This book sets out to investigate the experiences of the wives of warriors fighting in the Trojan War as depicted in Greek epic and tragedy through a combination of close reading of the ancient texts and a comparison with the perspectives of modern military wives from a variety of sources, including B.'s own insights as a military wife. As such, the book aims to bring into closer focus the experience of the non-combatant wife who remains at home during wartime, since this perspective is frequently side-lined in favour of the analysis of soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield in both ancient and modern sources and scholarship. The book also seeks to uncover further insights by the comparative evaluation of ancient and modern examples. Each chapter explores different aspects of the wives’ experiences in the journey between departure of the warrior and his return as well as the impact of the absence on their relationship in the aftermath of the military campaign.
In Chapter 1 B. discusses the departure of the warrior with a focus on the themes of gender division and separation. In the selected ancient examples, including pottery scenes of the departing warrior, men leave to go to war, while women remain at home running the household and taking on additional tasks that would previously have been undertaken by their husbands. B. explores the emotions that accompany departure, including sadness at the moment of separation, anger about the perceived choice of war over family commitments, as well as the subsequent loneliness, stress and fear for the future. However, B. does not consider in this chapter the emotions of the ambivalent wife or the wife who is in an abusive relationship and looks forward to the moment of departure. Paris’ departure from Helen in Iliad (6.332ff.) and the conflicting emotions depicted in this example would have made a good contrasting case study to the example of Hector bidding farewell to Andromache. The problematics surrounding the ‘romanticisation’ of the relationship between the warrior and his wife considered in Chapter 5 could fruitfully have been investigated further here as well.
Chapter 2 looks at the conflict for attention between the ‘greedy institutions’ of family and army (p. 43), and especially the expectation that military wives make sacrifices for the sake of their husbands' military ambitions. In ancient myth this theme plays out through the literal sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon who chooses the interests of the army and their military campaign over the interests of his wife and daughter. B. is interested in uncovering the emotional and psychological impact on military wives, and in particular Clytemnestra, whose resentment and anger towards her husband and his choices feature in several ancient tragedies. For B. this is the primary emotion driving Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ trilogy, while her adultery with Aegisthus and her desire for power are deemed secondary. However, the emotions and behaviour of the women in the modern examples upon which this resentful reading is based do not cohere particularly well with the depiction of Clytemnestra in tragedy nor with the complex range of motivations by which she is driven, generating questions around the applicability of this interpretation.
Chapter 3 covers the period of separation while the man is away at war, focusing especially on Penelope's experience of ‘ambiguous loss’ (p. 75), a reading that is particularly successful for this example as Odysseus is missing and Penelope does not know whether or not he will return. Penelope simultaneously longs for news and is distressed by news, placing her in a conflicted emotional state. B. outlines well the extent of Penelope's ‘emotional confusion’ demonstrated clearly through her grief, tiredness and attempts to keep busy as well as her ambiguous response to Odysseus’ story (pp. 84–5).
Chapter 4 discusses infidelity with particular focus on Clytemnestra as unfaithful wife. B. demonstrates how both ancient myths and modern stories draw on deep-seated fears of soldiers around what their wives are doing at home while they are away. The idea that predatory men will be more able to take advantage of a wife in her husband's absence is a key theme here. The tendency of suspicious soldiers to threaten or enact violence against their wives out of anger and jealousy at their imagined betrayal is prominent in modern examples, where B. notes that comrades are more sympathetic towards fellow soldiers who attack and sometimes kill their wives than towards the women, innocent or not. Here, again, there are dissonances with the way in which the violence within the husband–wife relationship appears in the modern examples and in tragic myth, where we find it is the adulteress wife, Clytemnestra, enacting murderous violence on her returning husband. The adulteress-murderess figure is not a modern trope, as B. notes (pp. 129, 135).
Chapter 5 investigates the reunion of husband and wife with a productive discussion of the psychological difficulties of transition and the need to re-establish trust in the relationship now that the husband has returned home after a time apart. While the romance of the reunion is a common thread in stories of reunion, B. highlights well the turbulence and experience of complex emotions for the married couple in her reading of the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus.
Chapter 6 explores the aftermath of warfare focusing on the experience of women who are taken as war captives, especially the difficulties for Andromache in her transition from warrior's wife to enslaved concubine in the household of her husband's killer. B. also discusses Sophocles’ Ajax, in which Ajax's suicide impacts upon his intimate partner Tecmessa, herself a war captive. While B. makes the case well for understanding the tragedies as ‘powerful reflections on the brutality of conflict’ (p. 202), the mythical examples once again do not map readily onto the modern examples of war wives in the UK and the USA.
Overall, the book is highly readable and achieves its ambitions of highlighting the emotional experience of war wives through the detailed discussion of a selection of mythical women. In places, the comparison of ancient and modern examples yields more fruit than in others. There are some difficulties with the comparison of women's experiences in the modern examples to the myth of Clytemnestra and the differences often seem greater than the similarities in this case. By contrast the approach works well for the myth of Penelope. The concept of ‘ambiguous loss’ is productively employed to throw light on her experience, and the complexity of her emotions both during separation and on reunion with her husband is articulated especially effectively. Equally, the discussion of trauma in the aftermath of warfare with spotlight on the experience of ancient women is a useful addition to this rapidly growing area of research and paves the way for further investigations in this worthwhile area of study.
