69 pages • 2 hours read
Natalie HaynesA Thousand Ships
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Meaning of a Hero
In her Afterword, Haynes describes her novel as an attempt to write an “epic” in which “heroism” does not belong solely to men and “tragic consequences of war” solely to women (345). Because Haynes writes her modern epic by retelling ancient Trojan war mythology for the purpose of recovering women’s voices, it is important to differentiate between her working definitions of “epic,” “tragedy,” and “hero” and those of ancient Greek speakers, whose texts provide the earliest sources for the myth narratives on which Haynes’s vignettes are based (345). The meanings of these terms continue evolving across antiquity and into the middle and modern ages.
Though Haynes never explicitly defines the term hero, her narrative, which she calls an epic, suggests that a hero is someone who performs brave deeds (e.g., great, terrible) in the face of tragic (i.e., disastrous) events. Her narrative portrays women from ancient Trojan war mythology exhibiting bravery in a variety of roles and circumstances. Penthesilea is a gifted warrior who chooses her manner of death. Penelope raises her son and maintains her household while her husband is away for twenty years. Oenone also raises her son with Paris alone. Creusa dies trying to reunite with her husband and son in a burning, fallen city. Clytemnestra exacts retribution against her husband who sacrificed their daughter. Hecabe avenges her youngest son’s death, even as she is being led into enslavement. Quiet and steady Andromache perseveres, overcoming every obstacle, even enslavement. Cassandra, Polyxena, and Iphigenia face death without resisting and with dignity.
Epic in ancient Greek referred both to narrative poetry concerned with the acts of gods and heroes and to a particular meter, dactylic hexameter. Tragedy referred not only to being the victim of disaster but also to having befallen that disaster through a combination of one’s own mistakes and circumstances beyond one’s control (engineered by Fate and other divine forces). The term hero in ancient Greek cosmology is not interchangeable with either warrior or with man. Heroes were superhuman forces who were the subjects of epic: dactylic hexameter narratives about gods and mortals. Heroes were men or women who had divine ancestry and lived during the Heroic age, an earlier generation of mortals who were directly descended from the gods and in direct contact with them. Because of their closeness to the gods, heroes were subject to excesses, with both godly gifts and flaws.
In archaic and classical Greek, heroes seem also to have been viewed as intermediaries between gods and men and were objects of cult worship. In addition to women being important figures within the Homeric epics, material evidence of ancient cults dedicated to women from Trojan war myth—e.g., Helen, Penelope, Iphigenia—further suggest that hero in archaic and classical Greek terms is not synonymous with warrior but refers to supremely gifts and flawed Heroic age figures. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are, among other things, poems that appear to illuminate hero cult to their historical audiences.
Haynes draws extensively on the plots and characters of archaic and classical texts including both Homeric epics and tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides. In addition, she pulls from Roman poets Ovid and Virgil. These texts, composed across hundreds of years and in different sociopolitical contexts, also present different visions of what it means to be heroic. Haynes does not engage the terms epic and hero in the way as they were understood in archaic and classical Greek antiquity. As in ancient texts, Haynes’s narrative is based on a story about ancient gods and mortals, and her heroes perform great and terrible excesses. However, Haynes’s belief that the term hero needs to be redefined is largely a response to how the term was applied by the overwhelmingly male scholars of the early modern and Victorian periods. These scholars focused primarily on the male warriors of Trojan war mythology, which has led to the contemporary conflation of the terms hero and warrior that Haynes also assumes. For example, she asserts that despite Achilles “sulking” in Homer’s Iliad, “we never question that he is a hero”; whether fighting or not, “his status as a warrior is never in doubt” (344-45). Scholars of Homer might argue that the Iliad indeed calls into question whether Achilles, though he is a hero by definition, can rightly call himself a warrior (e.g., if he is sitting in his tent, can he really be called “swift-footed,” as his epithet ironically describes him?).
Centering Women’s Experiences
The muse Calliope’s attempts to teach the bard how a true war epic should be told frame the vignettes that make up A Thousand Ships. It should not celebrate violence and destruction but reveal that war has no victors. Those who believe they have won are deluded and fail to see that they have sacrificed their communities and perhaps even their humanity. War’s true victims are not the men who die on the battlefield, but the women who lose their husbands, sons, and fathers (i.e., all the Trojan women) and the women who become victims of violence either directly or because of the emotional toll of loss (e.g., Iphigenia, Laodamia). To teach the bard this, Calliope orders him to follow the women among themselves and learn their stories. Her vignettes stretch across the world that the war affects, from Troy and its allied regions to various communities in Greece, describing the experiences of wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of men on both sides of the conflict.
By centering the stories of women from Trojan war mythology, A Thousand Ships presents itself as a response to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, two of the most influential war epics that have survived into modern times. Both center male heroes, Achaean Achilles and Trojan Aeneas, respectively. The Aeneid follows Aeneas from the burning city of Troy across the Mediterranean to Italy; it is primarily the story of one hero’s quest to create a new empire. Conversely, the Iliad begins with the wrath of Achilles and spirals outward to show how his rage impacts not only the Achaean military ranks, who suffer great losses when their best warrior sidelines himself, but also the Trojans, whose successes breed confidence, provoking them to take bigger risks as they believe they have the gods’ favor, which then leads to the city’s fall. A pivotal scene between Hector and Andromache in Book 6 introduces this arc. Women have the last word in the Iliad, which ends with their laments and Hector’s funeral.
Haynes borrows from the Iliad the concept of war as “a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself” (109). To correct what she sees as the errors of previous epics and/or how they have been received and interpreted, Haynes drastically reduces the presence of men, except as contrasting reference points who illuminate the heroism of women. Believing that women have been pushed to the margins, she flips the script, bringing them to the center and moving men into the margins.
Giving Voice to the Silenced
By creating an epic composed solely from the points of view of women, Haynes strives to recover their stories from ancient mythologies and allow them to narrate their own experiences. Some have been lost over time, such as Penthesilea’s, who featured in an ancient epic called Aethiopis that is lost. Some are named in various myth-based texts but either do not speak in their own voices or speak very little, such as Chryseis and Briseis respectively in the Iliad and Creusa in Aeneid. Some of their stories are told in ancient texts but receive a modern update, such as Penelope’s from the Odyssey. For others, who are only known in modern times by their names, Haynes invents stories to fill in the gaps.
The novel’s claim to give a voice to silenced women from antiquity is, however, open to critique. Haynes pulls her narratives from surviving ancient Greek and Roman texts, which are believed to represent a fraction of what has survived. In the case of ancient Athenian tragedies, 32 have survived among hundreds that were produced. This makes it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions about how women are portrayed in ancient literature. Further, the little that has survived largely complete provides Haynes with a wealth of material. In some cases, her vignettes are almost direct summaries that require little invention other than inner monologue, as with Clytemnestra, Penelope, Iphigenia, and Hecabe. Nevertheless, Haynes does illuminate more obscure figures, such as Penthesilea, Creusa, and Laodamia, and those who are completely or mostly silent, such as Briseis and Chryseis.
Notably, Haynes does not present the perspective of Helen, a central figure and counterpart of Achilles in ancient Greek epic tradition. Zeus’s plan to use the Trojan war to lighten Gaia’s burden, which Haynes refers to via the narrative of Themis in Chapter 32, involved two events: the marriage of Peleus and Thetis and the birth of Helen, which is referenced via summaries and fragments in the Cypria, a lost Trojan war epic. Scholars have noted that it was the birth of Helen, not her arrival in Troy specifically, that was significant. In Greek epic tradition, she was conceived in a rape, by Zeus of Nemesis (goddess of retribution), to serve as an instrument in his plan. Achilles also was conceived during a rape, of Thetis by Peleus, the husband who was forced on her by Zeus. The two figures of the Iliad, Achilles and Helen, are seen as complementary figures. In A Thousand Ships, Haynes names Zeus and the mortal Leda as Helen’s parents, apparently a later variant. Helen is repeatedly referred to as a “whore” by numerous characters in the novel, including Hecabe and Theano, is mocked by Penelope in chapter eight, and is dismissed by Calliope, who declares that she had “enough of Helen” (31; 37; 212).
