Jen Fawkes is the author of the new novel Daughters of Chaos. Her other books include the story collection Mannequin and Wife. She lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Q: You’ve said that Daughters of Chaos was inspired by historical events surrounding the legalization of prostitution in Nashville. Can you say more about that, and about how you created your character Sylvie?
A: My [original] central character was a boy growing up in a brothel. An agent who signed me for the novel before I’d written a word (and later fired me), insisted that the protagonist be a young woman, so I gave the boy an aunt and named her after one of my favorite characters (Aunt Sylvie from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping).
As I drafted, I built out Sylvie’s family, which had the same basic makeup it does now (brother, older sister, mother who died in childbirth, grieving father), but all the characters, including and especially Sylvie, evolved over time, as I wrote, rewrote, and discovered who they were.
In Sylvie, I set out to create a character who feels true to the lived experience of a woman of her time and place—one who exists at the whims of male relations, who lives daily with loss, who must fight for herself (and other women) in indirect ways—but one who also feels curious, capable, and strong. There are pieces of me in Sylvie, of course, as well as my sister, my mom, and other women I’ve cherished.
Q: What relationship does the novel have to Aristophanes’ classic Lysistrata?
A: After writing three drafts of a book that wasn’t working, I put the idea aside as I finished my Ph.D., dealt with my estranged father’s death, and figured out how to care for my mom, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in her 60s. Three years later, during Covid lockdown, I reread the Lysistrata (having last read it in college) and had what I can only describe as an epiphany.
A friend who saw an early draft of the book had expressed her desire to read the text of Sylvie’s play (originally Sylvie was a would-be playwright, not a translator), and in this epiphanic moment, I conceived of the Apocrypha, a fictional “lost” comedy of Aristophanes contained in Daughters of Chaos.
I set out to write a play that retained the “flavor” of an ancient comedy while using more modern methods and ideas—in other words, an ancient-feeling play that could appeal to 21st century readers.
To this end, I read Women at the Thesmophoria and Assemblywomen—plays in which, like the Lysistrata, Greek women seize power—and I reread Frogs and Clouds. While reading Aristophanes, I realized the role the Greek gods (especially Chaos) would play in Daughters of Chaos; reading the plays also strengthened my resolve to employ actual historical figures in the novel.
Q: Can you say more about how you researched the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: In addition to the plays (and analyses of Greek comedies), I looked at life in Civil War-era Nashville (and the American South in general), life in 16th century Venice (and the roles of courtesans and salons), the evolution of the Confederate submarine program (and the history of submarine technology in general).
I researched the city of Ephesus—home to the Artemision, the Temple of Artemis—where I decided to set the Apocrypha.
I sourced articles from JSTOR and EBSCO, as well as maps and photographs of Civil War-era Nashville. I studied maps of 16th century Venice and ancient Greece. I visited Nashville, exploring the riverfront area where the red-light district was once located as well as Fort Negley, where a pivotal scene in the novel takes place.
I consulted the eighth edition (1860) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—reference books owned by Sylvie (and available online through the National Library of Scotland)—and ended up placing a few tiny Britannica excerpts in the novel.
Books I read while working on Daughters of Chaos include Catherine Clinton’s Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War; Wild Rose by Ann Blackman; All the Daring of the Soldier by Elizabeth D. Leonard; Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War by Stephanie McCurry; and Margaret Rosenthal’s The Honest Courtesan.
Many things I learned while researching this novel surprised me! One example: the existence of Il catalogo di tutte le principali et più honorate cortigiane di Venezia (The Catalogue of All the Principal and Most Honored Courtesans of Venice), an actual catalogue that included the names, addresses, and rates of over 200 “working girls” in 16th century Venice!
Q: The writer Clare Beams said of the book, “This novel is interested in nothing less than the forces of chaos and order and the question of where lies threat and where salvation.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love it, and I think it’s remarkably apt! As Daughters of Chaos evolved, the character of Chaos—the original, primordial goddess, the void out of which the gods, the earth, night, the sky, human beings, love, and everything else was born—became increasingly central to the story. And I began to wonder if our notions of “chaos” and “order” are linked, inherently, to our binary notions of gender?
Do we really crave (masculine) order and fear (feminine) chaos, or is this just what we’ve always been told? If chaos is the “mother” of everything we know, should we be worshipping chaos—this ultimate female force—and trying to imitate her rhythms? Should we be trying to harness and understand chaos’s creative power?
As these questions occurred to me, they made their way into Daughters of Chaos, where the reader is also asked to reckon with them.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My next book is a speculative mystery novel set in a California Kirkbride insane asylum that’s been converted into condominiums.
The (present-set) external story is that of a film professor who sublets a unit in the building as she works on a book about the disappearance of a 1940s film star once committed to the asylum. The (past-set) interior story, told through the diaries of the hospital’s head nurse, recounts the events that preceded the movie star’s disappearance.
The novel deals with the historical treatment of women’s mental health, Hollywood’s golden age, and the phenomenon of feral children (a life-long obsession for me).
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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