The Women of Troy Trilogy #3

The unmistakable silhouette of Medusa looms at the centre of the cover of my edition of The Voyage Home. Medusa’s sinuous snake-hair seems to illuminate the winding path of water leading back to Mycenae. It is only when we look more carefully that we are likely to realise that this is a wooden figurehead on a boat. In fact, the boat is called Medusa. It is a merchant ship used to convey Agamemnon, Cassandra and Ritsa to Mycenae. In chapter 14 Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, is likened to Medusa, “leaning forward, like a second figurehead.” But the imagery also anticipates Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon, who will kill her husband and his new concubine/wife upon their return. Cassandra, we will find, has suffered a similar wrong to Medusa, but it is Clytemnestra who history will judge a monster.

The Voyage Home is the third book in Pat Barker’s Women of Troy Trilogy. It is primarily told from the perspective of Ritsa, the slave who appears in Barker’s previous book, The Women of Troy. Any reader already familiar with Barker’s Clytemnestra will know that the murders are not an act of jealousy for her husband’s infidelity. Clytemnestra tells Cassandra, “… if it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else.” Instead, her actions are those of a deeply wounded woman. In fact, the presence of Cassandra, ostensibly another victim of Agamemnon, reminds Clytemnestra of her daughter, Iphigenia, who was sacrificed to the gods by Agamemnon to gain favourable winds for the Greek forces as they waited to launch their ships towards Troy from Aulis. Since then, Clytemnestra has ruled Mycenae for ten years in her husband’s absence, and she is neither willing to forgive him for the murder, nor is she willing to cede power. Whatever character flaws Clytemnestra might have, this is the portrait of a modern woman: independent, intelligent and capable.

For so much of the history of this story Clytemnestra has been villainised: a monstrous woman. Who knows what the name of the boat might have been presumed to be in older versions of this tale? But Barker chooses Medusa, a name that seems chosen in condemnation, since Clytemnestra is a figure who, in many instances, has been reviled as unnatural. Aeschylus, writing in fifth century Athens, portrayed Clytemnestra as an adulterer, a most unnatural thing for a woman to be, since women were presumed to serve either their father or their husband. In Aeschylus’ plays, collectively known as The Oresteia, Clytemnestra has been doing it with Aegisthus, the cousin of Agamemnon, while her husband has been off fighting the war. For his part, Aegisthus has his own bone to pick with the Atreus family (this is a terrible pun you will soon realise), since Aegisthus’ father, Thyestes, was tricked by Atreus into eating Aegisthus’ brothers (see, I told you). Thyestes was presented with their hands and feet as evidence of his unwitting cannibalism at the end of a feast. Weirdly, that gives Aegisthus some rationale for wanting to seek intergenerational revenge on Agamemnon for this outrage, though Agamemnon was personally innocent in the affair. In this society, that’s how revenge works. In this novel, it’s what keeps Aegisthus in the story.

Because those familiar with Pat Barker’s version of the story will be aware that Barker’s Aegisthus and Clytemnestra are most definitely NOT lovers. Clytemnestra needs Aegisthus as muscle to enforce her will, but she’s also aware that Aegisthus may prove to be a threat against her own son, Orestes, once Agamemnon has been despatched. She also understands that taking Aegisthus as a lover would compromise her own power. As a man, people would look to Aegisthus, instead. That bit about them being lovers comes from Aeschylus. For Barker, changing this is a narrative choice that affords us further insight into her novel.

Pat Barker’s series has given voice to women who are so often at the margins of the story in traditional tales of Troy. The Silence of the Girls roughly coincides with the events from The Iliad, but it is told from the perspective of Briseis, the woman captured and given to Achilles as a prize of war: while The Women of Troy describes the aftermath of the Trojan War from the perspective of women like Briseis, Cassandra and Ritsa as they await a wind to take them to a new and unimaginable life. In these novels, Barker evokes our sympathy and understanding for the plight of women in war. But in this third novel we encounter a different kind of woman in Clytemnestra. She has been a victim of violence, but she is also willing to perpetrate violence. It is not that Clytemnestra must be a ‘good’ character for Barker’s purpose, but that her motives must not be impugned, it seems. So, in this story, there is no place for Aegisthus the boyfriend. Clytemnestra imagines that she performs justice, not revenge, in her plans to kill Agamemnon, so that any action beyond Agamemnon’s death – killing Cassandra, for instance – or any motive that sullies her own purpose – Aegisthus’ desire for revenge – would ensure her “purity of intention [is] contaminated”. That Clytemnestra does kill Cassandra is the result of an unplanned moment, whereas her determination not to subject herself to Aegisthus is a long-held determination.

So, Barker’s Clytemnestra begins from pure motives – to avenge her daughter – though we see the wrinkles in her character. She is a deeply serious woman, though she allows herself to be subject to petty resentment and is motivated by self-interest. For instance, she is a woman who has lived in the shadow of a beautiful sister – she is “Helen of Troy’s plain sister” – and her jealousy is evident. As a mother she works to set her daughter, Electra, against her father for the purposes of her plan, and places her in harm’s by doing it. And her anger at Agamemnon exceeds his crime against their daughter, Iphigenia: her motives range beyond revenge. By killing Agamemnon, she will not only avenge her daughter, but she will address the threat to her own social position: “the sense of being relegated to the sidelines of life, the ebbing away, not so much of power, as of significance.” She is a psychologically believable character. Clytemnestra understands her husband’s strength and battle experience, and so works to overcome his physical advantages. She is patient and she plans. Her weapons are wile and cunning. Like Lady Macbeth she will “be the blossoming flower - and the snake beneath.” Unlike Lady Macbeth, however, she does not work for her husband’s advantage, so her motives can never be so pure as Lady Macbeth’s. Clytemnestra is complicated and compromised by circumstance, by rumour in the palace and the possible consequences to herself and her children, which she must try to anticipate.

Nevertheless, Barker’s narrative encourages us to find sympathy for Clytemnestra. She is physically humanised through her bad knee: “God help any leader who stumbles.” Her shattered emotions, the result of her daughter’s murder, are real. In her memories of Iphigenia, it is not just her daughter’s lifeless head held in her hands that embodies the memory of grief. Clytemnestra remembers a ladybird on a leaf near her daughter’s corpse and recalls the rhyme: “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children all gone.” Through this small, inconsequential detail, Barker evokes a mother’s desolation with the use of a modern nursery rhyme.

The story of Medusa is more in keeping with the chronological setting of the novel. The point of Medusa’s story is that she is not a monster. That she is a victim. At the end of the fourth book of Ovid we are told that Medusa,

• … was very lovely once, the hope of many
• An envious suitor, and of all her beauties
• Her hair most beautiful – at least I heard so
• From one who claimed he had seen her. One day Neptune
• Found her and raped her, in Minerva’s temple,
• And the goddess turned away, and hid her eyes
• Behind her shield, and, punishing the outrage
• As it deserved, she changed her hair to serpents

This is the story of Medusa’s metamorphosis which is told by Cassandra. Cassandra identifies with the wrong done to Medusa, who is raped, as Cassandra was raped by Little Ajax in a temple of Athena at the end of the Trojan War. In answer to Cassandra’s question, “Who decides who’s a monster?”, Ritsa cynically responds, “The winner”, which is practically true. Poseidon (Neptune) is the perpetrator of the crime, but his victim, Medusa, pays the penalty, when she is physically transformed into the monster of legend. Likewise, it is Agamemnon who is cheered and adored by his army on the last leg of their journey home – “the fighters on the two nearest warships caught sight of him and started to cheer” – while Iphigenia is constantly misremembered as having gone to her death a willing martyr. It is an error that both elides the pain of her horrible death as well as the collective guilt it would otherwise entail. In this, Iphigenia’s ‘martyrdom’ serves the convenient narrative purposes of the “winner”, which happens to be the world of men. So, too, has Clytemnestra been transformed by this crime. She is likened to a spider and Agamemnon as a fly in her web. Women, in this story, are warped by the dominant world of men, so it is little wonder that Barker allows Clytemnestra the independence she claims against the otherwise controlling narrative of Aegisthus’ revenge and his quest for power.

The ending of The Voyage Home suggests there could be a fourth book, even though the series ends here. Aeschylus, after all, continues the story until Clytemnestra and Aegisthus have been killed by Orestes in retribution, and Orestes is subsequently tried in Athens for murder, thereby ending the cycle of revenge that has plagued the family for generations. Barker leaves her story at a more uncertain moment, in which Orestes is yet to act, but we know through Aegisthus’ story that the children of those wronged are bound to seek retribution. The ghosts of children haunt this novel: there are mysterious hand and foot prints that appear around the palace, and there are the haunting modern nursery rhymes that echo through its halls. Children are the ultimate victims of crime just as much as they one day may be its new perpetrators, as suggested in the ominous line “And here comes a chopper TO CHOP OFF YOUR HEAD”. In a sense, being a victim is about how one is changed as much as how one is wronged. To have one’s life upended through slavery, through rape, or ultimately, by murder, is one thing. But the effect of violence and war is transformative. It is an aspect of the story of the Trojan War story seldom considered in the heroic accounts of the world of men. But in Barker’s hands, the lives of women during war reveal a different facet of violence and suffering.

Overall, this is a great series of books which requires no knowledge of Greek myth to enjoy. Barker tells you everything you need to know to understand the story. And, what is more, by the time you are finished, you will know a great deal more than when you started. Highly recommended.

The Women of Troy Trilogy