This is Beginning to Bother Me

[shipperx]

I know that I should wait. I'm only halfway through the book. But at the halfway point of I, Claudius I am growing annoyed by what I increasingly suspect is out and out misogyny in the text. From a bit of google I see that Graves is touted for having 'strong women', but what is striking to me is that the women (thus far) are pretty uniformly evil and men are rather consistently their victims. Every self-serving thing that Augustus did is Livia's fault.  Germanicus is betrayed by grandmother and traitorous wife.  Claudius is forced into a marriage with an ill-spirited giantess by the machinations of two women, etc.  I know that Livia is generally cast as a villainess in history and assumed to have murdered Augustus (Although in Everitt's non-fiction book on Augustus: Life of Rome's First Emperor, the author seems to feel that she's been over vilified), but even assuming her treachery, the fact that virtually every cruel or vindictive choice that Augustus made is consistently laid at his wife's feet, rather than a Roman Emperor behaving like a Roman Emperor, defies credulity. I mean, come on!  Octavian didn't become Augustus without some ruthlessness of his own!  (And in 'Rome' a great deal of steely-eyed creepiness as well). It can't have all been Livia. Exactly how much power could she, or any of these women, have actually wielded...at least in comparison to the men? 

It isn't that I protest there being villainous women.  It's that I can't accept that they all are.  It's also that I can't accept that all of these men were honorable woobies surrounded by manipulative harpies who 'forced' them to do the wicked deeds in history.  Maybe I'll feel differently by the end.  Surely all of Caligula's excesses cannot be blamed on women, but from what I've read thus far I wouldn't entirely bet against it where this novel is concerned.

Comments

[quinara]

IIRC things get more balanced when it moves into Tiberius' and Caligula's reign, or at least my lasting memory is that Graves forwards the line that everyone was out to get what they could, not just the women, and anyone nice soon ended up dead. But at the time when I read it I wasn't as sensitive to misogyny as I've become (in such a way that I couldn't get through John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy because there were barely any women with speaking parts and all of them seemed to be defined completely by their relationships to the male characters), so I may have failed to notice it.

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

It's based very heavily on Seutonius's Twelve Caesars so it's possible Graves just lifted all the most scurrilous details from there. As I recollect, Claudius's mother Antonia is very nice and kind, though.

(And as I recollect, even in the Everett book, the introduction involves a scene of Livia murdering Augustus? Actually, i kind of think he had it coming :P)

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

the mental picture of all those roman emperors as honorable woobies surrounded by manipulative harpies just made me snort my coffee.

It's been a while since that classical history class in college, and I've never read "I, Claudius". I take that I don't really want to!

[quinara]

It's based very heavily on Seutonius's Twelve Caesars so it's possible Graves just lifted all the most scurrilous details from there.

Concerning Livia at least, Suetonius is actually quite a bit more circumspect than Graves is. (The nasty things that Caligula gets up to are all in there though.)

[elsaf]

Antonia is portrayed as honorable but not necessarily kind at all. She's strong, but never affectionate. She considers Claudius an idiot and admits she finds it difficult to love him.

Actually, the theme of I, Claudius and Claudius the God is that Claudius' life is defined by the women around him and seldom in good ways.

However, Graves himself isn't uniformly misogynistic. I'm blanking on the title but his novel about (damn, I can't even remember the name of the Roman general around the time of Constantine) revolved around the female characters in good ways.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

As I recollect, Claudius's mother Antonia is very nice and kind, though.

Thus far she's been uniformly disparaging of him and resentful that he's the 'head' of her family. Other than that she hasn't had much role to play.

And Everitt sort of pushed it IMHO in claiming that Livia 'killed' Augustus out of kindness or whatever as a form of Emporeal euthanasia claiming it was what Augustus would have wanted (not so sure about that). So I could certainly see a more villainous take on her. I just have a hard time buying her as the source of all evil in Augustus's life and he wasn't disowning/killing these people himself. Also, that his continued (if not his initial) prejudices against Claudius were because of Livia's evil whispers in his ears. (I've never seen the miniseries, so it may go an entirely different way. But that's my impression roughly half way through the book.)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Well, he does seem to take the side that Augustus's daughter Julia was unfairly persecuted, but Livia is a bit omnipotent.

It's an odd book because it isn't written in the more modern style. It's written as though Claudius set down his own secret self-history for distant posterity, so it's largely declarative in nature. There's not a ton of dialog, just Claudius narration. I guess, in that light, one could view him as an unreliable narrator, but since the effort is to present him as a mostly decent human being, I don't think we're to think him excessively unreliable, and perhaps even naive in certain parts. It took him forever to pick up on the repeated implications that Livia murdered his father and (probably) his first fiance (actually, where I am now, he still hasn't figured out the second one. That's just my assumption from the circumstances).

[jerrymcl89.livejournal.com]

I've never read the book and have seen the miniseries, and Augustus is definitely portrayed as too naive and easily manipulated to have ever gotten to where he got too, regardless of any woman behind the throne. I think the portrayal of him in "Rome" is much more plausible.

[rowanswhimsy.livejournal.com]

Livia is pretty evil in the miniseries and Antonia is hard to like because of how poorly she treats Claudius (although she clearly has more positive feelings about other men in her life to whom she compares Claudius unfavorably. Constantly).

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

I'd seen the series several times before I read the book, so my visions were colored by what the Beeb did with it; seeing it with this perspective, I guess you're RIGHT, but I never noticed it particularly watching or reading, I just enjoyed a truly fully-fleshed (and understandable, if horrid) villainous in Livia; and I don't recall that anyone could or did blame Caligula on anyone but Caligula.

Of course, now I want to see it again (it remains one of my favorite all-time mini-series/movies).

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

Count Belisarius which created my lifelong love of that period of Byzantine history :D

Robert Graves

[zanthinegirl.livejournal.com]

Completely coincidentally I just watched a documentary on Robert Graves; it was fascinating. I'm working my way through the special features on my Young Indiana Jones DVDs as it happens, and he's wedged betweeen Sigfried Sassoon and Charles De Gaulle. I was interested to find that the character of Livia is based largely on his then mistress-- not surprisingly she left him soon after it was published!