“Daughters of Sparta” - Claire Heywood
🏺Like Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad” which told the story from Penelope’s POV, Claire Heywood focuses her novel on the daughters of Sparta: the infamous Helen, and the dutiful Klytemnestra. Heywood writes that she chose to explore the lives of these women because traditional renditions of the great Trojan War did a major disservice to them by omitting them mostly other than as side characters to be married, to procreate, and to be used or traded as pawns. Surely, these women were multi-dimensional. What would the story of the Trojan War be, in fact, but for Helen herself?
🏺 Heywood weaves a background to Helen’s ill-fated decision to leave Sparta with Paris. Thoughtless though it was, Heywood humanizes the beautiful Helen. We get to glimpse her relatable feelings behind her impetuous decision. This is the first retelling I’ve read that cultivates real sympathy for her. Heywood adds dimension to Helen and takes her beyond a mere vain, harbinger of doom.
🏺We know even less about Klytemnestra than we do Helen. Though she has moments where her happiness seem supreme - she is a treasured, and fertile wife - her overall suffering is acute. Heywood narrates her childhood as the presumptive heiress to Sparta. An ill-fated choice she made as a child, has far reaching consequences for Klytemnestra. She loses her kingdom to Helen and Menelaus, and is married off to Agamemnon, whom we recognize as a tragic hero from “The Iliad”. Heywood’s version shatters his heroic armor, and we observe a stubborn, self-righteous, bully. The epic war seems as much his doing as Paris’. On the other hand, Menelaus, Helen’s jilted husband, gets a more sympathetic treatment, though he, too, is prey to the mores of the time and is imperfect.
🏺Beyond her choice of Greek spellings for people and places (i.e. Klytemnestra rather than the Latin spelling Clytemnestra), Heywood plays with some of the best known plot points. I was also interested in her treatment of the Greek gods. We see the main characters invoking various gods and goddesses, but in Heywood’s version of events, they are at most distant and uncaring, and likely mere figments of the warring royals.
🏺Heywood recommends “Helen of Troy” by Bettany Hughes, and Sarah B Pomeroy’s “Goddesses, Whotes, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity” for broader coverage of the female experience in the ancient world.
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