Daughters of Chaos: Try this if you crave beauty and strangeness more than story

Daughters of Chaos by Jen Fawkes 

Daughters of Chaos, by Jen Fawkes, came out in 2024. This literary feminist novel plays with layers, offers interesting characters and exquisite descriptions. The germ of the story is a fascinating real-life situation during the American Civil War. The city of Nashville, Tennessee, was occupied by Union troops. The military governor of the occupation grew concerned for the strength of his army and the security of the occupied city when Union soldiers began to get sick from syphilis. His medical advisor suggested that sex-work be decriminalized, regulated, and the (female) sex-workers subject to monthly health checkups. Outraged by this common-sense suggestion, the governor decided it would be more effective to simply exile the sex workers, so he piled them all onto riverboats and tried to send them away. This worked exactly as well as you would expect it to—with a final result that Nashville was the first city in the USA to legalize sex-work, at least for a while.

This laughable and eyebrow-raising bit of history appears in Daughters of Chaos, but the story that Fawkes formed around it, like nacre around a piece of grit in an oyster, is stranger and much more wide-ranging. It’s chock-full of fantastical creatures, magic, and illusion. I enjoyed it, especially the imagery and the stories within the story, but ultimately I wasn’t satisfied by it. The book’s genesis is literary, and I don’t require a linear, beat-by-beat plot from my literary reading, but I do want to see story elements carried through. I look for balance and harmony, and here, I had some trouble finding it.

Born in 1840, Sylvie Swift is one of a set of fraternal twins. Her mother died in childbirth, and her sister Marina, ten years older, is mostly responsible for “mothering” Sylvie and her brother Silas. Their father, mourning the loss of his wife, retreats into alcohol. Both Silas and Sylvie are strange in different ways, and so is Marina, who vanishes one day without a word of explanation. Silas and Sylvie take on their father’s profession of junk-selling, living one notch above beggars, although somehow Sylvie gets an education because she is able to read many languages. When the Civil War starts, Silas joins the Confederacy, while Sylvia heads to Nashville, following a clue left behind by Marina.

Jen Fawkes

The story doesn’t start there, though. Instead, the book opens in Monterey, California, in the 1880s. We learn that Sylvie gave birth to twin girls who she named Brigitte (after her mother) and Marina. She and her lover aren’t raising them, though—Sylvia gave them away. Sylvie decides to write the history of her life, complete with some historical documentation, as a gift (someday) for her girls. This is where the story starts, and much of it is told through an older Sylvie’s eyes as she looks back on those pivotal days.

In Nashville, Sylvie finds lodging in a house called The Land of Sirens, a brothel managed by Evangeline Price. Sylvie becomes a translator of a lost play of Aristophanes; a Union spy who joins another group of women called the Southern Ladies’ Aid Society, and a double agent. The courtesans (the word used in the book) of the Land of Sirens and the SLAS, who wear all black, looking like widows or nuns, are, beneath the surface, merely two arms of the same coalition, the Daughters of Chaos. While the Ladies’ Aid Society appears to bestow food and medicine on those less fortunate, they are also proficient arsonists. Sylvie is inducted into the group, whose mission is to overthrow the violent “order” of men and bring back the loving chaos of the female principle.

The play upends Aristophanes’ s Lysistrata. In that actual play, women refuse to have sex with men until men end the war. In Sylvie’s play, all the “respectable” women disguise themselves as courtesans. No reason is given, but as the play (and the Civil War story) continue, it does seem as if sex workers can go anywhere and learn anything. Maybe that’s the point.

This is a story of sea monsters with women’s faces, twinned images, false images, secrets in cellars, masks, and layers. Much of the play Sylvie translates from French mirrors parts of her own life. The life of the Venetian woman who translated the play into French mirrors Sylvie’s even more. Sylvie is a twin, but there is a prophecy about twin girls (Sylvie’s daughters are twin girls). Artemis of Ephesus appears and reappears, as do the strange river serpents, caverns, secret desires and the power of song.

Marina, who vanished when Sylvie was young, reappears. She also had fraternal twins. One is a human boy who draws. The other, a girl, is a human-faced tentacle on Marina’s serpentine siren body. Marina is not the only woman-faced serpent we see during the course of the book.

Fawkes steers her material gracefully, but seems to lose track of, or interest in, some elements. Before all the courtesans are banished onto a riverboat and sent upriver the Southern Ladies’ Aid Society plans a performance of Orpheus in the Underworld. Deep in the cellar of the opera house, Sylvie finds several crates of Springfield rifles. These, she is told, are not for the players, but for the audience. Clearly, the music being used in the rehearsals has a hypnotic effect on the audience, and plainly, a bunch of under the influence civilians with loaded rifles would be chaotic. The chaos might mirror an early scene in the Aristophanes play, where, disguised as courtesans, a women of Ephesus enter the guard house and take it over, locking up all the guards. In Nashville, though, nothing ever happens with the rifles. Similarly, no event happens that requires Sylvie to give up her twin girls. When she is giving birth to them, she hears “their voices” telling her that others have to raise them. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, and for something that happens quite late in the narrative, seems to have ben given very little thought.

While what happens (or doesn’t happen) in the book irritated me, how it happened made for a rich and entertaining read. The ephemera Sylvia includes in her book, like newspaper articles and editorials, are a delight, as is the Greek comedy. The visuals are stunning, much of what gets discussed among various characters is interesting even if I didn’t necessarily agree with it.

Ideas, imagery, and to some extent character take the place of a story here, but does the book really need a story? If you think strangeness and beauty can satisfy your reading craving, give this book a try.