Emma Bridges's "Warriors' Wives"

Emma Bridges was educated at a comprehensive school and state sixth-form college in North East England before studying Classics at the Universities of Oxford and Durham. She is now a Senior Lecturer and Staff Tutor in Classical Studies at The Open University, UK.

Bridges applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Warriors' Wives: Ancient Greek Myth and Modern Experience, and reported the following:

Open my book to page 99 and you’ll find a discussion of the mythical figure of Penelope, who in Homer’s Odyssey waits faithfully at home while her husband Odysseus, king of Ithaca, is away fighting the Trojan War for ten years, and then taking a further ten years to make his way home. Not knowing whether Odysseus is alive or dead, Penelope has to figure out not only how to manage the royal household and the estate he has left behind while parenting the son who was a baby when he left, but also to fend off the 108 suitors who have set up camp in the palace in hope that she will choose one of them to marry. In a starkly patriarchal society this is not just about another man taking Odysseus’ place in Penelope’s bed but also about taking control of his material wealth and power. Penelope’s ruse to delay having to remarry involves a typically (for ancient Greek society) feminine activity. She tells the suitors that she will choose which of them to marry only when she has finished weaving a shroud for her father in law. What they don’t know, however, is that she secretly unpicks the weaving every night.

The Page 99 Test does a reasonable job of capturing some of the key themes of Warriors’ Wives. Penelope is the archetypal ‘waiting wife’ who symbolizes some of the ideal attributes which are projected on to military spouses in both ancient Greek myth and the modern world – she is patient, faithful, and resourceful, keeping the ‘home fires burning’ while her husband is away. She is very much the ‘modal military wife’, a stereotype that persists even today in service of the largely patriarchal structures which military institutions still perpetuate. Not only that, but Penelope is also periodically silenced; although her actions are just as heroic as those of Odysseus, her story is given far less space. This mirrors the lack of attention which is still paid by policy makers, the media, and the wider public, to the experiences of military spouses. The focus of my book as whole is on unearthing those experiences, and on comparing the ways in which the wives of warriors are represented in ancient mythical narratives with aspects of the lives of those who are ‘married to the military’ in the modern world.

That said, there are elements of the experiences of soldiers’ spouses which Penelope’s story does not capture, and which I deal with elsewhere in the book. For example, I use the figure of Andromache – widow of the Trojan Hector – to explore the emotions connected with wartime farewells, as well as the devastating consequences of a soldier’s death in battle. Meanwhile the mythical Clytemnestra personifies some of the anxieties surrounding spousal infidelity in military communities, as well as symbolising the sacrifices which soldiers’ spouses have always been expected to make. Finally the story of the war captive and sexual violence survivor Tecmessa, who lives with a wounded and suicidal warrior, helps us to think about the traumatic aftermath of war for women.

Learn more about Warriors' Wives at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue