This is an excerpt from A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.
It’s about the Trojan war from the perspective of the women and ties together a bunch of different stories.
Also I would not really consider this a spoiler because it is just one small storyline, but feel free to ignore this post if you haven’t read it yet.
Here’s the quote:
‘More than ten years since you left me widowed,’ she said. ‘You abandoned me and our son, the son I bore you. You cared nothing for us. Now you crawl back to life, and I am a widow no longer? Did it occur to you once – once – on your journey up here to ask yourself if I might have grown accustomed to my widowhood? If I might first have learned to live with it, and then grown to prefer it? Did you think for a moment of what I might want, how I might feel?’
‘No,’ he said, and a mortal woman would have struggled to hear the sound. ‘I am dying, Oenone. I thought only of that’
The part about a mortal woman made me LAUGH out loud because I interpret it as a kind of dig at how often women take back men even after they treat them horribly. That because Oenone is a goddess she has a higher standard for herself than most mortal women do, who may constantly ignore red flags or blatant honesty of men not caring for them.
But then looking at it again I am thinking that I’m wrong and it is only saying that he spoke it so quietly (because he’s dying and probably out of breath and energy).
So just curious, what’s your interpretation of it?
by Bamboozled-creatures