The 'Hidden' Women In Male-Dominated Classics by Charlotte Cross

For most of history, men have been the ones writing things down. Their thoughts, their

experiences, their struggles have taken centre-stage, with the women off to one side. Over

there. Round that corner. This is not to say that every piece of literature hides its female

characters, but the fact is that once you start looking for them, they’re everywhere. Silent

women, or ignored women, or token women. Women whose experiences and inner lives we

never hear about in the text. They’re there, we just know almost nothing about them.

Women, everywhere, hidden. A female character might get a bit of description followed by

relegation to a quiet presence in the back of a scene, or a convenient death to move the

male lead’s character development along. Even when the plot turns on a woman she can be

in effect hidden from the reader by the narrative’s, or the author’s, refusal to centre her.

In the last decade or two, retellings of classic or even ancient stories have become more and

more popular. Multiple scientific studies have shown that women buy and read more books

than men, and its unsurprising that we’d want to see ourselves properly represented in these

famous tales.

Greek myths and legends love to hide women by refusing to care much about them as

human beings in their own right. Penelope in The Odyssey only shows up at the end as a

quiet, dutiful wife fending off unwanted suitors. Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad puts her

in the middle of her own story. Madeleine Miller did the same for Circe in Circe, Natalie

Haynes did it for Medusa in Stone Blind, Jennifer Saint and Costanza Casati in Elektra and

Clytemnestra respectively, and Pat Barker centred the war-ravaged Trojan women in The

Silence of the Girls. More of these types of books are being published every year, with

women no longer adjuncts to the male ‘heroes’. These hidden women take up space in

narratives previously reserved for men, resisting diminishment to a cardboard cutout of a

stereotype – loyal wife, witch, seductress, wronged wife, madwoman, monster.

Closer to home in Beowulf, that famous Anglo-Saxon tale beloved of English Literature

courses everywhere, the plot turns on the action of a female character who we know almost

nothing about. Grendel’s mother isn’t even given a name. In fact, the description of her is so

vague that scholars still argue about what it even means. The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana

Headley reinterprets and reimagines her, changing the setting to modern America, but I

would absolutely devour a story that put Grendel’s mother back in her original context as

well as at the heart of her own tale.

The rise of the novel as a form and of in literacy in general in the 18 th and 19 th centuries gave

us much of the literary ‘canon’. There are certainly some female writers in those great long

lists of men, and some well-written female characters in books by male writers. But how

much of said canon actually both centres and fully values women’s lives and experiences?

How often are we reduced to squinting at shadow puppets in crinolines or nightgowns and

asking, ‘who is she, really?’

Speaking of famous nightgown-wearers (at least, according to the film adaptations) the so-

called brides of Dracula absolutely come under the heading of ‘hidden women.’ Author Bram

Stoker tells us nothing about how they came to be involved with Count Dracula, or their

origins, or even their names. Count Dracula himself keeps them hidden, locked away in his

castle. I’ve always loved Dracula, and I’m obsessed by the question of who these women

could be. My debut novel The Brides imagines their histories, their lives, their loves, and

makes them heroines, or anti-heroines, in their own right. Their mystery makes them

mesmerising, and other writers have come up with other answers: Kiran Millwood Hargrave in the brilliant Deathless Girls, and S.T. Gibson in her runaway bestseller Dowry of Blood to

name but two.

Humans have always loved revisiting our stories to rework and reshape them. With more

authors writing and publishing now than ever before, and more diversity among those

authors than could have once been imagined, there will be many more ingenious and

fascinating retellings to come. It is long past time for all the hidden women to be brought

from the shadows into the light of their own stories.

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