Written by ‘In a time of ancient gods, warlords and kings, a land in turmoil cried out for a hero. She was Xena, a mighty princess forged in the heat of battle. The power. The passion. The danger. Her courage will change the world.’
A television serial of fantastic adventures in an ancient time, Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001) was at one point the most widely syndicated show on the planet. Xena’s beginnings were inauspicious – she was conceived as a mere villain of the week for Hercules: The Legendary Journeys – but her appeal was such that her eponymous spin-off soon eclipsed the success of its parent series. Figuratively and literally, and typically in leather, Xena kicks ass; she’s also very funny. Last year, I taught a course about her for undergraduate students at the University of Birmingham.
Why Xena? An obvious objection is that, although her name sounds almost plausible, this is a character with no basis in genuine antiquity. The world of Greek myth, in which most of her adventures are notionally set, is no place for a warrior princess: female characters get raw deals, and the best most of them can hope for is a walk-on part as some male hero’s quest object. Many of Xena’s adventures have a genuinely classical ring – she encounters classical monsters and fabulous beasts (centaurs and cyclopes), and lends a hand to famous heroes (Odysseus, whom she lets grab the credit so he can carry on being the hero of his own myth). And these adventures sometimes engage more or less closely with actual ancient versions (e.g. Homer but also Hesiod), or with classic post-ancient treatments based on them (e.g. Shakespeare), and that can be fun and enlightening to study. But these examples tell only one side of the story. The ‘Xenaverse’ is one big mashup of myth and history from many ancient times and places, from Prometheus to Pompey, Helen of Troy to Caesar (a recurring nemesis) – and with occasional cameos from other mythologies besides. If everything you knew about the ancient world was out of Xena: Warrior Princess, you’d have some very odd ideas about antiquity.
Why Xena, then? In part because ‘odd’ covers many of the ideas we share concerning the ancient world; we just tend not to examine them often. Why do we assume the ancient world is somehow our shared property and no-one else’s, as Western culture typically does, whether in its high art (Julius Caesar) or popular entertainments (Caesars [sic] Palace in Vegas)? At least with Xena it’s obvious we shouldn’t take everything at face value. Her world is more than a cheeky mashup – it’s defiantly anti-traditional. Its women take charge of their own stories – with Xena’s aid, this Helen of Troy heads off to make a new life for herself where neither Trojans of Greeks will find her. They are multicultural – the Cleopatra of this ancient world is black (the writing team’s riff on Afrocentrism and the Black Athena debate that shook up classics in the 1990s), and Xena learns her craft as a warrior from powerful women of the East. They embody sexual diversity, if only at the level of subtext – but the subtext is strong; the show’s writers knowingly courted an avid lesbian following that knew how to send out and pick up subtle signals, because that was how they survived day-to-day in a more openly homophobic time.
So, Xena: Warrior Princess invites us to question what we ourselves bring to the party when we engage with classical literature and civilisation. It’s full of opportunities to reflect on how different kinds of readers and viewers respond to the ancient world (or to the versions of it they can access – but really it’s only ever versions for any of us, even the experts). What’s more, it offers fascinating insights into how our receptions of the ancient world change with changing times – for students today, the 1990s are almost as distant and exotic as the worlds of antiquity (‘In a time of ancient gods, warlords and dial-up modems…’). And of course you can rely on your students to complete the homework, when the homework is getting together with their mates and watching Xena.
It worked great as an optional module at university. Would it work in schools? I’m not the person to even attempt to answer that. I certainly don’t see Xena: Warrior Princess appearing on an A-Level syllabus any time soon. But she might be a good example to us, just as she was when she coached Helen of Troy to ditch the fan club and do her own thing. So often, classical receptions get squeezed in as an afterthought – what we do in the last lesson of term instead of Latin Hangman, now that we have access to DVD players. The way things are, it’s not just the easy and natural-seeming use we have for film and TV in most of our classics-teaching contexts; it’s kind of inevitable. But we can do so much more with that graveyard slot than play ‘spot the mistake’. Xena embraced the mistakes and put them to work in the best of causes – changing the world, bit by bit and viewer by viewer. It was courageously wrong, and that’s why I still have a soft spot for it. That and the leather.
Gideon Nisbet, University of Birmingham
For more resources on Xena, try http://whoosh.org/
