Guest post written by Aphrodite author Bryony Pearce
Bryony Pearce is a multi-award-winning novelist working in both the YA and Adult markets. In the YA genre she has produced a mixture of dark thrillers, paranormal adventures, dystopia and horror. Hannah Messenger is her middle grade debut. Bryony teaches the course Writing for Children at City University, regularly visits schools to speak about reading and writing and conducts creative writing workshops, as well as delivering entertaining and inspirational talks. She has performed at the Edinburgh Literary Festival, The Wychwood Festival, Comicon, YALC, the Sci Fi Weekender, The Just So Festival and a number of other festivals and events.
About Aphrodite (out 1 May): From award-winning YA author Bryony Peace comes a deliciously feisty feminist Greek retelling. Beauty isn't everything, but love might be.
There she is, ‘laughter-loving Aphrodite’ (Homer) the goddess of love and beauty, standing in the back of so many Greek myths, and myth retellings looking good in a chiton, teasing heroes and gods, and being a bit of an air-head.
She has a lot of ‘walk on’ parts and few ‘big roles’.
She is, to be fair, an important player at the start of the Iliad, one of three goddesses who demand Paris’s judgement regarding which of them is fairest (Hera, Athena or Aphrodite), and her victory is the spark that ignites the flames of the Trojan War.
Other than that, her stories are limited and inconsistent. She emerges from the sea, the daughter of either Zeus, or Uranus, depending who you read. She has love affairs, which end up benefitting her lovers more than she. She visits the Hesperides with their golden apples and helps Hippomenes beat Atalanta in a footrace. She marries Hephaestus, but has an affair with Ares, which ends in humiliation. And she has a vengeful side, which we see in her treatment of the women who suffer for her jealousy of them.
Other gods and goddesses have libraries dedicated to their deeds (or misdeeds), Aphrodite barely has a few pamphlets. Perhaps this is because Eros was the least valued of the forms of love identified by the Ancient Greeks, which include Eros (sexual desire), Philia (deep friendship), Storge (familial love, especially that of a parent for a child), Agape (unselfish love, shown by acts of charity), Pragma (mature or longstanding love), Philautia (self-love) and Ludus (playful love – flirting, teasing and other sensual pleasures).
Or perhaps it is simply that, for readers throughout history, stories of war, strategy, cleverness, epic heroics, evil kings and monsters are simply more interesting than romance novels, and that Aphrodite has always been more useful as a catalyst (starting stories, or making them more interesting, by making various gods and heroes fall in love), than a main character.
But, to me, that is what makes her exciting. With a limited number of myths to draw on, and the fabulous uncertainty of her provenance, I was able to make Aphrodite whoever I wanted her to be.
And I wanted her to be incredibly powerful, so powerful that she threatens the status quo established by the Greek gods.
So, in my version of her story, Aphrodite really is the daughter of Uranus, created from the semen spilled during his murder. She has the power of the sea, as represented by the kraken that emerges from her body when she is enraged, alongside the innocence of a child and the passion of a young woman seeing the injustices of the world for the first time.
However, when Zeus finds out about Aphrodite’s existence, he recognises her potential to overthrow him and claims her as his own daughter, so that he can exert control over her. He forces her to marry a man she does not love, and who the other gods mock for his weakness. He imposes on her the mantle of goddess of love and beauty to destroy her connection to her kraken, because he, like the ancient Greeks, considers Eros of little importance, and believes this is the best way to limit her power and reach.
This is a mistake.
My Aphrodite learns to control those who wish to control her, by using her beauty; she learns to hide who she really is behind a pretty face and ensures that few see behind it.
And when she finds out who she truly is and where she belongs, she is able to claim her true power, which is greater than anyone could have imagined.
Of course I believe Aphrodite’s power has always been greater than we realised. Without catalysts there can be no myths. ‘Laughter-loving Aphrodite’ might hover in the background, but she is almost always there, mocking the gods for the mistake of underestimating her, and controlling their actions and stories via the love that they cannot resist.
Nor could I resist writing her story: the story of a young goddess searching for home, falling in love and finding her power, Aphrodite is a feminist tale, filled with fury and vengeance, passion and symbolism.
I, like everyone else who spends time with her, fell in love with Aphrodite and I hope you do too.
