Geata Póeg na Déanainn

We are not things November 17, 2018

Ever since I first read the Iliad as a teenager, so long ago the exact translation into English escapes me, I was struck by the secondary story that seemed submerged beneath the war, honour, and claims to immortality through militaristic deeds of heroism: the story of the women. I never had much interest in the long recitations of characters’ ancestry, names of warriors killed on the battlefield, wooden horses or lucky arrows shot through vulnerable heels. Instead, I focused on the story that whispered in the margins: the calamity of war to the women and children it made most vulnerable, the ways such women coped with the ever-present threat of male violence, and the simmering presence of this violence even in ostensible peacetime, in spaces where women were surrounded by their own families. I sought out retellings of the Iliad that brought this story to the fore, finding hints of it in medieval and early modern versions of the story of Troilus and Cressida, an unsubtle and clumsy rendering of it in The Firebrand, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s story of Cassandra, and, later, Euripides’ The Trojan Women, a powerful tragedy which gives the Iliad‘s victims their voice. With the notable exception of Adèle Geras’ Troy (which is constrained by its young adult status, meaning it needs to steer clear of a lot of the darker pathways an examination of the effect of the siege of Troy on Trojan teenage girls should take), most modern female character-centric Iliad retellings have been a monumental disappointment. My suspicion is that the authors of these retellings often want to tell some kind of love story — and to make any love story palatable to a modern readership, they need to make what are pretty contemptible male characters palatable to that readership, resulting in pulled punches and attempts to redeem the actions of violent, destructive men who see nothing wrong with parcelling out women as spoils of war. At worst, you get attempts to turn the relationship of Achilles and Briseis into a love story (see: the ghastly film Troy), or to make the whole war a kind of backdrop for Achilles and Patroclus’ epic romance (see: Madeleine Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which renders the captive Briseis as a sort of chaste cheerleader for the Achilles/Patroclus relationship). As someone who is really interested in stories that take Briseis out of the margins and into the centre of the page, I find this incredibly frustrating — but it doesn’t stop me from reading every Briseis-centric Iliad retelling, searching for that elusive story that truly lets her speak.

It was through this roundabout, decades-long search, that I arrived at Pat Barker’s incredible, astonishing The Silence of the Girls. The title is a deliberate misnomer: hers is a book where Briseis — so silent for most of the Iliad — truly speaks, giving voice to the horrors she endures as a captive of first Achilles and then Agamenmon and bringing the experiences of the Trojan captives in the Greek camp vividly to life. Barker’s book sticks close to the plot of the Iliad proper, and plays straight the supernatural elements of Homer’s epic: the gods appear, Achilles is the semi-divine son of a sea nymph, and so on. Where she diverges is in the weight given to the perspectives of those dispossessed or unnoticed in Homer’s original narrative: women, both free and captive, children, and the unnamed hordes of mercenary soldiers brought over to Troy on the promise of fame and plunder.

There are so many moments of devastating power in Barker’s brilliant story that it’s hard to select just a few to give an impression of the narrative. There’s the point, early on in the book, where Briseis (at this point the young wife of a petty king of a city allied to Troy) is trapped, waiting a battle’s outcome with the other women of the palace, knowing that defeat in the battle will mean rape and enslavement, and she realises that all the slave women hiding with her have already experienced this at the hands of her husband and male relatives. There’s her constant focus, once captured, on Achilles’ moods and hands and body; like all women trapped in a situation of domestic violence, she has to maintain a state of constant vigilence to minimise the harm done to her and ensure her reactions to volatile male tempers don’t spark life-threatening brutality. There’s the scene where Priam — having slipped into the Greek camp to plead with Achilles for his son Hector’s body, and kissed Achilles’ hands in an attempt to persuade him — carries on as if this act of kissing were the greatest sacrifice and humiliation imaginable (something ‘no man has ever done before’), and Briseis reflects scathingly on the ubiquity of what she, and all women affected by war, have been forced to endure. It’s so ubiquitous that it goes entirely unremarked and unnoticed, like something of the fabric of the world.

At the same time, Barker focuses relentlessly on the resilient, fractious, messy community of captive women that has sprung up in the Greek camp over the ten years of the Trojan War. The war itself is essentially a half-seen backdrop: the real action takes place in the laundry tents, weaving huts, and at the edges of racous warriors’ feasts, where women circulate, pouring wine. All find different ways to cope with their situation: some force themselves to fall in love with their captors, or try to persuade one captor to fall in love with them, because one rapist is easier to endure than a whole camp of them. Others take refuge in maintaining a pretence of respectability, remaining secluded, weaving cloth, and only venturing outside when wearing veils, as if behaving like proper married matrons will convince the world that nothing has changed in their status. Briseis’ technique is to remain hypervigilent, not just to the mood in her own tent, but within the camp as a whole — and in this she is aided by the network of captive women, who move about unnoticed, slipping into spaces where they can pick up news with ease, and spreading it rapidly around to their fellow captives. Briseis is well aware that her only power is to be prepared: to know what is being done to her before it happens. She cannot avoid the blows, but she can brace herself for when they fall.

Barker is an author whose works frequently focus on the horrors war visits on ordinary people, and so the experience of women, swept up in the brutal violence of the Trojan War is a story she’s well suited to tell. She does so with honesty, clarity, and illumination of the small acts of resistance that go unnoticed when women are perceived to lack agency.

I wish I could say the same of Emily Hauser’s For the Most Beautiful, a story recommended to me as one that did justice to Briseis. Instead, what I got was a syrupy YA romance between captive and captor. I’m not averse to this kind of story (see, for example, my recent review of Aliette de Bodard’s Beauty and the Beast retelling, In the Vanishers’ Palace), but it needs to either embrace the darkness, or work harder to convince me that the captor is as trapped by their circumstances as the captive. When the captor is Achilles, a violent, volatile warrior whose talent, identity and sense of honour and prestige is entirely bound up in his ability to kill and wage war, the author is going to have work pretty hard. Hauser’s attempts remain, to me, unconvincing. It was a moment of almost comedic horror when I realised her Briseis was going to forgive and sleep with Achilles on the instant she realised he had just returned from killing her brothers on the battlefield. The justification for this forgiveness — if her brothers’ and her captor’s positions had been reversed, she would have felt his actions entirely reasonable, and that, as a mercenary leader his job is to wage war wherever he’s hired, so he’s as trapped in his role as scourge of Troy as she is in hers as a slave whose body is not her own — is outrageous. In the hands of a stronger writer, For the Most Beautiful could perhaps have served as the story of the pretty lies a captive tells herself to endure an intolerable situation, and the portrait of a fragmented and fraying mind, but Hauser seems to want us to see a love story. For the Most Beautiful certainly suffers in comparison with The Silence of the Girls, not least because it lacks the latter’s sense of a community of enslaved women, finding strength in each other, and navigating their circumstances with ingenuity, giving voice to those treated as nameless things in the original Iliad narrative.

It was interesting to read both these retellings in parallel with Emiy Wilson’s intelligent, perceptive, and remarkable translation of the Odyssey. While obviously needing to stick to the story that is actually there on the page, Wilson, like Barker, shines a light in areas that previous translations of the story chose not to emphasise. Where previous translators used the word ‘handmaid’ or ‘servant’, Wilson uses ‘slave’, ensuring readers will not look away from these slaves’ eventual slaughter. There is equal weight given to women’s work at the loom and the conversations that take place in women’s spaces, and Odysseus’s travails on his long journey home. Even Wilson’s choice of book cover is deliberate, featuring a trio of women, rather than the more normal ships on unquiet seas. As she has noted on several occasions, just as much of the Odyssey‘s plot takes place around the looms, laundries, bedrooms and kitchens of women as on Odysseus’ convoluted ocean voyages, so a book cover that highlights the latter is making a deliberate choice about what — and whose — stories are worthy of attention.

While it is rare for most authors to get as much input into cover design as Wilson clearly did, it is worth noting that For the Most Beautiful has the sadly typical stock image of a headless woman, while The Silence of the Girls shows not only women and children in full, fleeing in terror, it also does not shy away from depicting what they’re fleeing from: the male warriors who have burnt their city. (There are, of course, other editions of these books with different covers.) When modern authors tackle the Iliad and the Odyssey — two epics which have occupied prime position in the Western literary canon for millennia — they are faced with many choices. What they choose to emphasise, whose story they choose to tell, and who they choose to forgive and redeem have a powerful effect. At brilliant best, like Barker, their choices bring justice and give voice to women silenced both the original narrative and myriad retellings. At worst, like Hauser, the choices of an author will take that voice away.