddesses around her, Hera is complicated and ultimately heartless. She does wreak revenge where it does not belong. She shows no concern for the milling mortals, and she perpetuates wickedness just as loosely and zealously as those around her. But we’ve seen brighter moments and the betrayal she went through, and we’re in both her head and her heart. We hate some of the things she does, but we also see the bigger picture, the full woman.

Jan Erasmus Quellinus, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Hera’s dueling relationships with her children (especially the at-first kindhearted Hephaestus) and her monsters (children born of herself and her anger only) create a nice dichotomy. In the love of monsters, we finally see an oddly maternal side to a goddess whose very personality has been consumed by the need for revenge and the desire to rise and be supreme. It’s a softening moment, one that helps center the tale and shows us that somewhere under the bitterness the goddess who ran laughing through streams still lives.

Is Hera: A Novel perfect? By no means. It gives readers a deeper sense of a long-hated character, rounding her out and showing where that infamous ire came from, but it also moves too quickly. A lot of the most famous moments from Greek mythology are thrown in, back-to-back, with a breathless sense of “getting there.” This doesn’t give a lot of key plot points time to develop. Either the narrative needs to slow and let these events happen organically, or they need to be cut so that we can focus on what truly matters. As it is, the story is episodic, a cameo from our grade school years, with us nodding along nostalgically and saying “oh, yes, I remember that!” But it makes Hera herself suffer, and she starts to once again become a stereotype instead of a real woman.

Overall, Hera was an interesting story with some innovative approaches to the character. It left me thinking, and it entertained me. Will I remember it long term? No – probably not. It’s still a beach read, a twist on a popular theme that will divert us for a while and then escape our memories. But I had fun reading it and enjoyed recalling my love of Greek mythology and the first time I ever heard most of these tales. Recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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