Reconciliatory Revisionism in Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra (2023): Refiguring Homeric Areté and Mētis through the Dialogics of Gender and Genre

This article critically examines Costanza Casati’s approach to rewriting key classical hypotexts in Clytemnestra (2024). These texts include Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Electra, and Euripides’ Electra and Iphigenia in Aulis. The analysis is theoretically grounded on the dialogue between gender and genre, serving both as a lens for understanding Casati’s literary intervention within the broader reception of Clytemnestra and as a means of articulating her feminist stance within mythological revisionism. I position Clytemnestra as a major development in a longstanding humanising tendency —one that begins with Homer’s fleeting mention of her in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, expands in tragic poetry, and culminates in Casati’s novel— by further amplifying the character’s story and voice. Central to this analysis is the concept of refiguration, which explores how Casati reimagines Clytemnestra’s past as a Spartan princess, resignifies her mētis from a tool of deceit to a means of female agency, and transforms the murders of Agamemnon and Cassandra from acts of vengeance into acts of compassion by situating Clytemnestra within a framework of female heroism that draws upon the heroic code of conduct in the Iliad. The key findings illustrate what I term Casati’s reconciliatory revisionism —characterised by canon expansion, source regeneration, and character rehabilitation— which unfolds through a three-step process: engaging in dialogue with classical sources, incorporating archetypes that have shaped Clytemnestra’s reception, and achieving reconciliation on multiple levels.