VILIFIED OR VICTORIOUS? Claire Heywood and Jennifer Saint Recast the Roles of Women in Ancient Greece and Sparta
For Saint, sifting out verifiable facts felt like “getting lost in a Labyrinth in itself!” she says. “It can be difficult to piece together the details of everyday life that make the novel feel realistic and inhabitable when so much of that ancient past is lost to us, but it was very important to me to do the best job that I could in making the details of their world feel textured and as immersive as I could, so that the fantastical elements of the story would ring true as well.” Claire Heywood was also faced with separating the strands of historical fact about Helen and Klytemnestra from the myths surrounding the Trojan Wars when researching her debut novel Daughters of Sparta (Hodder & Stoughton UK/Dutton US, 2021). One of the reasons she decided to undertake this project was her fascination with “the myth, of course,” she says, “but I also wanted to get at the real women beneath it, to imagine what their lives might have been like if they had really existed in the historic milieu of the Greek Bronze Age. It was certainly a challenge, and I had to make decisions about the kind of story I wanted to tell.” Taking the myth as her frame, she continues, “I wanted to make fact my priority. Our evidence for the culture of the Late Bronze Age is naturally limited – it being more than three thousand years ago and predating recorded history. While this granted me a generous degree of creative licence, I also wanted to make sure that I did not contradict any evidence we do have for the period.
Jennifer Saint’s debut novel Ariadne (Wildfire UK/Flatiron US, 2021) challenges the female stereotypes of Ancient Greece and their vilification by historians throughout the ages. “I have always been interested in Greek mythology,” she says. “When I read Classical Studies for my degree, I was particularly intrigued by Ovid’s Heroides, in which he gave voice to the often-overlooked heroines of myth. In particular, I was drawn to his portrayal of Ariadne and Phaedra as passionate, righteous, and intelligent women. “Years later, when I was reading Theseus and the Minotaur to my sons, I was struck by how limited Ariadne’s role often is in other retellings of the story, and that she is only seen in terms of her infatuation with Theseus. I wanted to draw on Ovid’s brilliant portrayal but also to explore her other relationships, not just with men but particularly with her family and her sister, to create a richer and more fully dimensional character.” She admits it was a demanding task to separate the strands of historical fact about Ariadne and her sister from the Minotaur myths and “very challenging to create a believable Bronze Age world in which monsters and gods exist against a landscape that’s unfamiliar to us but recognisable,” she adds. “What we have of the Bronze Age survives in fragments, and the myths come from a tradition of oral storytelling, so we find multiple, often contradictory, versions of the characters and the events which shape their lives.”
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FEATURES | Issue 97, August 2021
“This historicised, realist approach to the retelling meant that if an element of the myth could not reasonably have happened within my historic setting, then it didn’t go into the story. It also meant no meddling gods and no supernatural events. Instead, I wanted to find more human explanations for these turns in the narrative…what drove the characters to act as they did? How did their relationships to one another bring about a war to end a civilisation? What parts of the story had we never been told? So, although Daughters of Sparta is on the one hand a retelling of a traditional and familiar myth, it is also an imagined ‘secret history’ of the real people who may, if they ever lived, have inspired this great story.” For Saint, one significant element that drew her attention to Ariadne and Phaedra, and that she hadn’t seen developed anywhere, was that “they were sisters who both grew up with the Minotaur and were linked to Theseus. Despite their closeness, their stories always seem to be told independently of each other.” As a result, Saint became interested in “exploring how their shared childhood would have shaped them – the suffering of their mother for their father’s crime against Poseidon, the horror of the Minotaur imprisoned beneath the floor at Knossos, the flow of human sacrifices from Athens to Crete, and then their separation when Ariadne betrays the family and runs away. I wanted to bring them together and delve into the dynamic between them and how that would change as their lives take shape.” The research she carried out also influenced the physical description of her main characters. “Ariadne and Phaedra are granddaughters of Helios, the sun-god, so I incorporated a lot of bronze and golden tones into my description of the sisters’ hair and eyes to reflect their divine heritage.” Separating the bad press about her characters and the propaganda about them was difficult, because Saint realised that “Phaedra’s story in particular plays into a misogynistic propaganda that we still unfortunately see in modern life. Punished for the hubris of Hippolytus, Phaedra is cursed by Aphrodite to suffer a powerful
