The resurgence of Greek mythology in contemporary literature has prompted an aesthetic and philosophical reconsideration of its most canonical narratives. However, far from retelling these myths through a lens of simple admiration or romanticisation, recent feminist reimaginings have infused these ancient stories with elements of the gothic. This convergence between classical mythology and gothic storytelling is neither accidental nor merely stylistic. It emerges from a shared preoccupation with inherited violence, bodily containment, female suffering, and the unrelenting grip of memory. In novels such as Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind (2023), and Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne (2021), the gothic is not only present but essential. It operates as a literary strategy to excavate the repressed histories of women who have long served as secondary figures in tales of male heroism.
Traditionally, the gothic has served as a genre concerned with the past’s intrusive return, with haunted spaces and the unresolved tensions of lineage, repression, and grief. Its architecture is one of decay and entrapment. Similarly, Greek myth is founded on repetition – cycles of violence, betrayal, exile, and punishment. When these frameworks intersect in feminist retellings, the result is a literary terrain where the mythic female body becomes both a site of horror and of resistance. These retellings treat ancient texts not as static relics but as living palimpsests, open to intervention and re-inscription. In doing so, they centre what myth has historically peripheralised: the internality of women, the brutality of their silencing, and the emotional toll of survival.
In Circe, Miller transforms the traditionally marginal witch of The Odyssey into a fully realised subject whose story spans centuries of divine punishment and human exile. The novel’s setting, a solitary island where Circe is banished by the gods, echoes the classic gothic motif of the isolated woman in the haunted house. But here, the house is not crumbling stone. It is a supernatural island. The ghosts are not phantoms, but memories, curses, and inherited divine power. Circe’s body, too, becomes a gothic space. Punished for her difference, feared for her power, and distorted by the narrative gaze of others. Her solitude is not peaceful but politically imposed. Her exile recalls the gothic trope of female incarceration; women locked away for their transgressions or simply for their difference. The slow pacing of her transformation and self-realisation is a gothic resistance to patriarchal time, which demands immediacy and forgetfulness.
Likewise, in Stone Blind, Haynes reframes the Medusa myth, restoring subjectivity to a figure long reduced to monsterhood. Medusa’s transformation from mortal to gorgon has traditionally been read as divine punishment, but in Haynes’ retelling, it is clearly rooted in sexual violence. This recontextualisation aligns with gothic horror’s long engagement with bodily violation and monstrosity as metaphor. In Haynes’ version, the gaze is turned back on the viewer, exposing how the horror of Medusa lies not in her power to petrify, but in how that power emerged from violation. The gothic in Stone Blind is not external. It is inscribed on Medusa’s skin. It is the trauma made flesh. Monstrosity is often a label applied by those in power to those they wish to control.
Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne also engages with gothic patterns, particularly through its preoccupation with the labyrinth. In classical mythology, the labyrinth is a place of disorientation and entrapment, a structure designed to conceal a secret or contain a threat. In Saint’s retelling, it is symbolic of the psychological and familial labyrinths women are forced to navigate. Ariadne’s betrayal by Theseus is not presented as a tragic exception but as part of a long pattern of male betrayal and female abandonment. The mythic hero is demythologised. The monster is revealed to be more human than the man. The gothic function of the labyrinth here is not to obscure truth, but to reveal how truth itself is constructed by those who hold the narrative power.
Across these narratives, gothic elements operate not only as affective devices, but as political and philosophical critiques. The mythic world is shown to be inherently violent, shaped by the whims of gods and the ambitions of men. Women are punished for their autonomy, mythologised when convenient, and forgotten when not. The gothic intensifies this critique by highlighting how these patterns are not ancient anomalies but recurring structures. Memory in these texts is not restorative. It is reflective, fragmented, and sharp. These women are not simply remembering. They are refusing to forget.
Moreover, the affective tone of these retellings mirrors the gothic’s emotional palette: longing, dread, helplessness, defiance. The narrators are not passive victims. They are haunted women, but not broken ones. They speak from the margins, but with clarity, rage, and complexity. The gothic allows them to embody contradictions: to be powerful and afraid, monstrous and tender, immortal yet exhausted. These tensions resist narrative closure, the refusal of neat resolutions, the insistence on lingering, which is another hallmark of the gothic.
This persistence of the gothic within feminist myth retellings also gestures to broader cultural movements. The current appetite for such narratives reflects a desire to reclaim not only classical stories, but the emotional architectures they suppressed. In a time marked by systemic inequality, climate anxiety, and political regression, the gothic offers a language for collective unease. Through the lens of myth, it allows readers to confront what contemporary realism often cannot accommodate. It speaks of the psychic toll of enduring histories, and the strange hope of speaking through them.
The act of rewriting myth becomes a form of literary haunting. These women – Circe, Medusa, Ariadne – do not return as symbols. They return as subjects. They return not to please the gods or the reader, but to demand a reckoning. In the end, the gothic is not the opposite of myth. It is its mirror. It reveals that what we call myth is often just history, shrouded in aesthetic. And what we call gothic is simply truth, stripped of illusion.
