Theodora: Courtesan, Whore, Empress

 My special guest blogger this week is the utterly charming Stella Duffy. 
   Stella and met a few years ago when she was in Melbourne on an author tour from the UK to New Zealand and Australia. 
   This time the author tour is virtual but just as welcome.

Stella Duffy has written twelve novels. Theodora, Actress, Empress, Whore, published by Virago (UK) in 2010 and by Viking Penguin (US) in 2011, is her first historical novel. The Room of Lost Things and State of Happiness were both longlisted for the Orange Prize, and she has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year. She has written over forty short stories, including several for BBC Radio 4, and won the 2002 CWA Short Story Dagger for Martha Grace. She is currently working on the sequel to Theodora as well as several film and theatre projects. Stella is also a theatre-maker, has written eight plays, and directs for Shaky Isles, a NZ theatre company based in London. She was born in London, grew up in New Zealand, and has lived in the UK since 1986. She is married to the writer Shelley Silas.

Lindy and I are both published by Bywater Books in the US where the lesbian fiction market seems much more prominent than in the UK. While many successful lesbian writers in the UK sell very successfully in the mainstream as well as to readers who are gay (which is a great thing in itself), there doesn’t seem to be as obvious a UK market for publishers targeting specifically lesbian readers, in the way there is in the US. 

   Bywater have recently published my Parallel Lies (picking up some nice nods from award-givers in the US) which means I’m in the odd position of doing this Bywater Books blog tour – to  Australia now, thanks to Lindy – but Parallel Lies actually came out in Australia and NZ some years ago, under the Virago imprint.
    So – while mentioning Bywater yet again! – I’m going to tell you about a new novel you can get hold of in Australia and New Zealand, and while it’s not specifically gay in premise, it certainly does have some lesbian content – promise!

    In September 2006 I’d never heard of the Empress Theodora, the Emperor Justinian, or the Ravenna mosaics, which the Italians considered the eighth wonder of the world for some time. In my defence I’d claim a lack of Euro-centricity rather than sheer ignorance. I grew up in Tokoroa in New Zealand, not so very far away we had the memory of the Pink and White Terraces as our eighth wonder. I’m guessing not many Italians have heard of them either! The organisers of the festival were horrified and arranged a trip to see the mosaics.

A near-empty church, a few tourists, and an astonishing, vibrant, 1500-year-old mosaic of Theodora. I figured she had to matter. In the gift shop, I bought a bunch of postcards and the booklet about Theodora. One of those postcards has been on my noticeboard for coming up four years now. The booklet took maybe five minutes to read and, combined with the mosaics, lead to three years of work, with at least another six months to go on the edit for the sequel.

Theodora’s life is astonishingly rich. Born to the bear-keeper of the Constantinople Hippodrome in about 500 AD, her father died when she was five. She became an actress, a dancer, a mime, a comedian – none of our modern terms fully cover what her work would have been in those days. A physically-trained comedy improviser is perhaps closest, and by the age of 15 she was the star of the Hippodrome. She was also, as almost all actresses were at the time, very likely a child prostitute.

I started my working life in theatre, and while my main job is writing, I have not stopped making theatre – and I have never called myself an actress. Plenty of theatre makers use ‘actor’ for both men and women, and have done since the late 70’s. It’s long been recognised that the word actress can have a derogatory aspect to it, and the truth is that as soon as women were allowed on stage it very quickly also became a term that meant courtesan, whore, prostitute – which, in the case of Theodora and very many young women like her, was exactly what they were. 


Theodora walked away from her amazing career at 18, leaving Constantinople to be mistress of the man newly-appointed Governor of (modern day) Libya. When he dumped her, soon after, she  joined a religious community in the desert near Alexandria, experiencing a religious conversion. Theodora travelled on to Antioch where there are suggestions that she worked with Macedonia, a dancer and a spy for the Roman government. 

At 21 she returned to Constantinople, met Justinian, who was yet to become Emperor, and they became a couple. Justinian had one law changed to raise her status to patrician, and another created to allow her to marry – ex-actresses could not legally do so at the time. When his uncle died and Justinian became Emperor, ‘Theodora-from-the-Brothel’ became Empress of Rome.

It’s a powerful rags to riches story, made richer still by Theodora’s achievements in power. As Empress she worked on the paper On Pimps, an attempt to stop pimps making their money from prostitutes. Well aware of the impossibility of marriage and a future for women who wanted to give up working in prostitution, she set up a house where they could live in safety. 
Once Empress, Theodora worked for women’s marriage and dowry rights, anti-rape legislation, and continued working for the many young girls sold into sexual slavery, often for the price of a pair of sandals. It’s tempting to consider her an early feminist, but the story is more complicated that that. There are many hints of nastiness from poisoning to torture, forced marriage to religious fanaticism, and like so many women in power there are reports of her attacking other women who might threaten her position – and it’s these complications that made me want to write about her. 
Hers is a time of huge change in the Church, there was also massive unrest – as there is today – in the eastern Roman regions. People in Syria, the Levant, and Egypt were clamouring to use their own languages both in faith and in their calls for self-determination. This was the world into which the prophet Mohammed would be born, just 20 years after Theodora’s death. 
In more modern academic works she is often presented as, if not entirely an abject money-grubbing power-monger, then certainly not the nicest of women. The contemporary view of her seems to have been somewhere between Victoria Beckham/Yoko Ono on a bad day, and Princess Diana on a good one.

All of which made her a joy to write – while there’s loads of history written about the time, there’s comparatively little about Theodora. Graves has her in Count Belisarius, and in The Secret History Procopius makes her his Mrs Machiavelli, but Theodora herself has remained largely hidden. Yet there was enough in her life that I do know, from theatre and comedy, to society’s disapproval of non-conformist desire, to feeling like (and being) an outsider, to make some informed guesses about her character. So that’s what I’ve written, a character in a story. And I’ve had a great time doing so, because I’ve spent the past three years writing about the juiciest woman character this side of Lady Macbeth. Theodora is the kind of hero you couldn’t make up without being accused of over-doing it, and yet can’t tell her story without making a lot of it up. A perfect balance for fiction.

http://www.stelladuffy.wordpress.com/

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