Mary Renault World Literature Analysis
Mary Renault’s career may be divided into two periods: one of novels set in roughly contemporary time, and one of novels set in ancient Greece. When she began to write seriously, Renault was working full time, but she was employed as a boarding school nurse; the demands on her time were sufficiently light to afford her the time she needed to write. Seeking subject matter, she wisely chose to write about what was most familiar to her.
Her first novel, Purposes of Love, is set in a hospital where Vivian, a nurse, and Mic, a pathologist new to the hospital, have a romance. Mic is a friend of Vivian’s brother Jan, on whom he had a boyhood crush. His basic attraction to Vivian is attributable to her resemblance to Jan. Renault also introduces a lesbian nurse, Colonna, into the story and has her make advances to Vivian, who is neither enticed nor repelled. Colonna is having an affair with another nurse, Valentine, and when this affair ends, Colonna faces a bleak, lonely future.
The central story in Purposes of Love, which critics commended and compared to the work of such authors as Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, revolves around a conventional heterosexual attachment. Renault, however, is bent on demonstrating in this book that love has many faces, none being any more legitimate than another.
Each of Renault’s next four books contains homosexual elements. Kind Are Her Answers, rushed into print because of the anticipated exigencies of an impending war, tells the story of Kit Anderson, like Renault’s father a physician in general practice, whose marriage to Janet, a vacuous socialite, founders after Janet has a miscarriage and a hysterectomy. Kit falls in love with Christie, the niece of one of his patients.
It turns out that Janet is a lesbian. Renault, however, shows her in neither a complex nor understanding light but rather uses her sexual orientation as a means of disposing of Janet. She falls in love with another woman on a trip to South America, leaving Kit and Christie to their own devices. Renault realized the weaknesses of this book and its lack of the compelling detail found in her first novel, but because war was about to erupt, Renault’s American publisher pressed her into submitting a manuscript that rethinking and rewriting would have strengthened.
The Middle Mist has strong autobiographical elements, which are found in much of Renault’s writing. The protagonist, Leo, is a young writer driven from home by her parents’ bickering. Leo shares a houseboat with Helen, a woman somewhat like Julie Mullard, and is described as being manlike and tomboyish, much as Renault’s mother viewed her firstborn.
Into the story are introduced a young physician, modeled on Renault’s friend Robbie Wilson, convinced that he can cure patients with love, and Joe Flint, an American neighbor. Joe claims Leo’s virginity, which she thinks will be a turning point for her, but it is not. She leaves Joe, and at the end of the novel, not much has changed. Leo and Helen are still together, presumably in a lesbian relationship.
Return to Night is a tougher book than the two that preceded it. Hilary Mansell is a physician in love with one of her patients—Julian Fleming, eleven years her junior. She saves Julian’s life by performing emergency brain surgery on him. Upon recovering, Julian begins to court Hilary, but his possessive mother scuttles his romance. Finally, Julian, bisexual and dominated by his mother, wanders into a cave, where he is about to commit suicide. Hilary saves him a second time, but she...
(This entire section contains 2190 words.)
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realizes that a shared life can hold nothing for the two of them. The mother theme that always intrigued Renault is well developed in this novel.
The Charioteer is Renault’s most overtly homosexually oriented novel of her first creative period. Whereas her earlier novels deal only obliquely with homosexual love, this best-selling novel deals directly with it, tracing the sexual development of Laurie Odell from age five through manhood.
In this novel one finds Renault’s characteristic (and sometimes confusing) use of names that can be either masculine or feminine. Also depicted are the kinds of troubled family relationships that were a fundamental part of her own childhood. She also broaches the question of pacifism and of standing up for what one believes in the face of public vilification. The book is infused with the ethics found in the early Greek literature that Renault was devouring at the time, particularly Plato’s dialogues about Socrates’ trial and death.
For the next thirty years, Renault’s writing centered essentially on Greek themes, although she was always quick to point out that in dealing with such themes, she was also dealing obliquely with many of the social problems of her own age, particularly those brought about by McCarthyism in the United States and apartheid in South Africa.
The Charioteer was rejected by Renault’s American publisher, Morrow, because in 1953, when it was published in the United Kingdom, McCarthyism was stifling a great deal of creative expression in the United States. In that year, Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill prohibiting government employment of homosexuals. The Charioteer was not published in the United States until 1959, when Pantheon, then a minor publisher, not only published it but also launched a publicity campaign that made Morrow’s efforts in marketing Renault’s earlier books pale in comparison.
The books that followed The Charioteer are essentially the ones upon which Renault’s literary reputation rests. Her Alexander Trilogy, despite its historical setting, reflects a great deal of what she and Mullard were going through in the later years of their relationship, and the last of the Alexander books, Funeral Games, presages touchingly what Mullard’s life would likely be after Renault died.
The Last of the Wine
First published: 1956
Type of work: Novel
The novel covers thirteen years of Alexias’s life, from fifteen to twenty-eight, as Alexias shares it with Lysis, his lover and mentor.
The Last of the Wine, typical of Mary Renault’s historical novels, provides voluminous information about notable Athenians—Socrates, Plato, Kritias, Phaedo, Xenophon—but presents it through the eyes of a more ordinary Athenian. Alexias, a youth on the brink of manhood, suddenly has adult responsibility thrust upon him by the report of his father’s death in battle.
When Alexias’s mother dies in childbirth, Alexias is so sickly that his father intends to expose him to the elements, thereby allowing the Fates to decide whether he will live or die. A Spartan attack, however, forestalls this. Alexias grows up with no real father figure until Lysis courts him and becomes his lover, providing the youth with a father surrogate. As was customary, Lysis also informally becomes Alexias’s teacher, helping to prepare him for a manhood in which he will marry and have children, as Lysis himself plans to do.
Alexias’s father takes a young bride and with her sires a daughter. When news of his father’s death reaches Alexias, he is catapulted into being the man of the house, even though he is ill prepared to assume that responsibility. He grows deeply attached to his stepmother, becoming a surrogate husband.
Alexias prevails in the footrace at the Isthmian Games, but his joy at winning soon turns to disillusionment when his beloved Lysis is nearly killed by a wrestler during competition. Renault here shows what happens when the athletic ideal of developing a fine body is overshadowed by a meretricious concentration on winning, a change in attitude that eventually led to the decline of Greek athletics.
Alexias is severely shaken when it turns out that his father was not killed but taken prisoner. The father resurfaces, now a disenchanted, bitter man, whose land has been usurped by invaders. He turns on his son, whom he thinks has been taken in by dangerous revolutionaries. The father sides with the conservative aristocrats, who fault the liberal democracy that has led Athens to its present state.
To escape this hostile environment (broadly reminiscent of Renault’s family situation), Alexias and Lysis go off to fight at Samos, siding with those who favor democracy over oligarchy. The oligarchy is overthrown and the two return to Athens only to find that a similar situation exists there and that Alexias’s father is strong among the oligarchs.
The political situation grows increasingly unstable as power shifts from the people to the oligarchs and back again several times. Finally, after the Athenian fleet is lost at Aegospotami, Lysander, the Spartan general, blocks all transport into Athens, starving it into submission. He foists upon the city the Thirty Tyrants, who impose a rule of terror.
Kritias, expert at using the logic Socrates has taught him, uses his skill cynically to gain power. Kritias has learned rhetorical technique from Socrates but has failed to learn the great thinker’s most important lesson, that of pursuing the highest ideals of good and beauty.
Eventually, Kritias murders Alexias’s father. Alexias and Lysis join the revolutionaries outside the city walls. The Spartans now abandon the Thirty Tyrants and the people again rule, but Athens is severely weakened. Alexias kills Kritias, but in the confusion of the fight, Lysis is killed. The people have won, but Renault forces her readers to consider whether this victory is to the good if those in control are driven by motives other than the Socratic ideals of good and beauty.
The King Must Die
First published: 1958
Type of work: Novel
Theseus, returning to Athens, pauses in Eleusis, where he kills the king and replaces him, then escapes being sacrificed and goes on to create a male-dominated society in Athens.
Renault, given her strained relations with her mother, often wrote about mothers’ relationships with their children. In her novels, she frequently portrayed mothers as vacuous, manipulative, injudicious, and destructive. In her later novels, Renault deals quite harshly with women in general. She made it clear in her social life that she preferred the company of men, usually homosexuals, and in interviews she vehemently denied being a feminist, nor did she wish to be viewed as a woman author, regarding herself simply as an author.
In The King Must Die, Renault is concerned with the matriarchal social and political structure of ancient Greece. The book is about Theseus, who vanquishes the king, a man who, through established tradition, was chosen by the queen and, after a year of marriage, sacrificed and replaced with a new king, who would also be sacrificed after his year of marriage. Renault’s Theseus is small but wiry. He has exceptionally quick reflexes.
Theseus, passing through Eleusis en route to Athens, wrestles the reigning king to his death, snapping his neck like a twig, whereupon Theseus becomes king. When his year ends, however, he eludes being sacrificed by killing his wife’s brother and pressing on to Athens, where he seeks to weaken Medea’s hold on his father’s court. He then volunteers to go to Crete as a performer in the bull court, a ceremony dedicated to the mother-goddess.
Theseus, in keeping with Greek legend, goes into the labyrinth for a meeting with Ariadne, priestess of the mother-goddess, who gives him the thread that will enable him to retrace his steps. He ultimately marries Ariadne, only to abandon her on the island of Naxos. Departing from the classical legend, in which Ariadne kills herself, Renault has her instead join the Bacchae in their revelry.
Theseus sails to Athens, but, on approaching the city, fails to unfurl the white sail, a prearranged signal that he is safe. His father, Aigeus, dies, thinking Theseus has been killed, thereby leaving it to Theseus to eliminate the old order, end the female domination of Athenian society, and usher in the Golden Age of Athens, which he turns into a thriving, male-dominated society.
In The King Must Die, Renault pushes her disdain of mothers into a broad arena. In choosing to write about the fall of the classical matriarchal system, she seems to be casting her lot with a male-dominated society.
The Persian Boy
First published: 1972
Type of work: Novel
Bagoas, a Persian eunuch, seduces Alexander the Great, a Macedonian, who falls in love with him.
The Persian boy in this novel, Bagoas, is a beautiful eunuch who seduces the swashbuckling Alexander the Great, cleverly making Alexander think that he is the seducer. In this middle novel of Renault’s three books about Alexander, the pair’s love is intense but very brief. Alexander dies in Babylon, with Bagaos whispering in his ear that he loves him.
There is a sense in this novel of love’s conquering all. Bagaos is exactly what Alexander needs. Given Renault’s residence in South Africa when she was writing this book, one cannot ignore the fact that Alexander and Bagaos are ethnically different and that their love transcends such considerations. The two are loyal to each other, as Renault and Mullard were throughout their nearly fifty years together. The novel in many ways mirrors their unwavering relationship.