Daughter of Necessity by Marie Brennan
My rating: 3/5 cats
i do love stories like this—stories that take a well-known work as their foundation and then poke around in it to locate the parts of the story that stick out in our minds as unfinished or unexplored. where the heck did heathcliff go for those three years? what were bertha and miss havisham like before all their madness and disappointments? how did gertrude and claudius hook up? and, here—what was up with penelope and that weaving/unweaving cycle? was it just the weary stereotypy of woman endlessly waiting for her man to come home?
this story offers an answer, and on first glance it seems to be a satisfying and reasonable one, drawing from other corners of classical mythology and wrapping it all up in a tidy bow.
but, and this is where i need someone with a better background in greek mythology to step up. my understanding is that while helen of troy had zeus for a daddy, and could therefore claim a little divinity on college applications, penelope’s mother was “just” a naiad. which is nice and all for diversity and parlor tricks, but doesn’t have the same pull as a goddess. View Spoiler »whereas the fates were capital-g goddesses whose power was undisputed. and yes, penelope struggles here, with the manipulation of the threads:
She wants to weep, seeing what she has woven. The threads fight her, their orderly arrangement belying their potential for chaos. Each thread is a life, and each life is a thousand thousand choices; she is not goddess enough to control them. Only a woman, a mortal woman, with a trace of the divine in her veins. And a trace is not enough.
but she seems to be overstepping her place by even trying, right? i’m no classics scholar, but i do know the gods get really pissed when mortals forget their mortal limitations. you know, like having fire and all. and yet, penelope eventually succeeds and gets her happy ending with all her insides intact, which don’t get me wrong, i am all sorts of happy for her, but i’m just questioning the plausibility of this within the constraints of the greek worldview. especially this line:
A queen who can trace her ancestry back through her grandmother’s grandmother to the three daughters of Necessity. From them she inherits this fragment of their gift, to spin thread and link it to men, to weave the shape of their fates on her loom.
i am the laziest researcher today, and my half-assed googling gave me nothing suggesting this. and although this is just a short story and i hate to be the one poking around at the teeth of my gift horse, i am just wondering if this is just the glossing of an author who had a great idea and wanted to force it in, or if this is a claim penelope can actually make here.
why do i care? i have no idea—it’s just something that’s niggling in my brain a little, so i’m putting it out there for the geniuses amongst you. « Hide Spoiler
none of that has any bearing on my enjoyment of the story. i loved the concept/explanation. ultimately, this didn’t blow my mind because there was something hypnotic/soporific about the prose that just made me glaze over a little, but it was one of those “this story is fine and i neither loved nor hated it” situations.
it’s a solid three.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/10/da…
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