The title of this 2019 novel by Natalie Haynes derives its title from the famous description of Helen of Troy as the face that launched a thousand ships. Even though Helen of Troy has been mythically celebrated as the cause behind the subsequent Trojan War, the legendary battle has been very much a story that focuses on the masculinity of war. A Thousand Ships seeks to become a corrective to that long historical tradition by revisiting many of the characters involved and presenting the story through the lens of feminist participation.
The chapters are subtitled with the names of these female characters including such figures whose names should be recognizable if not necessarily their stories: Calliope, Penelope, Aphrodite, Iphigenia. Interestingly, several of the chapters are subtitled simply “The Trojan Women.” A summary of the novel is essentially a summary of the Trojan War. Paris steals the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus and brings her to Troy. This results in the outbreak of a long war between the Spartan and the Trojans. The intertwined stories of Odysseus and Agamemnon, among others, also become part of the narrative tapestry. The difference between this telling of the story and others is that the story of Odysseus is presented by his wife, Penelope, while the complicated story of Agamemnon is related by the important women in the king’s life: wife Clytemnestra and daughter Iphigenia as well as his sex slave Cassandra, though she may be an unreliable narrator, of course.
One need not be intimately familiar with the history and mythologies of Ancient Greece to understand what is going on. The multiple narrative approach is an ideal vehicle for introducing backstories and context which allow later narrative voices to get to the point rather than wasting time on exposition. The objective of this novel is simple. It is designed as a method for giving voice to those who have either taken a supporting role in the larger canvas of the Trojan War or whose stories have only been presented through the perspective of a male narrative voice.
The choice of the title is significant to this concept. All the blame for the devastation wreaked by the Trojan War has been placed for millennia upon Helen but even in her own story she has remained mostly an enigmatic metaphor. The line about her face launching a thousand ships implies that her beauty is what the war was ultimately fought over but from a larger perspective it really has nothing to do with her looks. It is the fact that she “belonged” to one man and was “taken” from him by another. Women in these stories primarily exist either as figures of cunning and villainy or as victims requiring rescue by men. Helen especially represents this since as a result of the war she comes to be either both Trojan and Spartan or neither Trojan or Spartan. In other words, the determination of Helen’s real place in the world of that time is going to be dependent on who is telling the story and that story is going to be told by a man.
A Thousand Ships is one of a recent spate of novels which seeks to give these famous women a voice which has been lacking in the traditional telling courtesy of Homer and other male storytellers that followed. It is important to remember that it is not just the women who are being given an opportunity to tell their story but that those stories are also being told a female author. Just this fact alone represents a modern-day revolution in relating the participation these females who are famous because men have been telling their stories centering on their parts in the larger epics of more powerful men. This version gives them all a chance to stand front and center and make the stories about them.
