Reclaiming the Feminine Voice in Mythological Retellings: A Comparative Study of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Madeline Miller

Abstract

This paper examines the feminist reimagination of mythology in contemporary fiction through a comparative analysis of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions and The Forest of Enchantments and Madeline Miller's Circe and The Song of Achilles. Both authors recover marginalised female figures from canonical epic traditions and grant them narrative authority, yet their cultural positions and strategies differ in instructive ways. Divakaruni writes from within a living Hindu epic tradition, retelling the Mahabharata and the Ramayana through the voices of Draupadi and Sita while negotiating religious sensibility and diaspora identity. Miller approaches the Greek tradition as secularised classical heritage, free to subject its gods and heroes to psychological and feminist revision. Drawing on feminist revisionist mythmaking, narrative theory, postcolonial feminism, and adaptation studies, and through close reading of the principal texts, this study argues that both writers practise what Adrienne Rich called re-vision, the act of looking back at old texts with new eyes, but that the stakes and strategies of that act differ profoundly when the source is sacred scripture rather than secular myth.