Book Review: "Daughters of Sparta"
Claire Heywood's new novel is a moving portrait of two of ancient myth's most (in)famous women.
I’m always up for a juicy retelling of classical myth, and this seems to be something of a golden age for the genre, with the Trojan War occupying pride of place. In just the last decade alone we’ve had numerous reinterpretations of that pivotal conflict of ancient myth, ranging from Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (and its sequel The Women of Troy) to Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships and, most recently, Claire Heywood’s Daughters of Sparta.
As its title implies, Heywood’s book focuses on two daughters of the Spartan monarchs, Helen and Klytemnestra. Though they are both born into wealth and prestige, they soon take very different live paths. Klytemnestra, though originally the heir to her father’s throne, is instead married to Agamemnon, newly-crowned king of Mycenae. Neither of them, however, find much happiness.
Heywood quickly immerses us in the dangerous, bloody world of ancient Greece. Indeed, one of the novel’s greatest strengths is the extent to which it grounds the happenings of ancient myth in the material reality of that world. Neither Helen nor Klytemnestra wields any significant political power, since in their world women are meant to spend their lives weaving, spinning, and tending to the affairs of the hearth. More wrenchingly, they also know that they may never see one another again—given that noblewomen do not typically travel, even to visit family. And, in fact, neither are present at the deaths of their parents.
Of the two, Klytemnestra is the more driven, though she has to disguise that aspect of her personality in order to survive in a court ruled by a man. It’s not until Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter at Aulis in an attempt to assuage the wrath of the goddess Artemis, however, that she really comes into her own. That devastating defeat sows the seeds for her later rebellion, and his long absence gives her the chance to rule his kingdom in her own right. Ultimately, of course, she finds herself drawn into the schemes of Aigisthos, who has his own grudge against Agamemnon. By the time the novel ends, she has slain her husband—and his hapless Trojan slave, Kassandra—and the foundation has been laid for yet another family tragedy. No matter how much she might wish it were otherwise, by transgressing the bounds of acceptable wifely behavior, Klytemnestra has sealed her own doom.
In some ways, Helen’s fate is even more tragic than her sister’s, for while Klytemnestra at least manages to solidify her position as the queen of Mycenae, the world’s most beautiful woman soon finds herself deeply unhappy as the queen of Sparta. Heywood ably captures her sense of heartbreak and despair as she comes to terms with the fact that she can neither love her daughter Hermione as she should and has no desire to have any more children with Menelaos. And, while the young Trojan prince Paris at first seems to offer her a chance to live life on her own terms and to escape from the prison of duty, things are not nearly so simple.
Unfortunately for Helen, Paris turns out to not at all be the man that she thought he was; in addition to being a coward, he also doesn’t seem to love her but instead views her as an ornament, a conquest he can parade in front of his brothers. What’s more, the one woman with whom she develops a meaningful friendship, Kassandra, ultimately turns against her once her own beloved is slain in the course of the conflict.
Alone of the women at Troy, Helen does get something of a happy ending, though it’s one marred by a bit of ambiguity. Having been rescued by Menealos, the two of them begin the long homeward journey toward Sparta and, for the first time since they were married, they actually talk about their feelings, after which they gaze out at the sea. Will they manage to find some measure of happiness, now that Helen has at last returned from abroad? Will Helen ever be able to fully mend the damage she has caused by leaving her husband and daughter behind? The novel refuses to definitively answer the question, and the ambiguity is both disturbing and brilliant.
I very much enjoyed the fact that Heywood chose to split the focus of the novel between the two sisters. While both Klytemnestra and Helen are, of course, famous individually, I daresay that relatively few people recognize that they were, in fact, siblings. In bringing them both into the frame as part of the same story, Heywood allows us to see how firmly intertwined their fates were from the beginning and how much they remained so throughout their lives. After all, were it not for Helen’s decision to abscond with Paris for Troy, Kyltemnestra wouldn’t have lost her daughter and wouldn’t have been driven to
If I have one complaint about Daughters of Sparta, it’s that it feels a bit too short. We are, after all, dealing with two of the most (in)famous women of ancient myth, one known for committing the heinous act of murdering her husband in his own house, the other known throughout history as a woman who ran away from her rightful husband and launched a devastating war. There are several time jumps that leap over some important developments—particularly the relationships between Klytemnestra and Aigisthos and between Helen, Paris, and the rest of the residents of Troy.
Where the novel succeeds, however, is in its willingness to peel away the layers of myth and glamor that have obscured the lives of the women of antiquity. There's a sort of brutal beauty about the world that Heywood gives us, but she never lets us lose sight of the fact that the lives of women and other subalterns—particularly slaves—were incredibly difficult and monotonous, and it was the rare woman indeed who succeeded in breaking out of that mold and making a life on her own terms. It’s to Helen’s and Klytemnestra’s credit that they were able to do so, even if for so brief a time.