I don't like The Bull From the Sea either, but I reread it from time to time hoping it will have grown on me.
That's what happened here—I remembered not liking it, but thought I would give it another try. I liked it even less.
But I'd be very interested in why you see it as a queer romance.
This should be an essay, but I am not well-slept enough for it, so you're going to get a textbrick with quotes instead. I apologize in advance.
Two reasons, mainly. One, that while Hippolyta does not characterize herself as other than female, she is very strongly coded male through the norms of Renault's Archaic Greek culture and Theseus' perceptions of her, which form the voice of the narrative. It's there as early as The King Must Die, when Theseus describes "Amazon girls from Pontos, proud-faced and slim, free-striding, with slender fingers hard from the bow and spear, who looked you in the eye as cool and measuring as young princes at war." When he sees Hippolyta and her warriors for the first time in The Bull from the Sea, he thinks again that "[t]hey looked like slender princes in the flower of youth, who meet after the hunt to drink wine and hear the bard . . . They worked briskly, like strong young men, not flinching at the bloody entrails; and the fighting sense in me warned me that they were warriors." Their beauty is androgynous: "Their thighs were taut and sleek, the legs long and slender; their shallow breasts were as perfect as wine-cups turned on the wheel. All over they were gold with sun, not skewbald from wearing clothes," like men who exercise naked, not women who cover themselves up. When he hears Hippolyta's voice for the first time, calling out to her lover whom she is about to defend by shooting one of Theseus' men, her voice is "cold, wild and pure like a boy's or a bird's." Even when he thinks of her in feminine terms, they are not human terms: "She was like the Moon Goddess, deadly and innocent; gentle and fierce like the lion." Theseus' greatest praise for the woman he loves is masculine: "She is more than queen. She understands the sacrifice that goes consenting. There is a king's fate in her eyes . . . A king, truly, lived in this white-haired girl."
(It's unclear whether her own culture would view her in this liminal way: as warrior-guardian of the shrine of Artemis at Maiden Crag, her title is "King of the Maidens." Since it's mentioned elsewhere in The Bull from the Sea that the Sarmatian women fight alongside the men, however, I suspect Renault's Amazons fall within the gender norms of their own people, just somewhat to one side of the spectrum.)
no subject
That's what happened here—I remembered not liking it, but thought I would give it another try. I liked it even less.
But I'd be very interested in why you see it as a queer romance.
This should be an essay, but I am not well-slept enough for it, so you're going to get a textbrick with quotes instead. I apologize in advance.
Two reasons, mainly. One, that while Hippolyta does not characterize herself as other than female, she is very strongly coded male through the norms of Renault's Archaic Greek culture and Theseus' perceptions of her, which form the voice of the narrative. It's there as early as The King Must Die, when Theseus describes "Amazon girls from Pontos, proud-faced and slim, free-striding, with slender fingers hard from the bow and spear, who looked you in the eye as cool and measuring as young princes at war." When he sees Hippolyta and her warriors for the first time in The Bull from the Sea, he thinks again that "[t]hey looked like slender princes in the flower of youth, who meet after the hunt to drink wine and hear the bard . . . They worked briskly, like strong young men, not flinching at the bloody entrails; and the fighting sense in me warned me that they were warriors." Their beauty is androgynous: "Their thighs were taut and sleek, the legs long and slender; their shallow breasts were as perfect as wine-cups turned on the wheel. All over they were gold with sun, not skewbald from wearing clothes," like men who exercise naked, not women who cover themselves up. When he hears Hippolyta's voice for the first time, calling out to her lover whom she is about to defend by shooting one of Theseus' men, her voice is "cold, wild and pure like a boy's or a bird's." Even when he thinks of her in feminine terms, they are not human terms: "She was like the Moon Goddess, deadly and innocent; gentle and fierce like the lion." Theseus' greatest praise for the woman he loves is masculine: "She is more than queen. She understands the sacrifice that goes consenting. There is a king's fate in her eyes . . . A king, truly, lived in this white-haired girl."
(It's unclear whether her own culture would view her in this liminal way: as warrior-guardian of the shrine of Artemis at Maiden Crag, her title is "King of the Maidens." Since it's mentioned elsewhere in The Bull from the Sea that the Sarmatian women fight alongside the men, however, I suspect Renault's Amazons fall within the gender norms of their own people, just somewhat to one side of the spectrum.)
I hate LJ-comment limits.