Daughters of Chaos (Overlook Press 2024) by Jen Fawkes begins at the end, in 1877, with Sylvie’s graveside promise to her longtime partner: “ ‘I’m going to write it all down, Hannah,’ I said as I knelt beside her grave, my fingertips piercing the cool earth. ‘Maybe I’ll give it to the girls. Maybe I won’t, but I plan to write the whole damn thing down.’ ”
This novel begins with a multitude of characters and events that seem tricky and tedious to navigate. But once readers land in Nashville, “the city of 10,000 whores,” those early scenes enlarge and deepen the unfolding tale and its character trajectories.
The resulting dynamo picks up steam and pulls readers along, tightening its grip, page by page. The web of events include the Union occupation of Nashville, syphilis outbreaks, and the city’s attempt to exile prostitutes, all true.
Prostitution is a crucial and unsurprising element in this novel. The real 1860 census counted 198 white and nine “mulatto” prostitutes plying their trade in Smoky Row, Nashville’s two-block, red-light district, but who knows the accuracy of government stats in those days?
Prostitutes were relatively free from the restrictive roles of wife and mother, and the trade could be lucrative. Even today, women may slide into sex work for money—especially society’s poor and marginalized.
The novel starts with the protracted birth of the main character, Sylvie, and her twin, Silas, killing their mother, once a stage actress in Nashville. A mother’s death, all by itself, is a myth-inducing event. When the twins are fourteen, their elder sister Marina also leaves.
Later, several fires mystify residents in their hometown of Whitley Courthouse, Kentucky, and Silas claims credit. He explains that people inside a blaze aren’t trapped—“they want to burn,” he says, of his otherworldly visions, “to start things over.” The Free School, founded by an abolitionist, burns, and so does Horatio Swift, their father, a Quaker who helped build the school.
Sylvie and Silas regularly receive money by mail from Nashville, suspecting Marina as their benefactor. Sylvie also receives a script—The Apocrypha, supposedly by Aristophanes of Athens, circa 386 BC. It’s mailed from the same address as the money.
Once they reach Nashville, fresh off the steamboat, the first sight Sylvie witnesses is women beating tambourines, and shaking baskets to raise money, without success. It’s the Southern Ladies’ Aid Society.
One man shouts, “Don’t trust women!” Another man spits on a lady’s face; she wipes the slobber, then licks it defiantly from her fingertip. Ugh. Here’s a writer who understands the power of specific, visceral details.
Sylvie locates the address on the letters and script. A large and sumptuous house. Persian carpets, velvet wallpaper, gilt-edged mirrors. Women lounge in “pantalets, chemises and stockings.” Queen Anne furniture. Sylvie asks who the women are. Doc, who had greeted her at the door, says, “Depends on who you ask.”
“My sisters,” one woman says, adding that Doc calls them priestesses.
Another woman sighs and says, “I’m afraid most people call us whores.”
Sylvie moves in. She keeps her eyes peeled for Marina. Sylvie thinks she sees her missing sister, swimming in the Cumberland River, but, up close, it’s only driftwood. Later she believes it’s a manifestation, foreshadowing the sister’s fate.
Every element of the novel serves one theme: the power of women. Even the complex and no doubt tedious task of translation is given due focus when Sylvie “visualizes” the translation while the women sing.
Fawkes collages chapters among news items, encyclopedia entries, play manuscripts and stories such as that of poetess Gaia Valentino, a famous Venetian courtesan. These inserts surprise, enlarge, and spice the story.
Texts include “Lysistrata,” featuring Greek women on a sex strike until men quit warring. The “lost text” of an “Apocrypha,” which typically refers to missing chapters between the new and old bible testaments, but this drama in Daughters, features a woman seeking “A world without endless civil wars. A world in which people are not thoughtlessly slaughtered in the name of politics or commerce or the ostentatious hoarding of wealth.”
Silas spends much of the novel under the Cumberland River tinkering with his homemade submersible, calling to mind the real Confederate-constructed “Hunley” submersible that disappeared in 1864.
Daughters of Chaos—the “whole damn thing”— is an epistolary feminist saga. It’s wild beast of a book, free-associative, drawing on glittering bits of antiquity, dystopia, legend, illusion, violence, superstition, myth, history—mining female tropes for all they’re worth.
Exiled prostitutes? Marina’s whereabouts? And so much more. Read the book.
Jen Fawkes
Jen Fawkes is the author of Mannequin and Wife, a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, winner of the 2023 Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Book Award, and Foreword INDIES gold medalist. Her collection Tales the Devil Told Me was a Foreword Indies silver medalist, one of Largehearted Boy’s Favorite Collections of 2021, and a finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Single-Author Story Collection. Her short fiction has won numerous awards, including the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize, and has appeared in One Story, Lit Hub, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, Best Small Fictions, and many others. A two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, Fawkes lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Leave a Reply