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Oct. 13th, 2025 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI'm thinking even more fondly of The Mune in retrospect also because although I don't know that I feel that Sue Dawes is always 100% succeeding at her Victorian pastiche she has definitely done her research and is making a solid effort. Meanwhile, the book I read immediately afterwards, Jen Fawkes' Daughters of Chaos, is a Civil War-set epistolary novel that has no interest in trying to sound like something written in nineteenth century. This is of course a choice an author is free to make, but not one that I personally welcome -- although this turned out to be in the broad scheme the least of my problems with this book.
Towards the start of the book, Our Heroine Sylvie and her twin brother Silas part ways: her to look for their missing older sister in Nashville, and him to join the Confederate Army. In Nashville, Sylvie joins a secret sect of Women who are working on translating a lost play by Aristophanes:
“It’s long been rumored,” Evangeline continued, “that Aristophanes of Athens penned a new comedy while he was dying. Set during the Peloponnesian Wars, it deals with women banding together to effect change. But unlike Lysistrata, Assemblywomen, and Women at the Thesmophoria—all of which treat the idea of women holding power as an absurdity—we believe that in his final play, the great poet treats female sovereignty as the standard toward which we should all be striving.”
“My stars,” I said.
(Yes, we do get the full text of this play interspersed within the novel. No, it did not convince me it was plausibly by Aristophanes.)
Past members of this cult of Women, we learn, include Hatshepsut, Catherine of Russia AND Elizabeth of England, Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, Phyllis Wheatley, AND Sojourner Truth, because certainly in the year 1861 Sojourner Truth had nothing more important to worry about than translating a lost play by Aristophanes towards the ultimate end of Inspiring Women to Sabotage All War Efforts, Every War Effort, Yes, Every War Effort, yes this book does take place during the Civil War:
In that moment, I understood that we weren’t battling the Unionists or the Confederates. We were fighting warlike men and the worlds they think they’ve made.
Does this raise some questions for you? Because it certainly does for me!
Are there any people who aren't white in this Civil War-set Feminist Book, other than offscreen respectfully namechecked cultists Phyllis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth? Sure there are! In the Feminist Cult Brothel where Sylvie is lodging and working on her translation, there is a largely silent man named Doc who turns out to be an ancient Egyptian who's been living in immortal cultist bliss with the head of the brothel for centuries. So that's nice. There's also a Free Abolitionist School that gets set on fire by Sylvie's Confederate brother Silas in a Regrettable Incident that Sylvie is very disappointed in him about for approximately ten pages before they spend the rest of the novel corresponding solely and entirely about experimental submarines. So that's less nice. Lastly there is also a miserable camp of nameless freedmen being put to forced labor outside Nashville; the cultists provide them with charity! when they're not translating Aristophanes or blowing up guardhouses with both Union and Confederate soldiers inside them. You know, they're very busy.
In the latter part of the book, Sylvie and her cultist friends get swept up in an attempted mass expulsion of prostitutes from Nashville (though, the book explains, they could have prevented it, with their mysterious woman cult power, but decided not to because of a longer strategy). At this point, I paused to look up the historical incident, read this article, and went back to the book.
In the novel, when Sylvie and her cultist friends get back to Nashville: Doc broke the news that the Land of the Sirens, along with every other Smokey Row fancy house, had been overrun by interlopers—gangs of women who’d moved in to fill the void left by the evacuation of Nashville’s public women. [...] I thought this news might evoke some emotion from Evangeline—perhaps a tear or two—but Miss Price didn’t bat an eye. Puffing on a fresh cheroot, she twisted her copper-colored hair into its customary chignon, leapt on a table, and announced that she would be back in her beloved brothel inside a month. “Do not be downhearted, girls!” she cried, blotting her decolletage with a lace-edged handkerchief. “I built that house from the ground up, by gum, and no one’s going to take it unless I decide to let it go!”
I found this particularly worth noting, given that the Smithsonian article says, explicitly: All 111 women aboard the Idahoe had one thing in common: their race. The women heading for points north were all white. And almost immediately upon their departure, their black counterparts took their places in the city’s brothels and its alleys.
In the endnote, the author notes that she was inspired to write this book by reading this exact same Smithsonian article. So, unfortunately, I don't think there is any way to read this charitably as a problem of ignorance: the elision must be intentional. The whole plot of this book makes for an annoyingly pat metaphor for a certain kind of white feminism and I'm annoyed that I have to be here making it, but, nonetheless, here we are.
So that, I think, is the book's biggest problem. But there are other problems, perhaps more personally annoying to me. For example, there's the internal 19th-century biography of a 16th-century courtesan titled Changeling: The Story of Gaia Valentino which includes a scene in which the 16th-century courtesan's mother says encouragingly to her, "Woman is the universe. We are the cosmos. We are the landscape. We’re the forest, the bear, the mountain, the beehive, the sea. And it is our ability to change, to adapt, to wear a series of faces that gives us our strength, that enables us—in spite of how we’re fettered by society—not only to survive but to prevail.”" which -- even aside from the fact that by the time I finished the book I was ready to throw it across the room if I hit one more sentence beginning 'Woman Is' -- is definitely absolutely the way both 16th and 19th-century women talked.
Then the courtesan turns into a sea monster, which is foreshadowing for the way that all women and only women can turn into sea monsters [sexy, laudatory, liberatory] if they really want, because we're all Daughters of Chaos, etc., etc. This also felt very seventies second-wave, tbh, but not in a way I enjoyed. I would like to go back to the deserted Victorian island with the secret time travel basement.
Towards the start of the book, Our Heroine Sylvie and her twin brother Silas part ways: her to look for their missing older sister in Nashville, and him to join the Confederate Army. In Nashville, Sylvie joins a secret sect of Women who are working on translating a lost play by Aristophanes:
“It’s long been rumored,” Evangeline continued, “that Aristophanes of Athens penned a new comedy while he was dying. Set during the Peloponnesian Wars, it deals with women banding together to effect change. But unlike Lysistrata, Assemblywomen, and Women at the Thesmophoria—all of which treat the idea of women holding power as an absurdity—we believe that in his final play, the great poet treats female sovereignty as the standard toward which we should all be striving.”
“My stars,” I said.
(Yes, we do get the full text of this play interspersed within the novel. No, it did not convince me it was plausibly by Aristophanes.)
Past members of this cult of Women, we learn, include Hatshepsut, Catherine of Russia AND Elizabeth of England, Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, Phyllis Wheatley, AND Sojourner Truth, because certainly in the year 1861 Sojourner Truth had nothing more important to worry about than translating a lost play by Aristophanes towards the ultimate end of Inspiring Women to Sabotage All War Efforts, Every War Effort, Yes, Every War Effort, yes this book does take place during the Civil War:
In that moment, I understood that we weren’t battling the Unionists or the Confederates. We were fighting warlike men and the worlds they think they’ve made.
Does this raise some questions for you? Because it certainly does for me!
Are there any people who aren't white in this Civil War-set Feminist Book, other than offscreen respectfully namechecked cultists Phyllis Wheatley and Sojourner Truth? Sure there are! In the Feminist Cult Brothel where Sylvie is lodging and working on her translation, there is a largely silent man named Doc who turns out to be an ancient Egyptian who's been living in immortal cultist bliss with the head of the brothel for centuries. So that's nice. There's also a Free Abolitionist School that gets set on fire by Sylvie's Confederate brother Silas in a Regrettable Incident that Sylvie is very disappointed in him about for approximately ten pages before they spend the rest of the novel corresponding solely and entirely about experimental submarines. So that's less nice. Lastly there is also a miserable camp of nameless freedmen being put to forced labor outside Nashville; the cultists provide them with charity! when they're not translating Aristophanes or blowing up guardhouses with both Union and Confederate soldiers inside them. You know, they're very busy.
In the latter part of the book, Sylvie and her cultist friends get swept up in an attempted mass expulsion of prostitutes from Nashville (though, the book explains, they could have prevented it, with their mysterious woman cult power, but decided not to because of a longer strategy). At this point, I paused to look up the historical incident, read this article, and went back to the book.
In the novel, when Sylvie and her cultist friends get back to Nashville: Doc broke the news that the Land of the Sirens, along with every other Smokey Row fancy house, had been overrun by interlopers—gangs of women who’d moved in to fill the void left by the evacuation of Nashville’s public women. [...] I thought this news might evoke some emotion from Evangeline—perhaps a tear or two—but Miss Price didn’t bat an eye. Puffing on a fresh cheroot, she twisted her copper-colored hair into its customary chignon, leapt on a table, and announced that she would be back in her beloved brothel inside a month. “Do not be downhearted, girls!” she cried, blotting her decolletage with a lace-edged handkerchief. “I built that house from the ground up, by gum, and no one’s going to take it unless I decide to let it go!”
I found this particularly worth noting, given that the Smithsonian article says, explicitly: All 111 women aboard the Idahoe had one thing in common: their race. The women heading for points north were all white. And almost immediately upon their departure, their black counterparts took their places in the city’s brothels and its alleys.
In the endnote, the author notes that she was inspired to write this book by reading this exact same Smithsonian article. So, unfortunately, I don't think there is any way to read this charitably as a problem of ignorance: the elision must be intentional. The whole plot of this book makes for an annoyingly pat metaphor for a certain kind of white feminism and I'm annoyed that I have to be here making it, but, nonetheless, here we are.
So that, I think, is the book's biggest problem. But there are other problems, perhaps more personally annoying to me. For example, there's the internal 19th-century biography of a 16th-century courtesan titled Changeling: The Story of Gaia Valentino which includes a scene in which the 16th-century courtesan's mother says encouragingly to her, "Woman is the universe. We are the cosmos. We are the landscape. We’re the forest, the bear, the mountain, the beehive, the sea. And it is our ability to change, to adapt, to wear a series of faces that gives us our strength, that enables us—in spite of how we’re fettered by society—not only to survive but to prevail.”" which -- even aside from the fact that by the time I finished the book I was ready to throw it across the room if I hit one more sentence beginning 'Woman Is' -- is definitely absolutely the way both 16th and 19th-century women talked.
Then the courtesan turns into a sea monster, which is foreshadowing for the way that all women and only women can turn into sea monsters [sexy, laudatory, liberatory] if they really want, because we're all Daughters of Chaos, etc., etc. This also felt very seventies second-wave, tbh, but not in a way I enjoyed. I would like to go back to the deserted Victorian island with the secret time travel basement.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 10:43 pm (UTC)ARGH.
Unless I am misreading or the text had to be retrived in fragments over the millennia, I do not understand why it takes from the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty to translate a single play.
I can't believe I am preemptively disappointed by a book in which people turn into sea monsters. Please tell me it's not linked to Tiamat (I ask because of the Chaos) or I will need to know what kind of theoretically feminist novel lets Jordan Peterson into its head.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 11:00 pm (UTC)And, alas:
My sister smiled. “She’s been called many things, by many peoples. Tiamat, Cybele, and Isis. Rhea, Ishtar, and Gaia. Reitia, Diana, and Bona Dea. For the worship of this deity began before recorded time.”
“Marina,” I asked, “what do you call her?”
“Artemis,” she said. “I call her Artemis.”
no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 11:10 pm (UTC)I do not think it is possible to write French so bad it takes almost three centuries to translate.
“She’s been called many things, by many peoples. Tiamat, Cybele, and Isis. Rhea, Ishtar, and Gaia. Reitia, Diana, and Bona Dea. For the worship of this deity began before recorded time.”
OH MY GOD PLEASE PUT THE PREHISTORIC MATRIARCHY BACK WITH THE REST OF THE EARTHY-CRUNCHY WOO-WOO AND STOP WITH THE SYNCRETISM BEFORE YOU HURT YOURSELF REGRET INFORM NONE OF THESE GODDESSES ARE INTERCHANGEABLE BUT REITIA AND IŠTAR ARE A PARTICULARLY BAD EQUIVALENCE
(And if you are going to go down that unrecommended road of ALL GODS SAME GOD at whose end lies Emeth in The Last Battle, maybe incorporate a few goddesses who are not almost strictly from the Mediterranean basin? Like, allow people who care about Sedna and Oshun also to be pissed off by this conversation.)
“Artemis,” she said. “I call her Artemis.”
That tracks with this story, which also uses classical myth to shore its super-gender-essentialism, after which I stopped poking at the author's back catalogue because I had in fact hurt myself.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 11:25 pm (UTC)(and it's all just such unimaginative woo! like the list of Famous Cultist Women, it feels like the output of a Wikipedia search, No Implications Considered!)
asdjfk;djl oh yeah this story absolutely tracks. Woman Is!!!! (There's another line later that's like Women are born revolutionaries, dissenters, and agitators which made me want to declare myself a polite un-agitated conformist purely out of spite.)
no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 11:55 pm (UTC)You were correct! It really is very Robert Graves, Marija Gimbutas, Riane Eisler '70's divine feminine.
(and it's all just such unimaginative woo! like the list of Famous Cultist Women, it feels like the output of a Wikipedia search, No Implications Considered!)
Reitia is minimally obscure in that she belongs to one of the non-Roman Italic cultures where everyone else in that catalogue can be recognized by the sort of lay reader who will be attracted by a fictional play by Aristophanes, but not all that obscure in the scheme of the book since the Romans assimilated her to Diana and Artemis, whom the author obviously has a thing about.
I would be tremendously entertained by a historical cult composed of no one the reader has ever heard of, because they actually were good at the secret history shtick of staying under the radar.
asdjfk;djl oh yeah this story absolutely tracks. Woman Is!!!! (There's another line later that's like Women are born revolutionaries, dissenters, and agitators which made me want to declare myself a polite un-agitated conformist purely out of spite.)
I think I appreciate the effort to structure this novel around an act of multi-millennial scholarship as opposed to running wholly with the notion of women as feral and ungovernable and gloriously unbound from implicitly masculine civilization (I GUESS THE DOMESTICATION OF ENKIDU BY ŠAMḪAT DIDN'T FIT INTO THE GENDER BINARY), but I am not sure that I appreciate it enough to balance out the rest of what you describe.
(It got blurbs from people I like! What!)
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Date: 2025-10-14 01:11 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-10-13 10:58 pm (UTC)It sounds a bit like C.S. Malerich's The Factory Witches of Lowell, which similarly tried to take a fantasy approach to a real historical event and immediately shot itself directly in the foot with its inability to handle race in even the barest minimum "well at least you tried" sense. (In that book, one of our heroines has a gift for magic that means she "cannot be around subjugated creatures, man or beast" without her life force draining away, which is why she had to flee the South, because being around slavery was making her sick.)
Also - the main character is born in Kentucky in the 1840s, and her name is Sylvie? With a sister named (based on my googling) Marina?
. . . oh god, she's Marina because they turn into sea monsters, isn't she.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 11:02 pm (UTC)and yeah. She sure is. (It turns out they are descended from some sort of feminist cult dynasty, which I guess? explains the names?? sort of??)
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Date: 2025-10-13 11:11 pm (UTC)Uh.
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Date: 2025-10-13 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-13 11:29 pm (UTC)Ah, yes, the Lowell mills, that famous worker-owned collective.
our heroine gets sick from being around farm animals, and she explains that the same thing happened to her on her parents' plantation.
UH.
I had heard functionally nothing about this novel until these comments, and I'm not hearing anything to its credit now. I appreciate the warning and please accept my sympathies on the knowledge base that enables you to offer it.
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Date: 2025-10-14 11:29 am (UTC)nopetopus.gif
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Date: 2025-10-14 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-15 02:55 am (UTC)(Also Hatshepsut predated Aristophanes by like 1000 years?)
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Date: 2025-10-15 07:55 am (UTC)no subject
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