First published as Book Review: Theodora: Actress. Empress. Whore. by Stella Duffy on Blogcritics

Theodora, wife of the Emperor Justinian, is perhaps my all-time favourite Roman empress – what’s not to like about a character who even her sworn enemy and libeller credited with saving her husband’s throne with resolute courage. So when I read good reviews of Stella Duffy’s fictional biography, I couldn’t resist.

The fact is, however, that he only major source we have for Theodora’s life is Procopius, who’s far from well inclined towards her in his Secret History, usually taken as his real views. There’s something about the slurs against her – that she was a teenage actress and whore, famous for her pornographic acts with geese – that draw questions in my mind. How is that women whom ancient (and not so ancient) historians never find their female characters just simple, garden-style sex workers, but make them always famous for their perversities?

Still, Duffy has chosen to go with the basic biographical outline provided by Procopius, and for the opening sections of the book, as Theodora is a young girl training for the Byzantine stage, then a star upon it, works pretty well.

We disappear into the back streets and sleazy alleys of Constantinople, its scents and colours, and I’ve no doubt Duffy has done her research on street names and geography. (There’s a bibliography for those who’d like to go further in non-fiction.)

And Duffy seems to capture well the mindset of a girl and a class of women who expect to have to make their own way in the world, through means that they mightn’t always like (not least for the social stigma), but are resigned to. There’s a sense here that she might have caught something real about a pre-Christian morality, although of course Christianity is fast taking hold in Theodora’s world.

The novel works less well, however, when Theodora, now a fugitive thief far from the city she calls home, hooks up with the quasi-heretic Alexandrian Patriarch Timothy, and has, she tells other characters, a not-quite Damacene conversion. She rejects as hysterics the conventional conversion narrative – liked that, for there must have been plenty of such scepticism at the time – but there’s never any real feel that sometime has changed in this character, although Duffy appears to want us to believe that it has.

Once again back in Constantinople, Duffy’s excellent on life inside the royal palace, its claustrophobia and fear, as Theodora winds her way into the life of Justinian, now heir-apparent to the aging Justin. It’s to the author’s credit, too, that she doesn’t try to make this a romance genre novel – strongly resists putting modern conventions of romance into the mind of either character.

But there’s a dryness to all of this, a dutifulness to the storytelling, that doesn’t quite grab the reader in the way this great character of history should.

The novel ends with the coronation – I can feel a sequel coming on, but I’m afraid I won’t be looking out for it. Much better try, I’d suggest, a non-fiction account of Theodora’s life.

(This novel is available in the UK, but appears as yet unavailable in the US.)

When you start reading Martine Segalen’s Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century, you might think she’s taking on straw men. Surely no one believes any more that peasant families were unemotional, wholly practical alliances of economic value only, or that children were not loved or treated as human to quite an age, or that the views of the 19th-century folklorists about the “backwardness” of traditional cultures would be given any weight.

Then you look at the publication date (1980 in French), and the foreword by Peter Laslett which explains how Segalen set up the “magnificent” exhibition on Mari et femme dans la France rurale traditionelle in 1973, and you realize that you are reading a modern classic, a revolutionary text, one that well-deserved being translated into English.

As you get into the text you realize that it deserved to be translated not just because of the revolution in theory if helped to create, but also because it has a cracking good story to tell. One of Segalen’s main sources is traditional proverbs, sayings, rituals, and practices and what a rich storehouse they are, and often a surprising one too.

On courtship, she notes how the practices in most places – thought by the 19th-century observers to be crude, rough, even violent – were in fact a practical way for both sides of the potential relationship to test out each other. The romantic explanation (yes, the peasants did do romance) was that the force of the interaction reflected the strength of emotion, but as Segalen says, this was a practical test. “The sense of what is beautiful is guided by the essential prerequisites of a society based on manual labour applied with both strength and skill.” She quotes Henri Massoul “Beauty consists in being well-fleshed, glowing, plump and large. A ben groussiere (buxom) woman, a ben rougeaud (ruddy) man, this is the criterion of beauty.”

And she says that while in a society where words were rare and often little used, courtship often relied on gestures, and when words were used, “the metaphors were often borrowed from the world of peasant objects”. You might not want to try this Vendean effort out on your own beloved, but it certainly worked at the time: “I think you’re so lovely, my great big darling: and then you’re so fresh, that I can’t do better than compare you to a field of young cabbages before the caterpillars have been through.”
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