Laughing with Medusa. Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (Classical Presences)

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors L o r n a H a rd w i c k James I. Peter CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, im...

Author: Vanda Zajko | Miriam Leonard

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors L o r n a H a rd w i c k

James I. Peter

CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

LAUGHING WITH MEDUSA Classical Myth and Feminist Thought Edited by

Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipe Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Oxford University Press 2006 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. ISBN 0-19-927438-x

978-0-19-927438-3

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Th e editors would like to thank the following for their help with this volume: Gillian Clark, Ann Clarke, Mary Economou-Bailey, Bob Fowler, Simon Goldhill, Duncan Kennedy, Genevieve Liveley, Charles Martindale, Pantelis Michelakis, and Ellen O’Gorman. We are also grateful to the anonymous readers for their incisive comments and to Hilary O’Shea for her encouragement and support. Finally we would like to thank all the contributors for their responsiveness, efficiency, and good humour.

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations List of Contributors

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Introduction Va n d a Za j k o and Mi r i a m Le o n a r d

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PART I. Myth and Psychoanalysis 1. The Cronus Complex: Psychoanalytic Myths of the Future for Boys and Girls Rac he l Bo w l b y

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2. ‘Who are we when we read?’: Keats, Klein, Cixous, and Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles Van da Zaj k o

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3. Beyond Oedipus: Feminist Thought, Psychoanalysis, and Mythical Figurations of the Feminine Gri selda Po l l o c k

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PART I I . Myth and Politics 4. Lacan, Irigaray, and Beyond: Antigones and the Politics of Psychoanalysis Mi r i a m Le o n a r d

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5. Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood Si m o n Go l d h i l l

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6. Fascism on Stage: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone Katie Fl em i n g

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PART I I I . Myth and History 7. A Woman’s History of Warfare Ell e n O’Go r m a n 8. ‘Beyond glorious Ocean’: Feminism, Myth, and America Gr e g o r y St al e y

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PART I V. Myth and Science 9. Atoms, Individuals, and Myths Du n c an Ke n n e d y

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10. The Philosopher and the Mother Cow: Towards a Gendered Reading of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Al i s o n Sh a r r o ck

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11. Science Fictions and Cyber Myths: or, Do Cyborgs Dream of Dolly the Sheep? Ge n e v i e v e Liveley

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PART V. Myth and Poetry 12. Putting the Women Back into the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women Lilli an Do h e r t y 13. Reclaiming the Muse Pen n y Mu r ra y

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14. Defying History: The Legacy of Helen in Modern Greek Poetry Efi Sp e nt z o u

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15. ‘This tart fable’: Daphne, and Apollo in Modern Women’s Poetry Ro w e n a Fo w l e r

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co n t en t s

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16. Iphigeneia’s Wedding Eli zabeth Co o k

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Select Bibliography Index

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L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S 3.1. Augustus John, Jane Harrison, 1909. Oil on canvas. (Newnham Edmund Engelman, College, Cambridge).

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3.2. Edmund Engelman, Freud’s Vienna consulting room, 1938; photograph reproduced by permission of Todd Engelman; photo supplied by Freud Museum, London.

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3.3. Edmund Engelman, Freud’s Vienna consulting room: detail of the wall at the foot of the analytical couch. photo, as Fig. 3.2.

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3.4. Jean-Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808. Oil on canvas, 189 144 cm. (Paris: Museé du Louvre.)

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3.5. ‘‘Gradiva,’’ copy of a Roman bas-relief copy of a Hellenistic relief of the fourth century bce in collection of Sigmund Freud. (Freud Museum, London.) 82 3.6. The horizontal topology in Lacan

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3.7. The horizontal and vertical topologies in Lacan

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3.8. Bracha Ettinger, Eurydice no. 17, 1994–6. oil and xerox on paper mounted on canvas, 25.2 52 cm, mounted on chassis, 29 55.5 cm. (Private collection.)

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13.1. Richard Samuel, The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, 1779. (Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London.)

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15.1. Paul Klee, Jungfrau im Baum (Virgin in a Tree), 1903. (Paul-Klee-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum, Bern.)

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Rachel Bowlby is Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London. Her books include Shopping with Freud (London, 1993), Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh, 1997), and Carried Away: the Invention of Modern Shopping (London, 2000). Freudian Mythologies is forthcoming from Oxford. Elizabeth Cook has written poetry, fiction, and works of scholarship. Her publications include Seeing through Words, a study of late Renaissance poetry (New Haven, 1986) and Achilles, a fiction (London, 2001). She is also the editor of the Oxford Authors John Keats (1990). She has recently completed a translation of Seneca’s ‘Thyestes’ and the libretto of an oratorio for the composer Francis Grier. Lillian Doherty is the author of Siren Songs: Gender, Narrators, and Audiences in the Odyssey (Ann Arbor, 1995) and Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth (London, 2001). She is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Katie Fleming is Lecturer in English and Classics at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London. She has a particular interest in the political appropriation of the classics in the twentieth century and its implications for the theory of reception. Her current work includes forthcoming articles on the use and abuse of the past, and the place of antiquity in twentieth-century totalitarianism. Rowena Fowler was until recently Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She has edited two volumes of the Clarendon

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Press edition of Robert Browning and is currently editing the verse translations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the new collected edition. She has also published articles on Robert Browning and papers on Victorian and twentieth-century literature. Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at King’s College, Cambridge. His publications include Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986), The Poet’s Voice (Cambridge, 1991), Foucault’s Virginity (Cambridge, 1995), and Who Needs Greek? (Cambridge, 2002). Duncan F. Kennedy is Professor in Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism, University of Bristol. He is the author of The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (Cambridge, 1993) and Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature (Ann Arbor, 2002). Miriam Leonard is Lecturer in Classics, University of Bristol. Her research interests are in the intellectual history of classics with a particular emphasis on the reception of Greece in modern European thought. She has published articles on He´le`ne Cixous’s Oresteia and Irigaray’s Plato as well as essays on Derrida, Lacan and the reception of classics in contemporary thought. She is the author of Athens in Paris (Oxford, 2005). Genevieve Liveley is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Bristol. Her teaching and research interests are in Latin literature and culture, gender, and sexuality, and the classical tradition. Her publications include articles and essays on Latin poetry and contemporary critical theory, and she is the author of Ovid: Love Songs (London, 2005). Penelope Murray is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Warwick. She contributed a chapter on Platonic myth to From Myth to Reason? ed. R. Buxton (Oxford, 1999), and a chapter on Plato’s Muses to Cultivating the Muse ed. E. Spentzou and D. Fowler (Oxford, 2002). Her other publications include Genius: The History of an Idea (Oxford, 1989), Plato on Poetry (Cambridge, 1996),


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and Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City, ed. with Peter Wilson (Oxford, 2004). Ellen O’Gorman is Lecturer in Classics, University of Bristol. She has published Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus (Cambridge, 2000). She is currently working on another book, about the representation of Carthage in Roman literature, for readers interested in history, cultural history, myth, aggressivity, trauma, and narrative, and on a co-authored book about Rome and the historical novel. Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds. She has written extensively on the problematic of the feminine in the fields of social and feminist histories of art and of cultural and psychoanalytic theory. Her publications include Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London, 1988), Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (New York, 1999) and Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Life, Death and Art (London, 2000). Alison Sharrock is Professor in Classics at the University of Manchester. She has published widely on Latin poetry and feminist literary theory, particularly relating to the Ovidian corpus. At present she is completing a book on Roman Comedy, and working on a feminist reading of Lucretius. Efi Spentzou is Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Readers and Writers in Ovid’s Heroides: Transgressions of Gender and Genre. (Oxford, 2003). She has co-edited with Don Fowler Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (Oxford, 2002). She is currently working on a project on subjectivities in Imperial Rome. Gregory Staley is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland. His article on Juvenal’s Third Satire recently appeared in the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, and his chapter on Rip Van Winkle as American Odysseus is forthcoming in a special volume on America’s Classical Greece. He is editing a collection of essays on American Women and Classical Myths, the subject of a conference he organized in 1999.

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Vanda Zajko is Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of Bristol. She has wide-ranging teaching and research interests in the reception of classical literature, particularly in the twentieth century, and in mythology, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. She has recently contributed a chapter on Homer and Joyce to The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2004) and on Ovid and The Taming of the Shrew to Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge, 2004). She is currently working on a book about literary identifications.

Introduction

V a n d a Zajko and Miriam Leonard arise no/symbols massed evident/the designated text (by myriad constellations) faulty lacunae lacunae against texts against meaning which is to write violence outside the text in another writing threatening menacing margins spaces intervals without pause action overthrow (monique wittig, les gue´rille`res) Men lining up for her. Having ideas about her. Fingering her in their thoughts while they finger themselves.

Our thanks to Ellen O’Gorman, Duncan Kennedy, and Simon Goldhill for their comments on this introduction.

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v a n d a z a j ko an d m i r i a m l e o n a r d they paste her with their thoughts till there is no air left to breath. not one of them has ever seen her. (elizabeth cook, achilles)

Monique Wittig and Elizabeth Cook, in their respective rewritings of Homer, typify two different modes of feminism’s engagement with classical myth. Written at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1960s, Wittig’s lesbian Iliad radically transforms what she sees as a founding text of patriarchal oppression. Exposing the ‘lacunae’ in the Homeric narrative, she combines a resistance to textual authority with revolutionary political activity. In the spirit of 1968 Paris the journey from ‘hors texte’ to ‘action overthrow’ is effortless. Cook’s description of Helen gives voice to a character whose actions are central to other people’s accounts of the Trojan War but whose inner consciousness is rarely explored. As Cook points out, ‘having ideas about her’ is not the same as ‘seeing’ her—an interesting phrase, given that it is Helen’s visual identity which has become so iconic. In a sense Cook’s approach here exemplifies a desire of feminists to make visible and to fill in the ‘lacunae’ of the tradition. At the same time, her engagement with the receptions of Homer betrays a self-conscious intertextuality which is characteristic of the post-modern aesthetic. Les Gue´rille`res and Achilles, however, both share a preoccupation with embodiment, a desire to reclaim the materiality of experience from the abstractions of its literary representation. Writing in the ‘margins spaces intervals’ of the myth they not only alter its perspective but challenge its very meaning. The differences between Wittig and Cook in terms of national identity, political context, generational outlook, and degree of reverence to the tradition are outweighed by the common strategy of turning to classical myth. Instead of creating new genealogies, many feminists have chosen to revivify ancient narratives to arm contemporary struggles. There is a tendency to overlook the strangeness of this choice. These myths are after all not only the products of an androcentric society, they can also be seen to justify its most basic patriarchal assumptions. The transformation of normative stories into potent tales of resistance has sometimes been a controversial endeavour for feminists.

introduction

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The tensions involved in the commitment to classical myth expose many of the conflicts within feminism itself. Laughing with Medusa aims to explore how classical myth has been central to the development of feminist thought rather than focusing on feminist interpretations of specific myths. He´le`ne Cixous’s ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ is regarded as one of the foundational texts of the movement known as ećriture feminine, perhaps the most sustained exploration of myth’s inspirational potential for feminism. Cixous has been associated predominantly with a group of French feminists but is distinctive in her determination not to lose sight of the poetic qualities of myth in her theoretical work1. Indeed her intensely lyrical voice has sometimes called her very status as a theorist into question. But for Cixous the potential for dissidence that she identifies in the poetic tradition is central to her very notion of theory. Her project envisions a utopian space at the limits of the literary imaginary: ‘There has to be somewhere else, I tell myself . . . That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.’2 These new worlds are in fact the old worlds of myth but they have been revitalized by Cixous’ revelation of their latent hierarchies and by her championing of those who resist them. For her this should not be confused with a naı¨ve form of escapism. Cixous makes it clear that her project involves more than a defiant rejection of the existing order. It is also a profoundly creative political engagement with the way things could have been. ‘I take books; I leave the real, colonial space; I go away. Often I go read in a tree. Far from the ground and the shit. I don’t go and read just to read, to forget—No! Not to shut myself up in some imaginary paradise. I am searching: 1

Ever since Plato the distinction between the poetic and theoretical aspects of myth has merited discussion. Feminists have self-consciously put this issue back on the agenda by questioning the denigration of poetical writing. One might think, for example, of Susan Griffin, Women and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New York, 1978), bell hooks, Ain’t I a Women: Black Women and Feminism (London, 1982) and Nicole Ward Jouve, ‘The Street Cleaner’ (London and New York, 1988 ). 2 He´le`ne Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in H. Cixous and C. Cle´ment, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London, 1986), 63–132, 72.

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somewhere there must be people who are like me in their rebellion and in their hope.’3 Cixous’ claim is not in itself uncontroversial. For her contemporary, Luce Irigaray, working with myth involves a different challenge for feminism. In her important reworking of the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic she shows how myth fossilizes existing hierarchies. The way forward for feminists, she suggests, is to dismantle the system by focusing on the contradictions which uphold it. Her more deconstructive project emphasizes the historical embeddedness of myth and therefore reveals the potential impotence of Cixous’ utopianism. The problem is exemplified by the possible feminist responses to Cixous’ identification with the figure of Achilles in ‘Sorties’, which has been the source of a debate between the two editors of this volume. In her essay Vanda Zajko challenges Miriam Leonard’s earlier scepticism about Cixous’ strategy. Leonard had expressed her surprise that ‘Cixous can, on the same page, perform the writing of the self around such incongruous figures as the Holocaust survivor and the psychopathic hero of Homer’s martial epic’.4 For Zajko the identification provides Cixous with a positive role model ‘in relation to whom she could negotiate her own subjectivity’, it shows her ‘who she could be and therefore who she was’. Culture and history are sometimes seen as oppositional terms to myth, but our debate illustrates how classics occupies a crucial and special place as both myth and history. Whereas classics sometimes operates diachronically as an originary point in history, at other times it defines itself synchronically as a constantly evolving point of reference. This duality is often regarded as an embarrassment or an affront to those who would want to emphasize the specificity of the classical past. Indeed much of the hostility towards ‘French Feminism’ has been couched in terms of the perceived neglect of history in structuralist and post-structuralist writing.5 For example, in 3

Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 72. Miriam Leonard, ‘Creating a Dawn: Writing through Antiquity in the Works of He´le`ne Cixous’, Arethusa, 33.1 (2000), 121–48. 5 Although there may seem to be a natural association of myth with structuralism because of the tendency to think of myth as ahistorical, it can be argued that post-structuralism reinvokes the notion of history to 4

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Feminist Theory and the Classics, Barbara Gold argues that ‘neither Irigaray nor Cixous emphasizes the effects of culture and history’ and goes on to criticize their theories for leaving ‘little room for social or political change’.6 But, as we have seen, Cixous’ relation to history is complex and what is more leaves room for diametrically opposed interpretations. Her obsessive returns to the specifics of her biography (as an Austrian/French Jew born in Algeria)7 are combined with a commitment to establishing an intimate familiarity with characters from myth across time and cultures. She highlights the contrast between the situatedness of women’s lives and the archetypal qualities of ancient stories. It is precisely because women are so circumscribed by their histories that myth becomes essential for imagining a different future. Irigaray’s divergences from Cixous have already been mentioned. In her influential work Speculum of the Other Woman she defines feminism in terms of a confrontation with history. By taking on the history of thought from interrogate myth as well as other categories: ‘One crucial difference between structuralism and post-structuralism involves the question of history. At first sight, the structuralist use of Saussure’s distinction between synchronic and the diachronic appears to allow for the effacement of history altogether. It is no accident that the essentially spatial model of structure seems to work well for a phenomenon such as myth, where the usual historical perspective is unavailable. But if the analysis of myth, a universal ‘‘grammar’’ of narrative, and even perhaps Foucault’s famous epistemes, can avoid the question of their own historicity, it could be said that the ‘‘post’’ of post-structuralism contrives to reintroduce it.’ Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, Post-structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987), 1. Within classics the figure of Jean-Pierre Vernant interestingly combines a structuralist approach to myth with a strong commitment to history. See his essay ‘Hestia–Hermes: On the Religious Expression of Space and Movement Among the Greeks’, in Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London, 1987). 6

Barbara Gold, ‘‘‘But Ariadne Was Never There in the First Place’’: Finding the Female in Roman Poetry’, in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York and London, 1993), 75–101. 7 Cixous’ precise biography is relayed in a footnote in ‘Sorties’, 131: ‘My father, Sephardic-Spain-Morocco-Algeria—my mother, Ashkeney-AustriaHungary-Czechoslavakia (her father) and Spain (her mother) passing by chance through a Paris that was short-lived’.

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Plato to Freud, she demonstrates how the myths of the past continue to structure women’s experience in the present. Within classics the issue of feminism’s relationship to history has often been discussed in terms of a contrast between women’s history and gender history8. The traditional periodizing account associates the former with Anglo-American gynocritics writing in the 1970s and the latter with the turn to discourse advocated by Foucault in the History of Sexuality9. This collection refuses to limit its engagement with the historical to a teleological narrative of this sort. The difficulties of reducing the discussion of a subject such as women’s involvement in warfare to a polarity between historical empiricism and discursive analysis are explored in Ellen O’Gorman’s essay. For her the two are mutually reinforcing and, moreover, their interrelation defines what is specific about feminist history: ‘Feminist historiography attempts to counteract the effects of [patriarchal] discourse by configuring the project of writing women back into 8 Early ground-breaking works in women’s history include Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (New York, 1975), Helene Foley, Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York, 1981), Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant (eds.), Women’s Life in Greece and Rome (Baltimore, 1982), Avril Cameron and Amelie Kuhrt (eds.), Images of Women in Antiquity (London, 1983), J. Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan (eds.), Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers (New York, 1987), Marilyn Skinner, Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological Approaches to Women in Antiquity, Helios, 13.2 (1987), Sarah Pomeroy (ed.), Women’s History and Ancient History (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1991). David Halperin, John Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin, Before Sexuality (Princeton, 1990) signalled a turn towards gender history. Other notable works include Halperin’s own One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (London and New York, 1990), Winkler, Constraints of Desire (London and New York, 1990), and Zeitlin Playing the Other (Chicago, 1996). On the Roman side see Amy Richlin, The Gardens of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (New Haven, 1992) and Maria Wyke (ed.), Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Body (Oxford, 1999). Mary Beard, ‘Re-reading (Vestal) Virginity’, in Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick, Women in Antiquity: New Assessments (Oxford, 1995), 166–77 is a self-reflective account of our evolving mythologies of women and gender. 9 For a feminist opposition to the dominance of the Foucauldian influence in classics see Amy Richlin, ‘Zeus and Metis: Foucault, Feminism, Classics’, Helios, 18.2 (1991), 160–80. Halperin responds to Richlin in his latest book, How to do the History of Homosexuality, (Chicago, 2002).

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history as a transformation not only of women but also of history.’ O’Gorman’s emphasis on the agency of Helen in narratives of the Trojan War also exemplifies a vital feminist critique of Foucault which exposes his complicity with androcentrism in downplaying the role of the subject in accounts of the past. And, as Lillian Doherty shows, the relentless foregrounding of textuality has exacerbated the marginalization of women from contemporary representations of antiquity. On the other hand the assumption that a certain kind of feminism has a more immediate relationship with social change is one that needs to be examined rather than merely asserted. It is not selfevident that talking about women’s reality is inevitably a form of political engagement, and the conflation of empiricism with activism denies the liberating potential of exposing phallogocentrism. Structuralist and post-structuralist critiques of the subject have not only been detrimental to feminism but have also animated its most fundamental debates. For example, post-structuralism poses the question of whether we can legitimately talk about a category of women and of what is at stake in the use of the metaphor of sisterhood. Thus Judith Butler acknowledges that there is ‘some political necessity to speak as and for women,’10 but she also insists that there is a necessity to interrogate identity categories: Through what exclusions has the feminist subject been constructed, and how do those excluded domains return to haunt the ‘integrity’ and ‘unity’ of the feminist ‘we’? And how is it that the very category, the subject, the ‘we’, that is supposed to be presumed for the purposes of solidarity, produces the very factionalization it is supposed to quell? Do women want to become subjects on the model which requires and produces an anterior region of abjection, or must feminism become a process which is self-critical about the processes that produce and destabilize identity categories?11

Simon Goldhill’s essay analyses feminism’s double and irreconcilable commitment to collectivism and to an identity category which is necessarily exclusionary. As he puts it: ‘Feminism v feminisms, 10

Judith Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations’, in S. Benhabid, J. Butler, D. Cornell, and N. Fraser (eds.), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London and New York, 1995), 35–58 (49). 11 Ibid. 48

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feminism for women v feminism for feminists are unresolved debates’. The interrogation of identity categories has, however, been one of the most successful projects of feminism12: distinctions between private and public, the personal and the academic, the autobiographical and the disinterested can no longer be so easily taken for granted. By structuring our own volume around such antitheses as ‘Myth and History’ and ‘Myth and Politics’ are we vulnerable to the charge of reifying the very categories that feminism has called into question?13 Cixous is best known for her determination to destabilize the hierarchical oppositions which order the symbolic systems of the Western tradition. But it is the difficulty of moving beyond binarism which is vividly highlighted by several essays in this volume. Feminism’s drive to oppose myth to logocentrism sometimes results in the search for an elusive alternative. In her essay Genevieve Liveley recounts how Donna Haraway ‘identifies a series of key pairings. . . . which she claims, are radically destabilized by the monstrous hybrid of entity and myth that is the cyborg. However,’ she argues, ‘cyborgs do not re-inscribe or re-embody the traditional binarism between such categories’. Plurality in contrast to hierarchy becomes, in Haraway’s schema, the telos of feminism. This begs the question of whether plurality endangers the fundamental binary opposition at the heart of femininism—are we really ready to move beyond sexual difference? Post-feminism too often reduces the post-structuralist move to subvert oppositional categories into an end in itself. A politically engaged post-structuralism—which does not have to be a contradiction in terms—makes us aware of 12

Nancy Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York and London, 1991), Nicole Ward Jouve, White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography (New York and London, 1991), Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body (New York, 1988), Denise Riley, ‘Am I that Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis, 1988). Within classics see Judith Hallett and Thomas Van Nortwick (eds.), Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship (London and New York, 1997). 13 It could be argued that some of the best feminist writings in classics have been structured around similar antitheses. The compelling work of Nicole Loraux and Froma Zeitlin springs to mind.

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the violence inherent in binary oppositions and also insists on their expedience in negotiating ideological struggles. The Oedipus myth is the obvious example of a narrative of violence which naturalizes gender inequity. From Deleuze and Guattari, to Lacan’s notion of the Non/Nom du Pe`re, the post-structuralist Oedipus has come to symbolize all modes of patriarchal authority.14 Feminists have played a particularly important role in exploring the potential of moving beyond Oedipal formations. For example, Griselda Pollock’s essay in this volume endorses Bracha Ettinger’s concept of the matrixial as an alternative relational structure to the Oedipal triangle. The matrixial here is used to describe the ‘cohumanity’ fostered by the mother between Antigone and Polyneices which is both beyond and anterior to the Oedipal drama. One might, then, be tempted to characterize the matrixial as pre-social or even archaic. But, as Pollock writes, ‘If we want to think beyond Oedipus, we will have to rewrite these pseudo-chronological habits that hide their ideological agenda and progressivist telos within chronology— in art and cultural history as much as in non-feminist psychoanalysis’. Rachel Bowlby develops this argument by analysing the way myth in psychoanalytic theory has functioned both as an atemporal archetype and as a means of understanding an individual’s development through time. She juxtaposes Freud’s use of myths associated with Cronos with his formulation of the Oedipus complex. She argues that the chronology oscillates so that sometimes ‘the Cronus-related myths are pre-pre-social’ and at other times ‘castration postdates and ideally draws a line under the mythical familial involvements of the Oedipal myth’. She thus highlights the dynamic which constantly shunts narratives backwards and forwards between the categories of mythos and logos. As Duncan Kennedy argues, these categories coexist within the term mythology. This can imply that ‘mythology’ encodes ‘the assumption that there is a logos, rationalizing and scientistic, that can explain myths, thus establishing a hierarchy of logos over mythos’. The collection From Myth to Reason? refutes the simplicity of this developmental narrative by arguing, from one historical 14 Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1983).

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perspective, for the interdependency of the categories in ancient Greek thought.15 The dynamism of this interdependency is crucial to the feminist interpretation of myth. Feminism’s identification with myth can be understood as a desire to reclaim the underprivileged term in the gendered opposition between rationality and the mythical. But, as Alison Sharrock argues: ‘As soon as we identify one of those ‘‘gendered oppositions’’, or notice how certain features like force or reason tend to be gendered ‘‘masculine’’ while bodiliness or passivity are gendered ‘‘feminine’’, we potentially create precisely the segregated conditions which we sought to oppose.’ Capitalizing on this contradiction, for strategic political reasons, many feminists have employed the freedom of moving between the rational and what is both prior and counter to it. Feminism thus functions both as an alternative logos and a critique of logocentrism. What are the implications of this idea for characterizing feminism as a mode of reception of the ancient world? This volume explicitly focuses on the importance of myth in the formulation of feminist thought and politics rather than positioning itself as a feminist guide to classical myth. Whilst feminism could be included as just one of the many contemporary discourses which mediate our relationship to antiquity, we privilege feminism as a particularly rigorous and self-aware model for negotiating presentist concerns and their investment in the past. Feminists’ simultaneous aim of exposing generalized structures of power, and their particular manifestations in personal politics, offer a distinctive contribution to reception theory16. Moreover, it is not only, as Lillian Doherty argues in Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth, that ancient myths reveal a obsession with sexual politics (‘in these stories wives kill husbands . . . mothers kill sons and fathers sacrifice daughters with distressing regularity’17) but their reception has also 15

Richard Buxton (ed.), From Myth to Reason: Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford, 1999). See also Geoffrey Lloyd’s important work in this area, Science, Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge, 1983). 16 An issue which is admirably addressed in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York and London, 1993). 17 Lillian E. Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth (London, 2001), 12.

introduction

11

repeatedly reinforced the idea that gender is the central preoccupation of myth. From Hegel’s canonical reading of Antigone, to Freud’s encounter with Oedipus, classical myth has been used by modernity to encode sexual difference. Feminism’s potency as a tool for exposing the ideological agendas in processes of reception sometimes conceals its own collusiveness with these very processes. Its status as a meta-narrative occludes its role in the dynamics of narrativization. Feminists do not only choose a specific set of protagonists from myth to include in their narratives, but they also ignore certain aspects of their ancient contexts and their more modern receptions. As Katie Fleming argues in the case of Antigone, her ‘totemic value—her eternal exemplarity—seems always already to recoup previous appropriations, negative or positive, even if . . . this is won with a modicum of historical and textual amnesia. As with any politicized appropriation of classical mythology, feminism invests in a selective recovery of its heroine’. It will be obvious from the essays in this collection that some mythical characters have been privileged at specific historical moments.18 Rowena Fowler, for example, shows how in the 1970s ‘women were drawn to particular female figures—Persephone, Antigone, Philomena—and to patterns and situations which can be rewritten or reversed . . . They spoke as strong women (Amazons) or vulnerable men (Philoctetes); they tended to prefer the Sybils to Muses and to reject the vigil at the loom in favour of the voyage out.’ There is a temptation to believe that each generation produces a more sophisticated and nuanced feminist reading which draws on 18

Whereas some myths and texts have been popular with specific brands of feminism others, such as the Odyssey, have resonated across both temporal and ideological differences; for an early example see Helene Foley, ‘‘‘Reverse Similes’’ and Sex Roles in the Odyssey’, Arethusa, 11 (1978), 7–26. More recently the ancient novel has been the subject of several monographs which deal with gender, e.g. Simon Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity (Cambridge, 1995), Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Cleitophon (Cambridge, 2004). The essays in this volume illustrate well how Antigone, for instance, has had an enormous influence on the history of thought but has played a relatively minor role for feminist classicists.

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an ever-expanding archive of previous interpretations. But Penny Murray interestingly shows us this process working in reverse: whereas Germaine Greer has recently argued that the ‘image of the muse denies woman’s active participation in artistic creation and silences female creativity’, in the eighteenth century ‘the learned ladies of the Bluestocking circle’ utilized the femininity of the muse to legitimize their own creativity.19 Contemporary feminist emplotments may unwittingly undermine the battles of earlier women. The receptions of individual myths are not only linked to history but also to national identity. In her essay on Helen’s afterlife in modern Greek poetry, Efi Spentzou shows how for many Greek poets the classical seemed increasingly insignificant against the background of contemporary struggles. She reveals how Helen in Ritsos’s Fourth Dimension ‘by her mere wretched presence, decries the abuse of the classical symbolism and exposes the irrelevance of the classical past, while the problems of the present are left to fester beneath a shiny facade’. This image of Helen, weighed down by her own reception, successively entrapped in adulatory representations, shows how myths may sometimes become obsolete. The refusal to forget the resonance of earlier receptions often has an ethical dimension. In America, for example, according to Greg Staley, while the Founding Fathers were steeped in classical culture, they saw the rejection of ‘European myth’ as an ethical imperative for the new nation. His essay raises the question of whether the explicitly European genealogies of myth perpetuate the eurocentric bias of feminism. However, for many it is Europe and America identified together as ‘the West’ whose dominance needs to be resisted. The universalist aspirations of classical myth can be challenged by those who feel excluded by this tradition.20 This is a 19

The description of Sappho as the tenth muse in antiquity has ensured her high profile. Recently the growth of reception studies has added a new dimension to her reputation. See Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho 1546– 1937 (Chicago, 1989), Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton, 1999), Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho History (London, 2003). 20 On classics and eurocentrism see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation (London, 1987), Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford, 1989), Shelley Haley, ‘Black Feminist Thought and Classics:

introduction

13

question that Cixous herself addresses throughout ‘Sorties’ as she negotiates the doubleness of myth—its complicity with colonialism and its capacity to provide a space beyond it: Yes, Algeria is unliveable. Not to mention France. Germany! Europe the accomplice! . . . There has to be somewhere else, I tell myself.21

This book is written under the sign of the Medusa. Its title combines a reference to Cixous’ seminal essay ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ with a figure from ancient myth who has become an archetype through her multiple receptions. As Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers put it in their recent anthology The Medusa Reader: Poets have called her a Muse. Feminists have adopted her as a sign of powerful womanhood. Anthropologists read her image as embedded in the paradoxical logic of amulets, talismans, and relics. Psychoanalysts have understood the serpents wreathing her head as a symbol of the fear of castration. Political theorists have cast her as a figure for revolt. Artists have painted her in moods from sublime to horrific. The most canonical writers (Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley) have invoked her story and sung both her praise and her blame. The most adventurous of postmodern designers and performers see her as a model, a logo, and figure for the present age.22

Part of the power of Cixous’ essay derives from the inscrutable figure of its title. The tutelage of the Gorgon as a beautiful and laughing presence makes a challenge to the traditional subordination of body to mind seem both possible and plausible and, what is more, it requires us to look again at the hollow triumph of Perseus. Cixous’ use of the Medusa exemplifies the way that mythical figures tend to transcend the restrictions of their particular textual incarnations. It is also shows how the potency of particular receptions Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering’, in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York and London, 1993), 23–43. For debates within feminism see Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London, 1987) and more recently and controversially Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge, 2000). 21

Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 72. Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), The Medusa Reader (New York, 2003), 1. 22

14


transform the mythical figure so that her subsequent and previous identities are profoundly altered. Laughing with Medusa is divided into five parts, each of which juxtaposes myth with a particular kind of logos that has been scrutinized by feminism. Freud’s obsessive engagement with classical myth inspires the discussion of the first part, ‘Myth and Psychoanalysis’23. Psychoanalysis is a clearly defined body of work which has been involved in a long-standing and fruitful dialogue with feminism.24 Each of the essays in Part I represents a major strand in the reception of Freud, from feminism through Melanie Klein to Lacan. Bowlby examines how the Freudian theory of sexual differentiation is grounded in a reading of classical culture and myth. It is based, on the one hand, on a gendering of the linguistic constructions of the Latin and Greek languages, and on the other, on an attempt to use the metaphor of archaeology to understand the development of the self with reference to Greek myth and history. The classical past thus becomes for psychoanalysis a means of historicizing and legitimating its clinical findings. Zajko uses a Kleinian model of identification to understand the trans-historical power of myth. In particular she thinks about the phenomenon of cross-gendered identification and explores its manifestation in a variety of poetic and theoretical contexts. Pollock looks beyond Freud’s particular relationship with Oedipus to the figure of Antigone. She discusses how Antigone’s relationship to her brother Polyneices can be reconfigured as an unconditional bond to the maternal other. The model of trans-subjective suffering that Pollock finds in Antigone demonstrates the continuing power of classical myth to question the premises of psychoanalysis even as it has inspired them. The focus on Antigone continues in the next part, ‘Myth and Politics’. Since (at least) Hegel, Antigone has found herself at the centre of a debate about political theory and its relationship to 23 See Page Du Bois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago, 1988). 24 Even classicists have acknowledged the impact of psychoanalysis: according to Geoffrey Kirk psychoanalysis is one of ‘three major developments in the modern study of myth’: Geoffrey Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Greek and Other Cultures (Cambridge, 1970), 42.

introduction

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sexual difference. Part II focuses on the reception of Antigone— both the myth and the play—with each essay discussing a different aspect of her ideological appropriation from Antigone’s role in the politics of psychoanalysis to her manipulation in Nazi thought. Leonard explores how the figure of Antigone has played a crucial role in the history of psychoanalysis in post-war France. As Luce Irigaray and Jacques Lacan compete for the figure of Antigone, Greek myth becomes the battleground for psychoanalysis and its definitions of woman. Goldhill asks why Antigone has proved so irresistible to feminist political theory and in particular the political theory of the family. Feminists have wanted to claim Antigone as a sister but he uses Ismene to query the valency of the metaphor of sisterhood. Fleming turns to Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and the controversy of the Nazi appropriation of Greek mythology. She uses the particular history of this play to highlight the ethical complexity of reception and its relationship to feminism. The third part explores the relationship between myth and history. The traditional opposition between these terms provides the impetus for feminism’s exploration of the benefits and limitations of historical modes of analysis. The essays combine broad theoretical perspectives on the contested boundary between the two categories with specific case-studies from the modern era. They address the way ancient mythical figures have informed more contemporary historiographical debates about memory, representation, and national identity. O’Gorman begins by questioning feminism’s failure to engage in the project of narrating a history of warfare. She argues that the figure of Helen in ancient accounts of war offers a potential model for the feminist historian to rethink history’s accounts of causality and accountability. She compares different versions of ‘the Helen myth’ to redirect attention to previously unrecognized thematics. Staley examines the role of myth in the construction of the nation and looks in particular at the experience of America. He argues that for the Founding Fathers the New World was no place for myth. Feminist writers, however, capitalized on America’s peripheral relation to the classical world to forge an identification with mythical figures who occupied a similar position within the ancient mythical topography. Part IV, ‘Myth and Science’, investigates the continuing presence of ancient mythic thought in the history and development of

16


scientific discourse25. The three essays discuss the ways in which myths of gender have structured the theory and practice of science. Kennedy’s essay introduces Lucretius and ancient theories of atomism to explore the role of reductionism within feminist accounts of science. He examines the spectre of ancient myth in science’s gendered formulations of the natural world. Sharrock returns to Lucretius to offer a reading which highlights the way De Rerum Natura has become part of science’s investigation of its own genealogy. She analyses the tropes of personification and abstraction and their gendering in scientific discourse and asks why Lucretius’s scientific manifesto is framed by accounts of female mythical characters. Liveley responds to the challenge posed by the previous essays to think about what constitutes feminist science by dissecting the work of Donna Haraway and the modern myth of the ‘cyborg’. She shows how the utopia of feminist science fiction is modelled upon ancient myths of hybridity but at the same time seeks to distance itself from that ancient legacy. The fifth and final part, ‘Myth and Poetry’, demonstrates and scrutinizes the intimate relationship between creativity and the feminine. There are various strategies available for feminist criticism if it desires to reanimate female figures in ancient poetry. Doherty examines the disruption of patrilineal narratives within the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women by prising apart the mythic stories from their reception in poetic discourses. She draws attention to the way most commentators have stubbornly refused to acknowledge women as the subject matter of this text. She reminds us that too often classics in its modern manifestations unthinkingly 25

For debates about feminist science see Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (London, 1992), Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, 1995) Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991). On ancient science see Geoffrey Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge, 1983), Ann Ellis Hanson, ‘Continuity and Change: Three Case Studies in Hippocratic Gynaecological Therapy and Theory’ in Sarah Pomeroy (ed.), Women’s History and Ancient History (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 1991), 73–110, Lesley Dean Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford, 1996), Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London and New York, 1998).

introduction

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replicates the male bias of its ancient sources. Murray explores the significance of the Muses’ gender and the various ways their femininity has contributed to their reception. She argues that their presence in the ancient texts is more multifarious than the tradition has sometimes allowed. In Richard Samuel’s eighteenth-century painting The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain she identifies a model for reclaiming the image of the Muse as an emblem of female capability. Contemporary women’s poetry continues to rework classical myth. Fowler takes the example of the Ovidian myth of Daphne in the works of Jorie Graham and Eavan Boland to examine the role of individual subjectivity in the confrontation between the poet and the female subjects of the mythic tradition. She considers closely the relationship between formal experimentation and the articulation of feminist ideals. Spentzou uses Helen to capture a moment in the modern Greek nation’s identification with and rejection of a sense of the classical past. The revalorization of the figure of an ageing Helen in recent women’s writing in Greece contrasts with an earlier male tradition which had gone so far as to kill off Helen. The volume concludes with an especially commissioned fictional account, ‘Iphigeneia’s Wedding’, by Elizabeth Cook in which she gives expression to Iphigeneia’s ambivalent reaction to her metamorphic body. Unlike most classical accounts of this myth which first depict Iphigeneia approaching her father at the scene of her sacrifice, Cook begins the story in Mycenae, where it is her relationship with her mother which predominates. For Cook, as for Cixous, myth becomes a space ‘far from kingdoms, from caesars, from brawls, from the cravings of penis and sword’26. In its potential for independence and creativity the autonomous space of myth becomes the contemporary ‘room of one’s own’: Clytemnestra replied, ‘She is too young. She is not ready. She prefers climbing trees with boys to the company of men.’ This was not true. Iphigeneia preferred to climb trees on her own.27 26 27

Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 130 See Cook’s piece in this volume, Ch. 16.


part i

Myth and Psychoanalysis


1

The Cronus Complex Psychoanalytic Myths of the Future for Boys and Girls

R a c h e l Bowlby

hope, promise, threaten, and swear Students of Greek and Latin used to be taught that special rules applied when composing sentences that involved the verbs ‘hope, promise, threaten, and swear’. The quartet is memorably nonsensical, like a stupid jingle you can’t get out of your head; at the same time it seems to suggest a kind of incantatory quality: witches brewing a mixed fate. For what the verbs have minimally in common is their reference to the future—or rather, their constructions, different in each instance, of a particular orientation towards the future.1 ‘Swear’ has the sense of an oath; it pairs with the ‘promise’ from which it is separated in the setpiece order of words. ‘Hope’ and ‘threaten’ are then left to make a 1 See e.g. William W. Goodwin, A Greek Grammar (2nd edn. 1894; repr. London, 1974), 275: ‘Verbs of hoping, expecting, promising, swearing, and a few others, form an intermediate class between verbs which take the infinitive in indirect discourse and those which do not; and though they regularly have the future infinitive, the present and aorist are allowed.’

22

r a ch e l bo w l b y

diametrical semantic contrast between two ways of imagining or imposing future possibilities: positive and negative. All four verbs entail the presence of a second verb: ‘I promise to do that’; ‘I hope he will’; ‘I swear to protect him’, and so on. In Freud the difference of the sexes can be defined through their characteristic orientations towards the future and ‘hope, promise, threaten, and swear’ are close to the bone. For it is versions of these verbs that supply the templates for the boys and girls of the future. They open up or rule out certain possibilities, according to their syntactical and semantic nature. In particular, a contrast between hopes and threats is fundamental; it is the structuring distinction that gives each sex its typical character. Femininity hopes (to be masculine). Masculinity is threatened (with the loss of masculinity). Despite appearances, the mode if not the mood of the future is negative in both cases, not just that of being threatened; indeed it is more, not less so for girls. This is because the hoping sex hopes in vain. The story that leads, in Freud, to sexual separation has been frequently retold. For both boys and girls, a formative, traumatic moment occurs when they realize the meaning of sexual difference in relation to the presence or absence of a penis. Immediately prior to that point, the ‘phallic’ phase does not distinguish between the value of the sexes. The ‘discovery’ or ‘recognition’ (both words are used) of castration—that the boy has something the girl does not, or that the girl lacks what the boy has—does away for ever with this imagined homogeneity. From now on, two sexes will be marked out by their dissymmetrical relationships to the phenomenon of castration. One hopes to remedy it as something that has happened to her; the other is threatened by the possibility that could happen to him, as it visibly has to her. This mood, grammatical and emotional, then governs their different futures; for her in particular it becomes what can only be called a life-sentence—one that Freud repeats many times in the course of his writings on female sexuality: When the little girl discovers her own deficiency [Defekt], from seeing a male genital, it is only with hesitation and reluctance that she accepts the unwelcome [unerwu¨nschte] knowledge. As we have seen, she clings obstinately to the expectation of one

the cronus complex

23

day having a genital of the same kind too, and her wish for it survives long after her hope has expired.2 The hope of some day obtaining a penis in spite of everything and so of becoming like a man may persist to an incredibly late age and may become a motive for strange and otherwise unaccountable actions.3 The second line leads her to cling with defiant self-assertiveness to her threatened masculinity. To an incredibly late age she clings to the hope of getting a penis some time. That hope becomes her life’s aim.4 The girl’s recognition [anerkennt] of the fact of her being without a penis does not by any means imply that she submits to the fact easily. On the contrary, she continues to hold on for a long time to the wish to get something like it herself and she believes in that possibility for improbably long years. . . . The wish to get the longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything may contribute to the motives that drive a mature woman to analysis.5 The girl appears as the passive protagonist in a distorted fairy tale— one in which wishes, hopes, and tenacity of purpose are not just thwarted, but presented as impossible of fulfilment right from the start. The story is not about a wish that comes true. Instead it begins

2 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London, 1953–74), xxi, 233; ‘U¨ber die weibliche Sexualita¨t’, in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie und verwandte Schriften (1905) (Frankfurt am Main), 176. Except where specified, English translations of texts by Freud are all quoted from the Standard Edition, hereafter SE, followed by volume number. In this and in further quotations, italics are added unless otherwise stated. 3 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ (1925), SE, xix. 253; ‘Einige psychische Folgen des anatomischen Geschlechtsunterschieds’, in Drei Abhandlungen, 163. 4 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 229–30; ‘U¨ber die weibliche Sexualita¨t’, 173. 5 Freud, ‘Femininity’ (1933), SE, xxii. 125; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, Studienausgabe (Frankfurt am Main, 1969–75), i. 556.

24


in mid-wishing with a negative fulfilment, and it tails off without an end into an indefinite future of wishing for what the unwished-for knowledge has rendered unobtainable, unwishable. At the beginning, she gets something defined as that which she does not wish for, the ‘unwelcome’—unerwu¨nschte, literally ‘unwished for’—knowledge. She clings and clings to the hope or wish for what she cannot have; the same verb, festhalten—hold tight, hold fast—renders ‘cling’ all three times as well as ‘hold on’ in the passages above. She wishes against all the odds that ‘in spite of everything’ (‘doch noch einmal’, ‘one day’ (einmal), ‘some day. . . in spite of everything’ (doch noch einmal), ‘some time’ (noch einmal), ‘eventually’ (endlich), her penis will come. Continuing in this way ‘to an incredibly late age’, or for ‘improbably long years’, the girl lives out a tale that like all fairy tales, good and bad, is unbelievable and unlikely; it does not seem to involve a real, or realistic life. The princess simply grows old in her hopeless hoping and impossible wishing; hope and wish take her place as the active subjects: ‘That hope [Hoffnung] becomes her life’s aim [Lebenszweck]’; ‘her wish for it survives long after her hope has expired’ (’der Wunsch danach u¨berlebt die Hoffnung noch um lange Zeit). This post-castrational story of a woman’s life evokes all kinds of features that seem to imply particular kinds of narrative outcome, none of which is actually fulfilled. There are hopes and wishes but no happy ending on the horizon; there are unlikely phenomena leading to ‘strange and otherwise unaccountable actions’, but no disaster or final revelation ensues. Nothing really happens as life passes the woman by. In Totem and Taboo, Freud refers to ‘the uneventfulness of her emotional life’.6 Years later in the development of psychoanalysis, and years earlier in the development of the little girl, this extended eventlessness would acquire a partial counterpart in the pre-Oedipal period of exclusive attachment to the mother, stressed for the first time in the 1931 essay ‘Female Sexuality’. This is another time in the girl’s life that seems to go on for ever, without significant changes taking place.

6 Freud, Totem and Taboo [1913], SE, xiii. 15; Totem und Tabu (Frankfurt am Main, 1956), 22.

the cronus complex

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the girl’s tragedy But between the two periods of indeterminacy, the girl is briefly and precipitately at the centre of a dramatic action, what is nothing less than the end-point of a tragedy. The traumatic ‘discovery’ of her castration involves the fulfilment of a negative destiny; in true Aristotelian style, there is an anagnorisis and a peripeteia: recognition and complete reversal. The girl’s pride is revealed retrospectively as having been the hubris of a mistakenly confident masculinity on the part of one who was never going to be a hero at all. Castration is her sudden downfall, in wretched realization of a destiny she did not know to be hers. Unlike the blur of the post-castrational non-story, the tragedy of the girl’s castration involves one sharply telescoped event, her seeing herself as lacking. Tragic ideas of fall, destiny, recognition, knowledge, and discovery are regularly associated with this moment as Freud recounts it. The last two occur for instance in the first passage of the four quoted above, in which ‘the little girl discovers her own deficiency’, and reluctantly ‘accepts the unwelcome knowledge’. What the girl ‘learns’ (erfahren is the discovery verb here) is not in question; it is knowledge. This applies equally to ‘the girl’s recognition [anerkennt] of the fact of her being without a penis’,7 inseparable from the drop in status that accompanies it: ‘She acknowledges [anerkennt] the fact of her castration and with it, too, the superiority of the male and her own inferiority.’8 The event is sometimes grandly marked: a momentous discovery [Entdeckung] which little girls are destined [beschieden] to make. They notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize [erkennt] it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim [verfallen] to envy for the penis.9

7

Freud, ‘Femininity’, 125; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 556. Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’ 229; ‘U¨ber die weibliche Sexualita¨t’, 173. 9 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences’, 252; ‘Einige psychische Folgen’, 162. 8

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The discovery (Entdeckung) of her castration is a turning-point in a girl’s growth.10 But though this critical moment stands out as a tragic event, it is not really an ending or denouement. It does not resolve a pre-existing conflict; instead it creates an indefinitely prolonged and futile struggle for the future. It is as a result of her unfortunate ‘discovery’ that—and Freud uses the phrase more than once—the girl will ‘fall a victim to’ penis envy.11 The verb verfallen carries an idea of addiction as well as decline: unheroically, she ‘sinks into’ penis envy. In classic Greek tragedy, the recognition typically makes explicit to the characters some fact or action of their past, or some aspect of their identity of which up till then they were unaware. Oedipus, in Aristotle’s paradigmatic example, is forced to see that he is Jocasta’s son and Laius’s murderer. That recognition is brought about wholly by the force of words. In other cases, regarded with suspicion by Aristotle, the recognition involves tangible objects: in Euripides’ Ion, for instance, the visible presence of the identifiable accoutrements of the baby abandoned at birth. The effect of a recognition in a tragedy need not be, as it is in Oedipus, destructive; in Ion it produces what is primarily a happy reunion of mother and son. In Freud’s tragic story, however, the recognition of sexual difference is unequivocally negative. For girls, it does not resolve a conflict but creates one: penis envy is a protest, a rebellion, against what is simultaneously ‘recognized’ as true. All is changed. All that is left is a contradictory future: the tension of a wish that arises out of its being ruled out.

t h e bo y ’ s bildungsroman The Freudian girl is thus caught up in the end of a tragedy that is followed by fragments of an unresolved fairy tale. In the boy’s case, though the story likewise centres on the same decisive ‘turningpoint’ of seeing the girl as castrated, the sequence of events and the genres in which they take place are very different. Being under 10

Freud, ‘Femininity’ 126; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 557. As well as in the passage quoted above, the verb occurs in this context in ‘Femininity’, 125; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 556. 11

the cronus complex

27

threat provokes a radical change; instead of being condemned to ‘cling’ to previous attachments, the boy is able to leave the mythical sphere of family and childhood and move on out into a wider, modern world. For girls, it is the recognition of castration that pushes them into the Oedipal situation. In search of the penis, they turn from the mother to the father; from this no subsequent life-changing event will ever definitively release them. For boys the possibility of castration—the existence of defective ‘girls’—is just as traumatic a realization as it is for girls, but it resolves, rather than instigating, the Oedipus complex: in deference to the threat they give up their erotic wishes in relation to the loved mother and their rivalry with the father. Freud stresses the sharpness and neatness of the boy’s Oedipal situation as a point of distinction between the sexes. In several ways, his is a much more classic tragedy than the girl’s. First, there is a clear conflict that arises from the realization of the possibility of castration: ‘If the satisfaction of love in the field of the Oedipus complex is to cost the child his penis [through the threatened punishment of castration] a conflict [Konflikt] is bound to arise.’12 This conflict is seconded by the force of the passionate love triangle: It is only in the male child that we find the fateful combination [schicksalhafte Beziehung] of love for the one parent and simultaneous hatred for the other as a rival. In his case it is the discovery [Entdeckung] of the possibility of castration, as proved by the sight of the female genitals, which forces on him [erzwingt] the transformation [Umbildung] of his Oedipus complex, and which leads to the creation of his super-ego and thus initiates all the processes that are designed to make the individual find a place in the cultural community [Kulturgemeinschaft].13

The characters of this drama are clearly differentiated according to the motives and emotions that structure the conflict. Love and hate and the disposition of roles produce the ‘fateful combination’ that can be identified as such. There is a radical and forced (erzwingt) upheaval (Umbildung). A hero is brought down to a human level.

12

Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924), SE, xix. ¨ dipuscomplexes’, Studienausgabe, v. 248. 176; ‘Der Untergang des O 13 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 229; ‘U¨ber die weibliche Sexualita¨t’, 172.

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This passage also brings out the teleological and reformulating aspects of the boy’s post-Oedipal development: ‘all the processes designed to . . . ’. In the German, the aspects of purpose and placement come out more strongly. The processes directly ‘aim’ (abzielen). Finding a place is Einreihung: the man is not merely put somewhere, but is subject to a ‘classification’ in which his individuality is irrelevant. It is a movement from uniqueness and exclusivity to equality and the sharing of ‘community’: a social revolution following a shake-up (Umbildung) of the existing autocratic regime. ‘His Majesty the Baby’, in Freud’s immortal characterization of infantile omnipotence, was the centre of his kingdom and the invulnerable source of royal commands and wishes. He has to give up his unique position and give way to a community of citizens in which each person, himself among them, has a place. The boy is from now on involved in a very different kind of subjective universe from the one that sustained his Oedipal wishes—one in which there are contracts and conditions, promises and oaths. Emotionally, the same motive forces are present for both sexes but they too are reversed in the temporal order, contributing to the very different stories. The boy starts off, Oedipally, in a situation of ‘hopeless longing’ (hoffnunglose Neigung)14 in relation to his mother, but he gets away from it; reversing the order, this state of longing is where the girl arrives as she belatedly enters her own version of the Oedipus complex after the traumatic recognition of her castration. Then the girl too is subject to threats of various kinds, but these are presented as being of a lesser order than those that apply to the boy: they do not have the same determining force. The girl’s ‘threatened masculinity’ (bedrohten Ma¨nnlichkeit)15 appears at the point at which she has just found out that she is without masculinity in any case: when the difference of masculine and feminine has just arisen, for the first time giving masculinity, for both sexes, the quality of threatenedness. In boys, crucially, the threat is combined with fear. But the girl has nothing to lose and hence nothing to fear, so again the threat appears as relatively small: 14 15

Freud, ‘Dissolution’, 173; ‘Der Untergang’, 245. Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 376; ‘U¨ber die weibliche Sexualita¨t’, 173.

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The fear of castration being thus excluded in the little girl, a powerful motive also drops out for the setting-up of a super-ego and for the breaking-off of the infantile genital organization. In her, far more than in the boy, these changes seem to be the result of upbringing and of intimidation from outside which threatens her with a loss of love.16

There is no big story, and no elementary emotions: ‘a powerful motive drops out’, is missing from the plot. You cannot have a proper tragedy without the force of fear (Aristotle’s phobos). As a threat, ‘loss of love’ is much vaguer than castration. The girl’s Oedipal situation, implicitly, lacks the sharp outline and hence the certainty of a ‘fateful combination’ that will bring about the Umbildung, an upheaval unbuilding followed by reconstruction, to which the boy is subject. Thus during the early phase of her attachment to her mother, the girl’s father does represent ‘a troublesome rival’, but still ‘her hostility towards him never reaches the pitch which is characteristic of boys’ in their Oedipus complex.17 For the girl, the story whose traumatic turning-point is the realization of castration is in other respects, before and after that crisis, a domestic tale. In the passage above, ‘changes’ come about as ‘the result of upbringing’ and their outcome will be her staying indefinitely at home. Instead of forcing her beyond the Oedipal wishes that stay in the family, the discovery of her castration encourages them. Thus there are ‘women who cling [festhalten] with especial intensity and tenacity [Za¨higkeit] to the attachment to their father [Vaterbindung] and to the wish in which it culminates of having a child by him’.18 As in the previous examples of the girl’s later orientations, clinging and wishing seem to be ends in themselves; the women ‘cling’, over-cling (‘with especial intensity and tenacity’) to ‘the attachment’ to the father: they clingingly cling to clinging.

the myth of castration In the outline story of male development, the boy is able to move forward from a pre-civilized, myth-making state, into a reasonable 16

Freud, ‘Dissolution’, 321; ‘Der Untergang’, 250. Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 226; ‘U¨ber die weibliche Sexualita¨t’, 170. 18 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences’, 251; ‘Einige psychische Folgen’, 162. 17

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world of social responsibility in which infantile expectations of heroic centrality have been abandoned and forgotten. Mythical, ancient thinking is superseded by modern, rational thinking. Fear of castration is the plot-clinching device that makes the break between the early and mature phases, between mythological and social orientations: the prince is forced to become a citizen, held in place from now on by the understanding that his masculinity is not invulnerable. Thus the boy is pushed beyond the familial scene of passionate struggle, and into a new order of rules and measures. The threat of castration is the precondition for his post-mythological subjectivity; it is a marked turning-point. But it also remains as the back-up to a newly circumscribed masculinity: it does not altogether disappear from the psychological scene once its catalytic role has been fulfilled. In this respect, the castration complex differs sharply from the explicitly mythological scenario of the boy’s development, the Oedipus complex. This, Freud says in 1924, should ideally be seen no more once the aftermath of the castration complex has done away with it; ‘the process . . . is equivalent, if it is ideally carried out, to a destruction [Zersto¨rung] and an abolition [Aufhebung] of the complex.’19 In the following year this is put even more forcefully, making Zersto¨rung and Aufhebung sound like calm philosophical abstractions by comparison: ‘the complex is not simply repressed, it is literally smashed to pieces [er zerschellte formlich] by the shock of threatened castration.’ The complex goes out with a bang; and Freud concludes that ‘in ideal cases, the Oedipus complex exists no longer, even in the unconscious’. This dramatic destruction radically re-forms the grounds of the boy’s existence: ‘[T]he catastrophe to the Oedipus complex (the abandonment of incest and the institution of conscience and morality) may be regarded as a victory of the race over the individual.’20 What is explicitly derived from myth, the Oedipus complex, is surmounted. By contrast, the castration complex survives as basic to the possible paths and the impasses of adult subjectivity. 19

Freud, ‘Dissolution’, 319; ‘Der Untergang’, 248. Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences’, 257; ‘Einige psychische Folge’, 167. 20

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For the most part, the episode of the castration complex in children’s development is presented without reference to any stories or facts that might independently suggest or support it. There is no equivalent to the overtly mythological scaffolding, built and destroyed after use, that is attached to the idea of the Oedipus complex. In that connection Freud many times reminds his readers of the ‘legend’ represented in Sophocles’ play. His claim for the universality of the experience is based directly on an appeal to the power of the Oedipal themes of incest and parricide to move an audience. The castration complex, on the other hand, appears to be independent of mythical or ancient roots. Yet castration does have its Greek myth, and Freud does refer to it on a number of occasions. Behind the more developed mythology from which the story of Oedipus is derived lurk the gods Uranus and Cronus, father and son; Cronus is the father of Zeus. Freud brings them up as a pair or trio several times. Their paternal and filial exploits, sometimes involving Zeus and sometimes not, include multiple infanticide and father-castration: Zeus may have castrated his father Cronos, and Cronus did the same to his father, Uranus. The Freudian Oedipus wishes to murder his father, and the mythical Oedipus does so by accident; a Cronus, mythical or Freudian, simply gets on and does it, and not for any secondary motive such as gaining possession of a mother. Zeus provides the pivot or dividing point between different orders of legend. Cronus and Uranus, his father and grandfather, are not the subjects of multifarious or elaborate narratives but are confined to some pretty elementary pre-human acts: eating their children and castrating their fathers. As fathers, they don’t exactly do the family thing. Freud’s statement that the supersession of the Oedipus complex implies the victory of the ‘race’ over the individual applies, a fortiori, to the movement of mythology beyond these monstrous fathers, absolute and obsolete individuals who seek to annihilate both their offspring and their own fathers. Tellingly, the word translated by ‘race’ is ‘Generation’. Zeus, at first sight, does not quite seem to fit in these connections; his other links, beyond his progenitors, make him an unlikely pater-emasculator. Yet his position is always to some extent that of one situated ambiguously ‘between’ different orders of divine existence. He mostly belongs

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to the newer world of gods who have relationships and enter into the plots and affairs of both the immortal and the mortal worlds. Zeus is both a participant and an arbiter; he has the ruling power, and is supposed to be aloof and neutral in his role as judge; and yet he is one among other gods, and not indifferent to mortal attractions and issues. He takes sides, although he also stands apart from strife, divine and human. Thus Zeus’s normal transitional or straddling place, between two incommensurable orders, is further confused by his alleged perpetuation of his father’s and grandfather’s anti-legacy: unfathering. Freud himself hesitated between the legend which made Zeus a father-castrator like Cronus himself, and the one which reported no such thing, and thus clarified Zeus’s separation from those old gods. It was the second of these that Freud usually took to be the more authentic, but he hesitates and checks himself. Amost every time that Cronus comes up in his writings, the issue is raised, and once specifically in relation to the possible significance of making a mistake about the story in this charged father–son connection. In the chapter on ‘errors’ (Irrtumer) in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud considers two passages from The Interpretation of Dreams in which—as he would also do many years later, as we shall see—he had made Zeus a father-castrator too, like his own father Kronos: ‘I state that Zeus emasculated [entmannt] his father Kronos and dethroned him. I was, however, erroneously carrying this atrocity a generation [Generation] forward; according to Greek mythology it was Kronos who committed it on his father Uranus.’21 Freud assumes, in identifying his mistake, that the event of castration was necessarily a unique one—not, for instance, the son repeating what the father had done. Freud then asks how it was that he came to get this wrong—why, as he strikingly puts it, ‘my memory provided me at these points with what was incorrect (mein Geda¨chtnis in diesen Punkten Ungetreues lieferte)’, a formulation which makes the error into something like a useful resource. He explains it in connection with his own family history. He was the son of his father’s second marriage; 21 Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1905), SE, vi. 218; Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), 185.

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a much older half-brother, son of the first marriage, himself had a son, Freud’s (half-)nephew, who was Freud’s own age. After getting to know this brother on a visit to his home in England, ‘my relationship [Verha¨ltnis] with my father was changed’ because the meeting with the brother had prompted ‘phantasies of how different things would have been if I had been born the son not of my father but of my brother’. This then Freud sees as the source of ‘my error in advancing by a generation the mythological atrocities of the Greek pantheon’. Freud’s ‘correct’ version of the myth keeps Zeus apart from the sins of his fathers, and thus more clearly confirms Zeus’s place as inaugurating a civilized order—one anchored in both the separation and the continuity of ‘generation’.22 In fantasy, Freud’s own difference in age from his father (and half-brother) gives realistic support to making the father redundant, or relegating him to the role of grandfather. In his explanation of how he came to make the Cronus mistake, he recalls a significant utterance on the part of his halfbrother: One of my brother’s admonitions lingered long in my memory. ‘One thing,’ he had said to me, ‘that you must not forget is that as far as the conduct of your life is concerned you really belong not to the second but to the third generation in relation to your father.’ Our father had married again in later life and was therefore much older than his children by his second marriage.23

The solemn, almost oracular tone of the ‘admonitions’ (Mahnungen) links a carefully preserved memory to specific constructions for the future. Mahnungen are also reminders; as surely as the brother enjoined the young man ‘that you must not forget’, so the sayings ‘lingered long in my memory’, a source of authority and a granting of permission to bypass the father on the part of the one who has himself replaced that father. Freud took his lead, he seems to be saying, from his older brother, in setting himself at a distance from an old-world father; and also, as he doesn’t quite say, in making 22

In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, the complete breakdown of the social and familial order is suggested by the blurring of the generations and the associated overlapping of kinship categories like ‘mother wife’ or ‘sister daughter’ that ought to be mutually exclusive. (See lines 1406–8.) 23 Freud, Psychopathology, 220; Zur Psychopathologie, 186–7.

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himself analogous to Zeus. This Zeus represents justice, leadership, and the beginning of a new era. But the stretching out of generations, enabling Freud to appear in the place of Zeus, has also, so it is implied, caused a muddle of another kind: if three is really two, then ‘Zeus’ is not so far apart after all, and is seen like his father as a perpetrator of mythological ‘atrocities’. Everything that has to do with the castration myths seems to be subject to this kind of blur and indistinction. Even Freud’s selfcorrection turns out to need recorrection, or at least qualification. Having stated that he was wrong to include Zeus among the unfilial sons, he puts in a footnote that begins, self-mockingly, ‘Kein voller Irrtum!’, ‘not entirely a mistake!’, and goes on to cite the Orphic version ‘which has Zeus repeat the process of emasculation on his father Kronos.’24 A further example of indistinction is that fathers and sons in the Cronus story do not stay generationally separate; instead each one is driven only and simply to do away with putative progeny and fathers. In the myth of Uranus whom Freud never mentions other than in connection with the castrating Cronus, the confusions are even more extreme. Uranus (the sky), the son of Gaia (the earth), has children with his mother but makes her swallow them back; one of them, Cronus, castrates his father, at her instigation—and she is the mother of both parties, father and son.

psychoanalytic mythologies Unlike Oedipus, Cronus and Uranus are rarely mentioned by Freud. But it happens that they, and not Oedipus, appear in a passage where Freud raises general questions about the relationship of psychoanalytic theory to mythology. The passage is worth considering in some detail, as it is fundamental to the issues of knowledge and story presented in relation to castration and sexual difference. In The Question of Lay Analyis, Freud offers his sceptical imaginary interlocutor an analogy with Greek mythology; this is meant as a way of making the extraordinary psychoanalytic description of infant sexuality seem less outlandish. He first appeals 24

Freud, Psychopathology, 218 (tr. mod.); Zur Psychopathologie, 185.

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to memories of the classical myths taught at school, mentioning as an example the one about the god Cronus swallowing his children: ‘How strange this must have sounded to you when you first heard it! But I suppose none of us thought about it at the time.’ The strangeness is initially both taken for granted and unexplored, not a matter for thought. But now, Freud goes on, a meaning is clear: ‘Today we can also call to mind a number of fairy tales in which some ravenous animal like a wolf appears, and we shall recognize it as a disguise of the father.’ Thus myths and fairy tales tell the same story, which can be interpreted at another level to which, as ‘disguises’, they are subordinate. Here the gods of mythology and the animals of fairy tales converge in the same picture of the father. Psychoanalytic theory has provided an explanation: ‘[I]t was only through the knowledge of infantile sexuality that it became possible to understand mythology and the world of fairy tales. Here then something has been gained as a by-product of analytic studies.’25 Freud then moves from a devouring to a castrating father, and makes a slightly different point about the relationship between mythological and analytic understanding. And once more Cronus is brought on as evidence: You will be no less surprised to hear that male children suffer from a fear of being robbed of their sexual organ by their father, so that this fear of being castrated has a most powerful influence on the development of their character and in deciding the direction to be followed by their sexuality. And here again mythology may give you the courage to believe psychoanalysis. The same Kronos who swallowed his children also emasculated his father Uranus, and was afterwards himself emasculated in revenge by his son Zeus, who had been rescued through his mother’s cunning [List].26

Whereas in the first example the myth is strange but can be made comprehensible through psychoanalytic understanding, here the myth is taken as read; its familiarity provides the grounds for believing an otherwise astonishing (‘you will be no less surprised’) psychoanalytic story. Previously, psychoanalysis gave credence to 25

Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), SE, xx. 211; Die Frage der Laienanalyse, Studienausgabe, iv. 302. 26 Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, 211–12; Die Frage der Laienanalyse, 302.

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mythology (‘it was only through the knowledge of infantile sexuality that it became possible to understand mythology’); here, it is the other way round: ‘mythology may give you the courage to believe psychoanalysis’. There follow two further hypotheses about the reader’s accreditation of psychoanalysis, the second of which is the one presented as preferable. Here is the first: If you have felt inclined to suppose that all that psychoanalysis reports about the early sexuality of children is derived from the disordered imagination [der wu¨sten Phantasie] of the analysts, you must at least admit that their imagination has created the same product as the imaginative activities of primitive man, of which myths and fairy tales are the precipitate.

Here analytic knowledge is identified with the ‘primitive’; it does not explain it but is ‘the same’. It is wild and chaotic (wu¨st) but it is given its low-level validation by the irrefutable identity between the two. Psychoanalytic theory is itself, on this theory, a wild story— a fairy tale or myth. The second hypothesis then raises the stakes by once again situating the analyst of both mythology and infantile sexuality at a distance from the object of study: The alternative friendlier, and probably also the more pertinent view would be that in the mental life of children today we can still detect the same archaic features which were once dominant generally in the primeval days of human civilization. In his mental development the child would be repeating the history of the race in an abbreviated form, just as embryology has long since recognized was the case with somatic development.27

The translation does not speak of ‘recapitulation’ here, though on other occasions where the combination of repetition (wiederholen) and abbreviation (abku¨rzender) appears, that is the word that is used.28 The last clause leaves no doubt that this is a reference to the

27 Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, 212; Die Frage der Laienanalyse, 302–3. 28 See e.g. Freud’s ‘ ‘‘A Child is Being Beaten’’ ’ (1919), SE, xvii. 188; ‘ ‘‘Ein Kind wird geschlagen’’ ’, Studienausgabe, vii. 240: in the phrase ‘recapitulate from the history of mankind’, ‘recapitulate’ translates ‘wiederholen’ (‘repeat’); Freud, Introductory Lectures, SE, xv. 199; Vorlesungen

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contemporary scientific theory, and that Freud is endorsing the idea—‘long since recognized’—that ontogeny repeats phylogeny.29 As elsewhere (notably at the end of the ‘Wolf Man’ case history), Freud transfers this theory to psychological development, positing that the child necessarily passes through a series of incommensurable modes of apprehending its world, each with its own characteristic attached stories or basic outlines; chief among these are the ‘primal phantasies’, offering and imposing answers to the child’s questions about sexuality and the origin of babies. In recapitulation theory proper, each stage of a recapitulation is superseded by the new form that takes its place. In Freud, on the other hand, no ‘stage’ of development is ever fully or finally surpassed. There is always the possibility of a detrimental ‘return’ to a previous one; or, putting this from the other direction, previous dispositions may ‘survive’ in the present as part of a heterogeneously composed psychical entity. But when Freud directly appeals to recapitulation theory, as in the passage cited, this interference inherent to his own model tends to be unstated. Instead, the stress falls on the succession of stages leading towards adulthood, with the earlier ones associated with a ‘primitive’ world that the adult will long since have left behind. Thus in this second hypothesis, the adult is not on a par with the mythologizing child or its phylogenetic analogue, the ‘primeval days (Urzeiten) of human civilization’. This ‘friendlier’ (freundlichere) hypothesis rescues the theorist from the ancient world of the first one; it is also, for good measure, probably ‘more accurate’ (zutreffendere) as well as (in the translation) ‘more pertinent’. The several interlocking hypotheses that Freud puts forward here offer a spectrum of possibilities about the relation between mythology and knowledge for various classes of thinker who are explicitly or implicitly compared. There is the child as opposed to the zur Einfu¨hrung in der Psychoanalyse, Studienausgabe, i. 204, where ‘abbreviated recapitulation’ translates ‘abgeku¨rtzt wiederholt’. 29

On recapitulation theory and its use in Freud, see Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979; London, 1980), passim; Lucille B. Ritvo. Darwin’s Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven, 1990), 74–98.

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adult; primitive as opposed to civilized human beings; and psychoanalysts as opposed to other people. The discussion comes immediately before a passage in which Freud raises the question of sexual difference specifically in relation to the castration complex, but without naming it as such, despite the proximity of the Cronus myth of Entmannung and the reference to boys’ ‘fear of being robbed of their sexual organ by their father’: ‘Another characteristic of early infantile sexuality is that . . . [s]tress falls entirely on the male organ, all the child’s interest is directed towards the question of whether it is present or not.’30 Thus the issues raised are bound to suggest some further considerations in relation to the asymmetrical ‘stories’ that attach to the different developments of each sex. It is the Cronus myth that Freud refers to, in The Question of Lay Analysis, as implicitly ‘disordered’ and chaotic: ‘wu¨st’. Bodies and body parts are indiscriminately ingested or removed within a caricaturally destructive ‘family’. ‘How strange [sonderbar] this must have sounded to you when you first heard it!’ Freud said, referring to the schoolboy understanding of the story that Cronus swallowed his children. Strange, peculiar, weird—but not shocking or shaking. Not a source of disturbance or curiosity then—‘But I suppose none of us thought about it at the time’. And easily assimilated now, intellectually, to an available schema: ‘Today. . . we shall recognize it as a disguise of the father.’ The Titan stories of the old gods are about extreme acts executed without meditation or delay. There is no narrative suspense, no impending fate: no time of delay in which an oracular promise or threat makes its mark on the characters. The response to them, on the part of both children and adults, is not represented by Freud as resembling the fearful effect produced by the tragedy of Oedipus: ‘There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize [anzuerkennen] the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus.’31 These myths are outside the complex human time where the present is always steeped in its imaginary futures, whether feared or wished for. 30

Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, 212; Die Frage der Laienanalyse, 303. 31 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE, iv. 262; Die Traumdeutung (Frankfurt am Main, 1942), 223.

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cronus’s last appearance There is one occasion in Freud’s writing when the Cronus story is given a full symbolic weight. In a brief, incomplete paper written at the very end of his life, ‘The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’, the mechanism of disavowal is described in similar terms to those that Freud had used in 1927 in his essay ‘Fetishism’. In most cases—‘the usual result of the fright of castration’ (Kastrationsschrecks)—the boy’s response is to ‘obey the prohibition’ (of masturbation) as he ‘gives way to the threat’; this is the trade-off that will lead to his incorporation into the social world. But in other instances recognition both does and does not take place and the boy finds a means of having it both ways. He acknowledges, but also fails to acknowledge, the ‘castration’ he sees in the girl, by creating a fetish or substitute for the missing penis; in relation to her (it does not affect his perception of his own penis) he has then ‘transferred the importance of the penis to another part of the body’. This ‘ingenious’ (geschickte) or ‘artful’ (kniffig)32 solution to the problem leaves the boy with a double orientation: on the one hand, the ‘apparent boldness and indifference’ that defies and ignores the threat, but on the other, ‘a symptom which showed that he nevertheless did recognize [anerkennt] the danger’.33 At this juncture the following passage appears: [H]e developed an intense fear of his father punishing him, which required the whole force of his masculinity to master and overcompensate. This fear of his father, too, was silent on the subject of castration: by the help of regression to an oral phase, it assumed the form of a fear of being eaten by his father. At this point it is impossible to forget a primitive fragment of Greek mythology which tells how Kronos, the old Father God, swallowed his children and sought to swallow his youngest son Zeus like the rest, and how Zeus was saved by the craft [List] of his mother and later on castrated his father.34

32

Freud, ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (1940), SE, xxiii. 275, 277; ‘Die Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang’, Studienausgabe, iii. 391, 393. 33 Freud, ‘Splitting’, 277; ‘Die Ichspaltung’, 393. 34 Freud, ‘Splitting’, 277–8; ‘Die Ichspaltung’, 393–4.

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First castration is named as what is either elided or out of the picture here: ‘silent on the subject’. Then, in connection with this silence, there enters none other than the arch-castrator, Cronus, here only in connection with his other violent deed, the eating of his children. Zeus, on the other hand, whom Freud had long ago sought to exempt, at least probably, from his father’s crime, now appears as the first and only father-castrator. The example concerns a blurring of the usual psychical developments in relation to the negotiation of the castration complex, and the mixture of myth and theory, Cronus and castrastion, echoes that same confusion. Cronus, even though he is its primary mythological agent, is dissociated from castration. But then Zeus, who may not have done the deed at all, comes in as if to compensate for the silence. There and not there, recognized and not recognized: the passage moves back and forth in precisely the same way as in the structure of splitting which it is describing. And almost immediately after this passage, the essay fades away (it was unfinished at the time of Freud’s death), mentioning another small symptom, this time the boy’s aversion to his toes being touched—‘as though’, says Freud, ‘in all the to and fro between disavowal and acknowledgement, it was nevertheless castration that found the clearer expression . . . ’.35 This oscillating exposition in the ‘Splitting’ essay echoes the ambiguities in Freud’s theory of castration as that which for boys enables the surpassing of myth. The ‘castration complex’ is made to play a decisive explanatory role in the psychoanalytic theory of children’s development. It traumatically divides boys from girls and launches each sex, now in their respectively wanting or threatened states, on the path of a particular orientation towards the future. For the boy, castration postdates and ideally draws a line under the mythical familial involvements of the Oedipus complex. He is able to make the move denied to the girl, from family to culture—or from myth to logos. From this perspective, ‘castration’ is part of Freud’s own theoretical myth of human development. But castration, as much as Oedipus, has Greek mythological sources, sometimes evoked by Freud, which form the underside of its structuring, humanizing role through the recognition of 35

Freud, ‘Splitting’, 278; ‘Die Ichspaltung’, 394; ellipsis in original.

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unpleasant but necessary sexual fact. Uranus and Cronus belong to a different age and world from that of Oedipus and Laius, who are themselves superseded in the movement initiated by the castration complex. Far from being to do with clarification or with an admission into sexual and social maturity, the Cronus-related myths are pre-pre-social. There is no narrative or temporal complexity; deeds are done without thought for a future, hoped or feared; progenitors and progeny are destroyed without any sense of generation on the part of the solely self-assertive perpetrator, free of all relations. Castration is embroiled in ur-myths of confusion; what it threatens is the collapse of all ‘generational’, historical human distinctions. The possible exception to the pre-Zeus order is the figure of Zeus’s rescuing mother, whom Freud twice alludes to, both times to mention her List (the same word translating both ‘craft’ and ‘cunning’ in the English) in outwitting Cronus’s son-swallowing enterprise. No further details are given, either by Freud or in reported versions of the myth. Rhea doesn’t save her other offspring. From this it could possibly be argued, ex post facto, that her forethought and attachment apply appropriately to the one who is destined for a post-Titanic future in a newer mythic world where the gods intervene in human matters of justice and fate; she would thus be in the vanguard of a civilizing process, her ‘cunning’ standing out against the gross destructiveness of her Titan husband. But it could also be argued that she is simply a mother, Freudian or otherwise, devoted to her baby son as a part of her self, and over and above her devotion to her husband. Her maternal instincts are useful and even indispensable to the move into culture and generation represented by Zeus, but culture is not her invention. Here the woman/mother is ambiguously placed, on the threshold between old and new orders, and identified with neither.

the man and woman of thirty In another late essay, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, the refusal to accept castration becomes the ultimate impasse, for both sexes; Freud speaks of ‘the paramount importance of these two themes—in females the wish for a penis and in males the struggle

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against passivity’, also described as the masculine protest (following Adler) and (Freud’s expression) the repudiation of femininity.36 They may be immutable: ‘We often have the impression that with the wish for a penis and the masculine protest we have penetrated through all the psychological strata and have reached bedrock [zum ‘gewachsenen Fels’ durchgedrungen], and that thus our activities are at an end.’37 Prior to this, at the end of the ‘Femininity’ lecture of 1933, the contrast of men’s and women’s futures that the castration complex installs had been vividly evoked in a picture of modern types. Freud appeals to the same ‘impression’ as in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ as being a commonplace therapeutic perception: I cannot help mentioning an impression that we are constantly receiving during analytic practice. A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful, somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use of the possibilities for development opened up to him by analysis. A woman of the same age, however, often frightens [erschreckt] us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influence—as though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned. As therapists we lament this state of things.38

At first sight, this passage seems to lend support to the view that the masculine bias of psychoanalytic theory is simply misogynistic. ‘Frightens us’ recalls the use of the same word in the context of fetishism for the alarmed reaction of the male to the sight of the 36 On the relationship of repudiation and femininity, see Rachel Bowlby, ‘Still Crazy after All These Years: Travels in Feminism and Psychoanalysis’, in Still Crazy after All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (London, 1992), 131–56. 37 Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), SE, xxiii. 251, 252; ‘Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse’, Studienausgabe, Erga¨nzungsband, 391, 392. The English translation removes the quotation marks that make gewachsenen Fels (literally, ‘evolved rock’) a conspicuous metaphor in the German. 38 Freud, ‘Femininity’, 134–5; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 564.

the cronus complex

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female genitals. In both cases, a shortcoming seen in the woman is a source of alarm to the man. At the same time, in this passage, the woman’s inflexibility—her stiffness (Starrheit) and unchangeability (Unvera¨nderlichkeit)—is set alongside the patently appealing and attractive figure of the blooming young man, ‘youthful, somewhat unformed’, who is going to make vigorous (kra¨ftig) use of the ‘possibilities of development’ that analysis ‘opens up [ero¨ffnet]’ to him through therapy; for the woman, in contrast, ‘Paths for wider development do not arise [Wege zu weiterer Entwicklung ergeben sich nicht]’, or ‘paths for wider development are there none’: in the German, the emphasis falls on the concluding negative, the nicht that immediately cancels the ways forward that the sentence has postulated. Here, in real life, as a kind of sad professional secret (‘I cannot help mentioning . . . ’) we are presented with the no-hope women of the theoretical account. But this is not all that is suggested. The spectacular, stark contrast also prompts regret that the path to femininity has been so draining as to have left the woman in this undesirable state. For the passage clearly deploys a notion of personal development linked in its positive form to change, openness, movement. Freud assumes that change is desirable for persons of either sex; persons are individuals who may or may not be able to go in new directions, to take up different ‘possibilities’. From a historical point of view, the surprising assumption in this connection may be that it is regrettable for a woman of 30 to be settled, to have found a final character. Would that the woman, too, he implies, could have the freedom to go on developing—that the woman, too, could be open to change. Freud granted women one possible sphere of perfect happiness, in mothering a son: ‘A mother can transfer to her son the ambition [Ehrgeiz] which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect [erwarten] from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex.’40 For once, the hope or 39

Freud, ‘Splitting’, 277; ‘Die Ichspaltung’, 393, quoted above. Cf. ‘Probably no man is spared the fright of castration [Kastrationsschreck] at the sight of a female genital’, ‘Fetishism’ (1927), SE, xxi. 154; ‘Fetischismus’, Studienausgabe, iii. 385. 40 Freud, ‘Femininity’, 133; ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, 563.

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expectation is not unreasonable even though it is compromised by its vicariousness and its dependence on a lost and recovered masculinity. But still the reference to ‘the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself’ carries the same recognition as noted in the passage about the man and woman of 30. The ambition was rightfully there; it is regrettable that she ‘had to suppress it [bei sich unterdru¨cken mu¨sste]’. As before, and even though the ending is a happier one here, there is an assumption of female potential that is undeveloped or thwarted, both psychically and socially. Since Freud’s lifetime, paths of development that were previously closed have been opened up to women in social life, in principle and in practice. This may not have made any difference to the relative states of psychic flexibility or rigidity affecting either sex, as individuals or collectively. Both sexes, though not necessarily in identical ways, are subject to the limitations as well as the opportunities of their place in the ‘cultural community’, including the obligation to identify as one of two sexes, but not the other; this is what the recognition of ‘castration’ implies. But given the obsolescence of the social correlates of the Freudian complex—there is no longer so sharp a distinction between the paths available to men and women—it seems anachronistic and needlessly hopeless now to cling to a myth in which women’s most fundamental conflicts are determined by the realization that they can never be men. Castration and Cronus are ancient history.

2

‘Who are we when we read?’: Keats, Klein, Cixous, and Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles

V an da Zajko But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence of many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others. (Freud: Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming) I began to take an interest in the sort of figure I thought I should cut in life . . . there was one book in which I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self: Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott . . . I identified myself with Jo, the intellectual. Brusque and bony, Jo clambered up into trees when she wanted to read; she was much more tomboyish and daring than I was, but I shared her horror of sewing and housekeeping and her I would like to thank the following for their help with this piece: Andrew Bennett, Miriam Leonard, Charles Martindale, Pantelis Michelakis.

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v a n d a za j ko love of books. She wrote: in order to imitate her more completely, I composed two or three short stories. (Simone de Beauvoir: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)

The concept popularly known as ‘identification’ is under-theorized in contemporary critical debates. It is, however, relied upon in a wide variety of contexts to help account for the mysterious way in which readers may sometimes experience themselves as being transformed by their intimacy with a literary text. The relationship between a reader and a character which develops in such circumstances is the subject of this essay: How might this relationship contribute to an explanation for the persistent way in which certain texts continue to give pleasure to very different readers across the ages? How might an account of the reception of classical texts and images benefit from an investigation of the dynamics of such familiar encounters? What kinds of vocabularies are available to us for both describing and analysing these experiences? And, in particular, what part does identification play in specifically feminist engagements with texts and how has it enabled mythical characters to provide such a potent resource for women? The importance of ‘role models’ has long been recognized as central to both feminist theory and practice. Without the exemplars offered by their predecessors those concerned to propagate feminist ideas would be bereft of an important source of inspiration,1 and many feminist projects have involved the development of a lineage that lends them the authority of a tradition. Lillian Doherty describes the process of revisionist myth-making as follows: In the late twentieth century, women writers have self-consciously sought to remedy the gap in the classical tradition by retelling myths from the points of view of the female characters. The range of genres and styles in which these retellings have appeared—from the poetry of Margaret Atwood and Carol Ann Duffy to the stories of Marina Warner, the novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley, and the television serial Xena, Warrior Princess—suggests that the effort to reclaim a distinctive ‘women’s classical tradition’ appeals to many women and at least some men at the turn of the millenium.2 1

In this they are like their own ancient predecessors for whom the ‘exemplum’ was an important source of inspiration. 2 L. Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth (London, 2002) 21.

k e a t s , k l e i n , ci x o u s , a n d co o k ’ s achi lles

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The process of ‘reclaiming’ a tradition here might alternatively be described as the process of creating literary role models which enable contemporary women to forge empathetic links with the women of the ancient world. In some instances—for example if we consider Medea’s famous speech comparing the travails of childbirth with the ordeals of the warrior in war3—it might seem that the imaginative leap this requires is not huge, since, arguably, the experience of childbirth is one which women of different time periods share.4 However, it is not the case that modern women writers restrict themselves to retelling myths in which the potential grounds for connection are so clear. And, as Doherty observes, there are plenty of instances where modern men have chosen to offer their own version of a story in which the main protagonist is a woman. The literary reception of myth shows us that gender is not the only basis for the kind of identification which makes possible intriguing and potent revisions of the tradition. If we consider the processes involved in cross-gender identification within the wider frame of theories of reception, will they become in any way more explicable? Or is it the case that confronting issues of creativity inevitably leads us to mystified aporia? I shall work through these questions with specific reference to one mythological character, the Homeric hero Achilles, and three very different texts. The first of these, Elizabeth Cook’s poetic novel Achilles, might be described as a feminist reworking of ‘the Achilles myth’ in the spirit of the revisionism described above by Doherty.5 But, rather than retelling the myth from the point of view of a single female character, Cook moves through a variety of subject positions while focusing her story on the figure of Achilles himself. In so doing 3

Euripides, Medea 214–66. It is certainly the case, however, that an argument can be made that any such assimilation of an experience from one historical period to another, however bodily or ‘essential’ that experience is deemed to be, fails to take sufficient account of the role of history in the construction of experience. So a twentieth-century woman’s experience of childbirth will be very different to that of a fifth-century Athenian woman’s because she has different conceptions of pain, her body, her social role, the role of her child, etc. 5 The tendency to create such ‘a myth’ out of the myriad sources pertaining to a mythological figure is typical of works of revisionist myth-making both inside and outside the academy. 4

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she opens up new spaces for exploration of his relationships with the central figures of his legend, his family members and lovers, and his fellow combatants at Troy. Within her work the consciousness of both male and female characters is scrutinized and the feminist ‘edge’ arises at least in part from the sensual focus on concerns of embodiment that may be said to have characterized many a feminist endeavour.6 The second text is one referred to directly by Cook, a letter of the poet John Keats in which he explains to his brother and sister-andlaw why he hopes he will never marry. He tells them that he never experiences a feeling of loneliness because his imagination is populated by numerous literary and mythological personages, one of whom is Achilles. There is nothing ‘spleenical’ in his decision to remain alone, rather it expresses his overwhelming sense of the ‘Sublimity’ which is there to welcome him home: I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds—No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit the office of which is equivalent to a king’s body guard—then ‘Tragedy, with scepter’d pall, comes sweeping by’. According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily.7

For Keats, the mythological landscape satisfies and comforts in comparison with ‘the commerce of the world’. His imaginative relationships are sufficiently vibrant to provide him with company and more fascinating than the ‘divided and minute domestic happiness’ that he declares would not satisfy his needs. 6

A mesmerizing and highly erotic example in Achilles is the transformation of the rape of Thetis into a sensual celebration of mutual sexual struggle and orgasm (pp. 13–19). However the claim that this work is ‘feminist’ is by no means uncontroversial and it is interesting to compare the strategies employed by Cook with those of the women poets discussed by Fowler in her contribution to this volume. It could be argued that Cook is working within the tradition of ‘filling in the gaps’ in Homer, a tradition which originates in the ancient world. There is a kind of provocation, for example, in the way that the description of Achilles’ shield, that most famous of Homeric ekphrases, is given in simply one line. 7 This letter to Keats’s brother and sister-in-law is included in the edition of Keats’s poems and letters edited by Cook herself (Oxford, 1990) 420–9.


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Cook’s reference to this letter comes at the beginning of the final section of her book, entitled ‘Relay’, which is concerned, inter alia, with the ways in which the story of Achilles has demonstrated an enduring power across centuries and cultures. The section is densely allusive, in contrast to the more straightforward story-telling of the first two chapters, and it moves the reader away from Troy to Georgian London where Keats is reading Chapman’s Homer and musing upon the relationship of his own body to the bodies of the heroes who people the mythological past. Keats is depicted as forging a connection with Achilles on the basis of a heightened sense of their shared corporeality. He emphasizes the similarity between Achilles’ physical sensations and his own, and regards ‘the continuity between cell and cell’ as the grounds for an identification which brings to life the Iliad. The relation of this final section to the rest of the novel raises important issues about access to the past. Cook’s reading of Keats provides her with a way of comprehending a vital Homer, and her juxtaposition of the two authors locates both the imagination and the body as prospective sites of empathy. The French feminist theorist He´le`ne Cixous also distinguishes Achilles as a figure with whom she has identified in her meditation upon empathy, fantasy, and history in the ‘Sorties’ section of The Newly Born Woman. She makes the claim that as a young woman her identification with Achilles, along with other mythological characters, fortified her against isolation and provided her with an ally: ‘Indeed, in Homeric times I was Achilles. I know why. I was the antiking. And I was passion. I had fits of rage that made History difficult.’8 For Cixous, reading provides an escape route from present injustice, and books function as the signs or maps which show the way to a place ‘which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise’. But her conception of the role of myth and literature is broader than this. In a vivid and poignant autobiographical passage she describes how in her reading she sought out people with whom she could identify, not simply because a sense of kinship made her feel less alone, but because the process of locating them showed her who she could be and therefore who she was: 8 H. Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in H. Cixous and C. Cle´ment The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London, 1986), 73.

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And that is where I go. I take books; I leave the real, colonial space; I go away. Often I go read in a tree. Far from the ground and the shit. I don’t go and read just to read, to forget—No! Not to shut myself up in some imaginary paradise. I am searching: somewhere there must be people who are like me in their rebellion and in their hope. Because I don’t despair: if I myself shout in disgust, if I can’t be alive without being angry, there must be others like me. I don’t know who, but when I am big, I’ll find them and I’ll join them. I don’t yet know where.9

The individuals she encountered in such circumstances provided Cixous with role models in relation to whom she could negotiate her own subjectivity. For her, as for Keats, the fact that these individuals were fictional did not diminish their power. The separation both writers make between the ‘real world’ and the world they become acquainted with through literature is not a distinct one, and there is no qualitative difference between the intimacy they experience with those who live and breathe around them and those who live and breathe in their imagination. At first this lack of clear distinction seems counter-intuitive—the inability to tell the difference between genuine and make-believe is surely something we associate primarily with children—but only until we pause to consider how hard it is to understand exactly what it is that happens when we read. The American critic J. Hillis Miller has recently written a book which investigates this subject. He explores his first overwhelming response to a work of literature as follows: When I was a child I did not want to know that The Swiss Family Robinson had an author. To me it seemed a collection of words fallen from the sky and into my hands. Those words allowed me magical access to a pre-existing world of people and their adventures. The words transported me there. . . . This other world I reached through reading The Swiss Family Robinson, it seemed to me, did not depend for its existence on the words of the book, even though those words were my only window on that virtual reality. The window, I would now say, no doubt shaped that reality through various rhetorical devices. The window was not entirely colorless and transparent. I was, however, blissfully unaware of that. I saw through the words to what seemed to me beyond them and not dependent on them, even though I could get there in no

9

Ibid. 72.


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other way than by reading those words. I resented being told that the name on the title page was that of the ‘author’ who had made it all up. Whether many other people have had the same experience, I do not know, but I confess to being curious to find out. It is not too much to say that this whole book has been written to account for this experience.10

Hillis Miller initially associates his willingness to be carried away by a story with the lack of cynicism that is typical of a child, but he goes on to argue that the power to transport the reader is in itself an essential quality of literature. The interpretative strategies of the more sophisticated adult may appear to tell us something about the way literary language works, but they are also a way of domesticating literature, diminishing its capacity to reveal or create new worlds. This kind of argument might seem to pander to the complaint of many a student that to be asked to think about a text is to spoil or diminish it. But the vocabulary Hillis Miller uses is itself quite demanding, and the challenge he throws out is potentially huge. The overarching claim, that literature may be defined as ‘a strange use of words to refer to things, people, and events about which it is impossible ever to know whether or not somewhere they have a latent existence’,11 has metaphysical connotations that do not sit comfortably with contemporary ideas.12 But the suggestion that there are vocabularies available to us from other periods and fields which might help us to articulate differently our experience of reading leads us away from a narrowly historicist or disciplinespecific perspective that can make some formulations appear to be out of bounds. Both Hillis Miller and Cixous emphasize the importance of reading in terms of their self-development. They both attempt to recreate originary moments when their imaginative experience of another resulted in their rejection of, or embrace of, an image of themselves. Whether or not such moments are ‘true’ in any straightforward

10

J. Hillis Miller On Literature (London and New York, 2002), 14–15. Ibid. 45. 12 ‘Who is to say that it is not the case, that all those alternative worlds have not been waiting somewhere for some author to find fit words for them? If so, they would go on existing there, waiting, even if their recording author were never to appear.’ Ibid. 44. 11

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sense, they represent an attempt to put into words an experience of an internal process which is at once very personal and yet seems to have the capacity to be shared. We cannot know if Hillis Miller, Cixous, and Keats are discussing ‘the same’ process when they talk about their transformative relationships with a variety of literary characters,13 but what is striking is that they all insist on the continuing role of these characters in the non-literary world. There is a sense in which they perceive the boundary between the literary and the non-literary to be a permeable one, and as readers they move between the two or, sometimes, inhabit them simultaneously. Another way of putting it is that the literary world becomes part of their non-literary world so that the two become inseparable. Such representations of mental process inevitably rely heavily upon metaphors of space and boundary and can only approximate to the experiences which inspire them. There is no single authority on which to rely for clarification and indeed any discourse which might be said to be explanatory would itself be grounded in similarly figurative language. One example of such a discourse is psychoanalysis which, throughout its history, has linked the effects of literature with the early experiences of childhood. Within objectrelations theory, the branch of psychoanalysis that focuses in particular on the individual’s very first bodily and psychic encounters, there is an emphasis on the way in which infantile mental life is conducted as a continual relationship between the self and the world. The processes of incorporation and expulsion, first of bodily fluids, and then of the images of the earliest love objects, are seen to provide the basis for later human interactions. In the words of Melanie Klein: My analytic experience has shown me that processes of introjection and projection in later life repeat in some measure the pattern of the earliest introjections and projections; the external world is again and again taken in and put out—re-introjected and re-projected.14

13

The question of what constitutes ‘the same’ is, as we shall see, one that Cook obsessively returns to in the final section of her novel. 14 M. Klein [1955] in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963 (London, 1997), 155.


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A comparison of this kind of account of the processes of ego formation with accounts of the reading process such as that offered by Hillis Miller raises the question of whether the one might be used to cast light on the other.15 The notion that as children we learn to incorporate desirable ‘objects’,16 either wholly or partially, into our sense of ourselves and to split off and expel those that we perceive to be hostile does suggest that the earliest kind of identifications might form the prototype for our later interactions as adults along the lines Klein proposes. The psychoanalytic insistence that psychical reality should not be confused with material reality is also important here because it substantially diminishes the importance of the distinction between fictional characters and known individuals in terms of their potential impact on our internal worlds. In order to pursue the implications of this comparison, we must think further about the role of phantasy in the development of subjectivity as explored by Freud and subsequently developed by Klein.17 As so often with Freud, phantasy is not a stable concept but one that is elaborated gradually and emphasized differently in different essays. At times it refers, somewhat confusingly, to both unconscious and conscious activity, and one of Freud’s principal concerns is to establish the continuity between these two aspects of mental life. In the 1908 paper ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ he sets 15

And indeed it raises the question of whether in some cases they may be ‘the same’. 16 This is a curiously impersonal word to describe what is in effect the origin of relationship. However, as it is the word used by Klein and by a whole tradition of psychoanalytic writing, from now on I shall use it without inverted commas. 17 ‘Phantasy’ is a translation of the German ‘Phantasie’ which is the word used by Freud. Within the English psychoanalytic tradition ‘phantasy’ has been preferred to ‘fantasy’ as the latter is deemed to have connotations of triviality that are unhelpful in psychoanalytic contexts. However, American psychoanalytic writers have on the whole retained ‘fantasy’ so that both spellings are in fact found in the commentaries on Freud. A close colleague of Klein’s, Susan Isaacs, argued in a paper first published in 1943 that in relation to her work the word should be spelt ‘phantasy’ in order to highlight the particular Kleinian emphasis on its unconscious status. See M. Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context (London and New York, 2001), 136–43.

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up a parallel between children’s play and the imaginative activity of the poet: Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s ‘play’ from ‘phantasying’. The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.18

Freud here positions the child at one end of a spectrum and the creative writer at the other; the ordinary adult occupies a space somewhere between the two in that when he ceases to play, without necessarily writing down his phantasies so that they become accessible to others, he ‘builds castles in the air and creates what are called day-dreams’.19 Day-dreams are, then, one sort of phantasy in which the conscious element is strong and which constitute a surrogate form of pleasure for the adult once he has left the things of childhood behind.20 The relation of day-dreams to the dreams that we have at night can be explained, Freud suggests, by thinking about the content of both phenomena. All forms of phantasy are

18 S. Freud [1908], in Penguin Freud Library, 14, On Art and Literature, 131–2. 19 Ibid. 133. 20 Ibid.: ‘As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate.’


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motivated by a sense of the unsatisfactory nature of reality and by expressing the fulfilment of a wish they correct this reality, making it more palatable to the one who has the phantasy. The unconscious element of dreams derives from the repressed aspects of the phantasy which are repressed because they express desires of which the dreamer is ashamed. Again, we are working with a continuum, with day-dreams at one end and night dreams at the other, rather than with an account of sharply differentiated experiences. Freud argues that the most popular but least critically acclaimed kinds of fiction, in which the characters are sharply divided into good and bad ‘in defiance of the variety of human characters that are to be observed in real life’, are most like day-dreams in that in these the wish-fulfilment operates at a crude and superficial level. The writers of these stories wish that they could achieve success like their heroes and in recounting their exploits they achieve satisfaction. The popular fiction that has ‘the widest and most eager circle of readers of both sexes’ would seem to offer to its readers a pretty straightforward means of identifying with the heroes who overcome sundry obstacles and achieve happy endings. Other kinds of fiction, however, present more complex challenges. Freud does not linger over these but he mentions in passing the ‘psychological’ novel, in which the modern writer splits up his ego and, in consequence, personifies ‘the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes’, and ‘eccentric’ novels in which ‘the person who is introduced as the hero plays only a very small active part’. Although not stated explicitly, it would seem fair to assume that if the fiction which most obviously resembles day-dreaming is the least demanding and satisfies most trivially, the fiction which is most demanding and affords a more profound satisfaction might be expected to more closely resemble night dreams; that is to say, it must contain a higher degree of unconscious material. Melanie Klein built on and expanded Freud’s concept of phantasy, particularly as it relates to the unconscious. The activity she observed while watching the play of her child patients led her to believe that play, like dreams, is governed by the primary thoughtprocess and not the more rational secondary process which is bound by the reality principle. Through spontaneous play the child externalizes his preoccupations and articulates his anxieties; the role of

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the analyst is to offer an interpretation about the significance of the material he expresses, in the same way as she does when listening to an adult talk about the content of his dreams. Freud himself had written about infant hallucinatory ‘thinking’ whereby the baby is able to summon up an image of the satisfying object for a short period if his immediate need for sustenance is not met. Klein went further in suggesting that ‘unconscious phantasy’ involves both the biological need for food and the mental representation of that need in symbolic form: Phantasy creates the earliest system of meaning in the psyche. It is the element that gives blind human urges their direction, and so is an instinctual mode of thinking based on the response to worldly impingements. Out of this primordial mental activity, a more mature cognitive capacity later develops.21

In order to make sense of the ways in which infants begin to form and respond to symbols, Klein developed two terms, projection and introjection, both of which are crucial for our current enquiry.22 Projection is the process by means of which the child displaces wishes, feelings or objects which he refuses to own or acknowledge in himself into another person or thing. Although this may sound too sophisticated a process for a child,23 Klein argued that the initial response to the acute sense of anxiety created by the birth experience is the rejection of frightening or hostile objects and the creation of new ones which symbolize those that have been abandoned. In this way the child’s relation to his parental figures is always phantastical in that, although it is based on his actual interactions with them, it also comprises his symbolic representations of them which are fashioned by the primary, unconscious, thought process. Introjection, the reverse procedure, is important here: the child also 21

Likierman, Klein, 139. Klein did not invent these terms (see e.g. Freud’s essay ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’) but it is her particular use of them that I am focusing on here. 23 This indeed was one of the criticisms made by opponents of the Kleinian position as it was articulated by Isaacs at the first of the Controversial Discussions. See P. King and R. Steiner (eds.), The Freud–Klein Controversies 1941–45 (London, 1991). 22


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transposes the images of objects from the outside to the inside of himself, some of which will have previously been formed via the projection of his own hostile impulses. In this way, there is a continual interplay between inner and outer worlds so that both are experienced in the light of the other: Super-ego development can be traced back to introjection in the earliest stages of infancy; the primal internalized objects form the basis of complex processes of identification; persecutory anxiety, arising from the experience of birth, is the first form of anxiety, very soon followed by depressive anxiety; introjection and projection operate from the beginning of postnatal life and constantly interact. This interaction both builds up the internal world and shapes the picture of external reality. The inner world consists of objects, first of all the mother, internalized in various aspects and emotional situations. The relationships between these internalized figures, and between them and the ego, tend to be experienced—when persecutory anxiety is dominant—as mainly hostile and dangerous; they are felt to be loving and good when the infant is gratified and happy feelings prevail. This inner world, which can be described in terms of internal relations and happenings, is the product of the infant’s own impulses, emotions, and phantasies. It is of course profoundly influenced by his good and bad experiences from external sources. But at the same time the inner world influences his perception of the external world in a way that is no less decisive for his development.24

It is of course impossible to verify Klein’s account of the earliest development of the child as there is nothing at our disposal that can be considered empirical data. We can only infer backwards, as did Klein, from the behaviour we observe in older children, and indeed in adults, and put forward some kind of theory as to the roots and causes of that behaviour. If we recall the descriptions of the reading process in the texts we looked at earlier, are there then grounds for thinking that for Cixous, Keats, and Hillis Miller the processes of projection and introjection have been, and continue to be, operative in the formation of their subjectivity? To paraphrase Meira Likierman, have the most intense and disturbing parts of themselves only been accommodated after they have journeyed through the minds of others?25 Is it plausible 24

Klein, Envy, 141–2. Likierman, Klein, 160 is describing Klein’s particular take on the development of identity. 25

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that when readers assimilate and are transformed by particular aspects of literary or mythical figures they are tracing the patterns of early object relationships? Cixous’ identification with Achilles is certainly striking, and its unexpectedness has led some critics to suspect that it is not to be taken seriously. For example, Miriam Leonard argues as follows: That Cixous can, on the same page, perform the writing of the self around such incongruous figures as the Holocaust survivor and the psychopathic hero of Homer’s martial epic raises questions about literary and historical identification. For a classicist investigating the dangers of a conflation of ancient and modern constructions of the self, it is hard to see Cixous’ formulations as anything other than parodic. That the spokeswoman of a radical contemporary feminist outlook should come to imagine herself in the figure of the aristos archaio¯n [the best of the Achaeans] seems nothing less than baffling. Cixous naturalizes the figures of an alien cultural construction, making them the mere mirrors of a Cixousian political investment.26

There are several points here worth commenting upon: it is of course true that a self-representation can be read as rhetorically as any other kind of representation, and Cixous’ identification with Achilles can be interpreted with an emphasis on the problematics of the construction of cultural difference. But the questions she raises about ‘literary and historical identification’ may also be worth considering in one of many possible wider contexts, that of the possibilities of accessing the past, and of changing it. In another passage from ‘Sorties’ Cixous is quite explicit about the transformative implications of her project: What would happen to logocentrism, to the great philosophical systems, to the order of the world in general if the rock upon which they founded this church should crumble? If some fine day it suddenly came out that the logocentric plan had always, inadmissibly, been to create a foundation for (to found and fund)

26

M. Leonard, ‘Creating a Dawn: Writing through Antiquity in the Work of He´le`ne Cixous’, Arethusa, 33.1 (2000), 133–4. It could, of course, be argued that Leonard’s use of the term ‘psychopathic’ in this passage deconstructs her argument about the historical particularity of constructions of the self.


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phallocentrism, to guarantee the masculine order a rationale equal to history itself. So all the history, all the stories would be there to retell differently; the future would be incalculable; the historic forces would and will change hands and change body—another thought which is yet unthinkable—will transform the functioning of all society. We are living in an age where the conceptual foundation of an ancient culture is in the process of being undermined by millions of a species of mole (Topoi, ground mines) never known before.27

Here it seems to be precisely the ‘dangerous’ aspect of the conflation of ancient and modern versions of the self that she is exploiting and manipulating. She suggests that the undermining of the conceptual power of an ancient culture can be effected by the retelling of its stories. The emotional power of a mythic text may be the means of transforming our historical knowledge, and to appropriate the past without deference to its alienness is properly to acknowledge the role of subjectivity in the production of all our representations of it. One significant aspect of Cixous’ intellectual position is that she writes both within and against a post-Freudian, psychoanalytically informed tradition which is highly aware of the dynamics of the formation of the self in the reception of literary texts.28 Her accounts of readerly identification necessarily take cognisance both of conscious and unconscious factors: while in some ways the connections between her and Achilles are relatively straightforward and explicitly articulated (both perceive themselves to be outsiders, rebellious, unfairly treated, and vehemently opposed to the unjust use of power),29 in other ways they are only partly known or 27

Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 65. Cixous seems to want to combine historically located notions of the self with a concept of the literary Imaginary and it is this combination which leads her to reject any simplistic description of her model of literary identification as a form of naı¨ve escapism. For Cixous there is a necessity of writing from History which she is also trying to escape and it is this tension which leads to her creative and combative engagement with the psychoanalytic tradition in ‘Sorties’. 29 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 73: ‘I fought the Trojan war my own way: on neither one side nor the other. I loathed the chiefs’ stupid, petty, and sanctifying mentality. What did they serve? A narcissistic glory. What did they love? Their royal image. The masculine code, squared: not only the masculine 28

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knowable, arising as they do from the unconscious. The Cixousian Imaginary, which is the locus of the unconscious, is conceptualized as occupying a space prior to gender differentiation, and so Achilles’ masculinity is not an obstacle to a feminine reader’s identification with him. Cixous’ theorization of ećriture feminine is driven by a desire to circumvent the hierarchical oppositions that currently organize our thought, including the opposition between mind and body. Just as the Kleinian processes of projection and identification elide the distinction between instinct and representation, so Cixous’ descriptions of masculine and feminine positions are neither wholly grounded in bodily differences nor ‘simply’ metaphors. Morag Shiach summarizes the position as follows: This interest in the material nature of language is related to Cixous’ conviction that writing is produced, and understood, in relation to the body. By this she does not mean that there is any simple equivalence between the writing body and the written text, but rather that it is impossible to sustain the complete dichotomy between mind and body which offers the illusion of intellectual control at the cost of erasing, censoring, and hystericising the body. This interest in the relation between language and the body leads her to an engagement with the unconscious, as the locus of that which has been repressed by the brutal severing of the corporeal and the linguistic, and by the processes of sexual differentiation. Thus both myth and dream are used in her texts as ways of exploring the archaic and the repressed, and as ways of unsettling the illusion of subjective autonomy and conscious control.30

Cixous figures her identification with Achilles as belonging to a time and place that both precedes the Symbolic and exceeds it, in as much as it belongs to the utopian realm of desire. In this extract from ‘Sorties’ which follows the lines quoted earlier, Cixous shifts between tenses and subject positions and shows how within the Imaginary gender is as much a mode of relationship as anything else. We are reminded of Freud’s characterization of the ‘psychological’ novel in ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ where the

value but the essence of virility as well, that is undisputed power. Now onto the stage comes the species of men-kings. Vile patterns. Villainous bosses. Wily. Guilty consciences. The Agamemnon type. I despised the species.’ 30

M. Shiach, He´le`ne Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London, 1991), 70.


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writer is said to split up her ego and, in consequence, personifies the conflicting currents of her mental life in several heroes: I didn’t give a damn for hierarchy, for command, and I know how to love. I greatly loved women and men. I knew the value of a unique person, the beauty, the sweetness. I didn’t ask myself any petty questions, I was unaware of limits, I enjoyed my bisexuality without anxiety: that both kinds harmonized within me seemed perfectly natural to me. I never even thought it could be otherwise. Had I not lived among women for a long time? And among men I gave up nothing of the tender, feminine intensities. Prohibition didn’t come near me. I was far above stupid superstitions, sterile divisions. And I always loved wholly: I adored Patroclus with all my might; as a woman I was his sister, his lover, his mother; as a man, his brother, his husband and himself. And I knew better than any man how to love women because of having been their companion and their sister for so long. I loved and I loved love. I never went back on love.31

The passage re-enacts a whole range of phantastical subject positions and perhaps this accounts for the disquieting effect it has on some of its readers. Although Cixous herself emphasizes the potential of writing to destabilize and unsettle, from the point of view of the reader the kinds of identification the writing makes possible may also have this effect. The retrospective narrativization of potent object relations may trigger in us a disturbing sense of nostalgia for capacities we have lost. In the final section of her book Cook is preoccupied with similar questions of belatedness and identification. The Keats she depicts is someone who worries away at the question of how he is both like and unlike other people, both real and imaginary, and how he is both like and unlike himself.32 As he stares down at the corpse of a criminal he is helping to dissect—Keats studied to be a doctor and such dissections were part of his training—he muses on the relationship between that body and his own: 31

Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 73–4. In psychoanalytic terms the unconscious is that part of us which is concealed from ourselves. Cook shows us Keats’s unconscious at work when, in a fine example of ‘dream-work’, the ‘sella Turcica’, the name for a part of the bone that Keats has been involved in excavating, becomes the ‘Turkish saddle’ he sits in when in a dream he rides a stallion outside the walls of Troy. E. Cook, Achilles (London, 2001), 97. 32

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The cold sac of coiled, dampish tissue was once a brain very like his own. In structure at least. His own warm hand—with which he writes, eats, ties his cravat, clasps other hands, pleasures himself etc.—is like the hand of him there, the cadaver whose right upper limb they’d seen displayed: nerve, muscle, tendon and bone. There are differences of course—variations in thicknesses, curves, placements—there was the man whose stomach had sagged right down into his pelvis. Differences in size. But even that great fellow who had gone to such lengths to ensure he wouldn’t be made an anatomy of when they hung him—even his huge bones were of the same number, the same design, the same function as his own. . . . the same and not the same. ‘It is very unlike you my dear Keats to be so peevish.’ How can I be unlike myself? I was not myself at the time.

The theme reoccurs in different forms,33 and via the personage of the poet Cook shows us the variety of ways in which human beings grapple with their fluctuating sense of who and what they are. Keats’s literary sensibility adds a powerful dimension, and his pressing awareness of his own materiality is combined with a responsiveness to his mythical forebears: The large Achilles (on his prest-bed lolling) From his deepe Chest, laughes out a lowd applause34 As Keats reads these lines he feels a little flood of satisfaction. He strokes them appreciatively with his thumb. The way the accents fall, on ‘large’, on ‘prest-bed’—you can feel the weight of the man sinking into his bed, the words pressing, like the printer’s ink, into the page. He takes his pencil to underline, to double underline this place. His chest eases, as if it were his own deep chest freeing itself. ‘Ah,’ he breathes in a low voice, ‘that’s nice’. He triple scores the margin too, making this place, this book, his own.

33

For example, when Keats thinks about a self-portrait of Rembrandt that his friends say looks like him, when he thinks about the way language operates to reinforce verisimilitude, and when he thinks about the body’s continuing mutation after death, a semblance of life ‘independent of any controlling consciousness’. Cook, Achilles, 98–9, 103. 34 These lines are taken from another of Cook’s inter-texts—Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida Act I Scene iii.


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Keat’s sensations on reading Chapman’s Homer demonstrate the inter-penetrability of the literary and real worlds: Reading is an incarnated as well as a spiritual act. The reader sits in his or her chair and turns material pages with bodily hands. Though literature refers to the real world, however, and though reading is a material act, literature uses such physical embedment to create or reveal alternative realities. These then enter back into the ordinary ‘real’ world by way of readers whose beliefs and behaviour are changed by reading - sometimes for the better, perhaps sometimes not. We see the world through the literature we read, or, rather, those who still have what Simon During calls ‘literary subjectivity’ do that.35 We then act in the real world on the basis of that seeing. Such action is a performative rather than a constative or referential effect of language. Literature is a use of words that makes things happen by way of its readers.36

They also remind us of Keat’s famous poem describing those sensations in conventional literary form: Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.37 35 Keats’s contemporary and interlocutor, Hazlitt, also attempted to describe this phenomenon when he described people ‘who are in the habit of reading novels and romances, are compelled to take a deep interest in, and to have their affections strongly excited by, fictitious characters and imaginary situations; their thoughts and feelings are constantly carried out of themselves, to persons they never saw, and things that never existed’. Complete Works, xix. 23. 36 Hillis Miller, On Literature, 20. 37 The edition used is Cook’s (Oxford, 1990). Cook’s engagement with the poet in her role as editor as well as writer adds an interesting dimension

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In this poem the speaker describes an experience of discovery that equates the impact of reading a translation of Homer to that of sighting a previously unknown planet or ocean. Like the natural phenomena which existed before they were observed by astronomer or explorer, the poems of Homer existed before Chapman’s translation (indeed the speaker acknowledges that he had heard about them),38 but it is this particular translation that imparts to the speaker the ‘pure serene’ - the experience of Homer that captivates him. In an often cited discussion Marjorie Levinson has argued that the sonnet expresses the deliberate distancing of the poet from the tradition of high culture that is represented by being able to read Homer in Greek: he advertises his corrupt access to the literary system and to those social institutions which inscribe that system systematically in the hearts and minds of young men. To read Homer in translation and after having read Spenser, Coleridge, Cary, and whoever else is included in Keats’s travelogue, is to read Homer badly (in a heterodox and alienated way), and to subvert the system which installs Homer in a particular and originary place.39

Keats’s relation to Homer is, on this reading, an edgy and defiant one which challenges the hierarchy of established canons both in terms of particular works and of the legacy of Greece. Martin Aske reads the poem as a statement about Keats’s sense of his own belatedness. He suggests that the mythological presence of Greece is produced by the act of reading the sonnet and that Keats, like contemporary readers and writers, has no option but to access the past via a complex series of encounters with literary texts and individuals. His descriptions of Keats’s encounters with Greek mythology, with Chapman, and with Homer, draw attention to the ways in which each of them is mediated by a number of others: to her identification with him and clearly shows the densely mediated nature of the process. She reads Keats reading Chapman reading Homer’s Achilles. The question must then be posed of whether Cook’s Achilles is Homer’s. 38

Keats was familiar with Pope’s translation and edition of Homer. Strikingly, in the words of Marjorie Levinson: ‘Keats’s acquaintance with Pope’s translation is suppressed by the sonnet.’ M. Levinson, Keats’s Life of Allegory (Oxford, 1988), 12. 39 Ibid.


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The name ‘Homer’ represents the most privileged site of the beautiful mythology of Greece—the ‘pure serene’ of an origin—but no sooner is the name spoken than it is displaced by another name, ‘Chapman’. And it is, I think, precisely this displacement which signifies, for the modern poet, the impossibility of a pure, unmediated return to origins . . . .40

Both these interpretations call attention to the gap that Keats opens up between himself and his illustrious predecessor, the one emphasizing his political stance, the other his self-positioning within the literary tradition. But what they underplay is the sense of intimacy that the poem expresses. The word ‘breathe’ in the seventh line is unexpectedly visceral and implies the taking of the text into the body of the speaker and its subsequent expulsion. The crossing of his body’s boundaries leaves the speaker transfigured: he is not the same person he was before and is able to forge identifications with the nameless astronomer and Cortez that were hitherto unimaginable to him.41 For the reader this sonnet both describes and enacts the transformative potential of literary identification—a potential that at the time of Keats’s writing was expressed using the language of the sublime;42 and, just like Keats’s introjection of the Achilles 40

M. Aske, Keats and Hellenism (Cambridge, 1985), 42. There is a substantial debate in Keats studies surrounding the identity of the explorer referred to here as in fact it was Balboa and not Corte´s who discovered the Pacific. C. Rzepka ‘ ‘‘Cortez—or Balboa, or Somebody Like That’’: Form, Fact, and Forgetting in Keats’s ‘‘Chapman’s Homer’’ Sonnet’, Keats–Shelley Journal, 51 (2002), 35–75, summarizes the various positions and makes a strong case for the deliberateness of Keats’s choice, arguing that it adds to the poem’s implicit comment on the effect of poetry : ‘By transporting Cortez to a peak in Darien, Keats represents the contagious effects of his own sublime ‘‘transport,’’ collapsing Cortez’s and Balboa’s separate encounters with the Pacific into a spatially identical but diachronically laminated point of exalted awareness, and investing a scene of belated discovery with the uncanny aura of a first discoverer whose achievement his successor would both supplant and appropriate. This desire can be realized only through the successor’s opening himself up to being possessed, ‘‘inspired’’ or ‘‘breathed into,’’ by his predecessor’s ghostly presence.’ pp. 73–4. 42 J. Hecht, ‘Scarcity and Poetic Election in Two Sonnets of John Keats’, ELH 61 (1994), 104: ‘ ‘‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’’ does the work of establishing the legitimacy of a certain kind of learning. It uses an accumulative, tripartite simile whose explosive poetic effect is adequate to the sublimity it describes. When the sonnet makes the reader feel he is in the 41

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who is ‘fighting in the Trenches’, it demonstrates that the mediated nature of our relationship with the texts of the past does not prevent their ‘transhistorical intelligibility’.43 Indeed it is the constant interplay between our sense of ourselves and our sense of what is not ourselves, between, we might say, projection and introjection, that enables any kind of relationship to develop.44 In the words of Lavinia Gomez: ‘Relationship arises through experiencing what is inside and what is outside as in some way the same: in other words, identification.’45 This applies as much to relationship with literary and mythological figures as it does to relationship with those who inhabit our more prosaic worlds. presence of something new and great, it occurs to the reader that this feeling is itself the very subject of the sonnet. Thus the poem poses the question, whether its own poetic spell is of the same order as that spell which it discovers in the reading of Chapman’s Homer and in the two commensurate moments which share the simile.’ For a sustained attempt to synthesize the poetic discourse of the sublime (of which Homer was of course a cornerstone) and a psychoanalytic criticism derived ‘from Freud’s work on the ego’s relation to outer reality’ see S. Ende, Keats and the Sublime (New Haven and London, 1976), p. xv. 43

Hecht, ‘Scarcity’, 104. The dynamic sense of relationship between a text and reader is beautifully articulated by Ende, Keats, pp. xi–xii: ‘We approach texts for relief, or delight, or perhaps as Yeats says, for the forgiveness of sin, and so we tend to idealize them, at least at first, and grant them a certain power. This is a power over us, as well as over the ‘‘reality’’ they comprehend, and the reader who would describe his vision necessarily puts off that power and clears a space within which to find his own voice. Such an effort at control need not be wilful, but it does seem necessary, for without a mild exercise of power, the text retains its ambivalent aspect of otherness; control, on the other hand, leads to possession. These two opposed movements, which we usefully may think of as intellectual and emotional in their respective extremes of yielding and retaining self-possession, seem always operative in textual encounters, and their ratio is one description of a reader’s approach. We can formulate an ideal approach, which would consist in striking a balance, in which the reader does not cease to need or love the text yet retains some of his power to define, to see properly, and to report. Whatever name we choose for this relationship will necessarily be paradoxical or oxymoronic, for it will need to comprehend outer and inner, expansion and contraction, contact and withdrawal.’ 45 L. Gomez, An Introduction to Object Relations (London, 1997), 53. 44

3

Beyond Oedipus: Feminist Thought, Psychoanalysis, and Mythical Figurations of the Feminine

G r i s e l d a Pollock

modernity and femininity: a leap in knowledge Thinking about classical myth and feminist thought found me rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, first published in 1928. Her reflection on trying to write a lecture on women and fiction opens with a vividly imagined scene. The author is in Cambridge, epitomizing the privileged classical university education from which, as a woman of her moment and class, Woolf felt excluded. As a ‘daughter of educated men’, deprived of the intellectual sustenance her father and brothers automatically acquired by gender, class, and nation in the university, her own thought would have to forge less formal means for its elaboration, seeking resources that would challenge the patriarchal establishment at every level.1 Her trip to Cambridge exposed Virginia Woolf to a hurtful experience of exclusion as she ‘trespassed’ on a College 1

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas [1938] (Harmondsworth, 1977), 55.

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Fellows’ lawn only to be shooed off by an officious Beadle not merely as not belonging to the College, but completely out of place as a woman in a masculine enclave. Instead of dining in style at one of the rich men’s colleges, Virginia Woolf takes her homely and plain dinner of gravy soup, tough beef followed by prunes and custard, at one of the poorer, women’s colleges. Here, however, as she approaches the dining hall across the lawns, the author looks up and sees a ghost that can offer some compensation in her intellectual exile: Somebody was in a hammock, some-body, but in this light they were phantoms only, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass—would no one stop her?—and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress—could it be the famous scholar, could it be J—— H——herself? All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by a star or sword— the flash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring.2

We know this fascinating passage to be a curiously guarded invocation of the ideas as well as an image of the renowned and pioneering classical scholar Jane Harrison (Fig. 3.1) who is thus significantly embedded in the modernist Woolf’s arch-feminist text as both a revered image of learning ‘in the feminine’ that counters the exclusive masculinity of the university, and as the icon of a feminist interpretation of classical culture that validated a feminine principle signalled by a bounding movement: running. Harrison’s distinctive interpretations of the spring rituals of the daimon are invoked by Woolf’s ‘a flash of some terrible reality leaping . . . out of the heart of the spring’.3 If Virginia Woolf is icon of and legend for later twentieth-century feminist theory, Jane Harrison is not.4 Known to classical scholars, this important and innovative feminist thinker of the early twentieth 2

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1928] (Harmondsworth, 1974), 19. 3 Martha C. Carpentier, Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf (Amsterdam, 1998), 67. 4 See Brenda R. Silver, Virginia Woolf: Icon (Chicago, 1999).

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Fig. 3.1. Augustus John, Jane Harrison, oil on carvas 1909. (Newnham College, Cambridge).

century emerges as a counter-phantom to that other deadly ghost Virginia Woolf avowed she had to kill in order to become a writer at all. The Angel in the House was the dulcet voice of domesticated and self-sacrificial bourgeois femininity policed by internalized masculine censorship that, had she been allowed to survive, ‘would have plucked the heart out of my writing’. Woolf bravely declared in another text: Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better be spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience that was found to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.5 5 Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’ [1931], in Michelle Barrett, (ed.), Women and Writing (London, 1979), 60.

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In this conceit of a murderous battle against a menacing phantom of bourgeois femininity subordinated to the patriarchal authority, Virginia Woolf invokes a mythic struggle for the emergence of the independent, and self-defining, voice of the modern woman as writer, thinker, creator. The battle against the Angel, however, bears equal and painful witness to an unconscious form of matricide that dramatically heightens the stakes for modern women as intellectuals. Their coming of age and finding a voice appears to involve a negation of a femininity they receive through the genealogy of mother—daughter relations, that is, precisely the psycho-symbolic domain screened by the exclusivity of the Oedipus legend in ‘classical’ accounts of subjectivity and sexuality.6 It is, however, 6 I need to clarify terminology here as the vocabulary of classical studies and psychoanalysis overlap but diverge. I shall use the term archaic psychoanalytically to refer to the deepest strata of the human psyche and the earliest of the events and experiences of the becoming human subject. This does not make the archaic level prehistoric in contrast to the classic period of Oedipus complex. Freud compared his discovery of the pre-Oedipal phases of femininity to the recently discovered Minoan and Mycaenaean cultures that had lain undiscovered behind the knowledge of the classical world. Their priority historically did not make them any less culturally developed or significant. Rather knowledge of them had been screened; excavation was needed to bring them back into our understanding and interpretation of the whole of human history. So it would be a mistake to superimpose classicist historians’ chronology Archaic–Classical onto psychoanalytical notions of archaic moments in the psyche since (i) the latter remain active, embedded in the structures of the psyche and (ii) later turns in Lacanian theory for instance and much feminist work have reevaluated and are researching the hitherto overlooked dimensions of psychic life that stretch between what Lacan named ‘trauma to fantasy’— between the Real and the Imaginary. Lacan’s initial stress on the Symbolic loosened in his later work as he came to appreciate that the archaic dimensions of subjectivity needed theorization and acknowledgement. So my argument does not compound the idea of the feminine or the maternal as archaic only to be imagined as operative in pre-Oedipal formations, to be overlaid or overwritten by the ‘classical’ Oedipal structures. Such play with transvaluation of the early versus to the later, does nothing to shift the Oedipal paradigm’s exclusive determination of subjectivity, as I shall go on to show. If we want to think beyond Oedipus, we will have to rewrite these pseudo-chronological habits that hide their ideological agenda and progressivist telos within chronology—in art and cultural history as much as in

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only the legacy of the Oedipal kinship model that leads the feminine subject either to a part-killing of herself or a melancholic refusal of maternal detachment, resulting in a holding of the entombed mother within a perpetually mourning psyche.7 In another essay, entitled ‘The Intellectual Status of Women’, defending women’s intellectual achievements against the critic Desmond McCarthy, Woolf openly named Jane Harrison as an example of the historical ‘advance in intellectual power’ of women over the centuries. As major scholar within not only the university but in its privileged discipline, classics, Jane Harrison’s symbolic importance is surely connected to her intellectual intervention in that domain of cultural memory. Harrison challenged the patriarchal interpretations of classical culture and supplied writers like Woolf the resource for another vision of the feminine and of the aesthetic that would sustain the ambition of Woolf’s own modernist literature as a radically different form and psychic economy. Feminist scholars, identifying the profound influence of Jane Harrison’s work on modernist writers such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, as well as Virginia Woolf, reveal the ways in which the novels of the latter can be read for their literary internalization and creative transformation/domestication of Harrison’s feminist identification of matrilinear and collectively oriented mythic structures, notably in the novel To the Lighthouse (1927). According to feminist literary scholars such as Jane Marcus and Martha Carpentier, therefore, Jane Harrison’s work installed a place for the feminine in the classical and pre-classical cultures that ‘leapt’ across historical non-feminist psychoanalysis. The feminine is not archaic, although researching what art history calls the ‘archaic’ periods of culture may yield other structures of meaning and mythic representations. What is psychologically archaic operates, however, according to sub-symbolic systems, not yet fully integrated into articulation and symbolization. Yet through intensities and affect, they deliver through their translations and linings of later image and word systems, what we can still name meaning. 7

This is the proposition of Julia Kristeva drawing on the work of Andre´ Green in her Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1989), 227–30 and it is explicated further in Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), esp. ch. 4, pp. 101–40.

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time to infuse Virginia Woolf’s modernism with the mytho-poetical resources. These other readings countered the menace of Victorian ideals of feminine vacuity and passivity to challenge the masculine privilege of an exclusive access to a classical hence universal knowledge. Precisely in hypothesizing a feminine counter-principle within the classical archive and at the foundations of Western art itself, notably through her book Themis (1912 and 1927), Harrison thus transformed a phallic lack into a feminist legacy.

return and persistence: a generation of thinkers As art historian rather than classicist, I came across Jane Harrison serendipitously. I was researching the American abstract painter Lee Krasner (1908–82). In the late 1950s, Lee Krasner read and referenced Harrison’s important book Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), as part of her search for an understanding of the ritual and mythic dimension of modernist painting that was typical of modernism’s search for structural origins of its practices.8 In her struggle with the real rather than phantom giants of her own artistic moment, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, whose both abstract and figurative post-surrealist paintings generated modernist mythic images of a monstrous, dangerous, and utterly Other femininity— terrifying sphinx-creatures and murdered mothers—Lee Krasner found support in Harrison’s mytho-poetics of the Dionysian rituals for a more beneficent figuration of the feminine principle of liveliness and renewal in communal action in a series of paintings that invoked notions of rebirth Spring Memory (1959, Norfolk Southern Corporation), Re-Echo (1957, Denver, Collection of Michael Williams), and indeed The Bull (1959, Mr and Mrs Meredith J. Long).9

8 Robert Hobbs, Lee Krasner (New York, 1999), 150–2. A copy of Harrison’s book is in the Pollock–Krasner Library at East Hampton. 9 For a typology of de Kooning’s work as massacred women see Julia Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’ [1977] in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford, 1987), 297–8. For my own analysis of this process, see Griselda Pollock, ‘Killing Men and Dying Women’, in Fred

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At the same time as I was led to Jane Harrison through L.K. (the gender-disguising signature of the artist married to Jackson Pollock), I was working on the radical rereadings of pagan antiquity as foundations for the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud and the art historical work of the Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg.10 Like Harrison, both thinkers are significant for their attention to the psychological, emotional, and affective sources of human culture in its archaic becomings and for imagining culture as the trace or memory-bearer of the profound psychic conflicts inside humanity, forever split between archaic drives and impulses and their managed sublimation and transformation into social forms and intellectual postures that are undone, however, in constant ambivalence and returns of the repressed. Jane Harrison, born in 1850, died in 1928, just six months before Virginia Woolf hallucinated her spectre on the terrace of Newnham College. Freud was born in 1856; Warburg in 1866; he died in 1929. Harrison was part of this generation. I want, however, to use this curious conjunction of Virginia Woolf, the feminist modernist, and Jane Harrison, a woman classical scholar whom she clearly knew, admired, and invoked, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, as a benign spirit signified by her great forehead, yet like all of women’s claims on education, poorly resourced and badly rewarded, hence her shabby clothes. Whatever the current scholarly status of ritualism as an account of the origins of Greek drama and by extension art itself, its historical value here is that, in advancing its theses, Jane Harrison challenged both an academic and a political orthodoxy. Jane Peacock writes: Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester, 1996), 220–94. 10

Although known as the founder of the Warburg Library and Institute, now part of the University of London, Aby Warburg’s work itself has remained less widely known because of the lack of translations of more than two of his key essays. In 2001 Kurt Forster edited a comprehensive translation, Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles, 2001). See also Michael Steinberg’s translation and insightful commentary on the essay on the Serpent Ritual in Aby Warburg, Images form the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. and intro. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY, 1995).

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Rather than internalizing Victorian scholarly views of classical Greece as the model for nineteenth-century Britain, she explored the archaic period in order to understand the intense emotional experience that underlay both cultures. She looked not to classical Greece to glorify the achievements of Victorian Britain, but to the archaic period to explain its failures.11

Independent of Freudian discourse, Harrison’s attentiveness to both the emotional intensities and the ritual management of life and death anxieties and energies of the chronologically archaic period of Western culture parallel in structure and effect the work of Sigmund Freud. Influenced by newly extended archaeological periodizations that revealed an archaic culture beyond the classical Greek world, Freud would develop his ideas about the archaic domains and strata of the psyche surrounded by the antique remains of ancient cultures that he began to collect so ardently in the later 1890s.12 Challenging the boundaries of a closed intellectual system that polices its participants and services a delusive masculinist national identity, and desiring to produce new knowledges drawn from emergent disciplines inspired by marginalized thinkers, is precisely the hallmark of feminist interventions. If we can parallel Harrison, Woolf, and Freud—it was, after all, the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press that published the English translations of Freud’s writings in the 1920s— does psychoanalysis itself allow for, and even demand, its own feminist interventions in its, canonically Freudian, rereading of classical myth and Archaic precedents, especially of the myth most deeply identified with Freudian legends of subjectivity: Oedipus? Where else should we turn thus to reconsider femininity and classical myth but to Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, itself a modernist revision to dominant conceptions of classical myth? Edmund Engelman’s hugely significant photographs of Freud’s study and consulting room taken in 1938 hold a profound interest for us today that goes beyond historical documentation (Fig. 3.2).13 11

Sandra J. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self (New Haven and London, 1988), 3. See also Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). 12 See Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells, Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (New York, 1989) 13 Edmund Engelman (ed.), Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (New York, 1972).

ig. 3.2. Edmund Engelman, Freud’s Vienna consulting room, 1938; photograph reproduced b permission of Todd Engelman; photo supplied by Freud Museum, London.

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Both workspaces are cluttered with Freud’s collections of classical antiquities: Egyptian, Chinese, Jewish and Greek. The almost overwhelming presence of figurines and sculptural fragments from many antiquities, on all possible surfaces, walls, and spaces of his workplace, invite us to ask: why did the atheist neuro-psychologist promoting his work as a new science of the mind live intellectually, and affectively, in a world populated by these fragmentary bearers of its antithesis: mytho-poetical, cultic, and pagan image-thought? Why is so much ancient art in the space of medical science? Not for Freud, Gauguin’s Oceania nor Picasso’s Africa, but the classical worlds of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and China spoke to his desire, and of his dreams formed in a European-Jewish heritage framed by a Germano-Christian world.14 As George Dimock has argued, this collection is a kind of metonym for Freud himself, the multi-disciplinary scholar, reading more books on archaeology, art history, and anthropology than on psychology and, from 1896 onwards, passionately collecting antiquities whose presence, Rita Ranshoff argues, provided him with ‘a sense of the ages’ within which to frame his excavations of the layered depths of the human mind: or psyche, the Greek word for soul that would be stripped by his work of its spiritual dimension to become synonymous with the workings of human fantasy, thought and an unconscious that psychoanalysis would set as its object to theorize.15

14

The specific significance of and repression of Egyptian mythology and its material remnants in the formulation of psychoanalysis despite its omnipresence within the analytical theatre is brilliantly analysed by Joan Raphael-Leff, ‘If Oedipus was an Egyptian: Freud and Egyptology’, International Review of Psychoanalysis, 17 (1990), 309–35. A further research paper, ‘If Freud was an Egyptian’, was given at a seminar, Out of Africa: Egypt in the West, Leeds: AHRBCentreCATH, 5–6 December 2003, whose proceedings are being edited for publication by Abigail Harrison Moore and Martin McQuillan. This is a very rich line of thought posing the psychological implications of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Horus as an alternative to that of the Greek Oedipus. 15 George Dimock, ‘The Pictures over Freud’s Couch’, Mieke Bal and Inge Boer (eds.), in The Point of Theory; Practices of Cultural Analysis (Amsterdam, 1994), 239–50. Rita Ransohoff, ‘Captions to Photographs, in Engelman, Berggasse 19, 58.

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Fig. 3.3. Edmund Engelman, Freud’s Vienna consulting room: detail of the wall at the foot of the analytical couch. photo, as Fig. 3.2.

Close examination of the layout of the scene of analytical encounter (Fig. 3.3) reveals three items of relevance to this argument. First, as we would expect, we find a prominent and strategically placed visual reference to the classical legend of Oedipus. A reproduction of a painting of 1808 by French neo-classicist Jean Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx (Fig. 3.4) is hung at the foot of the analytic couch. A print of the fully excavated Egyptian Great Sphinx of Giza gazed down upon the reclining analysand: or rather, the analysand gazed onto its petrified and hybrid face. Being almost too predictable because of the centrality to psychoanalysis of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, in Ingres’s painting, however, a

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Fig. 3.4. Jean-Dominique Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1808. Oil on canvas, 189 144 cm. (Paris: Museé du Louvre.)

complex mythic narrative is held before us in a condensed, static visualization. If Freud only slowly and painfully discerned, resisting all along, as its outlines appeared before him through auto- and alloanalysis, the potency of infantile desire addressed to the Mother,

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with concomitant desire for/rivalry with the Father and hostility to both parental figures as rivals for the child’s bisexual ‘eros’, how could any single image so blatantly appear to contain ‘the repressed’? Inspired by Warburg’s notion of pathosformel—the way images retain in gestural language a memory trace of psychic dramas long lost to cultural consciousness—we might ask: What do images remember for us in this paradox of retaining and disguising?16 As George Dimock has pointed out, Freud’s project transformed into a tragic narrative of incomplete desire the single moment condensed in Ingres’ painting: the asking of a riddle whose answer narratively plotted a progression that is also a stratification, namely, the formation of human subjectivity over the material moments of birth and infantile dependency, adult sexual maturity, and then physical decline to death. The riddle asked: what starts on four legs, then walks on two and ends on three? We read it now as an allegory of the ages of the human being, with the moment of upright, adult rational self-possession as the apex of this triangular trajectory. But Ingres’ painting does not narrate a progression from the childish to adult and decline into decrepitude. In the dramatic stillness of a neo-classical tableau, the painting represents not chronological development but the stratified layering of subjectivity in which no stage of becoming is lost. Each in fact becomes the buried—repressed—substrate of the next only to return in uncanny hallucination for which art finds measured forms. Let me explain. Ingres’ painting centres itself on the classically inspired nudity of Apollonian man, po(i)sed to signify reflection and thought. The edges of the painting, the world by/against which this luminously centred self is framed, imagines for the viewer, on the other hand, the menacing darkness over which presides a shadowy, monstrous hybrid, a semi-human, female creature, only partially separated from the animalistic, inhuman world. Those who fail to answer the enigma this 16

First posed in Warburg’s 1893 dissertation on Botticelli, the phrase ‘pathos formula’ as a ‘passionate gesture language’ appears in 1905 as part of Warburg’s search for a psychology of human expression in which ‘imageexpression forms are saved in, or re-issue from the archive of memory.’ See Sigrid Schade, ‘Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body: The ‘‘Pathos Formula’’ as an Aesthetic Staging of Psychiatric Discourse—a Blind Spot in the Reception of Warburg’, Art History, 18.4 (1995), 499–517.

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creature poses as the ancient and once worshipped but now abjected feminine/animal source of life, the riddle this breasted, thus maternal ‘she’ poses to the middle term of human life, the adult Man, fresh from the murder of his own father, are eaten, consumed, reincorporated: reversing the separation that is birth, reversing the child’s milky cannibalism at her breast, so prominent in the painting. In this horrible death, this Woman-Other-Monster takes back into herself what is born from her, undoing the act of mothering that, lying at the foundations of human sociality, is also the unacknowledged substrate, the signifying plane against whose repression the phallically constituted Subject is established.17 To stay that horrific, abjecting reclamation and regression from the human to the beastly and beyond to the annihilated, Oedipus must see only his own self-image in the mirror of her difference, even while Ingres has cannily composed his Oedipus figure so that he simultaneously stands and crouches, is upright and yet leans upon his spears. All three moments are visually condensed into this complete figure of the new Man, the figure of becoming Reason that the legend narrates while containing so many contradictory traces of its internal contestants and undoing desire.18 Behind Oedipus in the counter-pictorial scheme of a flowing curve of drapery, and the broken outline of an art historical citation of a famous pose of masculine energy from Pollaiuolo’s Hercules Slaying the Hydra, a man embodies anxiety and dread, wishing to flee this dangerous 17

I am rehearsing a basically Lacanian theorization that places Woman with Other and Thing, elements of an unsignifiable real on whose foreclosed exclusion from the Symbolic, the possibility of the phallocentric subject is erected since that subject is defined structurally by the solitariness of the phallus as signifier of a Symbolic defined by the logic of the cut, separation that isolates the One from what then is retrospectively defined as a primordial Other–Thing. This is the logic by which (i) the exclusive definition of subjectivity accessed by castration (presence/absence) is established and (ii) the indefinite location of Woman as the unthinkable, unrepresentable, and non-symbolizable Other/Thing is produced. The point is to see that this is a model of subjectivity, a particular legend with specific cultural as well as psychological effects—one of which is to make the feminine a radical but necessarily foreclosed Otherness for both masculine and feminine subjects. 18 Harrison, for instance, reads this myth as containing traces of the shift from the older order of the ritual murder of the Mother–Queen’s consort by a stranger, to the newer patriarchal dynastic system of the son’s inheritance from his King–Father—marked by the innovative strategy of prophecy.

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cave for the safety of the man-made, geometric architecture of the city that signifies the antithesis of the uncanny evocation of our earliest dwelling, the maternal body, typically evoked by the natural formation of a cave.19 But let our journey around this painting pause at the lower left, beyond the signature and date, painted above the sun-dried skeleton and skull, the memento mori, where a single horrific, still fleshy foot rises from the darkness, detached from the unseen corpse. It belongs to a recent victim, we assume. The sole of this foot, this fragment, not dried, or bony, so recently living yet already unnaturally pale, calls out visually and unconsciously traces a link to the larger image that Freud placed to its right: that is the second image that needs to detain us. It is a copy of the cast of a Roman copy of a Greek original from the second half of the fourth century bce that Freud had encountered in the Chiaramonti Museum in Rome on a visit there in September 1907. Sigmund Freud reported in a letter to his wife, written from Rome, that he had just come across a ‘dear, familiar face’. But it was not her face that made this image part of Freud’s psychoanalytical archive. It was her foot, or rather the name, Gradiva, to which this posture of the rising foot gave rise, a signifier in Latin that held the many threads of an enigma the unravelling of which had launched Freud’s metapsychological study of aesthetics and creativity. This famous isolated bas relief of a walking woman (Fig. 3.5) that hung beside Freud’s analytical couch was considered to be a fragment of a three-figured relief of the Graces (in an imaginative and feminist reinterpretation of those figures Jane Harrison linked the Graces with the spring rituals of renewal and the Dithyramb).20 The sculpture was dear to Freud because it 19

We might recall Pier Paulo Pasolini’s contrasting of the mythic world of Medea, set amongst natural formations of caves and agriculture, with that of the exile at Corinth to which Jason takes her only to abandon her, a city starkly signified by linearity and geometry. 20 For fuller discussion of the impact of Harrison’s theses on the Graces on Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse see Carpentier, Ritual, Myth, 180–8. The re-assembly of this relief with two other fragments from Florence and Munich was proposed by German archaeologist Dr Hausner, and a postcard of this combination was sent to Freud by Emmanuel Lo¨wy after the publication of Freud’s text on the sculpture. See Harald Leupold-Lo¨wenthal et al., Sigmund Freud Museum, Wien IIX, Berggasse 19 (Vienna, 1994), 59–60.

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Fig. 3.5. ‘‘Gradiva,’’ copy of a Roman bas-relief copy of a Hellenistic relief of the fourth century bce in collection of Sigmund Freud. (Freud Museum, London.)

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had occasioned a novella by minor German author Wilhelm Jensen (1837–1911), entitled Gradiva, that was sent to Freud in 1906 by his new colleague and follower Jung because of its themes: delusion and dreams. Freud’s intrigued study of Jensen’s novel about a young archaeologist haunted by the running step of a Pompeiian maiden becomes his first foray into psychoanalytical aesthetics.21 The light novella tells the tale of Norbert Hanold, a German archaeologist and his fatal fascination with this relief which he names Gradiva, meaning in Latin, the light-gaited, and which he then fantasized represented a young woman who had died in the catastrophe that overtook Pompeii in 72 ce. This delusion screened his unresolved erotic feelings for a young neighbour in his German hometown, Zoe¨, whose surname, Bertgang, also means a light gait or springing step. Between Latin and German the unconscious exchange takes place, screening another linguistic link: Zoe¨ also means life and thus again the light and springing step of a feminine life principle is inscribed within this text as well. In her study of Freudian aesthetics, Sarah Kofman positions Freud’s analysis of Jensen’s novella Gradiva as the pivotal text in a psychoanalytical aesthetic theory. In plotting out what he does in his essay on Jensen’s text, Kofman shows how Freud’s text moves through identifications with three different figures in turn: the archaeologist, the author, and finally Zoe¨ Bertgang.22 The first identification is between psychoanalysis and the archaeologist in the fiction, since, as so many have commented, archaeology functioned as a ‘mighty metaphor’ for Freud.23 According to Freud, 21

Sigmund Freud, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’ [1907], Penguin Freud Library, 14, On Art and Literature (Harmondsworth, 1990), 27–118. 22 Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: Freud’s Aesthetics, trans. Winifred Woodhull (New York, 1988), 175–200. 23 See Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, ‘Freud and Archaeology’, American Imago, in Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells, (eds.), 8:2 (1951), 107–28; Donald Kuspit, ‘A Mighty Metaphor: The Analogy of Archaeology and Psychoanalysis’, Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, (New York, 1989), 133–52. There is a chapter in my forthcoming book, Time, Space and the Archive: Towards a Virtual Feminist Museum, where I undertake an extended re-examination of the many threads of meaning of the archaeological metaphor for Freud.

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however, Hanold fails to recognize the Pompeii within, that is, the buried/repressed past that, none the less, determines unconsciously his current delusive actions. Thus Freud moves on to identify with the novelist who, creating and developing this character, dissects and exposes the fictional archaeologist’s delusion that leads him, when he unwittingly is drawn to Pompeii itself, to mistake the living Zoe¨ whom he re-encounters by chance at the antique site, for a reincarnation of the woman from the classical relief onto which he had projected fantasies banished from his actual sexual life. Freud, however, works to reveal that the author, too, is blind to his own unconscious that patterns his text, a text so interesting because it takes psychological delusion and dream as its own topic. While anatomizing the structure of delusion in a way the psychoanalyst admires for its perspicacity, the author, according to Freud, cannot, however, recognize the working of his own unconscious: what within him drives his novel, and others he writes, to repeat the image of denied sexuality, and to recreate scenarios of lost girls, dead in the mid-day sun, tropes which recur across the oeuvre of Jensen, marking the pressure of his own repressions. It is only psychoanalysis that offers us a way beyond both aporias. Kofman, therefore, concludes: All that is needed to possess the truth is to convert poetic language, the language of disguise, into metapsychological language. . . . Myth is the childhood of philosophy for Aristotle, just as for Freud, art is the childhood of psychoanalysis. Art occupies an intermediate position between the pleasure principle and the reality principle and reconciles them to one another.24

In the novel there is, however, an analyst-figure who forms a third point of identification for Freud. This is a woman: Zoe¨ Bertgang herself, to whom Freud turns in his final chapter. Freud names her a physician and notes that she is like an analyst in that she performs three critical tasks. She raises buried unconscious thoughts to the surface; she makes the explanation—interpretation—coincide with the cure; she awakens feelings, restoring affect and desire. Thus Zoe¨ Bertgang becomes, in a sense in which we can also speak of Freud, a psychological archaeologist with a difference.25 That difference is 24

Kofman, Childhood of Art, 198 Mary Bergstein, ‘Gradiva Medica: Freud’s Model Female Analyst as Lizard Slayer,’ American Imago, 60:3 (2003), 259–84. 25

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her acknowledgement of the circle of hermeneutics, precisely what psychoanalysis offers and which her name embodies, the principle of life working over the deathly impulses. Zoe¨ unravels the web of delusion. Freud thus sets up a parallel between dreams, delusions, and poetic texts: same metaphors, same terms describe them as riddles to be deciphered because they both carry and disguise meaning. Kofman writes: The continuous character of text, the coherence of the web functions as a lure; it hides the holes in the text, the missing links. Both truth and delusion are inscribed in one text—veiling and speaking its own desire. Thus all are both memory bearers and memory holes in one dialectical moment.26

In Freud’s reading of the novella Gradiva, the dead, lost object, the revenant screens and is ultimately displaced by the intellectually acute and empathetically alive Zoe¨ Bertgang, a feminine site of a deeper, embodied, and affective knowledge necessary to release Norbert back into an erotic rapport. At the end of the story, however, when the lovers are reconciled and have become engaged, Norbert asks Zoe¨ one last time to trip across the paving stones of Pompeii, her springing step revealing that rising sole, no longer stony fetish and petrified icon but the dancing foot of life, invoking the springing reality Virginia Woolf embedded in her vision of Jane Harrison at Cambridge. Zoe¨ Bertgang, Jane Harrison, and Virginia Woolf come together here only to find a closing of the psychoanalytical door against their conjugation of intellect, affectivity, poetics, knowledge, and a sense of its undoing by different elements of the human psyche. With the following infamous words, Sigmund Freud signed off on his long but fruitless inquiry into femininity in the New Introductory Lectures written in 1932, revised for publication in 1933 but never delivered, notorious for their address to the men in the audience over the heads of the women, who as femininity itself remain the riddle. That is all I had to say to you about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly. But do not forget that I have only been describing women in so far as their nature is determined by

26

Kofman, Childhood of Art, 178.

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sexual function. It is true that that influence extends very far; but we do not overlook the fact that an individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well. If you want to know more about femininity, inquire from your own experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information.27

I define feminists as thinkers ‘in, of, and from the feminine’ where the latter invokes not a known and but desired potentiality for differencing the monism of phallic culture in which the feminine is voided as an empty cipher of difference to the One. The feminist thinker refuses to remain caught in the structure of Freud’s exhausted closure, that has laid down a normative concept of knowledge with femininity as the unknowable object of masculine art or science. Feminists do not merely wish to turn the tables, however, and render masculinity the object of an all-women university, academy or laboratory, as in Tennyson’s poem about Princess Ida’s dream. Instead we wish to know ourselves—the as yet un-re-cognized feminine difference beyond the limitations of the all-important sexual function—a term which, paradoxically, itself excludes a conceptualization of its own sexual specificity, subordinating its pleasures and resources to a functionality defined in a Malthusian relation to heteronormative masculinity and familial reproductivity. Feminists want to report from their experience, their imagination, and their formal research on that which, signified but not exhausted by the psycho-linguistic term femininity, is however, not merely a radically unknowable otherness, the very cipher of difference. Surrounded by enormous dangers of misunderstanding, the Israeli psychoanalyst, theorist, and artist Bracha Ettinger, for instance, introduces the term ‘the matrixial’ to postulate as a feminine a non-essential, psychosymbolically constituted specific sexual difference that is capable of generating dimensions of fantasy and meaning as a shifting supplement to the phallic organization of subjectivity and meaning.28 The

27 Sigmund Freud, ‘Femininity’ in [1933] in Penguin Freud Library, 2, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth, 1973), 169. 28 Bracha Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, Differences, 4.3 (1992), 176–208; ‘The Becoming Thresholds of Matrixial Borderlines’, in George Robertson (ed.) Travellers’ Tales (London, 1994) 38–62; ‘Plaiting in a Being-in- Severality and the Primal Scene’, Almanach of Psychoanalysis

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matrix will not invert or replace, but complement and shift that which has been generated from and accords with the psychocorpo-real imaginary of the masculine subject: what can be defined as phallocentric. Lacan famously declared that there is no sexual rapport because there is no knowledge of the sexual difference of the feminine. If such were to be discovered, he thought, it would have to be reported ‘from the ladies’ side’. Lacan allowed a theoretical possibility which he, however, refused, declaring that although he kept asking, women never told him what they wanted, what was this jouissance beyond the phallus.29 His theories open the space of a possible theorization of such a dimension of subjectivity, precisely ‘beyond the phallus’ (beyond its ordering logic of one and other, castration and lack) but not outside of the psycho-symbolic parameters of psychoanalytical thought. Unlike previous attempts to ‘excavate’ a pre-Oedipal feminine, associated with precocious or archaic phases of intimacy with the mother, Ettinger’s Matrix functions beside, beneath, as well as beyond but not merely before the phallus as a symbol for elements of subjectivity. Thus I want to follow—rehearsing the recurring metaphor of Woolf’s trespassing walk on the lawns of Cambridge dons— both the lively tread of Zoe¨ Bertgang and the leaping spring of Jane Harrison’s vision of the origins of art across the spaces of masculinist psychoanalytical thought to reread certain possibilities held before us in the archaeology of cultures by mythic figuration or image at the threshold of life and death that refuse to be contained as chronologically archaic, while their antiquity both historically and psycho-logically, attests to their vital, if not mortal importance.

III (Rehovot, Israel, 2002), 91–112. For a special issue devoted to Ettinger’s post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalytical theory see Theory, Culture and Society, 21.1 (spring 2004). 29

Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–73, Encore Seminar XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London, 1988). For a commentary on this seminar and the counter-theoretical work of feminist theorists in France see Stephen Heath, ‘Difference,’ Screen, 19.3 (1978), 51–112.

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getting beyond oedipus There can be no doubt that what both liberated and blocked Freud imaginatively and intellectually was the figuration of the human psyche through the exclusive structure of the Oedipus myth.30 The origins of psychoanalytical method in the originally dialogical work of Freud’s analytic theatre with a series of highly intelligent young woman patients, the so-called hysterics who have attracted much feminist attention, was deflected and ultimately buried when his own self-analysis, starting after the death of his father in 1895, laid over that rich seam of conversations with young Zoe¨s the narcissistic image of an exclusively masculine, Oedipal psyche.31 While many intellectual women engaged with psychoanalysis soon after its initiation and many radically revised Freud’s theses of the Oedipal complex, locating it much earlier and making it a more rageous and intense, pre-verbal affair between child and a reinstated Mother, none truly challenged the fundamental premises of its ultimately defining role around the theme of castration in human subjectivity which frames our concepts of sexual difference (masculine identification with the phallus and feminine lack—offering only the illusion of being the phallic object of desire for the masculine Subject) and sexuality. Moreover, the exclusive dominance of the Oedipal model makes it virtually impossible to think with the feminine since its version of the feminine is already incorporated structurally as what cannot yield meaning except as absence or loss: Woman/Other/Thing, in Lacan’s formulation. Almost all psychoanalytical theories of the feminine, therefore, operate within the walls of the Oedipal topos even if they overtly attempt to reevaluate aspects of femininity that they can only, revealingly, subordinate as the pre-Oedipal. Precocious, archaic, remaining closer to a maternal 30

See Joan Raphael-Leff’s reading of the different concept of psychic life that might have followed from Freud’s engagement with the Isis–Horus myth rather than that of the Oedipus legend, which contains, according to Jane Harrison, the trace of the killing of the old king by the incoming stranger, now mapped onto a patriarchal social system of dynastic succession. 31 I am indebted for this insight to Carol Gilligan, speaking in 1992 at the ICA, London, on the occasion of a symposium to mark the publication of Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester Freud’s Women (London, 1992).

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dyad or to identification with the maternal body that cannot be entirely rejected, the feminine in so many post-structuralist feminist rereadings of Freudian theory is arrested theoretically in an archaic period of subjective development, confined to the lowest strata of psychological archaeology.32 Identified with emotion, disruption, the maenadic wildness, the unmediated intensity of acting out that ritual would socialize, and drama sublimate, the feminine, like the Sphinx, still remains outside the realm of the truly human, and is itself hardly allowed to deliver from its sexual specificity anything of general significance in the understanding or symbolic potential of the human. The feminine tends, therefore, to be identified only with the materialized maternal and hence the sexual, copulatory, or lactating function of Freud’s model, and seems to be unthinkable as a principle in the symbolic domain of thought.33 It is important to stress here that although both Julia Kristeva’s thesis on the chora and the semiotic and Luce Irigaray’s philosophical and psychoanalytical theses on a psycho-corporeal sexual difference have been hugely influential, and while the texts of both intimate radical possibilities, neither work beyond Oedipus at a structural level. In very different ways that have their own value, in both Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s works, early moments in the formation of feminine subjectivity, may be transvalued, or radical differencing 32 A recent, brilliant but definitively phallic attempt at re-feminine in terms of bi-sexuality and a two-part Oedipus complex is offered in Julia Kristeva’s ‘On the Extraneousness of the Phallus: or, The Feminine between Illusion and Disillusion’, in Sense and Non-sense of Revolution, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York, 2000), 94–106. 33 I am necessarily summarizing a vast and complex field of debate, softening important lines of major differences between feminist theorists and theoretical traditions. As will become clear, what appear to be quite different in their attempts to theorize the feminine in the works of Irigaray, Kristeva, Silverman, and many others share, despite important differences, the theoretical horizon of the Oedipal formulation of human subjectivity. Not in a position to contest the clinical aspect, I follow Joan Raphael-Leff here in stressing that the choice of classical myth made by Freud entailed insight and blindness, closing of dimensions of subjectivity clearly imagined in other myths or mythological systems. It is here that classical myth and feminist thought function as investigative intersections about what we allow ourselves to imagine about ourselves and what we foreclose by rendering one imaginative device and narrative an authoritative canon.

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of the imaginary and symbolic proposed, and telling critiques of the damage caused to the feminine subject by the inhospitality of the Oedipal structure may be delineated. Following Ettinger, however, I would argue that until now a specific re-theorization of femininity and hence subjectivity as a whole has not been offered that can make a substantial difference to the Oedipalized psychoanalytical model: that is, subjectivity is premised on castration, lack, and the phallus is its exclusive signifier. This phrase, ‘the sexual specificity of the feminine’, may already cause some readers anxiety. We have been trained to be ‘good’ feminists by policing any suggestion that there might be such a thing as the sexual specificity of the feminine because we too quickly confuse ‘specificity’, that is, a particular semiotic or symbolic meaning creating and affective dimension, with a fundamental derivation of such particularity from a non-symbolic source: the anatomical body or, worse, the biological disposition. Thus the suggestion that we might think about the ‘specificity of the feminine’ easily smacks of the dreaded crime essentialism: that is, the derivation of the meaning of the feminine from some given physiological or inherent level of being. That the morphology of the feminine as it is inevitably mediated through fantasy and imaginary or symbolic representation might yield imaginative or intellectual resources for thought and understanding of the human or social condition is commonly treated as frankly embarrassing. Prepare to blush. Remember psychoanalysis itself is precisely a theory without nature: it is all in the mind, or rather psyche. Or perhaps, following Jane Harrison, Zoe¨ Bertgang, or Virginia Woolf, we have to have more courage, to run over the lawns and stones of intellectual orthodoxies, even of our own, feminist making, while escaping from the traps of binary inversion that are laid whenever we try to do so. In so far as I have been conjugating classical myth—a poetic tradition of imaginative meaning and cultural memory—and feminist thought—a rigorous engagement with post-structuralist concepts of signification and the psycho-linguistic constitution of subjectivity, my invocation of ‘the feminine’ must here be understood in such toughly theoretical terms, and not as a sudden fall from theoretical grace into the abyss of essentialism. It must be possible to address the still unanswered question of sexual

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difference, in Lacan’s terms, ‘from the ladies’ side’, while remaining rigorously within the carefully plotted domain of psychoanalytical uses of myth as means to excavate the processes of, yes, affectively embodied but psychically virtual subjectivities. It was Julia Kristeva’s major purpose to reinstate the corporeal—the drives—into the discourse of psychoanalysis after its structuralist and hence heavily linguistic turn with early Lacan. It was Luce Irigaray’s major contribution as a dissident daughter of that school to track the metaphorics of sexual bodies and sexual difference through the discourse of Western philosophy and psychoanalysis. So, resting on their substantive ‘bodies’ of thought, we can take for granted that we are allowed to engage with this fascinating domain between what Ettinger writes as the corpo-real and fantasy: the beginnings of the psyche’s imaginings or what Lacan would in his later return call the realm between trauma and fantasy. To do this we must step sideways from an exclusive focus on Oedipus in the extended legend to that of other members of his family through whom we might recover this lost potential of a feminine difference, not reducible to the binary opposition masculine/feminine which, in Oedipal principle, can only place the feminine in the space-off of its monstrous and menacing archaic other or conclude that, however noble in its fidelity, it can never rise to the level of a general ethic or morality.

listening to antigone As this volume demonstrates, many of us are called back to Oedipus’ daughter/sister, Antigone. The debate about this mythic character stretches from at least Sophocles to Hegel and now onto Lacan, Irigaray, and Butler. As literary work, Sophocles’ play warrants careful textual analysis. As philosophical problem, Antigone’s actions have generated major theories of the ethical and the political. But what is a specifically psychoanalytical reading of both a cultural text and a philosophical problem? How did Freud’s reading of texts from many historical periods isolate and theorize particular structures of subjectivity? Antigone has been a signifier and a myth infused with diverse meanings by varied interpreters: she figures in debates on gender and ethics, on kinship and the state, on resistance

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and fascism (in the essay by Kate Fleming on Anouilh’s Antigone and its unstable readings in occupied France). My contribution is a small one, drawing into this exciting field a debate internal to French psychoanalytical theory, which has, I think, enormous ramifications for the still developing discourses of feminist analysis and a feminist imaginary. In this volume, Miriam Leonard offers a stinging critique of Lacan’s reading of Antigone in terms of an opposition between the pure and impure, between the heroic beauty of the virgin rebel and the contaminated crime of an impure mother, Jocasta. She calls Lacan to account for a sexual politics embedded in the repressed structure of his text on Sophocles’ play. This powerful critique is warranted and serves to alert us to the constant vigilance we need in reading all texts for the play of political desire and an ideological unconscious. My starting-point is neither critique nor exoneration. It is the practice of analytical reading that Lacan himself enacts in his seminar and to which Bracha Ettinger responds by offering another reading, indeed of the most contested lines of the Sophocles’ play: Antigone’s declaration of the reasons for her action. Let me start this other reading, therefore, with a long quotation from the psychoanalytical theorist and artist whose concept of the matrixial feminine is the focus of the second half of this paper, Bracha Ettinger.34 In her reading of the figure of Antigone, Ettinger concludes: What in Antigone’s argument is waiting to be heard and com-passioned is her suffering from the tearing away into total separateness of her principal partner-in-difference, until this moment separated-in-jointness. If the almost impossible knowledge of the Thing-Event concerns the originary 34

First proposed in 1992, in a paper titled ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, Differences, 3.4 (1992), 176–208, Bracha Ettinger’s radical theses on a supplementary signifier of a non-Oedipal feminine difference or feminine dimension of the symbolic has been elaborated across the series of major articles, books, collections, and catalogue essays (on her art work). A collection of her ećrits appeared in French in 2000: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Regard et espace-de bord matrixiels (Brussels, 2000) and an English selection is being edited by Brian Massumi for University of Minnesota Press. Other key articles include ‘Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial Borderspace’ in John Welchman (ed.), Rethinking Borders (Basingstoke, 1996), 125–59. A special issue of Theory, Culture and Society, 21.1 (2004), including essays by Jean François Lyotard, Judith Butler, and myself is devoted to this theory.

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feminine rapport, it is not death itself that inflicts the horrible cut in the matrixial web, but the passage to a bestiality that threatens to blow up and explode this sphere altogether into separate pieces.35 (my italics)

This extract introduces a new vocabulary that may at this point hold little meaning for the uninitiated reader. I want to open the space to hear this text, which is part of Ettinger’s conclusion, so that as we read it closely what its web of words is trying to plot out will become more resonant, effecting an opening of the play and myth to other, hitherto unrecognized possibilities. Since the publication of Judith Butler’s philosophical and feminist reflections in Antigone’s Claim, we have been invited to think ‘beyond Oedipus’—that is, to go beyond his mythic support for the hetero-normative ordering of sexual difference and kinship in an innovative and emancipatory way.36 Butler focuses on the impossible no-place in kinship structures of the woman, Antigone, who is both daughter and sister to her father-brother, both aunt and sister to her nephew-brother, both daughter and granddaughter to her mother-grandmother. Antigone has been subject to a radical, feminist rereading as a figuration of non-filial, non-familial affiliation sought beyond the family plot that Butler reveals as the foundational and continuing metaphor for philosophy, ethics, and political science. The passage I have just quoted and which I will quote again later after what I hope to be useful explication of its meaning suggests, however, yet another significance in the mythic figure of Antigone than that to which Hegel and his followers or feminist philosophers such as Irigaray and Butler still confine her as a counter-force. What is needed beyond critique of phallocentrism is what the Butler move cannot contemplate without becoming anxious about a femininity that remains a trapped and trapping positionality inside the heteronormative frame. Thus the move beyond Oedipus, here as elsewhere, is a move beyond phallically defined sexual difference, 35

Bracha Ettinger, ‘Trangressing With-In-To the Feminine’, in Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (eds.), Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy and Feminist Understandings, (Aldershot, 2000), 205. 36 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, (New York, 2000).

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that, despite its own hopes, becomes only the ever more occluded reinstatement precisely of the universal normalization of the phallus as the only arbiter of subjectivity and meaning. Oedipal sexual subjectivity reversed into its non-Oedipal opposite does not shake its logic; it merely makes anything of the feminine in its specificity even more untheorizable, for we move from a gendered family plot to a non-familial system of affiliations—certainly important in terms of sexualities and their living. If we sacrifice sexual difference to emancipation from the limits of gender, we also sacrifice the feminine on a theoretical altar once again. You either get sexual difference by Oedipus, or no sexual difference at all, which adds up to the same monistic logic of the One or the None. I want to suggest that it is premature to suspend the debate on femininity/sexual difference. Like Ettinger, I think we can go beyond Oedipus in a way that radically opens the field of human thought and culture to a feminine supplementary and poeı¨tic structure that is not defined Oedipally (absence/presence), and that, therefore, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Oedipal binary masculine (þ)/feminine (), and thus with our commonsense, postOedipal understanding of gender as men and women. This other feminine is not of women (gender — social or linguistic), confined to female persons or experience. Ettinger poses the matrixial as a facet of human subjectivity that is, however, particularly hospitable to aspects thereof that have special resonance for the perpetually perplexed and disillusioned (Kristeva) feminine subject. There is still a deep confusion between gender: man and woman, and sexual difference: psycho-linguistic positionality defined according to the logic of a certain signifier (or signifiers) that leads to anxiety if we talk of the feminine as having any meaning beyond its negative function as the Other of the One, to use Luce Irigaray’s terms.37 But psychoanalysis does confuse the matter of my stringent defence against essentialism. What makes its discourse and practice challenging is precisely the fact that psychoanalysis is a tradition of thought that tries to think, conceptually and affectively, about a 37

Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY, 1985). Few philosophers have been more readily misread and ignorantly accused of essentialism than Irigaray.

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material corporeality of intensities, drives, and non-linguistic potentials that are retrospectively invested psycho-symbolically with meanings, through later psychic operations such as fantasy and linguistic operations such as signification so as to produce the psychosomatic entity that is human subjectivity itself always failing before attempted fixing. Mediated and represented, consciously and unconsciously reprocessed, displaced, repressed, and symptomatized, psychoanalysis cannot abandon the bodily offering of potentialities for translation from sensations into images and thoughts that it never imagines as a given nature. The relays between processes (intensities, affects, drives) and their formations is the heart of its difficult theory. The materiality of always retrospectively imaginary corporalities anaclitically supports structures of fantasy and meaning without the latter ever being reducible to origins in ‘the body’: that is the core of the theory of drives, symptoms, and the unconscious that elaborates stories of energies into figurations of subjectivities. The opening quotation of this section on Antigone suggests that in the actions and words of Antigone as she is constructed textually in the Sophoclean tragedy, ‘Something is waiting to be heard and com-passioned’. That means some affect and some meaning are suspended awaiting us as readers and viewers in this text that invites us to share in suffering and affectivity but only if we become differently attuned listeners: retuning our psychic receivers to this different pulse of subjectivity. What, we must ask, is this something that in Antigone’s argument is waiting to be heard and com-passioned? Is it ‘her suffering’, that is, both her pathos and her trauma? Or is it the trauma that this character as an imaging of subjective moments brings to us in this tragedy that has already happened when the play opens? From what is ‘she’ suffering? What is the trauma ‘she’—Antigone as image— can transmit to us, the necessary subjective site of the translation of artistic gesture and performance into resonant meaning? Bracha Ettinger argues that Antigone’s pain/trauma arises ‘from the tearing away into total separateness of her principal partner-indifference, until this moment separated-in-jointness.’ This is a radical redefinition of the role of Polyneices, Antigone’s brother/ nephew. Polyneices is placed not merely in his perverse kinship

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relation to his sister/aunt; he is evoked as the embodiment of a subjective condition defined by two structures: ‘partnershipin-difference’ and ‘separation-in-jointness’. These paradoxical neologisms define Ettinger’s excavation of a dimension of human subjectivity that she calls subjectivity as encounter signified as Matrix. The Oedipal or castration paradigm defines subjectivity as the effect of accumulated cuts and cleavages caught up and retrospectively defined by castration that posits the subject as the discrete, territorialized celibate One, cut away from a non subjective continuum or archaic Other. The matrixial paradigm suggests that, beside this model and not instead of it, we can trace elements of another dimension or subjective stratum in which subjectivity is generated not by cut and an economy of loss and absence, but by encounter, severality, and sharing from the inception with an unknown, partial Other that is never fused, never lost, never had, never absent, but constantly sensed, into and from which its partner in difference, separated in jointness, fades and retunes. So no images of absolute rupture, cut, isolation, no mention of symbiosis or autism. Instead Ettinger calls to mind a shared borderspace that is only imaginable as the co-creation of an always, already several trans-subjectivity. Instead of the scarred singularity of the Lacanian subject, imagine two trembling poles within a shared field linked and thus not fused by threads whose transmissions of events that occur in that shared border-space resonate within each pole simultaneously but differently. Let me quote now, in this invocation of the matrixial dimension, Antigone’s famous lament in Sophocles’ text when she tries to explain the motivation of her burial of her brother to the Chorus as she fearfully contemplates her appalling fate of being buried alive:38 Never, I tell you, if I had been the mother of children or if my husband had died, exposed and rotting— 38

There is one other instance of such an explanation in classical literature: indeed some thing that Sophocles borrowed from the historian Herodutus who tells the story of the wife of Intaphrenes, who when threatened with death for conspiracy by Darius asked to save her brother rather than her husband on similar grounds (Herodutus, 3.119). I am grateful to Lois Williams for this drawing my attention to this reference.

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I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself, never defied the people’s will. What law, you ask, do I satisfy with what I say? A husband dead, there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again.39

For Jacques Lacan, in his psychoanalytical study of Sophocles’ play, Antigone does not represent the clash of social versus natural moralities (gendered as masculine and feminine, state and family, philos and polis), as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the ethics of sexual difference. For Lacan, Antigone is the image of the aesthetic.40 His reading depends on a formula. Lacan identifies the human with the cut that initiates the subject as an effect of language. The cut simply makes meaning possible by marking a differentiation that itself is the inscription of prohibition; something of the infinite possibility of being is negated, refused, excluded, differentiated, subjected to a prohibition: not this. The law, regularity itself, creates the very possibility of meaning by the act of negative differentiation. This structure is erected, as Fig. 3.6 suggests, on a ground provided by another dimension that is radically foreclosed by Lacan: The human is only the effect of language whose support is Being The Symbolic: the effect of the cut Nature/Culture Life itself/beyond/negative support B

E

I

N

G

Fig. 3.6. The horizontal topology in Lacan. 39

Sophocles, Antigone in The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Eagles (London, 1984), 105. 40 Luce Irigaray, ‘The Eternal Irony of Community’, in Speculum of the Other: Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1985); George Steiner, Antigones (London, 1993); G. W. F Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (London, 1977), 266 ff. For a contemporary feminist engagement, see Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York, 2000).

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signification that allows only certain pairings to be meaningful on its plane. Thus Lacan hypothesizes a beyond language: the Real, which is pure Being. I take this to convey the notion of life itself, being a living thing (zoe¨) which is, in its pre-symbolic condition, an undifferentiated state, that is, the invisible but necessary support for the formal inscriptions of syntactic difference that sustained bios: narratable signified human social living. These syntactical differences are the effect of language, for instance, that famous initiating pair: nature/culture. Thus we have both a vertical and a horizontal topology with a frontier that marks a territory of radical otherness, the zone of the Other/Thing, in Lacan’s scheme, and this boundary marks the humanization of life. Upon its substrate, a binary system of significatory difference is created that makes us sexed speaking subjects through the play of the binary slash: culture/nature—man/ woman, and so forth (see Fig. 3.7). This inscribes, in another local differentiation, a sexual marking and a sexualizing of the logic of (þ/) that will determine the signification of the signs Man/Woman. Thus whatever is beyond language can have by definition no meaning since it is the negative ground—being—on which meaning, signification, is created in a series of relational marks of difference internal to its already erected elevation. The double negation of the ‘feminine’, signifying the minus pole of the significatory pairing above the line, is thus captured, with different but always lacking valencies, in both vertical and horizontal

The logic of the CUT ¼ on/off Phallic Model + M

/ / ‘F’

Woman/Other/Thing/Death/the Real The Feminine is also beyond in so far as the feminine is negated by the function of ‘f’ as merely the other of the One, the specular of the Same (M¼ þ) Fig. 3.7. The horizontal and vertical topologies in Lacan.

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systems. For Lacan, the feminine becomes, with Death, aligned with the Thing, the Other in a radical sense, while at the same time, the feminine acquires a negative inscription in the linguistic and psychosexual domain as the negated other to the masculine, the to its þ, the lack to the illusory phallic plenitude. Thus there is a double structure of femininity in phallic logic: as both linked to death and radical inhuman Otherness imaged in part behind the monstrous Sphinx, and linked in the signifying chain as emptiness. It is this double role that confuses us and means that we become afraid to think the feminine for fear that, in our attempts to fill its emptiness with meaning, we merely confirm even in inversion a masculine logic of this negative difference and risk collapse into the horror of the Real where, as subjects, we cannot exist. The level at which we must challenge both Freud and Lacan is, therefore, paradoxically the place where Lacan takes us in his reading of Sophocles, and where Bracha Ettinger will read Sophocles’ Antigone for sexual difference that the Lacanian system cannot imagine; a space between life and death, meaning and no-meaning. For Lacan the figure of Antigone, textually and performatively summoned in the play Antigone, blazes forth as an unsettling image that tips into a visibility encountered by the audience watching the play, as performance or read text, a sense of the radical ‘beyond’ the orders of life and language that is conceivable only as its absence, hence as death, non-being, non-meaning, non-differentiation. For, from the moment the play opens, Antigone is condemned to be buried alive for having dared during the night to cover with earth her rebel brother in defiance of the king’s decree that his traitorous act against Thebes cause his body to be left rotting and desecrated outside the city walls. Recall for a moment the figure of the devoured but still fleshy foot from the painting by Ingres that evokes the horror of this place, outside the walls, where animals, monsters, and the dreaded Sphinx feed on the unburied (de)human(ized) dead. Polyneices is to have no grave and for her act of humanizing burial—mere ritual gesture—Antigone must live to die in her own tomb: the dead remain unburied while the living are entombed. The play on the desecrated and unburied dead lying exposed above ground (not returned with appropriately semantic ritual to the earth) and the living entombed creates the chain of meaning and

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trauma along which the dramatic text’s mythic substrate is strung. That the two poles at the joint yet separate ends of this string are brother/sister, hence masculine/feminine is significant, but I think the play suggests another kind of connectedness in difference between the brother/sister pair that is not reducible to the masculine/ feminine opposition. Here I diverge somewhat from Simon Goldhill’s interesting reading of the sisters’ relation within the play, and the forgotten figure of Ismene that puzzles over feminism’s apparent neglect of the difficulty of sisterhood in the story. It is not the masculinity of the brother that calls for Antigone’s action in the reading I am offering here: it is the fact of his being a sibling whose humanity is being violated by his unburial. Ismene is, as Goldhill himself affirms, first hailed precisely by the term that should call forth in her the same necessity as that from which Antigone has acted: ‘Of common kin’. The repetition of common—shared and kin—family underlines not merely the relational connection but a commonality whose failure to respect renders Ismene the unaffecting cipher to Antigone’s tragic beauty. On one level of understanding, life and death are a binary meaning-generating opposition in which death is the theoretical negativity around which we, the humans, fashion the meaning of life, for instance, by the rituals of burial performed by the living on the dead body. These rituals give meaning to human life by turning its disappearance into a semanticized form: death. We might say that we became human because, in our earliest cultural moments, we performed this distinction and did not just toss the bones of our relatives on the midden with the rest of our recent debris of food and excrement. We are humanized precisely because we ritually mark the difference of human from animal by creating an idea of death as the negative, still human other of the living state. Antigone is condemned to some kind of impossible half-position, neither killed nor living. She is to be buried alive because she refused to leave her brother uncovered by the rites of burial that would alone ensure the imaginary and symbolic persistence of his humanity after his physical death. Doing this in the knowledge that it carried the death penalty, Antigone becomes an image of what Lacan calls a second death. As textually fabricated image, ‘Antigone’ according to Sophocles, transgresses an impossible boundary

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because normally there can be no knowledge of this other beyond the horizontal plan of Figure 3.7: death, this utterly beyond that is both testament to her acknowledgement of her brother’s irreplaceable being and to her own. Nothing can be reported back from this space: death. But in an aesthetic practice, such as a play, we are given an image by the uncanny structure of an unfolding drama that depends for its dramatic tension on telling us of an act already committed under a law already defied, whose punishment is already a death sentence. Thus we open upon an image of the transgression, the irresolvable oscillation between living and death that can be refracted back through the work of art to flash out in splendour, as Lacan puts it, as beauty. Bracha Ettinger writes: ‘The aesthetic dimensions arises in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60 [the text in which Lacan discussed Antigone] via the question: what is the surface that allows the emergence of ‘‘images of passion’’, images of suffering, images of the indelible play of subjectivity in and beyond the body and its materiality?’41 In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in which he discussed Antigone as the image of the beauty, Lacan invoked the Marquis de Sade, as a further explanation of this function of the support, this surface on which emerge images of suffering.42 De Sade explained that torture does not kill us; rather it makes us experience ourselves by dislocating body and subjectivity while making the former the support for the experience of the latter. Pain stresses the body so that its resistant materiality becomes the support for the suffering that is subjectivity projected by the experience of bodily pain apart from it, experienced in an intensity that appears to lie beside its unbearable physical suffering, indeed as a result of it. The subject wants to die 41

Ettinger, ‘Transgressing’, 191. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London and New York, 1992), 261 ff. ‘In the typical Sadeian scenario, suffering does not lead the victim to the point where he is dismembered and destroyed. It seems rather that the object of all the torture is to retain the capacity of being an indestructible support. Analysis shows clearly that the subject separates out a double of himself who is made inaccessible to destruction, so as to make it support, borrowing a term from the realm of aesthetics, one cannot help calling the play of pain.’ 42

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to escape the pain but, if the body does not succumb to the torture, the body remains a material support for a subjective dislocation that is, in effect, what pain and suffering are, the agonistic experience of subjectivity. Torture stages the play of pain that raises subjectivity to a level of besideness. Bracha Ettinger comments on Lacan: The extraordinary passion which transports death into life and impels life into death arises only, says Lacan, from some contact with that which is, the unique and irreplaceable, with what has no substitute, and can not be exchanged. Beauty enters the picture through ideas of relations with the irreplaceable. A disappearance in appearance creates the effect of beauty. The effect of beauty results from the relation of the subject with the horizon of life, and from traversing to a second death. From Antigone’s point of view, life ‘can only be lived from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side. But from the place that she can see it and live it in the form of something already lost.’ This limit, detached from historical time, is a source of creation ex nihilo. If the surface of passion captures such a unique value to make an image of it, this image creates a barrier that blocks us from traversing to the other side, and, writes Lacan, the image of beauty is the effect of blindness, blindness to the other side, blindness as the castrating schism. The function of the beautiful, therefore, is precisely ‘to reveal to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death and to reveal it to us in only a blinding flash’.43

Thus Antigone as image is named an outrage within Lacan’s text and Lacan pulls out meanings from its various forms, aller outre, outrepasser. The Latin form, transgress, occasions a change, but not in the Kristevan sense of renovation of meaning. It introduces the idea of criminality or prohibited passage. Beauty glows in the place of an impossible, illicit transgression whose motor is desire: that mark of the ultimate prohibition of the Father’s Law. ‘The aesthetic question operates, therefore, at a limit materialized and represented in art by the human body. . . the envelope of all possible phantasms of human desire.’44 The human body is thus both transport and 43

Ettinger, ‘Trangressing’, 191. Translations are by the artist from the French original transcripts of the seminar published in English as The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 44 Ettinger, ‘Transgressing’, 192, citing Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 281.

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barrier from the Other beyond—a second death that is, as figured through this play, the feminine. Thus Bracha Ettinger concludes: ‘It is in the domain of aesthetics that the frontier that separates the human being from death converges on the frontier that separates the human being from the feminine.’45 Saying this is not to force a natural assimilation of the feminine to the non-human, but to reveal, in proper structuralist terms, the map of meanings and associations by which these terms become symbolically aligned. They do not need to be so, as symbolic is always social and cultural, and other maps of relations can be proposed, already calling out to us from that archive of cultural memory: myth and its writings. Now I want to introduce the heretical, feminist question: What if that aesthetic, glimpsed in Sophocles’ image of Antigone, the sister/ daughter/aunt, is not just about the encounter with death that, in effect, reinstates the blinding cut on the other side of which is both death, the absolute void of otherness, and the feminine? What if it textually/performatively allows us a glimpse of another economy, a subjective and subjectivizing connectivity between terms of difference—partners in difference, as it were, such as the dead and stillliving but already under the mark of death through the transmission of trauma, through the co-responsibility of subjects who share a non-Oedipal sense of the humanity of the other as a result of having been in contact with an unknown other as the condition of coming into life at all? The conditions under which we come into life, bare life, are not, as Lacan’s scheme suggests, non-human. Ettinger will stress that they are already under the mark of humanizing, subjectivizing life. For those of us born, and without prejudice to any choices a potential mother may make about her own body, we can consider that our prolonged prenatal sojourn, months of living activity, sensation, movement, hearing, responding to the co-presence of an unknown other living entity can be conceived in relation to a non-phallically defined ‘invisible feminine specificity’ that is understood not as place or organ, but as a register of trans-subjectivity and encounter of the several. Please, dear reader, first remember the Ingres painting and the evocation of the feminine-sphinx as 45

Ibid.

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non-human within a menacing cave. Then forget that horrible image of the maternal body as a monster or enclosure. Think instead of the airwaves, of transmissions and retunings, of resonance and pressure, sensing the not quite presence of an other fading in and fading out, leaving traces in both vibrant but unknown partners, at the point of not-quite contact that is, none the less, a moment of exchange and co-aesthesis. I am not referring here to the feminine within phallocentric signification: the minus to a phallic plus, with a feminine that Lacan placed with the Other and the Thing beyond the very boundaries of human meaning. We can refuse to submit to Lacan’s elimination of this feminine from all human sense-making, and instead imagine as feminine specificity a model for certain, not all, dimensions of human subjectivity that concern such aesthetic connectivity signalled as separation in jointness and partners in difference. In her speech, Antigone clearly invokes the ground for her absolute obligation to bury her brother in their joint standing for, as well as having in common a space of co-generation not simultaneously with each other, as in the case of twins, but as a space of sharing that defines a primary ethical order of co-being, that is about connectivity and co-response-ability (Ettinger’s term) and not the solitary, celibate individuality of the phallic order. Invoked, but waiting to be heard in Antigone’s pathos, is this feminist heresy: that the condition of being humanly generated and born is an ethical ground ab initio, a form of linking, an already trans-subjectivity conceived as primordially, irreducibly relational—in a form that appears transgressive to a phallic autism when its archaic foundations are activated and invoked politically, ethically, aesthetically, symbolically as the basis for human thought and action. Antigone’s now no longer perplexing explanation stresses that the relationality, the connectivity that is shared by the fact of being born is not the dyadic bonding of mother to child, but the shared capacity to sense and feel human connectivity, to the limits of one’s own death. This is not merely the Levinasian ethic of maintenance of the humanity of the other, but the activation of a shared humanity that cannot survive if the other’s is abused. To say this requires us to acknowledge that the non-gendered space of the several that is the effect of a sexual difference of the

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feminine impacting on all subjects who are born, the always coinhabited plurality of our becoming with an unknown other; what medicine or religion will define only as the asubjective carrying called pregnancy, is a humanizing site of potential meaning for defining an irreducible human co-affectivity and co-respons-ability that can be called upon with the realm of ethical and political action as an account of human feeling and necessity. If Bracha Ettinger dares to invoke psychoanalytically and not medically, the later stages of the jointness of pregnancy—of becoming and transforming—as the site of this traumatic trans-subjective potentiality, we must be careful not to let the cultural repressions that have evacuated from all sense and fantasy the sexual specificity of the feminine once again close down these thoughts by jumping to the conclusion that any invocation of our becoming space is reductive, natalist, or essentialist. Let me firmly distinguish between the phallic concept of motherhood which involves a mother and a baby already in some fantasmatic circuits of need, demand, and desire for each other as objects, from the condition Ettinger defines as later stages of pregnancy when, in a non-prohibited pre-birth intimacy that she dares to name non-prohibited incest, a potential and still partial and unrealized subject-to-be co-inhabits a later to become psychically reinvoked space.46 This is not a place which would take us back to bodies and organs and fantasies of the inside of the woman’s body imaged as a cosy or suffocating house, a cave, a dwelling, an envelope, a chora, and so forth; all these render the feminine merely instrumental as the enclosure within which a One-to-be-separated is generatively held. In this border-space or web of subjective transference: thought under the prism of the Matrix, the becoming infans is a proto-psychic entity sharing a borderspace with a fantasizing subject-other who is being transformed psychically as well as libidinally by the co-emergence of a new subjective condition defined by the coexistence with this unknown other that she fantasizes and 46

Her challenging concept of the non-prohibited pre-birth incest clearly supplements the whole edifice of cultural theory premised precisely on the incest taboo. See her elaboration of this concept in her fascinating feminist reading of the Judaic ritual of the red heifer, or red cow, ‘The Red Cow Effect’, in Beautiful Translations, ACT 2 (London, 1996), 82–119.

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thinks about not as a fishy-embryo in a watery sack but as a psychically affecting and human other: and why? Because this process is a repetition with a difference of her own becoming in a severalized space of co-emergence with an unknown partial other. Thus certain moments may be considered psychic evocations and creative transformations of what was once experienced archaically: a pregnancy, a friendship, pedagogy, an analysis, an aesthetic experience, an artwork. In phallic logic, the mother can be reduced to a body (later imagined as the dark cave, the fire-belching throat, the abjectly monstrous other). In Ettinger’s matrixial logic, the late, pre-birth covenant of the several unknowns is the site of an archaic partial subject–partial subject encounter. This must be stressed: there are no full subjects (for whom another becomes a known or desired and invested object). Yet in this encounter there are co-affective exchanges that are mutually transforming both partners in their radical unknowability to each other in the shared border-space. The becoming mother subject is transformed by an unknowable otherness that she can only fantasize as a human subject. The becoming child is becoming human precisely in its garnering of material from this incestuous proximity with an unknown humanizing otherness that cannot yet be human although this encountering is what conditions that possibility. What if, through a feminist turn within psychoanalysis, we can imagine what Ettinger names a different difference? Here the feminine is not just the yawning void of a non-subjective body but signifies an inter/trans-subjectivizing structure/encounter/space where potentially human subjects co-emerge and co-transform within a space of minimal difference? Neither fused nor separated, yet distinct and sharing, a structure can be imagined that delivers potential for fantasy and meaning to the human subject that arises from the feminine outside of its definition by the phallic. Risking what is for phallic thought the unthinkable and the heretical, we can hypothesize psychoanalytically, hence without any risk of essentialism, a before-birth moment of archaic encounter/severality that, like all elements psychoanalysis theorizes, exists only in its nonoriginary repetitions of events occurring traumatically, that is, too early for meaning-making but not too early to lay down the imprint

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for later psychic investments and recaptures in fantasy. Holding fast to the psychoanalytical logic of belated, retrospective catching up of corpo-real ‘events’ into psychic representation, we can nonessentialistically think of relays between the zones of trauma (the real) and fantasy/thought (imaginary and symbolic). Thus Ettinger proposes a supplementary humanizing dimension that, not displacing but supplementing and differencing the phallic, deserves the designation matrixial-feminine because it is the sexual specificity of the feminine that brings this dimension into human possibility via this braiding of real and imaginary encounter. The matrixial as supplementary stratum offers the potential for experiences subjacent to language: especially those we encounter through the affective channels of artistic practice and imaginative experience in ritual, drama, sound, and image. What if the experience of art is itself dependent on unconsciously activating that re-encounter with human meaning, meanings that structure our sense of being human (sex and death and the beyond)? If myth is the childhood of art, encoding the deepest affectivities and anxieties, can we not, like Zoe¨ Bertgang, deliver it into analysis and transformative knowledge to a different effect? Theories of subjectivity and theories of the aesthetic so encoded in myth converge at the site of revised theories of sexuality and sexual difference. At its most basic, Ettinger’s matrixial supplement to theories of subjectivity and sexual difference allows us to revisit key sites of Western discourse on art and on the subject with the possibility that the feminine can be theorized beyond the Oedipal concept of woman as the castrated or abjected other, the desired incestuous mother or the passive unwanted sister. We can think a different feminine structuring as a supplementary dimension of subjectivity not based on the cut alone: castration—but also on combination of minimal difference (adult/becoming child) and connectivity, shared border-spaces and co-affection. Never, I tell you, if I had been the mother of children or if my husband had died, exposed and rotting— I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself, never defied the people’s will. What law, you ask, do I satisfy with what I say?

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griselda pollock A husband dead, there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again.47

When Antigone speaks from the point of no return condemned between a no-life and not-yet-death of enclosure, alive in a tomb, she utters a long lament that explains her actions.48 What she has done, to bury her criminal brother on pain of death for disobeying the king’s edict that he should remain dishonoured, she declares she would only do for a brother. This is the point at which Goethe and other commentators have balked. Why so? Antigone’s argument is that a child or a husband can be replaced. But once her mother and father/brother are dead, there can be no more brothers, no others who shared in this space of generation that bonds her particularly with this representative of the human family. Her speech can, therefore, invoke the maternal matrix—the womb invoked in the Greek adelphos—as a site that can structure meaning and become the basis for an ethical position. In Lacan’s text, this evocation of the mother’s body and her desire is, however, swiftly erased by being folded immediately into the paternal metaphor: ‘born of the same womb . . . and having been related to the same father’.49 Under this patriarchal slippage, the brother functions then as the sign of the One, the unique, the irreplaceable, that which the phallus signifies through its logic of the One and its negation, life or death. Painter and psychoanalytical theorist, Bracha Ettinger questions the exclusive sovereignty of this logic and suggests that a shifting of this phallic perspective allows us to imagine dimensions of subjectivity—especially those that flash out in our encounter with the aesthetic—beyond the phallic model of One and its Other, life/ death, nature/culture, masculine/feminine, presence/absence. She transgressively dares to think of the constituting shadow of maternal, that is, adult feminine sexuality and desire as signified by ‘the borderspace of the several’ that is the generation of children as a support for other fantasies and other logics that are premised on 47 48 49

Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Eagles, 105. These form lines 995–1004, in ibid. Eagles, 105. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 279.

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trans-subjectivity from the start. This does not mean things originate in the female body in a reductive or essentialist fashion. It argues that our psychic beginnings in this space of severality makes connectivity the originating condition of subjectivity instead of the usual view that it is a series of cuts and separations: birth, weaning, language, castration that form the founding conditions of the subject. Ettinger has forged from her reflections on her own painting, arising at the open passageway of transmitted trauma between generations of the Holocaust, two new terms to locate her theoretical innovation in relation to our accepted theories of poetic meaning and figurative speech: matrix and metamorphosis. There is nothing cosy about the situation of matrixial co-subjectivity. It is the pathway of transmitted trauma, hatred, anxiety, or fear as much as it can become the basis for theorizing the way in which what is not me can none the less affect me, and in which I can handle affects that are not mine: these capacities seem critical to understanding the transmission of trauma and affect that art as encounter induces at the level of subjectivities. In the matrixial supplementation of our theories of the subject, subjectivity functions as an encounter and not only, as in phallic logic, as the effect of the cut, of separation. Using the metaphor of psychic aerials tuning in and out to transmitted signals that acquire shape and form once registered even beyond the permeable place of the boundaried I, Bracha Ettinger furthermore retheorizes a dimension of the gaze in the field of vision that painting in what I have named ‘painting after painting, after history’ illuminates.50 This involves a visual field which incites a longing to look as the desire for proximity or 50

Painting after painting in after-history refers to a feminist resumption of the unfinished business of painting prematurely foreclosed in the tactically necessary anti-modernist moves of feminist critiques of modernism. It also locates this resumption within the field of post-Auschwitz aesthetics and philosophy. We both come after history and exist in a new epoch beyond previous historical patterns as a result of the Holocaust. See Griselda Pollock, ‘Gleaning in History. . . ’ in G. Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (London, 1996), 266–88 and Griselda Pollock, ‘Painting as a Backward Glance that Does not Kill’, in ed. Greg Hainge (ed.), Fascism and Aesthetics, special issue of Renaissance and Modern Studies, 43, (2001), 116–44.

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reconnection while never letting a gaze fix, master, or hide, grow active and turn passive. Secondly, in lieu of the figures of metaphor and metonymy, figures of substitution characterizing phallic signification, dreamwork, and analysis, Ettinger coins the term metramorphosis as the passageway through which ‘affected events, materials and modes of being infiltrate and diversify onto non-conscious margins of the Symbolic through/by sub-symbolic webs.’ Thus never rising fully to what Julia Kristeva would name the communicative dimension of the symbolic, but hovering like her concept of the semiotic, at its transformative margins where affectivity hinges bodily intensities to the sub-symbolic intimation of meaning as affect, metramorphosis catches poetically that which we have now come to experience and accept in radical moments of modern painting from Rothko onwards. Locatable in traditional art historical framings, the moves that Bracha Ettinger’s paintings now dare to make by looping back to reconnect with that suspended moment ‘after Rothko’ are also to be considered under the sign of her Antigone for another historical reason. The artist/theorist writes and we read again: What in Antigone’s argument is waiting to be heard and com-passioned, is her suffering from the tearing away into total separateness of her principal partner-in-difference, until this moment separated-in-jointness. If the almost impossible knowledge of the Thing-Event concerns the originary feminine rapport, it is not death itself that inflicts the horrible cut in the matrixial web, but the passage to a bestiality that threatens to blow up and explode this sphere altogether into separate pieces.51

Antigone must bury her brother not because he is the irreplaceable One, but because he is a partner in a co-humanity. His bestialization by lying unburied for the birds and dogs to tear his flesh is inescapably her transmitted trauma. The death of the other is in part my death if we take the definition of a human openness to reside in that archaic encounter under the feminine matrixial web as the co-emergence of subjectivity in a relation of non-familiar I and non-I. According to Ettinger, Antigone would rather die than bear the mauling of her human link with the (br)other. His relation to

51

Ettinger, ‘Trangressing’, 205.

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her, however, stems not from his real personality as a good or bad man (as Creon tries to persuade Antigone in the text), nor from family loyalty based on a shared fatherhood or even parentage with Oedipus and Jocasta as their twice-over pro-genitor. It is an ethical act, a statement of an unbreachable co-affectivity ‘in, of and from the feminine’ as a structure of human possibility that, arising in the Real of our vital gestation, awaits imaginative and symbolic re-articulation to become a means of thinking and fantasizing who and what we are in that forever belated process of re-enactment in image and thought that is psychic life and symbolic representation. It is this that Antigone performs in a speech that calls to us for understanding of a pain she can hardly bear now its consequences are to be lived: she calls to us as witnesses and co-com-passionate. As image, she is not feminine because Antigone is a female character, a daughter-sister of Oedipus, challenging the laws of the state with those of a pre-social kinship. In this text by Sophocles, the woman’s, Antigone’s, words produce an image in, of, and from the [matrixial] feminine in affective performance of the anguish of her trans-subjective suffering, her suffering as trans-subjectivity. It is not, therefore, as Judith Butler has argued, Antigone’s disordering place in kinship relations that Sophocles’ play offers to our changed hearing and compassioning, but her elevation of a structure of the matrixial feminine severality to an ethical articulation as an act. Have I lost you all? In this labyrinth of post-Lacanian aesthetics, it is easy to lose one’s way and find oneself misunderstood. For nothing is so precluded from feminist thought than the feminine, especially in any suggestive relation to its bodily sites of desire and creativity. Through already approved theoretical paradigms we are permitted to decry its abjection and our peers respect us when we wish to find ways beyond it, beyond Oedipus. But why can nothing of the feminine in its sexual specificity be ever imagined as constitutive of what it is to be human? Why must this astonishing proximity of the becoming, co-affecting two that is the doubled passage of human creation be denied any place in our imaginative and symbolic orders? For Bracha Ettinger, what lurks awaiting recognition as a philosophical and dramatic trace in the play by Sophocles has a terrible

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concrete resonance in the historical moment of which she is the bearer. The wound to the matrixial web of co-humanity invokes the bestiality of the unmarked, unburied inhuman dying of her own family/people and those of the Roma, Sinti, and Lalieri peoples in ghettos, execution sites, and concentration camps of the Jewish and Romany Final Solutions in Europe between 1941 and 1945. Found or sought in the anonymous and ubiquitous images of atrocity that form the photographic archive of that genocide, her recurrent painting of three haunting figures of her unburied non-Is stay time and hold that crime and its mourning before our eyes (Fig. 3.8). Bracha Ettinger began painting in the mid-1980s with a series of large-scale canvases titled After the Reapers. Seared onto nuclearized landscapes of disaster, gesturally evoked traces of skeletal bodies and death’s heads marked the limits of the Western representational tradition premised on the bounty of the land and the specular idealization of the body. The ash of cremated millions beneath the grass of Europe, the unbearable images of corpses of those starved to an inhuman death potentially mark the ethical end of the possibility of that once self-affirming and beneficent Western tradition of figure and landscape. Turning to the ultimate antiauratic machine, the photocopier, the artist began to work with the remnant of a Family Album that now historically registered the dislocation and yawning absence: the Shoah.52 Passing found images of both a personal and a collective archive through the photocopy machine while interrupting it at the point it scattered its dust/ash as the residue of the burnt image, Bracha Ettinger assembled only fragments of apparitions into ghostly assemblages of invisible bodies by placing several papers in vertical Perspex framings. The fragments on torn papers of sometimes searing violet were assembled into spectral figures and combinations that

52

Anyone directly involved in the Shoah necessarily scans these often unidentified photographs of camps, massacres, and ghettos, fearing as much as desiring to recognize a lost family member. Could these people be me, could they be a sister, mother, grandmother, aunt, friend? Thus the actual remnants of family photographs and the whole archive of the collective disaster resonate with personal and immediate terror as well as longing to refind, even for a moment.

ig. 3.8. Bracha Ettinger Eurydice no. 17, 1994–6. oil and xerox on paper mounted on canva 25.2 52 cm, mounted on chassis, 29 55.5 cm. (Private collection.).

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reformed a fractured alphabet of what she named ‘the memory of oblivion’.53 In the early 1990s she began a series called Autistworks, returning to these intermediate spectres that dusted the page, with her paintloaded brush, but now with colours of red and violet, the colours of blood and of grief. If something of Western representational logic was incinerated at Auschwitz, aspects of the formalist and literalist attention to painting’s defining potentialities as space and colour could be once again re-articulated, but on the other side of this radical post-modern disillusion. In 1992 the artist began a third major series, whose title evoked another marginalized feminine figure of the classical archive: Eurydice, the mythic woman abandoned at the mouth of a hell she had already seen by her artist lover Orpheus and killed in a second death by his backward glance. Eurydice is also a figure of the feminine that allows us to ask what she, like Antigone, might say from that place between two deaths. Like many of her works there is a recurring encounter that Bracha Ettinger repeatedly re-stages through working again and again from one image of a frieze of naked women about to be shot, taken from an unidentified photograph of mass murder by Einsatzgruppen Aktionen in Mizroc in the Ukraine in 1941. Isolating three figures, a woman with her head averted, a woman appealing to the place where the viewer now stands but that once held the perpetrator soldier photographic witness, and a woman tenderly protecting her small child in her arms, Bracha Ettinger has spent over a decade at this arresting spot both bringing her ‘three graces’ back into view and fading away representational violence by an aesthetic practice of painting on that suffering as support. Bracha Ettinger’s paintings lay veils of colour to deflect our looking from the naked atrocity that the genocidal gaze of the 53

Bracha Ettinger, Matrix Hala(a)—Lapsus: Notes on Painting (Oxford, 1992). These are the carnets in which the artist daily recorded responses to her painting practice and from whose scattered grains she began to develop a theorization that, once transplanted to the terrain of psychoanalysis, could offer another means of thinking and articulating what arose in and through an aesthetic practice of painting as trans-subjectivizing encounter. These writings are textually analysed by Carolyn Drucker, Translating the Matrix, Versus Occasional Paper, 1, Versus, 3 (1994).

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original photograph encodes. Her combination of machinic drawing in ash and overpainting in searing violets or reds shields the women from the voyeuristic or abjecting gaze, bringing the intensity of face and gesture: these are her pathos formulae—close enough to the viewer to establish the possibility of affecting contact across time that becomes materialized in the space that painting can create. But this contact then remains suspended at the gulf that marks the epoch that began here, the epoch Adorno names ‘After Auschwitz’. Attentive to the physical and material marks that conjure the illusion of the image in the same movement as it returns to materiality and thus dissipates into its irreducible colour and gesture, the artist works and works again with veils and webs of grief colours to ‘erase all image while conserving its constituents: its fragility, its screen, its blur, its abstract character, its ‘‘shadow space’’[Michaux].’ Christine Buci-Glucksman calls this ‘veil-painting’ and ‘violet skin’.54 Yet, as theorists of the transmitted trauma argue, these ghosts and their past inhabit the artist as a child of survivors occupying her own present, constituting an expanded trans-subjective field that makes her participate in traumatic ways with their dying which, like Zoe¨ the analytical life bearer, she argues can be otherwise mourned through a matrixial processing of traumatic encounter in the metramorphic process of painting and matrixial gazing. It is not just a matter of life or death, but of co-emerging at their threshold. Thus Ettinger argues against Lacan, insisting that, because of the Matrix, life and death are constituted in the psyche as already human even when beyond the reach of the human symbolic exchange or communication, even at the corpo-real level. Human body is not animal body. Non-human bestiality inflicted on any of my non-Is diminishes, and can also abolish, the capacity of the matrixial web for the reabsorption of loss, for transference of memory and for the processing of mourning. Antigone’s private death—she hangs herself in the womb-tomb—is less a price to pay than living through the irremediable explosion of the matrixial borderspace. Antigone literally acknowledges the corpo-real source of this psychical space: the shareable maternal womb.55

54

Christine Buci-Glucksman, ‘The Inner Space of Painting’, in Bracha Ettinger, Halala Autiswork (Aix en Provence, 1995), 58–68. 55 Ettinger, ‘Trangressing’, 205.

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The painter, working through a joint psychoanalytical and aesthetic exploration of/conversation with the mythic images of Antigone/Eurydice as figures for the present historical moment of a postShoah Jewish feminine subjectivity, proposes the aesthetic: the shocking encounter with the other’s dying, as the site of an aesthetic poeı¨sis that generates an ethical dimension: the encounter with the human in the space of the inhuman act of its desecration that can, in its ethical witnessing become a transport/transformation. What speaks to me through this painter’s practice and her reading of Sophocles’ Antigone mediated by Lacan’s aesthetic turning is the anguish of the survivor’s child. Formed by a transmitted trauma from a past event she did not witness, she becomes not only a witness without an event, which is, she then argues, the condition of every viewer of art, the inheritor of affect without the historical cause being known in ourselves. The artist also becomes what she calls a wit(h)ness, capable of bearing the trauma of others, or rather, incapable of not sharing it. Yet this gives death a means of transport to another site of living, even if that is still tragic. Antigone’s stance is not to set moral social law below family law, or the law of the gods who represent for human thought the beyond and below of being itself. The mythic figure of Antigone can be reread to offer what the historical trauma of our times has made horrifyingly real: that all our humanity is compromised if any of us is reduced from the human to the bestial, that such a wounding of the commonality can become a political intention, a bureaucratic aim, an administrative achievement that makes us collectively wonder what Antigone faced individually: what are the conditions for living on? Ettinger suggests that humanity arises not in the logic of phallic difference, one/other, but is unqualified, originary and that such a connectivity arises from and is the gift—dora—of a feminine site of matrixial co-subjectivity. Funeral rites are a mark of the human, but, Bracha Ettinger is arguing, only because being itself is already human through the matrixial, feminine prism and thus the feminine enters into thought not merely as the Thing/Other/Death or negativity and radical alterity. The feminine subjectivizes from that place of always already human becoming. If that is the case then sexuality as well as the aesthetic and the ethical is intimately associated with the matrixial site of feminine difference.

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If feminine originary sexual difference is an enigma of which we can know something through the matrixial prism, and if this prism opens to us the contact with the spaces of non-life, the transgression [the aller-outre, the outrage] with/in/to the feminine via the process of art has a particular aesthetic effect because in transmitting sub-knowledge from the site of transgression, in a borderspace that contacts by a surplus of borderlinking, the artist can bear wit(h)ness to and articulate sub-knowledge of/from the sex of the other. The fate of Tiresias—the figure who transgressed from male to female and back—which is impossible in the phallic stratum is also a matrixial ‘promise of happiness’ even if such beauty is tragic [as is the work of Bracha Ettinger in repeatedly visiting the site of Eurydice—woman caught between two deaths at the mouth of hell].56

The mythic feminine figures of Antigone and Eurydice thus flash out as mytho-poetic signifiers for an intellectual and political community concerned to re-stage the relations between classical myth and feminist thought in an ethics of our anxious present that can take on Freud’s injunctions to look to our own experience, and to our poets/artists and then to write our insights into theoretical formulations that offer a means of placing the matrixial concept of the feminine as a profoundly important contribution to those areas for which the Western classics remain a continuing archive and provocation: ethics, aesthetics, and human sociality. 56

Ibid. 205–6.


part ii

Myth and Politics


4

Lacan, Irigaray, and Beyond: Antigones and the Politics of Psychoanalysis

M i r i a m Leonard In her recent book Antigone’s Claim Judith Butler returns to a question once posed by George Steiner: What would have happened if psychoanalysis had taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure? If Freud has forever changed the meaning of Sophocles’ Oedipus for the twentieth century, Oedipus’ daughter/ sister seems largely to have escaped the analysts’ couch. But, as Griselda Pollock has argued in this volume, a desire to move ‘beyond Oedipus’ has gripped the recent history of psychoanalysis. As Pollock notes, ‘there can be no doubt that what both liberated and blocked Freud imaginatively and intellectually was the figuration of the human psyche through the exclusive structure of the Oedipus myth’. While psychoanalysis has its origins in Freud’s encounter with ‘a series of highly intelligent young woman patients’, the analyis of the female psyche was ‘ultimately buried when his own Thanks to Vanda Zajko, Charles Martindale, Griselda Pollock, Katie Fleming, and Simon Goldhill for their help with this essay. I would also like to thank the editors of PCPS where a longer version of this essay with a different focus appeared in 2003.

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self analysis . . . laid over that rich seam . . . the narcissistic image of an exclusively masculine, Oedipal psyche’. But the move ‘beyond Oedipus’ has coincided with the re-emergence of Antigone as a crucial figure in the post-Freudian history of psychoanalysis. For Jacques Lacan, Antigone will come to occupy a pivotal role in his formulation of an ethics of psychoanalysis. Moving away from the Hegelian reading of the play as a clash between opposing political positions, Lacan will identify Antigone with an ethics of pure desire. Luce Irigaray returns to Antigone to uncover the phallogocentric bias of both the Hegelian and Lacanian readings. For Irigaray, Antigone’s exclusion from the political is no selfwilled exile, but is rather the result of the prejudice of her readers from Hegel to Lacan and beyond. The conflict between Lacan and Irigaray, I will argue, provides us with one answer to Steiner’s question: If psychoanalysis had taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure it would have given rise to a more explicitly politicized understanding of the psychoanalytic sexual subject. The confrontation over the Antigone not only marked a crucial turningpoint in the history of psychoanalysis and its relationship to feminist thought, it also raises important questions about the relationship between ethics and politics in feminist theory more generally. The debate about ethics and politics in the Antigone is also fundamentally a debate about feminism’s relationship to the political.

lacan’s antigone and the ethics of pure desire Lacan’s reading of the Antigone appears within the context of his seminar devoted to The Ethics of Psychoanalysis1. As Lacan explains in his introductory session on the Antigone:

1 Lacan’s reading of the Antigone has recently attracted the attention of several critics: see Patrick Guyomard, La Jouissance du tragique: Antigone, Lacan, et le de´sir de l’analyste, (Paris, 1992); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘De l’e´thique: a` propos d’Antigone’, in N. Autonomova et al. (eds.), Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris, 1991), 31; Philippe Julien, Pour lire Jacques Lacan: Le retour a` Freud, (Paris, 1995); Philippe Van Haute, ‘Death and

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I told you that I would talk about Antigone today. I am not the one who has decreed that Antigone is to be the turning point in the field that interests us, namely, ethics. People have been aware of that for a long time. And even those who haven’t realized it are not unaware of the fact that there are scholarly debates on the topic. Is there anyone who doesn’t evoke Antigone whenever there is a question of law that causes conflict in us even though it is acknowledged by the community to be a just law?2

Lacan thus places the Antigone at the centre of the history of moral and political thought. But his language here is interesting. The slippage in terminology between a politics and an ethics of the Antigone will be crucial to Lacan. It will be this gap, this impasse between an ethics and a politics of psychoanalysis which will be at the centre of my reading of Lacan’s Antigone. Lacan’s conceptualization of ethics consciously writes itself in and against a whole tradition of ethical thought—stretching, as he puts it, ‘from Aristotle to Freud’.3 But his search involves a complex manipulation of ethical, moral, and political discourse. Lacan’s depoliticizing gesture is achieved through a reading of the Sophoclean drama which places the figure of Antigone at the foreground of the play. In Lacan’s version there is no room for any further protagonists—this is the tragedy of Antigone and Antigone alone. Creon finds himself utterly marginalized in Lacan’s interpretation. In the Lacanian reading, it will precisely be the desire of Sublimation in Lacan’s reading of the Antigione’, in S. Harasym (ed.), Le´vinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter (New York, 1998), 102–20; Lisa Walsh, ‘Her Mother Her Self: The Ethics of the Antigone Family Romance’, Hypathia, 14.3 (1999), 96–125; Jean-Michel Rabate´, Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature (New York, 2001); Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York, 2000); and Cecilia Sjo¨holm, ‘Family Values: Butler, Lacan and the Rise of Antigone’, Radical Philosophy 111 (2001), 24–32. For some readings by classicists see Nicole Loraux, ‘Antigone sans theáˆtre’, in Autonomova et al. (eds.), Lacan avec les philosophes (Paris, 1991), 42–9; Paul Allen Miller, ‘The Classical Roots of Post-Structuralism: Lacan, Derrida, Foucault’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition (1998), 204–25; and Jean Bollack, La Mort d’Antigone: la trage´die de Creon (Paris, 1999). 2

Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, tr. Dennis Portter (London, 1992), 243. 3 Ibid. 9.

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Antigone, outside the political context of a struggle of law and authority with Creon, which will provide the basis of Lacan’s elaboration of the ethical programme of psychoanalysis. So Lacan begins by asserting: ‘What does one find in the Antigone? First of all, one finds Antigone’. Or as the classicist Nicole Loraux has put it: ‘It is indeed Antigone, and only her, that Lacan encounters—‘‘the heroine and not necessarily the play’’, and I’m not sure that theatre really gets a look in this exclusive encounter’.4 Entitled ‘Antigone sans theáˆtre’, Loraux’s essay on Lacan’s Antigone can be read as a polite call to repoliticize psychoanalysis’s appropriation of antiquity. I want to suggest that Loraux’s critique of Lacan, her accusation that he leaves theatre out of the Antigone, can be read as a criticism of Lacan’s lack of attention to the politics of Athenian drama—when Loraux tries to put the ‘theáˆtre’ back into Lacan’s commentary, she finds herself reintroducing the ‘city’ into the ‘psyche’ of Lacan’s Antigone. So, if Loraux begins her analysis by praising Lacan for moving away from the ‘pious discourse’ on the Antigone, she nevertheless shrinks back from endorsing the outright rejection of the Hegelian reading—Lacan’s primary target in his commentary. For Hegel’s reading of the Antigone is absolutely central to understanding the politics of Lacan’s commitment to an ethical reading of the Antigone5. It is precisely against the dialectical reading of this play that 4

Loraux, ‘Antigone’, 42. Hegel’s reading of the Antigone spans several of his major works although the most important discussions appear in the Philosophy of Right, the Aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s writings on tragedy are conveniently assembled in A. Paolucci and H. Paolucci (eds.), Hegel on Tragedy (New York, 1962). The bibliography on Hegel’s Antigone is vast. See George Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Westen Literature, Art and Thought (Oxford, 1984); Ciro Alegria, Trago¨die und bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft: Motive und Probleme der politischen Aufhebung des ‘Notstaats’ bei Hegel (Frankfurt am Main, 1995); Christoph Menke, Trago¨die im Sittlichen: Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (Frankfurt am Main 1996); Martin Donougho, ‘The Woman in White: On the Reception of Hegel’s ‘‘Antigone’’ ’, Owl of Minerva, 21.1 (1989), 65–89; Judith Shklar, ‘Hegel’s Phenomenology an Elegy for Hellas’, in Z. A. Pelczynski (ed.), Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge, 1971), 73–89; William Conklin, ‘Hegel, the Author and 5


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Lacan’s analysis is written. Hegel’s seminal interpretation of Sophocles in the Phenomenology of Spirit dramatizes a clash between family and State, the individual and the polis. Hegel’s meditation on the nature of Antigone’s ethical consciousness is crucial to understanding the passage between ethics and politics in Lacan: Hegel denies Antigone full ethical consciousness which aims at the universal. For Hegel’s Antigone, in other words, there is no accession to the political. Lacan starts from a different premise. He defines his project as a search for what he calls ‘le pur desire’, ‘pure desire’. And it is Lacan’s pur de´sir which is explicitly at odds with the ‘morality’ of Hegel’s dialectical reading: In effect, Antigone reveals to us the line of sight that defines desire. This line of sight focuses on an image that possesses a mystery which up till now has never been articulated, since it forces you to close your eyes at the very moment you look at it. Yet that image is at the centre of tragedy, since it is the fascinating image of Antigone herself. We all know very well that over and beyond the dialogue and the moralizing arguments, it is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendor. She has a quality which both attracts us and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us; this terrible self-willed victim disturbs us.6

Lacan demands that his readers do not confuse his ethics of psychoanalysis with pre-existing moral discourses: ‘We are now in a position’, he tells us, ‘to be able to discuss the text of Antigone with a view to finding something other than a lesson in morality.’7 As we saw above, Lacan wants to prise apart his ethics from ‘la morale’, and it is precisely in this space that he wants to construct his innovative programme. But as Loraux puts it:

Authority in Sophocles’ Antigione’, in L. Rubin (ed.), Justice v. Law in Greek Political Thought (New York, 1997), 129–52. For feminist perspectives see Butler, Antigone’s Claim, Shari Neller Starret, ‘Critical Relations in Hegel: Woman, Family and the Divine’, in P. Mills (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (University Park, Pa., 1996), 253–74; and Kimberly Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford, 2003). 6 7

Lacan, Ethics, 247. Ibid. 292.

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Assigning to Antigone this position beyond the limit, Lacan knows or wants us to suppose, although he gets pleasure from not pointing it out directly, is tantamount to forbidding any return to Antigone and Creon, a couple which is Hegelian, for sure, but not purely Hegelian. Lacan is only concerned with Antigone and prefers to exile the all too human Creon from tragedy—from Antigone’s tragedy. . . . Its beautiful. . . . But this would mean that one would have to stop reading the tragedy at the moment of the heroine’s exit from the stage, or at the very least before the arrival of the messenger so one could ignore the second passion of the Antigone, that of Creon where the name of Antigone is not once spoken.8

So, as Loraux reveals, Lacan will have to do away with a good third of Sophocles’ drama if he wants his interpretation to stick.9 The almost complete absence of reference to Antigone’s tragedy in the last 300 lines of the play makes a difference to Lacan’s reading of Antigone’s ‘fascination’. More important than this distortion of the tragic narrative, however, are the consequences of Lacan’s reading for his ethics. Loraux’s interjection, ‘It’s beautiful’, has perhaps more significance than her subsequent remarks allow. For the whole project of Lacan’s reading is predicated on a fundamental interdependency of ethics and aesthetics.10 The violent illumination, the glow of beauty, coincides with the moment of transgression or of realization of Antigone’s Ate, which is the characteristic that I have chiefly insisted on and which introduced us to the exemplary function of Antigone’s problem in allowing us to determine the function of certain effects. It is in that direction that a certain relationship to a beyond of the central field is established for us, but it is also that which prevents us from seeing its true nature, that which dazzles us and separates us from its true function.11

8

Loraux, ‘Antigone’, 43. Jean Bollack argues in his book La Mort d’Antigone: la trage´die de Creon that Creon is the true subject of the Antigone’s tragedy. Lacan comes under explicit attack on pp. 98–104. 10 See Pollock above and her discussion of B. Ettinger ‘Transgressing With-In-To the Feminine’ in P. Florence and N. Foster (eds.), Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy and Feminist Understandings (Aldershot, 2000), 185–209. 11 Lacan, Ethics, 281. 9


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Lacan’s ethics are rather what Lacoue-Labarthe will characterize as an ‘esthe´thique.’12 For what is at stake in Lacan’s heroization of Antigone is precisely the beauty of her choice. A beauty which is not assimilated to any particular good. In Paul Allen Miller’s words: ‘For Lacan, it is the beauty of Antigone’s choice of a Good beyond all recognisable goods, beyond the pleasure principle, that gives her character its monumental status and makes her a model for an ethics of creation rather than conformity’.13 In order for Antigone’s choice to signify within the economics of a Lacanian ethics, Antigone must be removed from any dialectic with Creon. To see Antigone’s choice as pitting one value up against another, one dike in conflict with another, would be fundamentally to misunderstand the nature of her tragedy. As Van Haute puts it: ‘According to [Lacan], what is at stake here is not a conflict between two contrary principles, each of which can make claim to equal justice or injustice; it is in fact, says Lacan, a matter of a conflict between, on the one hand, Creon, who makes a mistake, and on the other, Antigone, who is found, as it were, jenseits von Gut und Bo¨se.’14 Lacan can, of course, rest his case on the notorious difficulty of constructing a convincing discourse of Antigone’s familial piety. We know well that Antigone’s differential treatment of her family members and her uncomfortable hierarchy of family ties has made it difficult to assimilate her cause to a simple model of the dike of the oikos. Her speech at 905 ff. is, of course, at the centre of this controversy: Never, had I been a mother of children, or if a husband had been mouldering in death, would I have taken this task upon me in the city’s despite. What law, ye ask, is my warrant for that word? The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another to replace the first-born; but father and mother hidden with Hades, no brother’s life could ever bloom for me again. (Jebb)

Hegel’s well-known interpretation of this passage not only sets up a dialectic between human and divine laws but also establishes sexual difference as the basis of its moral thought: 12

Lacoue-Labarthe ‘De l’e´thique’, 31. Paul Allen Miller, ‘The Classical Roots of Post-Structuralism: Lacan, Derrida, Foucault’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5.2 (1998), 209. 14 Van Haute, ‘Death and Sublimation’, 111. 13

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The loss of the brother is therefore irreparable to the sister and her duty towards him is the highest . . . The brother is the member of the Family in whom Spirit becomes an individuality which turns towards another sphere, and passes over into the consciousness of universality [ . . . ] He passes from the divine law, in whose sphere he lived, over to the human law. But the sister becomes, or the wife remains, the guardian of the divine law. In this way the two sexes overcome their (merely) natural being and appear in ethical significance, as diverse beings who share between them the two distinctions belonging to ethical substance.

Where for Hegel what had been at stake was a fundamental collision between the laws of the Gods and those of the polis,15 Lacan exiles the gods from his tragic world. As Lacan phrases it, ‘It isn’t simply the defence of the sacred rights of the dead and of the family, nor is it all that we have been told about Antigone’s saintliness.’16 Lacan’s secularizing gesture removes his Antigone from the ethical framework set up by Hegel. Far from representing a pious female ‘ethical substance’, for Lacan, the gaps in Antigone’s logic of the oikos are tantamount to introducing the fundamental tautology of her existence: ‘My brother is what he is, and it is because he is what he is and only he can be what he is, that I move forward to the fatal limit’. So it is that Antigone invokes no other right than that one, a right that emerges in the language of the ineffaceable character of what is—ineffaceable, that is, from the moment when the emergent signifier freezes it like a fixed object in spite of the flood of possible transformations. What is, is, and it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed.17

In Lacan’s reading, Antigone’s choice to bury Polynices becomes the ultimate ethical action precisely because it is disinherited of any moral logic. But how resonant is this of the Hegelian Antigone? For it is Hegel’s Antigone who is famously denied the ability to understand moral logic, to make an ethical choice. In Lacan it is the absolutist, tautologous, self-referential nature of Antigone’s 15

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), 275.On Hegel, Antigone, and religion see Steiner, Antigones, and Starret, ‘Critical Relations’. 16 Lacan, Ethics., 255. 17 Ibid. 279.


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motivation—a motivation without motive—which is precisely what makes it an ethics: Because he is abandoned to the dogs and the birds and will end his appearance on earth in impurity, with his scattered limbs an offense to heaven and earth, it can be seen that Antigone’s position represents the radical limit that affirms the unique value of his being without reference to any content, to whatever good or evil Polyneices may have done, or whatever he may be subjected to.18

But Lacan continues: The unique value involved is essentially that of language. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama that he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is nothing more than the break that the presence of language inaugurates in the life of man.19

In Antigone’s relation to her brother, Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis bring us back to language, to discourse, to the splitting of the self through man’s encounter with the symbolic. Many classicists have also commented on the necessary interrelationship between language and the politics and ethics of the Antigone.20 One could think of how the discourse of dike becomes profoundly destabilized in the clash of violent rhetorics of Antigone and Creon or how the language of duty decomposes around the different models of political and familial responsibility debated by Creon and Haemon. But Lacan’s rejection of the Hegelian dialectic, of any kind of dialogue between Creon and Antigone, indeed of any context for Antigone’s discourse, makes his a vision of Sophoclean drama where language rebounds in a self-referential echoing with no connection to social or political debate. Lacan’s ‘Antigone sans theáˆtre’ is precisely an Antigone removed from the theatre of language, from the politics of drama.

18

19 Ibid. Ibid. See Simon Goldhill, ‘Greek Drama and Political Theory’, in C. Rowe, M. Schofield (eds.), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge, 2000), 60–88; and Nicole Loraux, ‘La Main d’Antigone’ Metis 1 (1986), 165–96. 20

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Lacan’s anti-moralism, in founding his ethics of psychoanalysis on the notion of ‘pure desire’, recalls a familiar discourse of structuralism. For it is precisely this tendency of structuralist discourse to make the ‘linguistic turn’, far removed from any social or ideological context, which has made it so suspect to its politically engaged critics. Lacan would seem to perform this tendency almost to its limits in his reading of the Antigone under the sign of an ethics of psychoanalysis. For the ethics of pure desire would in a sense seem to be the personification of a double rejection of politics by the joint forces of structuralist and psychoanalytic discourse. But it is precisely at the moment when a system professes purity that it is the most vulnerable to political abuse. In other words, Lacan’s model of a pure, contentless ethics can all too easily let in all kinds of dubious ideological contents through the back door. But not only does his reading leave itself open to dangerous political manipulation, Lacan’s own discourse of pure desire is hardly a politicsfree zone. Even were one to accept Lacan’s distancing of the Antigone from the moral plain, it hardly seems right, in the context of Sophocles’ drama, to claim that Antigone’s desire is entirely pure. In fact, it is a paradox of Lacan’s reading that this psychoanalytic interpretation pays so little attention to the continuing cycle of the incestuous narrative of the house of Oedipus. Antigone’s decision to bury her brother and accept a certain death is not just the performance of an unconditional ethics, it also represents a rejection of normative patriarchal structures. Not only does Antigone as a woman stand up to the authority of her guardian Creon, but her decision to die also denies generational continuity through her marriage to Haemon. Simultaneously the daughter and sister of her father, Antigone rejects the possibility of a return to normative genealogy by choosing her brother above her husband. As Guyomard puts it: ‘A paradox emerges. The Lacanian eulogy of Antigone is the application of his theory of desire [ . . . ] but it is also at the same time a hidden eulogy of incest. Is the pure desire which Antigone personifies an incestuous one? Is its very purity the sign of incest?’21 As Guyomard goes on to demonstrate, Lacan’s theory of incest is intimately bound up with his discourse of female desire. So, Guyomard continues, this alliance between pure 21

Guyomard, Jouissance, 59.


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desire and incest is an ‘uncomfortable conclusion which Lacan avoids; he does, however, explicitly raise the question of incest, but it is an incest which is forced upon the figure of the mother. In order to maintain a theory of a unique and unifying signifier, so closely aligned to his theory of the phallus that it is impossible to talk about one without implying the other (a theory which is itself upheld by the place of the father, and here that is to say Oedipus), the impurity, the confusion, and the rupture are attributed to the mother and the maternal figure.’22 So, having identified Antigone as the incarnation of pure desire, Lacan argues: Think about it. What happens to her desire? Shouldn’t it be the desire of the Other and be linked to the desire of the mother? The text alludes to the fact that the desire of the mother is the origin of everything. The desire of the mother is the founding desire of the whole structure, the one that brought into the world the unique offspring that are Eteocles, Polyneices, Antigone and Ismene; but it is also a criminal desire. Thus at the origin of tragedy and of humanism we find once again an impasse that is the same as Hamlet’s except strangely enough even more radical.23

In a swift gesture then, Lacan manages to exile all that is impure in Antigone’s incestuous resolve to the crimes of the mother. The mother as the origin of both creation and destruction. The mother who gives birth inevitably also gives death to her children. In the process, Oedipus becomes innocent, excused of his responsibility for his own incest. The whole weight of the crime rests on Jocasta’s shoulders. In an analysis which otherwise acknowledges the importance of gender politics as a frame for reading Lacan’s discussion of the Antigone, one of Lacan’s most recent critics, Jean-Michel Rabate´, interestingly tries to dodge this difficult passage. So Rabate´ claims ‘The one problematic assertion made by Lacan concerns what he sees as the origins of the tragic ‘evil’ or Ate, namely the desire of the mother.’24 But after quoting the passage I cited above, Rabate´ merely retorts: ‘We should not attack Lacan for unduly blaming poor Jocasta!’25 and goes on to discuss another issue. Why should one ‘not attack’ Lacan? Why does Rabate´ think this is a sufficient commentary on a passage which he admits is central to 22 24

23 Ibid. 59–60. Lacan, Ethics, 283. 25 Rabate´, Jacques Lacan, 83. Ibid.

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the construction of Lacan’s ethics? Rabate´’s coyness shows us, again, how resistant many Lacanians remain to exposing the difficult ideological programmes that lie behind Lacan’s vision of the ethics of psychoanalysis. But as a literary critic, Rabate´’s complicity is all the more important for understanding Lacan’s investment in Sophoclean drama. Lacan insists that his interpretation is supported by the Sophoclean text—‘the text alludes to the fact,’ he retorts. It was certainly not beyond Sophocles to dramatize the destructive force of female desire: one need only think of the violent narratives of the Trachinae or the Electra. However, Jocasta is nowhere portrayed in the Oedipus Tyrannus as the active agent of Oedipus’ incest: the tragedy takes form precisely in Jocasta’s and Oedipus’s mutual ignorance of their actions. The Lacanian version, on the other hand, is predicated on a radical disparity of agency and responsibility—for Lacan, Jocasta has consciously acted out her desire on an unsuspecting Oedipus. In Guyomard’s words: Lacan identifies in an imaginary and symoblic way Jocasta’s desire—the desire of the mother—with the origin, the origin of destruction. The bad mother, the obscene and maternal figure of the super-ego comes to occupy the tragic scene. The eternal threat of the feminine, the duplicity of woman, the Oedipal hatred of the mother, the potentially destructive nature of mother–daughter relations [ . . . ] all these are condensed, and take shape without any hestitation or precaution, in this radical essential impurity which makes the desire of the mother a criminal origin.

In other words, Antigone’s pure desire has its mirror image, its supporting opposite in the impure desire of her mother. We are back here with the most classic economy of misogyny. Antigone’s pure, sexless desire to care for her brother is held up in opposition to the active, dangerous, erotic desire of her mother Jocasta and her original sin of incest. As Guyomard puts it: ‘The feminine sees itself incarnated in its two most familiar traits: Eve, the temptress whose diabolical desire seduces man and precipitates his fall and the virgin, a new Eve, immaculate mother who saves man without either sex or temptation by bringing a divine child into the world.’26

26

Rabate´, Jacques Lacan, 62.


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The pure desire of Antigone, then, turns out to have a surprisingly literal meaning. Despite his efforts to escape Hegel’s Christianizing reading, Lacan posits a virginal martyr at the centre of his construction of an ethics of psychoanalysis. In introducing the concept of an ethics of pure desire in his commentary on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis the critic Julien is at pains to separate the notion of ‘de´sir pur’ from that of ‘pur de´sir’. As he puts it: ‘This is not a pure desire in the sense that one could make a judgement between pure and impure desires.’27 For Lacan, he insists, there is no moral discrimination of desires, no desire which would be more or less impure than another. Julien’s reading, however, contrasts strikingly with Lacan’s taxonomies of female desire in his Ethics. Lacan’s amoral ethics is nevertheless predicated on a surprisingly traditional sexual morality. His formulation of a contentless ethics, then, could not be more disingenuous. When Lacan exiles politics and morality in the name of anti-humanism it is only to return to the most pernicious and exclusionary rhetorics of humanist discourse. The pure desire of Antigone is complicit with the most traditional of humanist fantasies. Man remains very much at the centre of Lacan’s world. Lacan’s reading of the Antigone in his Ethics, then, raises many questions about the political consequences of a Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis. And it is precisely in the context of this dialogue over the Antigone that Luce Irigaray founds one of her most forceful denunciations of the political blindness of the ethics of psychoanalysis. By opening up a dialogue with Hegel around the Antigone, Irigarary puts the politics of this play firmly back on the agenda for psychoanalysis. Irigaray’s feminist critique of the phallocentric edifice of psychoanalysis brings us straight back to the hidden ideologies of the Lacanian reading.

irigaray’s antigone: the sexual difference of the unconscious Irigaray’s critique of the Hegelian Antigone will help us articulate many of the questions which emerged from Lacan’s Ethics of 27

Julien, Pour lire, 107.

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Psychoanalysis. For it is precisely against the apolitical paradigm of the Antigone that Irigaray’s analysis is written. Irigaray makes this agenda explicit in Thinking the Difference: ‘With regard to civil rights and responsibilities, I would like to return once again to the character of Antigone, because of her relevance to our present situation, and also because she is used today to diminish women’s role and political responsibility.’ She continues: According to the most frequent interpretations—mythical, metaphorical and ahistorical interpretations, as well as those that denote an eternal feminine—Antigone is a young woman who opposes political power, despising governors and governments. Antigone is a sort of young anarchist, on a first-name basis with the Lord, whose divine enthusiasm leads her to anticipate her own death rather than to assume her share of responsibility in the here and now, and thus also in the order of the polis. Antigone wants to destroy civil order for the sake of a rather suicidal familial and religious pathos, which only her innocent, virginal youth can excuse or perhaps even make attractive.28

In Irigaray’s version, Lacan’s beautiful virginal figure, seductive in her innocence, is seductive precisely because she allows men to exile her from the civil sphere. But as Irigaray goes on to claim: ‘Antigone is nothing like that. She is young, true. But she is neither an anarchist nor suicidal, nor unconcerned with governing [ . . . ] It suits a great many people to say that women are not in government because they do not want to govern. But Antigone’, she concludes, ‘governs as far as she is permitted.’29 But Irigaray’s appeal for the civil rights of women in Thinking the Difference is based on her earlier reading of the Antigone in the Speculum of the Other Woman—her doctoral thesis whose publication was responsible for her expulision from Lacan’s Ećole Freudienne. Here, through a rereading of Hegel’s Antigone, ‘Irigaray’, in Chanter’s words, ‘retrieves Antigone from the role in which she is cast by Hegel in his reading of Sophocles’ play, as the other of reason, ethics and knowledge.’30 The focus of Irigaray’s analysis is 28

Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans. Karin Montin (London, 1994), 67–8. 29 Ibid. 68. 30 Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York and London, 1995), 81.


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Hegel’s denial of Antigone’s ‘consciousness’; in the Hegelian version, although Antigone acts ethically, she does not know, indeed is congenitally incapable of knowing it. Irigaray places as an epigraph to her reading of Hegel’s Antigone a passage of Hegelian sexual biology: On the one hand the uterus in the male is reduced to a mere gland, while on the other, the male testicle in the female remains enclosed within the ovary, fails to emerge into opposition, and does not become an independent and active cerebrality. The clitoris, moreover, is inactive feeling in general; in the male on the other hand, it has its counterpart in active sensibility, the swelling vital, the effusion of blood into the corpora cavernosa and the meshes of the spongy tissue of urethra. [ . . . ] On account of this difference therefore, the male is the active principle; as the female remains in her undeveloped unity, she constitutes the principle of conception.31

She will go on to show how Hegel’s notion of ethical consciousness is inextricably bound up with this vision of the material sexual body. In other words, Irigaray shows up the naturalizing discourse of Hegel’s ethico-political thinking. The Hegelian reading places woman on the side of nature, outside the civic sphere. Such a reading, however, presupposes a deeply ideological reading of the ‘natural’. Hegel’s assertion that the reason that Antigone ‘does not attain to consciousness of [what is the ethical], or to the objective existence of it [is] because the law of the Family is an implicit, inner essence which is not exposed to the daylight of consciousness, but remains an inner feeling’32 is predicated precisely on his vision of biology. In her analysis of a Hegelian ethics, Irigaray reveals their profound implication in a self-contradictory logic of sexual difference. We must go back to the decisive ethical moment which saw the blow struck producing a wound that no discourse has closed simply. [ . . . ] A dark potentiality that has always been on the watch comes suddenly into play when the deed is done: it catches the consciousness of self in the act—the act of also being, or having the unconsciousness which remains alien to it but yet plays a major role in the decision consciousness takes. Thus the public offender who has killed turns out to be the father, and the queen who he has 31

Hegel quoted in Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 266. 32 Hegel, Phenomenlogy of Spirit quoted in Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 89.

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wedded is the mother. But the purest fault is that committed by the ethical consciousness, which knew in advance what law and power it was disobeying—that is to say, necessarily, the fault committed by femininity. For if the ethical essence in its divine, unconscious, female side, remains obscure, its prescriptions on the human, masculine, communal side are exposed to full light. And nothing here can excuse the crime or minimize the punishment. And in its burial, in its decline to ineffectiveness and pure pathos, the feminine must recognize the full measure of its guilt.33

But as Irigaray goes on to exclaim: ‘What an amazing vicious circle in a single syllogistic system. Whereby the unconscious, while remaining unconscious, is yet supposed to know the laws of a consciousness—which is permitted to remain ignorant of it—and will become even more repressed as a result of failing to respect those laws.’34 In the Hegelian version, the female is both on the side of the unconscious and on the side of the guilty. Determined by biology to passivity, woman is at the same time identified with subversive activity by her society. As Hegel puts it: Since the community only gets an existence through its interference with the happiness of the Family, and by dissolving [individual] self-consciousness into the universal, it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy—womankind in general. Womankind—the everlasting irony of the community—changes by intrigue the universal end of government into the private end, transforms the universal act into a work of some particular individual, and perverts the universal property of the State into a possession and ornament for the Family.35

It is in violating the laws of the community that Antigone is pushed to its margins, and yet, her very action of rebellion is supposed to be unconscious, and therefore, one would assume, beyond responsibility to the law. Antigone’s action is, thus, doubly marginalized by the polis—its other, both as an a-political and as an anti-political action. For Hegel, woman combines within her this double and utterly inconsistent threat. Irigaray, on the other hand, wants to repoliticize Antigone’s choice by bringing it precisely back into the realm of the conscious, of the civic. In Chanter’s words, in her analysis of 33 34 35

Irigaray, Speculum, 276–7. Ibid. Hegal, Phenomenology, 288.


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the Antigone Irigaray shows us ‘how it is necessary to create a symbolic order for women that will not only subtend their civil rights, but will also call for a new conception of the civic realm, one that takes account of sexual identity’.36 In Irigaray’s analysis, Hegel removes Antigone from the symbolic order and thus denies her the possibility of significance in the political world. Irigaray’s reading shows us the necessity of ‘question[ing] again the foundations of our symbolic order in mythology and in tragedy, because they deal with a landscape which installs itself in the imagination and then, all of a sudden becomes law’.37 Irigaray’s challenge to Hegel, then, is in an important way also a direct challenge to Lacan. Although Lacan wants to place his reading under the sign of a radical anti-Hegelianism, Irigaray’s analysis shows how complicit it remains with the premises of a Hegelian vision of sexual difference. By making Antigone the spokeswoman of the unconscious ethics of psychoanalysis Lacan ends up by confirming the Hegelian dialectic he wishes to subvert—as Lacan puts it himself elsewhere, ‘Everybody is Hegelian without knowing it’.38 As the representative of an a/anti-political ethics, Antigone ends up by adopting the same antithetical position to Creon that she does in the Hegelian version. So the anti-political agenda of Lacan’s ethical programme is just one more way of removing Antigone from the political scene. Lacan’s anti-humanism remains utterly steeped in a humanist conception of political man. As Lacan’s rebellious disciple, Irigaray wants to make a Creon out of Lacan. Although Lacan repeatedly identifies himself with Antigone, for Irigaray he is the ultimate representative of male authority. For all its desire to appropriate the ‘feminine’, Lacanian psychoanalysis remains on the side of Creon, on the side of patriarchy. Irigaray’s analysis shows us how psychoanalytic discussion of the ‘unconscious’ will always be profoundly caught up in this political debate. Lacan’s desire to make an ethical heroine out of Antigone merely succeeds in 36

Chanter, Ethics of Eros, 125. E. Baruch and L. Serrano (eds.), Women Analzye Women (New York, 1988), 159. 38 Jacques Lacan, Le Se´minaire II: Le Moi dans la theórie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Paris, 1978), 93. 37

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corroborating Hegel’s attempts to keep Antigone outside the realm of the political. The ethical unconscious of the Lacanian reading becomes yet another harbour for male political hegemony. If Griselda Pollock has argued that Antigone’s relationship with her brother could be used as a model for moving beyond sexual difference, Irigaray, I believe, ultimately shows up the political danger of imagining such a beyond. ‘The move beyond Oedipus’, Pollock writes, ‘here as elsewhere, is a move beyond phallically defined sexual difference, that, despite its own hopes, becomes only the ever more occluded reinstatement precisely of the universal normalization of the phallus as the only arbiter of subjectivity and meaning’. For Pollock the concept of ‘sexual difference’ can only be ‘phallically defined’. As she argues: ‘you either get sexual difference by Oedipus, or no sexual difference at all, which adds up to the same monistic logic of One or None.’ While Irigaray’s project is to expose that double-bind, Pollock’s/Ettinger’s is to move beyond it. So Pollock follows Ettinger as she imagines Antigone as a post-Kristeviean creation of the maternal semiotic. Lacan elects his Antigone as a representative of the Real.39 But what ultimately ensues from this valorization of Antigone as a figure who escapes the Oedipal economy is the reincarnation of the not fully conscious female of the old Hegelian reading. The move away from sexual difference so often results in the ‘ever more occluded’ reinscription of the same pernicious dichotomies. The move beyond Oedipus can all too easily become a step backwards to further political marginalization. Sexual difference, even and especially because it is ‘phallically defined’, still has a crucial strategic role to play in feminist politics. As Antigone wages her battle with Creon over the body of Polyneices, so psychoanalysis has waged its own battle about the political over the body of Antigone. Antigone’s myth appropriated and reappropriated has become the locus classicus of a debate about the

ˇ izˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Bath, On which see Slavoj Z 1988) and Enjoy your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York and London, 1992). 39


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interrelationship between political action and sexual difference. Irigaray systemically exposes the bad faith of the male canon’s attempts to annex the fate of Antigone. To paraphrase Lacan’s famous dictum on the place of woman in the symbolic order, for the patrichal tradition from Hegel to Lacan, ‘Antigone n’existe pas’, ‘Antigone does not exist’. The question for a feminist reading of the Antigone remains—what might it mean for Antigone to exist?


5

Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood

S i m o n Goldhill for Teresa Brennan: in memoriam

Since Hegel . . . Antigone’s history, as an icon for feminist thinking about the family and the state, is long, ongoing and passionate; but I want to stall this history at the very first line of Sophocles’ foundational play. To go back to the beginning, in order to trace how this verse’s extraordinary act of address has paradoxically resulted in a misrecognition, a silencing that in turn poses a troubling question for the myths of kinship. There is no metaphor more potent in modern feminism than sisterhood. It is the problematic invention of that bond which Antigone encourages us to explore. o¯ koinon autadelphon Isme¯ne¯s kara Of common kin, my very sister, dear Ismene.

Antigone calls Ismene forth; and will dismiss her. And she remains a silenced, despised figure in the critical tradition. ‘Ismene is set aside’, Thanks to Miriam Leonard and Helen Morales for comments on this chapter as it developed. It is dedicated in fondest memory to Teresa Brennan for whom feminist theory was always political activity.

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as Irigaray states—and herself performs.1 For in the grand clash of ruler and resistance, male and female, blood and State, what place is there for poor Ismene? ‘Ismene seems indisputably a ‘‘woman’’ in her weakness, her fear, her submissive obedience, her tears, madness, hysteria—all of which are met with condescending scorn on the part of the king. Ismene is subsequently shut up . . . with the other women.’2 As merely a ‘woman’, Ismene is indeed scorned not merely by Creon, but also by Antigone and by critics. She becomes at best a foil for her sister, who ‘does not yield to the law of the city, of its sovereign, of the man of the family’.3 There is no doubt who the heroine is here, who provides feminist inspiration, who transcends being a ‘woman’: the woman, with whom Irigaray identifies in her resistance to Lacan, her maıˆtre.4 For Irigaray, reading Antigone is paradigmatic of a necessary engagement with antiquity in contemporary politics. Myth matters hugely to her feminist agenda: her project is to dismantle the symbolic furniture of the mind, the struts of patriarchy. That is where myth does its work, especially the intellectual myths of Plato’s heirs.5 It is this alone that could justify her intellectual hooliganism when she declares Antigone to ‘mark the historical bridge between matriarchy and patriarchy’.6 If this sentence is not a crass recapitulation of the myth of matriarchy, articulated by Bachofen and Engels (and more weakly echoed in modern myths of the Goddess),7 it must be an 1

L. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans., G. Gill, (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 219. 2 Ibid. 217–18. 3 Ibid. 218. 4 See M. Leonard, Athens in Paris (Oxford, 2005). 5 See M. Leonard, ‘Irigaray’s Cave: Feminist Theory and the Politics of French Classicism’, Ramus, 28 (1999), 152–68; T. Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York and London, 1995); M. Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosopher in the Feminine (London and New York, 1991). 6 Irigaray, Speculum, 217. 7 A tradition I have discussed briefly in S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986), 51–4. See J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother-Right., ed and trans. R. Mannheim (London, 1967); F. Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. E. Leacock (London, 1972); J. Bamberger, The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in

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ironic and provocative comment on how ‘history’, from Irigaray’s perspective, is the self-authorizing narrative of patriarchal society. Antigone is to become a weapon to set against that ‘history’. Yet why, then, shut up Ismene with the other women? In a play which makes so much of kinship, can a sister be just one of the other women? A ‘woman’? Since Hegel . . . ‘Kinship’ has been central to feminist responses to Hegel. Hegel’s reading of Antigone depends on an opposition of family kinship and state authority, and it is precisely on his valuation of kinship, and on his construction of the family, that feminist criticism has focused.8 There have been two main lines of engagement. First, it has been emphasized that Hegel’s analysis denies to Antigone an ethical consciousness. Because of her gender, she cannot achieve the full moral agency that would allow her accession to the political. With considerable rhetorical potency, Irigaray puts as an epigraph to her discussion a lengthy quotation from Hegel on the physical, bodily difference between males and females, whichconcludes: ‘Thus, the simple retention of the conception in the uterus is differentiated in the male into productive cerebrality and the external vital. On account of this difference therefore, the male is the active principle; as the female remains in her undeveloped unity, she constitutes the principle of conception.’ For Plato’s Socrates, real men Primitive Society’, in M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds.), Women, Culture and Society (Stanford, Calif., 1975); S. Pembroke, ‘The Last of the Matriarchs: A Study in the Inscriptions of Lycia’, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 8 (1965), 217–47 and ‘Women in Charge: The Function of Alternatives in Early Greek Tradition and the Ancient Idea of Matriarchy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 30 (1967), 1–35. On Bachofen’s background, see the riveting L. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago, 2000). 8

See P. J. Mills (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (University Park, Pa. 1996), esp. S. Benhabib, ‘On Hegel, Women and Irony’; P. J. Mills, Women, Nature and Psyche (New Haven, 1987); J. Elshtain, ‘Antigone’s Daughters’, Democracy, 2 (1982), 46–59; L. Zerilli, ‘Machiavelli’s Sisters: Women and the ‘Conversation’ of Political Theory’, Political Theory, 19 (1991), 252–75; Chanter, T. Ethics of Eros. I have a soft spot too for C. Lonzi’s Sputiamo su Hegel (Milan, 1970).

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have soul babies—thoughts—and only those most tied to the bodily rather than the spiritual realm long for immortality through children with women; for Aristotle, men provide the guiding spirit that forms the (mere) matter provided by the mother. Hegel is in a long tradition when he makes bodily difference the ground and proof of the moral and political hierarchies of gender. The denial to Antigone of moral agency because of her gender provides the first point of criticism of his analysis. Secondly, however, the very construction of the family and of kin by Hegel has been scrutinized. Antigone, as Judith Butler notes, both for Hegel and for those who work with his analysis, ‘articulates a prepolitical opposition to politics, representing kinship as the sphere that conditions the possibility of politics without ever entering into it’.9 This is strikingly evidenced by Irigaray whose critique, for Butler, thereby shows the deep influence of Hegel. ‘Woman is the guardian of the blood,’ she writes. ‘But as both she and it have had to use their substance to nourish the universal consciousness of self, it is in the form of bloodless shadows—of unconscious fantasies— that they maintain an underground subsistence.’10 This repressed existence can, however, erupt: ‘But at times the forces of the world below become hostile because they have been denied the right to live in daylight. These forces rise up and threaten to lay waste the community. To turn it upside down.’11 The hope is that ‘womanhood would then demand the right to pleasure, to jouissance, even to effective action.’12 The aim is to find a place to think from, where ‘blood’s autonomous flow will never re-unite again’.13 Antigone, for Irigaray, can help us revalue the place of blood in politics, to rethink what blood means for patriarchal thought. Butler’s response to the Hegelian opposition, however, is differently aligned. She sets out to question whether kinship can exist ‘without the support and mediation of the state, and whether there can be the state without the family as its support and mediation.’14 9

J. Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York, 2000), 2. 10 Irigaray, Speculum, 225. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 226. 13 Ibid. 14 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 5.


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She analyses the impure, interwoven mutual interdependence of the discourse of family and State, and she emphasizes both the impure sexual origin of Antigone herself in the incestuous family, and the familial origin of the legitimacy of Creon’s rule. Consequently, for Butler, Antigone’s act of resistance produces ‘the social deformation of both idealized kinship and political sovereignty’.15 Most tellingly, the idealizing readings of critics reproduce the blindnesses of the idealized rhetoric on stage. Butler aims to uncover the messy political performativity of Antigone, in order to question the relation between kinship and the reigning systems of cultural intelligibility: Antigone represents not kinship in its ideal form but its deformation and deplacement, one that puts the reigning regimes of representation into crisis and raises the question of what the conditions of intelligibility could have been that would have made her life possible, indeed, what sustaining web of relations makes our lives possible, those of us who confound kinship in the re-articulation of its terms?16

Butler’s agenda—to see how a re-articulation of kinship terms can become a politics which is acted out—takes her cue and inspiration from Antigone. I want to follow the logic of Butler’s analysis, but to take her enquiry back to the opening line of Sophocles’ play in order to question not merely why Butler, like so many critics, avoids discussing Ismene, but also to interrogate what Antigone’s address calls into being—and why silencing Ismene is itself a revealing and worrying political gesture. o¯ koinon autadelphon Isme¯ne¯s kara Of common kin, my very sister, dear Ismene.

George Steiner in Antigones is particularly eloquent about the ‘fertile duplicity’ of these opening words.17 Koinon means ‘common’ or ‘shared’. It can mean ‘kin’, as ‘sharing common blood’, but it is also a key political term: ‘commonwealth’, ‘the common good’ (though Steiner does not pursue this semantic level).18 It can imply a 15

16 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 6. Ibid. 24. G. Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and Thought (Oxford, 1984), 208. 18 See e.g. 162, where the chorus describes itself as ‘summoned by this common mandate’, koino¯i ke¯rugmati—not only ‘shared’ but ‘of common interest’, and ‘of importance to the State’. 17

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normative bond both at the civic and at the familial level, and an object or aim of the community. Democracy’s special commitment to the collective makes it always a pointed term. But it is also a charged and troubling word for members of an incestuous family, where what is common marks the confusion of incest. What is it that Antigone and Ismene share? Autadelphon ‘very sister’, a rare word, insists that the mere appellation ‘sister’ is not enough. Juxtaposed to koinon it renders the relation between the two sisters ‘concretely hyperbolic’.19 It gives and asks for a special form of recognition. The periphrasis Isme¯ne¯s kara, literally (as it were) ‘head of Ismene’, normally implies respect, affection, or both. Hence my translation ‘dear’. (Only Ho¨lderlin tries to transfer this idiom into a modern language: ‘O Ismenes Haupt’, he translates, straining against the norms of language, almost to the point of parody.)20 Every act of naming is an act of categorization, and the persuasive definition of this recognition is a powerful pleading. Ho¨lderlin, again, strains to catch the pull of the address with his single, craggy opening word ‘Gemeinsamschwesterliches’. Antigone is calling a charged and normative relationship into being. Antigone’s claim of sisterhood is, of course, fundamental to her action of burying her brother. It motivates her behaviour. She acts ‘as a sister’, and there has been much critical commentary on how she relates to her brother (a relationship made doubly difficult by her Oedipal inheritance).21 Yet the relationship of sisterhood is not simply or necessarily symmetrical, nor can it be taken for granted. In Homer, the foundational text of Greek culture, there is no relationship of sisterhood that demands such recognition. Brothers are a privileged connection, for sure. When Odysseus returns in disguise, 19

Steiner, Antigones, 209. On Ho¨lderlin’s Antigone see Steiner, Antigones, 66–106 (with further bibliography). My reference to parody should cue Houseman’s famous parody of tragic diction: ‘O suitably attired in leather boots head of a traveller’. 21 Since Hegel . . . See J. Derrida, Glas (Paris 1974); Irigaray, Speculum (both originally published in 1974); C. P. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 184–90; M. Whitlock Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge, 1989), 106–48. 20


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he questions his son about the difficult state of the household. ‘Is it that the people hate you?’, he asks, ‘Or do you find fault with your brothers, on whom a man trusts in a fight, even when the quarrel is huge’ (Od. 16. 95–8). Telemachus rejects these ideas: not only do the people not hate him, but also he has no brothers to find fault with. For ‘Zeus has made my race single. Arkesias had a single son, Laertes; Laertes was father to Odysseus, single son; Odysseus gave birth to me, single son’ (Od. 117–20). Brotherhood has two conflicting drives within it, which go to the heart of the patriarchal, patrilineal household. On the one hand, brothers indicate strength. A set of men to work the land and protect the property. To rely on one son to continue the family line is extremely risky in a society where family continuity is dangerously precarious at the best of times. But on the other hand, inheritance also makes plural brothers a source of dissension. How can the paternal property be split and remain viable? So Hesiod’s Works and Days, no less a foundational text for the Greek family than the Odyssey, is predicated on the dramatic situation of two brothers, Hesiod and Perses, in conflict over the patrimony. Indeed, a string of brothers, from Eteocles and Polyneices to Atreus and Thyestes, find brotherhood to be the source of dissent, violence, and intrafamilial conflict. Brotherhood is a relationship that most fully articulates the tensions within the hierarchies of the family in the patriarchal, patrilineal household. To call on a brother is to open the normative, power-laden ties of such a relationship. But in Homer, Hesiod, and indeed all our extant texts before the fifth century, sisterhood is not so charged. Even on the rare occasions when sisters are named as such, the act of naming brings none of the associations of power, precedence, and threat from within or without. None of the rhetoric of family loyalty. It is not possible to call on a sister—either for a male or for a female. Even when sisters are made parallel because of their similar traits—Helen and Clytemnestra, say (Od. 11. 436–9)—it is a (rhetorical) example of ‘the plots of the race of women’, not a family sign. Groups of sisters normally appear as ‘daughters of so-and-so’ with no mention of their ties as sisters. Since a daughter/sister has such a different relationship to the household from the son/brother—there is no issue of precedence or, most importantly, of inheritance—the

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rhetoric of kinship is quite different. ‘Sister’ is not a normative term of address: it is not an appeal. The system of power determines the scene of naming. Yet in the fifth century and in Athens in particular there immediately seems to be a telling difference in the rhetoric of affiliation. The general frame of the city-state, on the one hand, and the specific frame of Athenian democracy, on the other, change the structuring of the politics of the personal. The city-state redefines the nature of collective activity. Democracy, the constitution of Athens, restructures the commitments of the individual to the collective in a particularly heightened manner. While the household depends on hierarchy, precedence, and the authority of the kurios [the master], democracy privileges horizontal relationships of citizenship: equality before the law. The rhetoric of family terms shifts in a fundamental way, as the political system changes. In democracy key institutions of the family, like burial, and key terms of family affiliation are taken over by the State (‘the laws are my father and mother. . . ’). What is more, brothers can become a civic, political symbol, rather than a token of family strength, as, for example, Aristogeiton and Harmodius, the brothers who killed the tyrant of Athens, were honoured in cult and drinking songs and their statues were erected in the market-place of the city. ‘Fraternity’, as Derrida has discussed at length, has remained central to the ideology of modern Western politics and its relation to ancient political theory. ‘All men are brothers under one universal father who wills the happiness of all’ is a banner of Enlightenment revolutionary politics—its phallocracy, as Derrida puts it—which always puts fraternity next to liberty.22 In this all-embracing shift in political rhetoric, and against the claim of fraternity, sisterhood also changes as a normative term. Sisterhood learns to speak. In Homer, Agamemnon has three daughters (Il. 9.144–5/286–7): Iphianassa, Laodike, and Chrysothemis. Iphianassa is often taken to be the same name as Iphigeneia, though in the Cypria (fr. 13) both Iphianassa and Iphigeneia appear (giving Agamemnon four daughters). In Hesiod (fr. 23a16–17 [West]), however, Agamemnon has two daughters, Iphimede and Electra. Iphimede is sacrificed for the 22

Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (New York, 1997).


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fleet, but saved miraculously by Artemis (as is Iphigeneia in most later tellings of this family history). But Electra has no story in Hesiod or Homer. Iphigeneia’s (or Iphimede’s) sacrifice is a terrible act of a father to a daughter, which leads to no narrative possibilities for Orestes, let alone Electra. Orestes—his story is told more than a dozen times by Homer—returns and takes revenge for his father’s death as a sole agent, a man with a mission. There is no mention of any sister in this tale. But in Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 bce) there is a pivotal shift of expressability. Now Electra is a character, a figure who speaks and who has a narrative. In Aeschylus’ Choephoroi, unlike Sophocles’ Electra or Euripides’ Electra, Electra is a conventionally proper girl. She speaks in the play primarily during acts of religious observance, such as the opening scene of pouring offerings, and the great mourning song: religious ritual is the privileged scene of public female utterance. She is sent inside by her brother as the moment of revenge approaches in order to wait in silence for marriage, which is the archetypal role of a woman in the patriarchal family. Paradigmatically, she prays to be more pious than her mother (Cho. 140–1). Yet when Electra and Orestes meet in the most extraordinary recognition scene of all Greek tragedy, sisterhood becomes bizarrely highlighted. Electra approaches the tomb of her father, and finds on it a lock of hair. She holds the lock to her own head, and sees a similarity to her own. She finds a footprint by the tomb, places her own foot in it, and from these two signs of likeness recognizes that her brother has returned. This leap of faith was brilliantly mocked already by Euripides in his Electra, but its very strangeness raises a set of highly pertinent questions. What is it for a brother and sister to recognize each other? And like this? What is at stake in this act, which is a gesture not just of perception but also of authorization? This recognition scene needs to be viewed within two frames. First, the Oresteia retells a Homeric story for the new political world of democratic Athens. The play finds closure, its answers, in the justice of the city. It provides a charter myth for the city’s lawcourts, and celebrates the city as the condition of possibility for social order. It moves away from the hierarchical family towards the ties of citizens within the State. Secondly, the Oresteia is a play which redefines kinship. It sets matricide centre stage, and has the

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god of truth, Apollo, defend Orestes’ act of kin-killing on the grounds that a mother is not a true parent of a child, but a mere guest-house for sperm: ‘the parent is he who mounts’ (Eum. 660). This is a response precisely to a question of blood. ‘Am I of my mother in blood?’, asks Orestes (Eum. 606). ‘Is not the blood of a mother most dear?’, demands the chorus of Furies, asserting the integral, intimate, and necessary tie of child to mother’s womb (Eum. 607–8). ‘Judge this blood’, begs Orestes of Apollo, his defender in the courtroom (Eum. 613). Apollo’s judgement is that the mother’s blood means nothing to the son. The Oresteia works to devalue the role of the mother. Hence, before Clytemnestra bares her breast and demands respect for the place where he was nourished, Orestes’ nurse has been brought on stage to lament his loss, as the woman who actually did suckle him. The mother’s plea has already been dramatically undermined. Neither mother’s milk nor mother’s blood tie her to her child. These two frames of the democratic city and the re-evaluation of kinship are intimately interconnected (as gender and politics inevitably are). They provide the matrix in which the Oresteia articulates its sense of the subject of tragedy. In the recognition scene, the tie between Electra and Orestes is asserted both as a physical link—same hair, same feet—and as a shared project of revenge. This recognition is also a way of rejecting—refusing to recognize—Clytemnestra. Both daughter and son have to undo the tie to the mother. Electra declares her mother ‘in no way lives up to the name mother’ (Cho. 190–1), is ‘hated with all justice’—and declares that any affection she owed her mother now belongs to Orestes (Cho. 240–1). The recognition constructs a horizontal bond between brother and sister, which, in rejecting the mother, is part of the trilogy’s move away from family blood to the ties of citizenship in the city. But the city is still patriarchal (and made up also of households), and the daughter must be returned to the house, her proper place. Electra can be like her brother, but by virtue of her gender must also remain quite different. In the way that brother and sister do and do not make a pair, this strange recognition of Electra and Orestes is formed within the tensions of this trilogy’s dynamic movement between the power of the household and the power of the State. The shifting articulation of kinship and gender


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roles takes place within the shifting systems of power. The sheer strangeness of the recognition demands reflection on what is being recognized: how alike, how linked are brother and sister? The recognition scene constructs—performs—a new, non-Homeric tie between brother and sister. It is within the new democratic ideological frame of the city and citizenship that Electra and Orestes recognize the (family) tie which links them. Antigone’s relation to her brother is no less tied up with politics, as she establishes the ties of blood and kinship as a motivation above and beyond the edict of the State; and the problematic nature of Antigone’s claim to be her brother’s sister above all else has been extensively discussed.23 But Antigone also has a sister. It is not just with sisterhood that the play opens, but with sisterhood articulated as sister to sister. And Antigone’s relationship to her sister poses a particular difficulty for her paraded relationship to her brother, a difficulty that questions both Hegel’s construction of family values and Butler’s critique of them. Let us look first at how Antigone rejects Ismene. Ismene’s response to Antigone’s initial declaration that she will bury her brother is shock and despair at her sister’s willingness to ignore the ruler’s edict. She reminds Antigone of her family’s terrible history (Ant. 49–57): Ah! Reflect how our father, sister, Died, hated and infamous: He himself with his own murdering hand Destroyed his double eyes because of his self-detected crimes. Then the mother wife, double word, Destroyed her life in a twisted noose. Third, two brothers on one single day In self-slaughter, wretches both, wrought Shared doom by each other’s hands.

Her language strains to capture her family’s incestuous and violent history. The address, ‘sister’ (o kasignete) is strikingly juxtaposed to the bare noun, ‘father’, who, she asserts, died as an ‘object of hate’ (apechthes), rather than as the object of love (philos), which is how Antigone has described her brother as an expression of her passionate 23

See n.20 above.

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sense of family duty. Oedipus struck out his ‘double’ eyes (and all words of doubling are inevitably significant in this family history, and much played with by Sophocles24), an act which led Jocasta, the mother/wife, ‘double’ word, to hang herself. In turn, the two brothers killed each other. Here too the language of slaughter is uncannily mixed with the language of suicide and incest, their parents’ sins. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives are all in the dual form, an archaic linguistic usage used only for pairs of objects: it makes the brothers a natural pair, like hands or eyes. The participle I have translated ‘in self-slaughter’ is autoktonounte: in Greek, ‘suicide’, and ‘kin-murder’ are both expressed by the term autoktonein and its cognates (the etymology of which is ‘self’ (auto) and ‘killing’ (ktenein)). It is not as easy a term as such lexical diagnosis suggests, and when two brothers willingly fight each other to the death, the confusion of ‘self’ and ‘slaughter’, ‘suicide’ and ‘kin-murder’ is apparent and significant. But Ismene summarizes this fratricidal act tellingly as ‘shared doom’, koinon moron (a term immediately reinforced by the chorus in their opening lyric, who also echo her enumerations of two and one (145–6): ‘born both of one mother and one father. . . they are sharers in a common (koinou) death’.) As with the first word of the play, so here too koinon is a freighted term.25 It implies a death that is shared, for sure, and a death that is of common kin, too. But the question it raises is whether this doom will be shared by the next pair in the family line. As Ismene goes on: ‘But now we two, left all alone—think how we will perish miserably if . . . ’. Ismene’s recognition that she and her sister are a pair—the dual again—is part of an ominous narrative of paired destruction. What is koinon? Does the recognition of their familial tie, their sisterhood, bind them both together in a self-destructive descent into tragedy? Antigone, however, hears nothing persuasive in Ismene’s speech, and promises that she will complete the act on her own if necessary. Ismene tries at least to get Antigone to tell no one of her plan and promises silence on her part. Antigone, however, wants her acts to be broadcast (Ant. 86–7): 24

On incestuous word play in Sophocles, see S. Goldhill, ‘Exegeisis: Oedipus (R)ex’, Arethusa, 17 (1984), 177–220. 25 See the sensible comments in R. Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1980), 134–6.


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Oh, denounce it! You will be much more hated For your silence if you do not announce it to the world.

Antigone’s demand of loving duty (philia) for her brother is matched now by her willingness to see her sister as hated (echthros). So when Ismene warns her not to attempt the impossible, Antigone hisses (93–4), ‘If you say that, you will be hated (echthare¯i) by me, and you will always be hated (echthra) by the dead man, and rightly so.’ Antigone’s sense of philia is as polarized as Creon’s and as impossible: if you disagree with her you are hated, even if you are a sister. If you are a brother you are loved, even when you attack the State. When Ismene is brought in after the arrest of Antigone, crying, as the chorus comments, ‘tears of sisterly love (philadelpha)’ (527), she willingly accepts responsibility for the burial. But Antigone denies her (538–9): Justice will not allow you this, since You did not will the act, nor did I share it with you.

Koino¯same¯n: ‘I did not make common [koin-]’, ‘did not share’ . . . Antigone rejects the pairing of sisters: they, unlike the brothers, will not have a koinon moron, ‘a common fate’. So when Ismene begs (544–5), ‘Do not reject me, sister, let me die with you and honour the dead’, Antigone replies (546): ‘Do not die a common death (koina).’ The first line of the play asserted a common bond (koinon) between sisters. Now it is clear that this commonality is rejected in the same terms by Antigone. The two sisters will not then be parallel to the two brothers, and the implications of the series of duals in Ismene’s telling of the family history will not be lived out. Ismene will not be destroyed, but, like Electra in the Oresteia, will go back inside the house to silence. Could two sisters be like two brothers? Could symmetry be maintained? Sophocles’ Electra asks that question in a different but pointed way. Like Antigone, Electra has a sister, Chrysothemis, who does not wish to continue her family’s line into self-destructive violence. Electra, like Antigone, is unmarried, is wholly committed to her family (‘Do not teach me to be bad to my philoi’, she says (El. 395), in words Antigone would care to echo): she mourns her dead father incessantly, as Antigone dies to honour her dead brother. Electra, too, tries to persuade her sister to join her in a

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bold act against the authorities. When she hears the false tale of her brother’s death, Electra decides that now she and Chrysothemis themselves must take on the act of revenge. She tries to bring Chrysothemis round to this idea by imagining their reception if they succeed in killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus (El. 973–85): Do you not see what great glory you will win For yourself and for me, if you follow what I say. What citizen or stranger when he sees us Will not receive us with praise like this: ‘See these two sisters, friends, Who saved their paternal home, Who when their enemies were firmly established Risked their lives to be ministers of bloodshed! We must love these twain; we must all revere them. In festivals for the whole assembled city We must all honour them because of their manly virtue.’ Thus will everyone speak of us, So that in life and death our glory will not fail.

Electra imagines winning glory (eukleian 973; kleos 985), the standard aim of a Homeric hero or Athenian warrior. While Odysseus can praise his wife, Penelope, for having ‘kleos like a king’ (Od. 19. 108–9), it is rare indeed for any woman even to be said to have won kleos let alone to act in order to win it. As Pericles famously states in Thucydides (2. 45), ‘a woman’s kleos is not to be talked of for praise or blame by men’. Electra, however, imagines Chrysothemis and herself fully celebrated in the public arena by citizens and foreigners alike. They will be lauded as saviours, and honoured in festivals by the city as a collective. The civic language here is strongly marked. They are revered by ‘citizen or stranger’, ‘revered by the whole assembled city’. Indeed, they are honoured (tima¯n) in festivals as if they were heroes of the state, greeted or received (dexio¯setai, 976) with cultic honour (heortais, 981). In an Athenian context, there can be no doubt which cult is the model for Electra’s remarks here. She is depicting herself and Chrysothemis as if they were the tyrannicides.26 Aristogeiton and Harmodius were two brothers who were honoured with cult because they killed the tyrant of Athens and thus 26

On the tyrannicides, see M. W. Taylor, The Tyrant Slayers: The Heroic Image in Fifth Century b.c. Athenian Art and Politics (New York, 1981).


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freed the people. They are heroes of democracy, who were celebrated in the most popular drinking songs of the day as well as by state cult. Their statues were prominently displayed in the agora, the main public space of Athens. They are the archetypal pair of brothers as political role models. The phrase I have translated ‘Behold these two sisters’ is in Greek idesthe to¯de to¯ kasigne¯to¯. These words are in the dual (hence ‘two’), and the whole passage of praise stays in this rare form. She is imagining the sisters as naturally paired. But the term kasigne¯to¯ can mean ‘brothers’ as well as ‘sisters’: it is ungendered. It certainly helps the slide between the two sisters and the model of the tyrannicides. This may seem like noble rhetoric in the pursuit of a noble act (and for many Victorian scholars, led by Jebb, so it is has been standardly read). But the final word of praise should give us pause. Electra imagines the sisters being celebrated because of their andreia. Although andreia is often translated ‘bravery’, or ‘prowess’, it is a noun formed from the word ane¯r, ‘male adult’, ‘man’, and indicates the quality of manliness (hence my translation ‘manly virtue’). Can a woman be praised for andreia? Not without pause.27 The problem of evaluating Electra as a figure and especially as an agent is no less heatedly debated than the problem of evaluating Antigone’s action. Since Hofmannsthal and Strauss, and their reading of Electra through Rohde, Freud, and Nietzsche, modern criticism has emphasized Electra’s violence, her psychological disturbance, her diseased pursuit of glorious revenge.28 She will not finally be able to act out the murder she imagines in this speech to Chrysothemis, as her brother returns to complete the killing. But her self-image as the object of praise for ‘manly virtue’ not only draws the sisters closer still to the tyrannicides but also raises a question. Can the sisters be like the tryannicides? Can they live out the role of the two brothers? Can they lift a sword and commit an act of political revolution to free the paternal property? The image of the armed woman is not a 27 See S. Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (Cambridge, 1995), 137–42; and in general R. Rosen and I. Sluiter (eds.), Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity (Leiden, 2003). 28 See S. Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2002), 108–77.

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comfortable one for the Athenian imagination, nor is the female political revolutionary. Chrysothemis’s response to Electra’s speech in its dismissiveness mirrors this ideological frame. She rejects the plan as foolishly incautious and destined to fail miserably. But the terms she uses are telling (995–7): Where on earth have you turned your gaze that you have armed Yourself with such rashness and call me to help? Do you not see? You are a woman not a man.

Electra called on Chrysothemis to ‘see’ her future glory, and to imagine the citizens and strangers declaring ‘See!’. Now Chysothemis turns this language against her: where was she turning her gaze when she came up with such a plan? Can she not see the basic fact of her gender? Electra’s vision looks like a willed blindness to Chrysothemis. She rejects Electra’s call to arms as ‘armed with rashness’. Electra’s appeal to andreia is marked as impossible because she is not an ane¯r, but a woman. For Chrysothemis, the two sisters can never live out the role of the two brothers. Women cannot be men. Sisters cannot be symmetrical with brothers. Indeed, when Orestes returns, he comes with Pylades, a comrade, an older man, a philos. It will be these two men, linked by philia but not by blood, who will kill the tyrants, under the instruction of a Tutor. Electra, outside the house still, is separated from the male work of killing. ‘Women’, she tells the chorus, ‘the men (handres) are on the point of fulfilling their task’ (El. 1398). Electra and Chrysothemis cannot make a duo for heroic action. Antigone’s relationship to Ismene is not, then, in direct parallel to her relationship with Polyneices; nor is the relationship of the two sisters parallel to the relationship of the two brothers. Essential to the story of Eteocles and Polyneices (in whatever form the tale takes) is that Eteocles has control of Thebes and Polyneices attacks his own homeland in order to wrest it away from him. Theirs is a story of precedence and power, and the failure of to koinon. From Jacob and Joseph in the Bible to Shakespeare and beyond, the younger brother plays a particular role in narratives of family succession. It is unclear if such ideas have any purchase on Ismene and Antigone. Can one ask if Antigone is older than Ismene? In normal Greek terms, from the fact that Antigone in the play is certainly and emphatically on the


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point of marriage to Haimon (a man whose name echoes with ‘blood’ (haima) in this play of blood), and from the fact that there is no mention of any such prospects for Ismene, one could assume that Antigone is the older sister. Not everyone has so read the dynamics, however. Kierkegaard, for example, in his ironic and very personal rewriting of the Antigone story does not include Ismene (yet another silencing), but when he imagines putting his Antigone on stage, he gives his heroine a bit more of a context: ‘She has a sister living, who is, I assume, older than herself and married.’29 (Few modern writers like to consider the implications that if Antigone is imagined as the average age for a parthenos, say, 14 or 15, then Ismene cannot be older than 13 or 14: and thereby not easily to be ‘shut up with the other women’.) Sophocles’ play has no indication that I can see to encourage us to think that comparative age or precedence has any significant role in sisterly interactions (where, again, modern readings are likely to make much of a dynamic of older and younger with sisters). Being first is everything to Polyneices and Eteocles; it does not enter the rhetoric of the sisters. Power relations determine the expressivity of kinship terms. What happens to Ismene, then? The play follows Antigone’s dismissiveness. On the one hand, she does not reappear after she is taken inside by the attendants at the end of the second scene (577– 81). She is not allowed even to be a spectator of the unfolding events, and no word is made of her as the tragedy progresses to its horrible conclusion. On the other hand, the discourse of the play through Antigone’s language seems to kill her off. As Antigone processes to her death, she sings, ‘Behold me, princes of Thebes, the last remnant of the house of your kings’ (940–1)30. Ismene is treated as if she were indeed no longer alive or no longer kin, no longer of common blood. Ismene is written—spoken—out of the family line. This silencing is all too often repeated, rather than analysed, by the critics. Antigone’s treatment of Ismene, then, moves from a passionate appeal to the normativity of sisterhood to an equally total rejection 29

S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. D. Swenson (Princeton, 1971), 160. The text has been thought difficult here. I have translated with Jebb. There is no reason to delete it, as Dindorf does. 30

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of her sister. From intense recognition to no recognition at all, from common blood to refusing the claim of the common. This may shed some light, finally, on the play’s most notorious crux. As she is led to her death, Antigone explains that she would not have undertaken the forbidden burial for a husband or a child, since a husband or a child could be replaced, but since her mother and father are dead, her brother is irreplaceable (904–20). Goethe found her argument here ‘quite awful’ (‘ganz schlecht’) and it prompted him to hope that scholars would find reasons to declare it spurious, and many scholars have been duly encouraged to give reasons for deletion. Here is not the place to review centuries of debate. I have one simple point to make. Critics who want to delete these lines rely primarily on the assertion that these lines are incomprehensible and especially so in the mouth of Antigone. Those who defend the lines claim that they are comprehensible (and usually quote Herodotus 3. 119, where a similar argument appears), and thereby try to domesticate their oddness. But it is not clear to me that the lines must be either simply comprehensible or simply incomprehensible. Rather, they provide a moment of what Richard Buxton would call ‘bafflement’, a node of opacity in the text.31 And this opacity is significant. It provokes a question to the audience’s comprehension: what kinship ties do count and under what circumstances? What kinship ties are worth fighting for or dying for? How does a woman calibrate the potentially competing roles of sister, daughter, wife? Or, perhaps most pertinently, can Antigone’s rhetoric of sisterhood make sense? There is a double conclusion to this argument. First, while feminist readings of Antigone have been hugely and rightly influential in exploring the difficulties of Hegel’s dominant model of approaching the play, within the ongoing work of critical exchange between feminist writers, it is fascinating to see how Ismene can be written out of the story. Hegel’s obsession with the brother–sister relationship ignores the sister–sister bond ‘in his search for the ideal relationship as a male–female relationship of identity-in-difference’.32 ‘Pourquoi fre`re/sœur et non pas fre`res ou sœurs?’, as Derrida asks, 31

R. Buxton, ‘Bafflement in Greek Tragedy’, Me´tis, 3 (1988), 41–51. P. J. Mills, ‘Hegel’s Antigone’, in Mills, (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel, 76. 32


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and explores at length. Yet the same strategy is followed by the feminist writers who work expressly in this Hegelian tradition. For Irigaray it means denying Ismene the name of woman, and ‘shutting her up’. Irigaray finds it easy to associate herself with the revolutionary resistance of Antigone, and thus repeats the gesture of making Ismene the ‘other woman’, the ‘woman’ who must be excluded. Perhaps any political movement needs to invent and make an anathema of its other, but excluding one of the sisters might need particularly special theoretical care, which Irigaray does not seem to offer here. For Butler it involves ignoring her (as do so many critics, of all political colours). The attraction of Antigone’s resistance leads, it seems, to a re-enactment of Antigone’s dismissive attitude towards her sister, rather than an analysis of it. This is particularly odd for Butler, who wishes to interrogate how normative heterosexuality might be threatened by Antigone’s version of kinship: Although not quite a queer heroine, Antigone does emblematize a certain heterosexual fatality that remains to the end . . . Her example, as it were, gives rise to a contrary form of critical intervention: What in her act is fatal for heterosexuality in its normative sense? And to what other ways of organizing sexuality might a consideration of that fatality give rise?’34

Butler (who has herself been hailed as quite the queer heroine) wants to use Antigone to challenge the common sense of cultural intelligibility. Yet the asymmetries between brother and sister in Antigone’s rhetoric of kinship are central to the problematic and fissured construction of to koinon, ‘the common’, in this play, and understanding to koinon is the most pressing imperative of its interrogation of family and politics. How much does Butler’s story of the ‘not quite queer’ Antigone rely on repressing her relation to her sister? On not wondering why Antigone is made to reject her sister in order to bury her brother? For Butler, as for Hegel, Antigone has a relationship solely with the male, and not with the

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Derrida, Glas, 169. Derrida analyses in great detail how Hegel’s privileging of the brother/sister relationship causes immense difficulties for Hegel’s own construction of the idea(l) of the family. 34 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 72.

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female, Ismene. If blood and irreplacabilty motivate Antigone’s resistance to Creon, should not her claim to be the only sister left, when Ismene ‘remains to the end’, be more worrying for the feminist myth of Antigone? The figuring of Ismene is integral to articulating the distortions of Antigone’s self-positioning. In short, both Irigaray’s and Butler’s readings of Antigone show how the myth of the heroine is constructed with all the inspirational force and selective blindness of hero worship. Is that not both the value and the danger of myth for feminism? The second strand of conclusion concerns not Sophocles’ play and its role in the construction of an image of Antigone in one particular strand of post-Hegelian feminist theory, but the metaphor of sisterhood itself, which has been so important to a much broader feminist political activity. (It is perhaps not without irony that the feminist theorists whose very level of theorizing has led it to be rejected by American feminist activists in particular, should be the figures who sideline Ismene. Feminism v. feminisms, feminism for women v. feminism for feminists are unresolved debates cued by this discussion in the current political context.) The hazard of this chapter is that it is worth our while to look carefully at how sisterhood learns to speak. And to see how a sister’s relation to a brother is not the same as a sister’s relation to a sister, and how two sisters cannot be the same as two brothers. What it means to call on a sister, or to speak as a sister, are normative ideals that develop within specific systems of social authority, and in the case of ancient Greece the shifting systems between the Homeric household and the (democratic) city-state change the condition of possibility for such rhetoric of kinship. The political construction of citizenship as fraternity frames the counter-construction of sisterhood. Sisterhood has proved a grounding metaphor of modern feminism, but its necessary implication with the broadest power structures of society is less commonly questioned. While black feminists or feminists from the Third World have questioned whether they are or want to be included in appeals to a universal sisterhood, the political and psychological conceptualizations of sisterhood itself remain largely uncontested: and hence replete with all the danger and value of myth. From the beginning, Sophocles’ staging of the sisters Antigone and Ismene demands that we listen with great attention and


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self-consciousness to the normative and persuasive claim that ‘this is what we have in common; you are a very sister; you are dear’. It recognizes that in the personal conflicts of the tragic narrative to come there is a difficult and unresolved claim of sisterhood. The tragic myth of Antigone also offers a profound way of thinking about myth and feminism productively through a critical gaze at the politics of sisterhood.


6

Fascism on Stage: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone

K a t i e Fleming

the afterlives of antigone The story of Antigone has long been a dominant script in European thought and culture. ‘Sophocles’ Antigone . . . held pride of place in poetic and philosophic judgement for over a century’—so George Steiner, of the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, in his account of this play’s extraordinary Nachleben.1 And although it can be argued that, owing to the revolutionary theories of Freud, the last century was that of Oedipus, none the less Antigone has continually asserted her relevance to the modern world. Not least in feminism. From the early feminists of the French Revolution to George Eliot, and beyond, Antigone has been recalled to vocalize the most powerful of personal and social politics.2 In 1938 Virginia Woolf evoked the spirit of Antigone in her polemic Three Guineas.3 In this radical text, Woolf locates the seeds of 1 G. Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and Thought (Oxford, 1984), 6. 2 Ibid. Passim. 3 V. Woolf, Three Guineas (London, 1938).

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fascism not in the regimes of Italy and Germany, but in the very fabric of patriarchal society, where men, from an early age, are educated and socialized in militarism, nationalism, and dominance (particularly over women). Excluded from this history, women are free from such aggressive motivations, and therefore present the possibility of an alternative point of view, one which respects difference and defends the marginalized. She thus offers Antigone, the archetypal outsider, as the paradigmatic feminist, pacifist, antifascist, and anti-imperialist. This combined list of attributes continues to inform modern feminisms, which remain firmly committed to anti-militarism.4 More recently, but no less urgently, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler—as Miriam Leonard and Simon Goldhill have shown in this volume—have returned to the Antigone to develop sophisticated, radical, and controversial feminist theories which challenge and redefine the socio-political status quo.5 Synonymous with confrontation, resistance to tyranny, and defiance of patriarchy, Antigone is the feminist heroine par excellence. Antigone matters. Indeed, any cursory glance at the manifold interpretations and modern versions of this famous story demonstrates how determining whether Antigone or Creon ‘wins’, and why, (consequently stating what Sophocles’ play ‘means’), was and remains a classic move for political self-fashioning and selfassertion.6 From Bertolt Brecht’s anti-fascist Antigone of 1948, and Athol Fugard’s 1973 critique of South African apartheid in The Island, a ‘satyr play to all preceding Antigones’,7 to, most recently, Seamus Heaney’s 2004 translation of Sophocles’ text, Antigone continues to play a central role in the politics of the twentieth, and 4

See e.g. J. Liddington, The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (New York, 1991). 5 See L. Irigaray, The Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1985), ‘The Universal as Mediation’, in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G. C. Gill (New York, 1993), ‘The Female Gender’, in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G. C. Gill (New York, 1993); J. Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York, 2000). 6 This concern has dominated scholarship on the Antigone. See e.g. C.W. Oudemans and A. P. M. H. Lardinois, Tragic Ambiguity: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Sophocles’ Antigone (Leiden, 1987), 107–17 for a schematic account of the differing interpretations. 7 Steiner, Antigones, 144.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 165 now the twenty-first, centuries.8 In fact, it is arguable that (re)reading and rewriting this play are always already political actions. However, these politics are not always what one might expect. Alongside Antigone’s noble and famous history of valiant confrontation runs another, decidedly less salubrious, narrative. Antigone’s symbolic value has also been hijacked by those with more disturbing political intentions. She has been used to justify the most pernicious element of Nazism, the ideology of racial purity and superiority;9 she has stood for an anti-democratic and autocratic monarchism;10 and, as I shall discuss in this essay, she has been depicted as the epitome of the fascist heroine. Such readings may seem surprising, given her totemic association with the historical and political anti-militarism of feminism and other forms of political and social resistance. However, why should this particular history of the reception of the Antigone make a difference to each succeeding (feminist) appropriation? Should it concern Butler, for example, that the figure she employs to subvert the State was once used as a prop for racialized totalitarianism? Perhaps. Charles Martindale has argued of ancient texts that ‘our current interpretations . . . whether or not we are aware of it, are in complex ways constructed by the chain of receptions through which their continued readability has been effected. As a result we cannot get back to any originary meaning

8

Ibid.; S. Heaney, Burial at Thebes (London, 2004). See K. Glaser, ‘Blutsbande und Staatsgewalt in der ‘‘Antigone’’ des Sophokles’, Die Alten Sprachen, 3 (1938), 105–12; F. Joachim, ‘Der nordische Blutgedanke in der ‘‘Antigone’’ des Sophokles’, Die Alten Sprachen, 6 (1941), 51–5. For the performance history of Sophocles’ Antigone in Germany between 1929 and 1944, see H. Rischbieter (ed.), Theater im ‘Dritten Reich’. Theaterpolitik, Spielplanstruktur, NS-Dramatik (Leipzig, 2000), 293–5. The bibliography on the National Socialist and Fascist engagement with antiquity is vast. For a recent collection of articles see B. Na¨f (ed.), Antike und Altertumswissenschaft in der Zeit von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus. Kolloquium Universita¨t Zu¨rich 14.–17. Oktober 1998 (Mandelbachtal and Cambridge, 2001), which includes a comprehensive bibliography on this topic. 10 C. Maurras, ‘Et si l’anarchiste e´tait Creón?’, Action Française, 25 May 1944. 9

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wholly free of subsequent accretions.’11 This seems a compelling analysis of the dynamics of reception. If it is true, then Antigone’s (reception) history does indeed, in some way, matter. How then does this history affect our understanding of—the ‘continued readability’ of—Antigone, qua acceptable (feminist) icon? I shall address this question by tracing and examining the text and reception of another notorious twentieth-century Antigone. The (perhaps) unexpected history of this play might in the end cast light on the nature of feminism’s appropriation of classical mythological figures in general, and Antigone in particular.12

antigone in 1944 On 4 February 1944 the long-awaited Antigone of Jean Anouilh opened at the Atelier theatre in Paris, under the direction of the playwright’s long-time theatrical colleague Andre´ Barsacq. It was an instant success. Well-attended, it ran unbroken from the winter to the summer, until the Liberation of France. Further performances were also staged the following year to popular and critical acclaim.13 This was not, however, merely another successful production on the stage of occupied Paris. Almost immediately, the play created a storm of controversy unlike any other. During the time of its first run it provoked an unprecedented number of reviews and responses in many papers and journals. These articles came from all sides of the Parisian press, from collaborationist to Resistance. They all addressed the play from different angles, but all with some degree 11

C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge, 1993), 7. 12 See e.g. L. E. Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth (London, 2001). 13 For an exhaustive and authoritative account of the historical circumstances of Anouilh’s Antigone see M. Flu¨gge, Verweigerung oder Neue Ordnung: Jean Anouilhs ‘Antigone’ im politischen und ideologischen Kontext der Besatzungszeit 1940–1944 (Berlin, 1982). My thanks to Herr Dr Flu¨gge for discussing his work on the Antigone with me. While his research is compelling and ultimately convincing, I am reluctant to reject, as he does, the significance of the (non-French) post-war reception history of the play.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 167 of fervour. Both politically and culturally, this Antigone, inevitably, was seen to matter. Of the numerous Antigones of the twentieth century, Anouilh’s remains, if not one of the most popular, then surely one of the most famous. Certainly the status of the play in European consciousness is enforced by its regular use in the teaching of French in schoolrooms across the continent.14 In the years following the Second World War this Antigone undoubtedly became canonical. It has passed into the literary canon, however, precisely because of the place it is seen to fill within the narrative of twentieth-century literature: the reception history of Anouilh’s Antigone is crucially linked to its role as literature of war. As such, this play remains enshrined in occupied Paris, 1944. Most readings of this play do not fail to take into account the very specific temporal and geographical position of its first production. Moreover, importantly and essentially linked to this continual historicizing of the play is the fact that Anouilh’s Antigone is consistently interpreted, by its Anglophone readers and audiences, both popular and scholarly, as a clear and damning allegory of the contemporary circumstances of occupied Paris in 1944.15 It is understood and performed as a depiction of the heroic resistance of the French, represented by Antigone, to the German Occupation (and/or to the Vichy government), embodied in the figure of Creon. This reception tradition began early: ‘The ethic of Antigone is opposed to the logic of Creon as all the sentiment and patriotism of the French underground fought against the cold and ruthless despotism of the Nazis.’16 It remains the most accepted interpretation of the play. As one journalist has asserted recently, ‘To Jean Anouilh . . . Antigone, battling Creon for the right to give 14

See ibid. 8; H. Footitt and J. Simmonds, ‘The Resistance Experience: Teaching and Resources’, in R. Kedward and R. Austin (eds.), Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology (London, 1985), 193–205. 15 See e.g. A. della Fazia, Jean Anouilh (New York, 1969). Such a reading is particularly common in Anglophone countries, but not exclusively so. See Flu¨gge, Verweigerung, 233 ff; D. Bradby, Modern French Drama 1940–1980 (Cambridge, 1984). 16 E. Berry, ‘Antigone and French Resistance’, Classical Journal, 42 (1946), 17.

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her brother Polyneices a decent burial, is a martyr of the French Resistance.’17 What must be realized is that, contrary perhaps to our expectations, the play and, in particular, Antigone herself, were in fact rejected by important sections of the Resistance.18 By contrast, the collaborationist press (arms of which, more often than not, if they did not actively support fascism, were at least sympathetic to it) embraced the play almost uniformly.19 Importantly, for our purposes here, the meaning, or perhaps rather the intent of the play, regardless of whether one supported Antigone or Creon (although this was still a crucial and hotly debated distinction, as in the long tradition of Sophoclean interpretation), was frequently understood to be complicit with fascist ideals and politics. This troubling analysis of Anouilh’s play has never dropped out entirely of the Francophone debate, where ‘la petite Antigone fasciste’,20 as well as Creon, remain controversial figures.21 This can surely, among 17 B. Morrison, ‘Femme Fatale’, in ‘Review’, 16–17, Guardian, 4 Oct. 2003. 18 C. Roy, ‘Notre Antigone et la leur’, Lettres Françaises, 14 (March 1944); P. Gaillard, ‘Pie`ces noires. L’Antigone du de´sespoir’, La Penseé (Oct.–Dec. 1944). Here a distinction perhaps ought to be made between what could be termed the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘popular’ resistance. Several contemporary commentators recall that members of the audience who were sympathetic to the Resistance understood Antigone as a Resistance figure. See e.g. B. Dussane Notes de theáˆtre. 1940–1950 (Paris, 1951); H. Amouroux, La Vie des Français sous l’Occupation (Paris, 1971); H. Le Boterf, La Vie parisienne sous l’Occupation (Paris, 1974). See M.-A.Witt, ‘Fascist Ideology and Theatre under the Occupation: The Case of Anouilh’, Journal of European Studies, 23 (1993), 49–69, for the contradictory receptions of Anouilh’s Antigone. 19 An illuminating contrast can be made with Sartre’s Les Mouches. This play, which its author suggested was written overtly as a statement of political resistance, was uniformly criticized and attacked by the collaborationist press. See T. Malachy, ‘Le Mythe grec en France avant et pendant l’Occupation (Giraudoux, Sartre, Anouilh)’, Revue d’histoire du theáˆtre, 51 (1999), 53–60; P. Marsh, ‘Le Theáˆtre a` Paris sous l’occupation allemande’, Revue d’histoire du theáˆtre, 33 (1981), 197–369. 20 J. Lacan, Le se´minaire VII: L’E´thique de la psychanalyse (Paris, 1986), 293. 21 See M. Leonard, Athens in Paris (Oxford, 2005) and in this volume for discussion of the French post-war appropriation of Antigone. See also

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 169 other issues, be connected to the tortuous and contested post-war legacy of the Occupation, the E´puration (the post-Liberation purge of French collaborators), and (French) fascism, and the ways in which the Second World War and its effects continue to influence French intellectual and political life.22 In what follows, I shall demonstrate how Anouilh’s Antigone can be shown to contradict the dominant post-war Anglophone interpretation of the play in two key ways. It is evident, first, in the play’s fascinating engagement with the Sophoclean text, through its crucial deviations from it, as well as important fidelities to it. These, I believe, intentionally reduce the heroine to the barest characterization of meaningless refusal. This is not to imply that Anouilh was not a sensitive reader of Sophocles. If anything, the changes he makes indicate precisely the opposite. The departures from the Sophoclean text are as revealing as the concurrences with it. The second important aspect of the play to be considered here is its employment of a vocabulary and register which can be identified as being complicit with fascism.23

anouilh’s antigone refusante24 Sophocles’ Antigone begins with the fraught discussion between the eponymous heroine and her sister, Ismene. It is Antigone herself who opens the play (ll. 1–10). Within these few lines Sophocles signals both her complicated past and her tortured present. Her Steiner, Antigones; R.-M. Albe´re`s, La Re´volte des ećrivains d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1949); J.-P. Lassalle, Jean Anouilh, ou La Vaine Re´volte (Paris, 1958); P. Vandromme, Un auteur et ses personnages (Paris, 1965); C. Borgal, Anouilh: la peine de vivre (Paris, 1966); B. Beugnot (ed.), Les Critiques de notre temps et Anouilh (Paris, 1977). 22

See e.g. H. R. Lottmann, The People’s Anger: Justice and Revenge in Post-Liberation France (London, 1986); H. Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 a` nos jours (Paris, 1987); P. Watts, Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France (Stanford, Calif., 1998). 23 See Flu¨gge Verweigerung; Witt, ‘Fascist Ideology and Theatre’. 24 See Dussane, Notes . . . 1940–1950, 125.

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over-determined bonds of philia, which will be crucial to her tragedy (and Creon’s), are made clear in the play’s very first line ( ŒØe ÆPº ŒæÆ—‘My own sister Ismene, linked to myself’).25 Her history, her inheritance from Oedipus, is asserted. Furthermore, we are given news of the events which will prompt her action and so lead her to initiate her tragedy. Anouilh chooses a different beginning. In place of Antigone, we have the Prologue: The people gathered here are about to act the story of Antigone. The one who’s going to play the lead is the thin girl sitting there silent. Staring in front of her. Thinking. She’s thinking that soon she’s going to be Antigone. That she’ll suddenly stop being the thin dark girl whose family didn’t take her seriously, and rise up alone against everyone. Against Creon, her uncle . . . the king. She’s thinking she’s going to die . . . though she’s still young, and like everyone else would have preferred to live. But there’s nothing to be done. Her name is Antigone, and she’s going to have to play her part right to the end.26

The Prologue then proceeds to relate the events we will see unfolding before us on stage. Immediately, Anouilh’s concerns with the tragedy are made clear. Like many of his other plays, here we see the playwright’s fascination with predestination and the exposure of the essentially artificial nature of the whole dramatic and tragic process.27 The logical philosophical and ethical consequence of such revelations, which Anouilh seems to posit, then, is fatalism, indeed even pessimism. In order dramatize this central message Anouilh must extract the typical elements from the Antigone, which he does in two particular ways. In the first place, he removes or subtly adjusts the tragic motivations of the Sophoclean characters. Anouilh’s dramatis personae act as they do because they have to fulfil their roles, and for no other reason. Secondly, he revises considerably the powerful gendered narrative of the Greek text, and adds to it certain other 25 Greek quotations and translation taken from Sophocles.II, H. Lloyd Jones. (ed. and trans). See e.g. M. W. Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge, 1989). 26 J. Anouilh, Antigone, trans. B. Bray, in Plays: One (London, 1991), 79. All further citations of Anouilh’s Antigone are from this edition. 27 See e.g. H. G. McIntyre, The Theatre of Jean Anouilh (London, 1981).

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 171 elements which alter its perspective utterly. These are not unsophisticated decisions. Indeed, they suggest that, far from ignoring the Sophoclean Antigone, Anouilh was seemingly in close dramatic dialogue with it. Each of these factors can be read as a deliberate engagement with particular tensions within the ancient play. As we have seen above, by setting out the play in the opening lines as he does, although Antigone is put centre stage, necessarily a striking inactivity is stressed, almost a passivity in the face of dramatic forces. The Sophoclean struggle between fate and the individual hero is crystallized into role-playing and self-dramatizing.28 In this version, before the action of the play begins, Antigone has already made her first attempt at burying Polyneices. Thus the portrayal in Sophocles’ play of her decision to act, followed by her departure at line 97, is radically altered. Already presented as a fait accompli, Antigone’s gesture at burying her brother (although, in order to provide the necessary moment of her capture, Anouilh follows Sophocles in depicting Antigone as visiting her brother’s corpse on a second occasion) is sidelined. What is important to Anouilh is the revelation of the essential meaninglessness of her act. In order to make central his own interest in undoing and divulging the things of theatre (particularly tragedy) and dramatizing the absurdity of existence in the face of fate, Anouilh must remove the critical Sophoclean concerns and motivations of philia, nomos, oikos, and polis.29 He adjusts the initial debate with Ismene—in which Sophocles’ Antigone sets out her principles of behaviour, to which she will remain faithful even as she confronts Creon (for example, lines 73–7: º ÆPF Œ ÆØ, ºı Æ, j ‹ ØÆ Æıæª Æ Kd ºø æ j n E Iæ ŒØ E Œø H KŁ: j ŒE ªaæ ÆNd Œ ÆØ ı N ŒE j a H ŁH Ø IØ Æ .—‘I am his own and I shall lie with him who is my own, having committed a crime that is holy, for there will be a longer span of time for me to please those below than there will be to please those here. As for you, if it is your pleasure, dishonour 28

See e.g. J. Harvey, Anouilh: A Study in Theatrics (New Haven, 1964); C. Smith, Jean Anouilh: Life, Work, and Criticism (Fredericton, New Brunswick, 1985). 29 See e.g. S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1988), 88–106.

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what the gods honour!’)—and reduces the scene between the siblings to one which revolves around the topos of inevitability. Antigone herself states that ‘everyone has his part to play. Creon has to have us put to death, and we have to go and bury our brother. That’s how the cast-list was drawn up. What can we do about it?’ (p. 87) (although, perhaps this is the ultimate distillation of the Sophoclean Antigone’s relentless pursuit of a glorious death, for instance at lines 71–2: ŒE Kªg= Łłø: ŒÆº Ø F Ø fi ŁÆE.—‘[b]ut I shall bury him! It is honourable for me to do this and die’). Rather than being an issue of complicated or even contradictory familial and religious obligation, Antigone’s decision to attend to Polyneices’ body is predicated simply on her fatalistic refusal to accept the ways of the world. When Ismene tries to reason with her (not realizing that Antigone has already scattered soil over their brother’s body), Anouilh’s heroine’s response is markedly dissimilar from her Sophoclean counterpart. She provides no motivation other than irrationalism: i s m e n e . Listen, I’m older than you, and not so impulsive. You do the first thing that comes into your head, never mind whether it’s sensible or stupid. But I’m more level-headed. I think. antigone. Sometimes it’s best not to think too much. i s m e n e . I disagree. It’s a horrible business, of course, and I feel sorry for Polyneices too. But I do see Creon’s point of view. an t i g o ne . I don’t want to see it. i s m e n e . He’s the king. He has to set an example. an t i g o ne . But I’m not the king, and I don’t! . . . i s m e n e 1. That’s right! Scowl! Glare! . . . But listen to what I say. I’m right more often than you are. an t i g o ne . I don’t want to be right! i s m e n e . At least try to understand! an t i g o ne . . . . Understand, understand, always understand! I don’t want to understand! (pp. 87–8)

Compare this exchange with the equivalent passage in Sophocles (ll. 41–97). Several crucial differences emerge. Initially, Anouilh modifies Ismene’s motivations. Rather than feeling inhibited by her position as a woman (as the Sophoclean Ismene is at lines 61–2: ºº

KE æc F b ªıÆE ‹Ø= ı , ‰ æe ¼æÆ P

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 173

Æı Æ: —‘Why, we must remember that we are women, who cannot fight against men’), here she sees Creon’s side of the argument and urges Antigone to be sensible, like her. Creon only acts as he does because he must.30 However, as this suggests, somewhat like Sophocles’ Ismene, Anouilh does paint his character as the political realist. When Antigone responds negatively, then Ismene begins to conjure up the power of the king and his supporters. It is interesting to note that at this point Anouilh insists on a number of important allusions to the Sophoclean text. For example, at lines 79–80, Ismene reasserts her commitment to her family, but underscores her inability to act on account of the power of the politai of Thebes (ªg b PŒ ¼Ø Æ ØF ÆØ, e b= fi Æ ºØH æA ı I Æ.—‘I am not dishonouring them, but I do not have it in me to act against the will of the people of the city’). As we can see from the dialogue above, Anouilh’s Ismene too feels ‘sorry for Polyneices’. Furthermore, for her part, she similarly takes into account the reaction of the general populace. However, instead of being citizens of the polis, Anouilh’s crowd are feared, and imagined wildly as a bloodthirsty lynch mob, who will ‘hiss and boo. They’ll seize us in their thousand arms, surround us with their thousand faces and their one expression, spit at us. And we’ll have to ride in the tumbrel through their hatred, through their smell and their laughter to our execution.’ (p. 88). Critically, this crowd all agree with the king (p. 88). There is no indication of dissent, as conveyed in the Sophoclean text by Haemon in his argument with his father (ll. 691 ff.). The change in dramatic and political register is striking. In response to Ismene’s imaginings, Antigone, in Anouilh’s text, admits that she does feel fear, and would prefer to live. However, nothing is resolved. The conversation fades out quietly, as she tricks Ismene into believing that she will not go ahead with her reckless task. Consistent too with Anouilh’s dramatic agenda is his description of Antigone. As I suggested above, he replaces the Sophoclean heroic temper, the personality which drives the tragedy,31 with 30

See Goldhill in this volume for Antigone’s relationship to Ismene and its consequences for feminist politics. 31 B. Knox., The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley, 1964).

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irrational fatalism. However, in addition to this, and at work with it, there are also strong visual cues for Antigone’s appearance. She is pictured as a ‘thin dark girl’ (p. 79) and as something of a tomboy (pp. 86–9). She is also compared unfavourably with Ismene, whom she briefly tries to imitate (by wearing make-up, perfume, and a pretty dress) in an attempt to be more womanly in order to attract Haemon (pp. 93–6). Anouilh’s markedly physical depiction of his protagonist may well be an imaginative extrapolation from the Sophoclean Antigones, from the transgressively un-feminine or even anti-feminine Antigone of the Antigone or the unkempt, wandering Antigone of the Oedipus at Colonus. However, it is clear that Anouilh is not interested in making this a gendered drama per se, or, at least, certainly not along the traditional lines. Antigone’s actions here are not determined by her status as a woman, which provides one (albeit, ultimately unsatisfactory) explanation for her to attempt to bury Polyneices in the Greek text.32 Nor is the clash between Creon and Antigone figured in gender terms, as in the Greek text (see, for example, lines 484–5, 578–9, 738 ff.). The complicated gender-identity of the Sophoclean Antigone is here distilled to paint a rather different picture.33 Here Antigone is instead strangely but deliberately masculinized.34 It would seem, however, that this is not to emphasize the transgressive nature of her act, but rather functions with another aspect of her portrayal to produce a characterization which has both dramatic and political implications. This is Anouilh’s decision, possibly in dialogue with Antigone the parthenos, to portray her as barely a child. In the early scenes of the play, he introduces the character of the Nurse to facilitate and emphasize this (pp. 82–93). In their conversations, Antigone’s vulnerability is made clear, as she asks the old Nurse to protect her as she once did, ‘cuddle me and keep me warm just the same, like you used to when I was ill . . . I’m still a bit small for it all.’ (p. 91). This infantilization is sustained throughout the action of the play. 32

See e.g. R. C. Jebb, Sophocles. The Plays and Fragments, Part III. The Antigone, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1891), p. xxv. 33 See e.g. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, 102, 107–37. 34 See D. Grossvogel, The Self-Conscious State in Modern French Drama (New York, 1958), 158–9.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 175 Antigone uses an old toy spade to bury her brother (p. 99) and even the girdle with which she hangs herself is described as looking like a child’s necklace (p. 134). The combined effect of these two aspects of Antigone here operate to keep her in a pre-sexualized, naive limbo, nostalgic for the idyllic realm of innocent youth. She must die, not only to play out her role, but also to preserve her ideal state. As I shall suggest below, such a narrative, when read within the wider concerns of the play, suggest much broader political implications for Anouilh’s work. Anouilh’s decision to remain faithful to two further important aspects of the Greek text is also in harmony with this, although this may initially seem paradoxical. The first appears to be an illusion to one of the most contentious elements of the Sophoclean Antigone, namely the over-determined philia which Antigone shares with her brother. This philia, with its controversial assertion, or perhaps encapsulation, at lines 905–12, has troubled scholars for generations.35 Anouilh, in his turn, appears to entertain the possible sexual overtones of this relationship. When, at the beginning of the play, the Nurse discovers Antigone out of bed in the early hours of the morning, her assumptions as to her charge’s intentions are clear: nu rse . You had a rendezvous, I suppose—don’t tell me you hadn’t! an t i g o ne (quietly). Yes, I had a rendezvous. nu rse . You mean you’ve got a sweetheart? [Pause]

an t i g o ne [strangely]. Yes . . . Poor thing. (p. 83) Antigone’s ‘strange’ response is tellingly ambiguous, potentially referring to both Polyneices and Haemon. Anouilh, however, does not pursue this ambiguity, and instead uses it to introduce a motif which is not evident in the ancient tragedy: the love story.36 Antigone swiftly reassures the Nurse that she has not been acting 35 See M. Leonard, ‘Antigone, the Political and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis’, PCPS, 49 (2003), 130–54, for a brief account of the early 19th-c. debate over these controversial lines of the Antigone. 36 ‘It is no blame to later dramatists that they found it necessary to make more of the love-motive; but, if our standard is to be the noblest tragic art, it is a confession of their inferiority to Sophocles.’ Jebb, The Antigone, p. xxx.

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indiscreetly, and that her reasons for leaving her room will soon become clear. Then, following immediately the scenes between Antigone, the Nurse, and Ismene (pp. 82–93), comes an exchange between Antigone and her fiance´, Haemon, in which they declare their love for one another and imagine their future happiness together (pp. 93–6). Despite the apparent contradiction with the characterization of Antigone as child, this romantic theme in fact fits seamlessly with it. We hear that Antigone’s and Haemon’s relationship has not been consummated, and so the idealized love that Antigone feels for him is as much a utopian fantasy as her perfect childhood. Anouilh, throughout his career, regularly dramatized thwarted romances (for example, in Eurydice [1941] and Romeó et Jeanette [1945] ) as a means of expressing the sordid effects of the world on what was true and beautiful, but essentially ephemeral and impossible. It is from this perspective, then, that I believe we are to understand the second, even more distinct echo of the Sophoclean text. On hearing that she is to be walled up outside the city, Antigone exclaims, ‘Hail, then, my grave, my marriage bed, my underground home! [She looks very small in the middle of that big base room. She looks cold. She wraps her arms around her. Then, as if to herself ] But all on my own . . . !’ (p. 131). This (‘O tombeau! O lit nuptial! O ma demeure souterraine!’) corresponds closely with lines 891–2 (t , t ı E, t ŒÆÆ ŒÆ c= YŒ Ø ÆN æıæ— ‘O tomb, O bridal chamber, O deep-dug home, to be guarded forever’).37 Here Anouilh employs this line to remind the audience of perhaps the tragedy, the heroism of his Antigone—that she will die despite her unfulfilled love for Haemon. The king too is not a typical Sophoclean tragic hero (although, this is consistent with many interpretations of the play which, as 37

I have been unable to ascertain the extent of Anouilh’s familiarity with the Greek text. It is most probable that his understanding of the play was based on French translations. It is very possible that this line, with its archaizing tone, is inspired by, and alluding to, Robert Garnier’s version of 1580. If this were the case, it would be an interesting historical coincidence. Garnier’s play, which was very popular, none the less received its first staged performance only in 1944, the same year as the first production of Anouilh’s Antigone. See Steiner, Antigones, 143.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 177 I suggested above, see Antigone as the sole heroine of the Antigone). Far from being the reciprocally resolute figure of the Sophoclean text (cf. e.g. ll. 473–96), his first inclination in Anouilh’s version is to forget the whole affair. He offers Antigone several chances to escape her fate (pp. 107, 112, 113). However, Antigone, who knows as well as anyone that she must play her part, refuses such clemency. Creon, in response to Antigone’s flaunting of her royal parentage, even describes himself proudly in almost anti-heroic terms: ‘What Thebes needs now is an ordinary king with no fuss. My name’s only Creon, thank God. I’ve got both feet on the ground and both hands in my pockets’ (p. 109). However, this portrayal of Creon as the ordinary man is nuanced in his transition to a policy of aggressive Realpolitik. He upholds his decree (although he is not even sure that it is Polyneices’ body he is withholding from burial—when he ordered his men to retrieve the dead, he found that ‘the Argive cavalry had ridden over the bodies and made mincemeat of them. They were both unrecognizable’ [p.120] ), not because it fulfils the laws of the State (for which he has little regard), but because it is a demonstration of his power, critical to his ability to maintain order (p. 114). The two clear allusions to the Sophoclean text in the portrayal of Creon, namely the repetition of the ship-of-state metaphor (pp. 115–16, ll. 162 ff.), and his immediate suspicion of conspiracy when he hears of the burying of Polyneices (p. 100, ll. 280 ff.) reinforce this despotic portrayal of the king. These characterizations serve the playwright’s purpose well, and do, to a certain extent, evoke real pity for Antigone (and even for Creon). However, they also ultimately undermine her. While Creon is perhaps given his most sympathetic portrayal in Anouilh’s play (a fact which did not go unnoticed by the play’s original reviewers, both collaborationist and Resistance), Antigone is stripped of any significance other than as the child-like character that simply refuses. Her important claims, at lines 454–5, to the observance of ¼ªæÆÆ ŒI ÆºB ŁH= Ø Æ—‘the unwritten and unfailing ordinances of the gods’ (and even Creon’s own assertion of adherence to the laws of the polis [ll. 661–80] ) are absent. Anouilh’s play gives us a very different conception of dikeˆ. Antigone and Creon have no claim to represent any kind of justice, human or divine.

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Instead it is the guards who ‘are the agents . . . of justice’ (p. 81). The king and the princess are merely playing out their roles. Even Creon admits this, to himself as much as to Antigone, ‘All right—I’ve got the villain’s part and you’re cast as the heroine’ (p. 112). All of this, it could be argued, is (relatively) harmless. However, set within the historical framework of the Occupation (and combined with the accusation of the employment of a fascist register, as I shall argue below), the climax of Antigone’s meaningless refusal becomes almost irresponsible: cr e o n . Why are you acting like this, then? To impress other people, those who do believe in it? To set them against me? an t i g o ne . No. cr e o n . Not for other people? And not for your brother himself? For whom, then? an t i g o ne . No one. Myself. (p. 111)

Her rejection of her Sophoclean forebear is clear. In case we should doubt the decisiveness of this scene, its message is confirmed towards the close of the play, when Antigone, dictating to the guard a letter for Haemon, confesses, ‘Creon was right: it’s awful, but . . . I don’t know any more what I’m dying for’ (p. 133). It is this pointlessness—evidence, it was said, of Antigone’s ‘evil character’—which so distressed and enraged its Resistance audience.38 Far from inspiring resistance, this play was serving the Nazi occupiers and Vichy regime.39 Unlike her Sophoclean predecessor, this Antigone commits treason. We should not be deceived by her superficial appearance: The Antigone which [the play] offers us is not our Antigone, the only Antigone, the true Antigone. . . . It is . . . the 1944 Antigone of Jean Anouilh. . . . When Creon asks why she insists upon dying she replies, ‘For myself’. This answer echoes morbidly, uttered at the same time as over all of Europe, indeed over the entire world, men and women are dying who could, to Creon’s question, reply, ‘For ourselves . . . For mankind’.40

38 39 40

R. Gaillard, ‘Revue de theáˆtre’, Cassandre, May 1944. Ibid. Roy, ‘Notre Antigone et la leur’.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 179 For this reader, Antigone’s politics are clear. She is not merely a pessimist, but more than that, she is a dangerous anti-humanist.41

antigone and the language of fascism This was not simply a coincidence between interpretation and historical urgency. For well over a decade before the production of Antigone, Anouilh had been concerned with dramatizing the refusal of his protagonists to accept the adult world of compromise and their rejection of its corrupting mediocrity.42 Crucially, however, this negation was not merely an aesthetic judgement, but also a political one. It is clear that in plays such as L’Hermine (1931), La Sauvage (1934), and Le Rendez-vous de Senlis (1937), Anouilh’s characters are refusing not simply life and contentment, but the bourgeois life and contentment. It is not difficult to place Antigone within this dramatic genealogy, particularly if one also maps a narrative of age onto this framework, so that the denigrated bourgeois life becomes equivalent to maturity, even senescence, and the life which rejects it, the ideal life, is equated with youth and innocence (a structure which Anouilh implied both in the plays mentioned above, and elsewhere). Combined with Anouilh’s polyvalent meditations on ‘happiness’ (bonheur), this attack on the bourgeois succeeds in making his political affinities complicit with the rhetoric of fascism. For fascist writers and intellectuals, the bourgeois life was synonymous with democracy.43 Bonheur signified the political (and cultural) status quo, the acceptance of bourgeois corruption and immorality, a condition to be utterly rejected in favour of the ‘new order’.44

41

See Lassalle, Vaine Re´volte (see n. 21), for a post-war protest against Anouilh’s anti-humanism. 42 See e.g. H. Gignoux, Jean Anouilh (Paris, 1946); B. A. Lenski, Jean Anouilh: Stages in Rebellion (Atlantic Highlands: NJ, 1975). 43 See e.g. Z. Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. D. Maisel (Princeton, 1994). 44 See D. Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, 1995).

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In the following scene, having revealed the emptiness of Antigone’s motivations (p. 111), Creon attempts to ease her towards reconciliation: cr e o n . . . . Life’s a book you enjoy, a child playing round your feet, a tool that fits into your hand, a bench outside your house to rest on in the evening. [Pause] You’ll despise me more than ever for saying this, but finding it out, as you’ll see, is some sort of consolation for growing old: life is probably nothing other than happiness. an t i g o ne [a murmur, staring into space]. Happiness . . . cr e o n (suddenly rather ashamed). Just a word, eh? (pp. 121–2)

He is nearly successful. However, this mention of bonheur merely serves to remind Antigone of her role, her obligation to say no: And what will my happiness be like? What kind of a happy woman will Antigone grow into? What base things will she have to do, day after day, in order to snatch her own little scrap of happiness? Tell me—who will she have to lie to? Smile at? Sell herself to? Who will she have to avert her eyes from, and leave to die? . . . You disgust me, all of you, you and your happiness! And your life, that has to be loved at any price. You’re like dogs fawning on everyone they come across. With just a little hope left every day—if you don’t expect too much. But I want everything, now! . . . I don’t want to be sensible . . . I want to be sure of having everything, now, this very day. . . Otherwise I prefer to die. (pp. 122–3)

At this, Creon finally succumbs to his rage, and Antigone’s fate is sealed. Antigone’s previous assertion that she no longer knew what she was dying for now seems false. Here it is clear that she is dying so that she can truly enact her refusal of life, so that she will not grow old.45 It was these scenes, the dramatization of Antigone’s purete´ and grandeur (both terms, which read within the framework both of the racial doctrines of fascism, and its insistence on the theatricality of politics and culture, are not innocent literary observations), which so impressed her collaborationist and fascist audience. As Alain Laubreaux, an influential journalist and enthusiastic collaborator, observed, Antigone depicts, ‘the revolt of purity against the lies of

45

See Flu¨gge, Verweigerung, 1–4 for the ‘problematische ‘‘Nein’’ ’.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 181 men, of the spirit against life, a mad and magnificent revolt’.46 For such commentators literature and politics were inseparable. Robert Brasillach, a renowned fascist, and also one of the leading writers and critics of his day, who was later executed under the E´puration for collaboration, in the most important and definitive post-Liberation trial, also understood Anouilh’s Antigone explicitly as a political work.47 He was amazed at the ‘profound importance of the modern politics of this play, full of our sicknesses, but without any partisan spirit . . . In our deceitful age, ‘‘Antigone’’ is the most distinct protest which makes itself heard against all the efforts of trickery.’48 For Brasillach, identifying heavily with Antigone herself, Anouilh’s work was a political act, a call to arms. Anouilh himself, notoriously reclusive throughout his life, always asserted that he was not a political man, and that in writing plays he was simply performing his me´tier.49 Despite this, throughout the Occupation, Anouilh wrote over a dozen articles for collaborationist journals, which, on several occasions, focused on the evil of money in the theatre (an opinion consistent with his antipathy for the bourgeois existence), and the need for a revival of a national sense of drama.50 Anouilh may have claimed to be apolitical, but such articles, whether consciously or not, precisely reflect a language both of anti-Semitism and of fascism.51 Thus, Anouilh’s dramatic agenda coalesces powerfully with two sinister doctrines. On the one hand, Antigone is the model

46

A. Laubreaux,‘Du theáˆtre!’, Je suis partout, 18 Feb. 1944. See e.g. A. Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago, 2000). 48 R. Brasillach, ‘Revue de theáˆtre’, Chronique de Paris, March 1944. 49 See Gignoux, Jean Anouilh. However, see Dussane, Notes . . . 1940– 1950, 125. She perceives a certain disingenuousness in Anouilh’s stance. 50 See e.g. J. Anouilh, ‘Plaie d’argent’ Aujourd’hui, 22 September 1940, ‘Soliloque au fond de la salle obscure’, La Gerbe, 23 Jan. 1941. 51 This language was prevalent in France long before the outbreak of war and the Occupation. At least since the Dreyfus affaire, anti-Semitism had been a powerful and flexible political vocabulary, which had been variously fused with ideas of the bourgeois, the democratic, and the socialist, etc. See e.g. Z. Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. D. Maisel (Berkeley, 1986); Carroll, French Literary Fascism, see n. 44. 47

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fascist—youthful, vigorous, and rebelliously uncompromising; on the other, Creon is le dictateur roi, the authoritarian ruler who gets on with the difficult job of stabilizing the country, and governs with despotic hand. The play, Witt notes, ‘reverberates with a number of themes dear to both the traditional European right and to fascism’.52 Of course, this, in itself, cannot be held as evidence for the intended spectre of fascism within the play. It could be argued that such a reading is little more than speculation. Does it even matter that such politics are perceptible? Pol Gaillard, another Resistance critic, thought so: ‘ ‘‘Antigone’’ will remain the example not only of a false masterpiece, but also of a bad deed.’53 This remark reflects an important development in wartime and post-war French thought. Throughout the war the intellectual Resistance, in line with the Resistance credo that to speak was to act, had insisted that to write, or to think, was to do, and to act.54 Such a fusion of the literary, the political, and the philosophical made clear that a writer or an intellectual must be held entirely accountable for his work and its consequences. This philosophy, triumphantly represented by such figures are Sartre, was to be crucial to the meaning and outcome of the post-war trials of intellectuals and collaborators.55 Therefore, on this level at least, Anouilh’s political responsibilities are clear.

the politics of reception But what, you might ask, has all this to do with the feminist Antigone? Admittedly, I am not attempting to rebuff any feminist appropriations of Anouilh’s Antigone (of which, as far as I have been able to ascertain, there are none). Rather, in revealing the context concealed by the course of this play’s post-war reception, I hope to have cast light indirectly on feminism’s claiming of Antigone. 52

Witt, ‘Fascist Ideology and Theatre’ (see n. 18), 65. P. Gaillard, ‘Pie`ces noires’ (see n. 18). 54 See e.g. Watts, Allegories of the Purge (see n. 22). 55 See e.g. J.-P. Sartre, La Responsabilite´ de l’ećrivain (Paris, 1946), Qu’est-ce que la litte´rature? (Paris, 1948). 53

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 183 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, in a recent pamphlet, has also returned to the Antigone: Nothing, however, can match the incredible fate of Antigone. It doesn’t matter that I read this play in an age in which the laws of Creon were those of the occupying Nazi. It matters more that, concerning more or less faithful translations in more or less free adaptations, it is possible to construct the history of European consciousness through the Antigone. The freedom in this field is and must be complete. The Antigone of Anouilh, for example, was staged in February 1944, therefore under the German Occupation, like Sartre’s Les Mouches. I personally saw the play in the autumn of 1944, after the Liberation. Two opposing readings can be given, both of which are legitimate if one places them in Anouilh’s oeuvre and in the behaviour of this playwright. The ‘resistance’ interpretation makes Antigone a variation of the Jeune Fille sauvage theme, to quote the title of one of Anouilh’s first plays. The pro-German interpretation makes Creon into a kind of Pierre Laval figure, who at the end of the play, reunites the Council of ministers. These two interpretations are possible because Jean Anouilh is an authentic man of the theatre.56

Vidal-Naquet is right to stress similarities between La Sauvage and Antigone. They even share a significant line—‘You disgust me with your happiness!’.57 However, he is right in more ways than this. For, while his account both acknowledges the flexibility and the potency of Antigone’s story, and even goes so far as to recognize the legitimacy of the two opposing interpretations, nevertheless implicit in his reading is also his judgement.58 He refers the ‘resistance’ theme of the play to before the war, thus before the Resistance, locating it within the genealogy of Anouilh’s plays which can be shown to be politically ambiguous at best, complicit at worst. In the case of Anouilh’s Antigone (at least) it is also critical to recognize, as Vidal-Naquet suggests, the powerful effect that not only historical circumstances, but also historicized mythologies can 56

P. Vidal-Naquet, Le miroir brise´: Trage´die atheńienne et politique (Paris, 2002), 47–8. 57 J. Anouilh, Pie`ces noires (Paris, 1942), 194; Anouilh, Plays: One, trans. B. Bray (London, 1991), 94. 58 It is interesting to note that ‘resistance’ lies within quotation marks, and ‘pro-German’ does not. Admittedly, this could be a typographical coincidence.

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have on our (re)readings. In fact, as the example of this play has shown, it is through the combined efficacy of myth and the urgency of the historical situation that meaning itself is generated. Most importantly, though, in returning to Sophocles’ Antigone he notes the incompatibility of sensibility in the ending of Anouilh’s play with that of the Athenian tragedian’s. In his reading and renewing of the heroine and the language of the play, Vidal-Naquet implies, Anouilh has revealed his true politics. It is thus by coming clean about what must be done to and over the ancient text in order to claim its heroine, that the politics of reading can be acknowledged and understood. However, despite the apparent and stated prominence of the (Sophoclean) text in many politicized readings, on closer inspection it is apparent that in (re)turning to the Antigone, many commentators allow Antigone herself repeatedly to escape from its strict confines. Like many of her Greco-Roman mythological counterparts, she has transcended the restrictions of any particular incarnation and become truly, if not simply, iconic. This state of ambiguity, hovering between her role in text and her role as symbol, governs many appropriations. Indeed, in perhaps her most influential modern incarnation, the rapturous reception of the Antigone within the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel (who famously dubbed it ‘one of the most sublime and in every respect most magnificent works of art of all time’59), the Sophoclean text is referred to only very sporadically. Her exemplary nature—‘the heavenly Antigone, the most magnificent figure ever to have appeared on earth’60—far outstrips her textual role.61 This complicated relationship to the text is crucial to the history of Antigone. Consider the scholarly controversy over her notorious declaration at lines 905–12:

59 G. W. F. Hegel, Werke: Theorie Werkausgabe, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), xiv. 60. 60 Ibid., xviii. 509. 61 There is obviously not room in this essay to discuss adequately Hegel’s influential reading of Antigone. See Leonard in this volume for a bibliography on Hegel, tragedy, and Antigone.

f a s c i s m o n s t a g e : j e a n a n o u i l h ’ s antigone 185 P ªæ h i N Œ z æ ı h N Ø Ø ŒÆŁÆg KŒ, fi Æ ºØH ifi Mæ : ı c ÆFÆ æe æØ ºªø; Ø b ¼ Ø ŒÆŁÆ ¼ºº q, ŒÆd ÆE I ¼ººı ø, N F X ºÆŒ;

æe K Øı ŒÆd Ææe ŒŒıŁØ PŒ Iºe ‹ Ø i º Ø . For never, had children of whom I was the mother or had my husband perished and been mouldering there, would I have taken on myself this task, in defiance of the citizens. In virtue of what law do I say this? If my husband had died, I could have had another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the first, but with my mother and my father in Hades below, I could never have another brother.62

Both Goethe and Jebb, among others, rejected these lines, deeming them inappropriate for the noble Antigone who, until this moment, has stood for the eternal, unwritten laws of heaven. Jebb writes, rather sorrowfully, ‘I confess that, after long thought, I cannot bring myself to believe that Sophocles wrote 905–12 . . . The composition of vv. 909–12 is unworthy of Sophocles.’63 Such anguish over the text arises precisely because of the emblematic value of this most unique of heroines. This, sometimes uneasy, imposition of Antigone’s symbolic, ethical, and political importance onto, and over and above, the text (which does not always oblige, as in Jebb’s case) is one of the most important, and often overlooked, factors in the reception of the Antigone, and one which can be brought to bear (not least) on any feminist account of it. The history of Anouilh’s Antigone throws into (admittedly unusually) stark relief the potentially complicated or dual nature of ‘reception studies’ and their relationship to feminism and classical mythology. On the one hand, an analysis of the text within its immediate historical context provides a very specific narrative; on the other, its dominant post-war reception has dictated a very different trajectory. Both are arguably equally legitimate readings. Ultimately, its reception history has prevailed. Few now, if any, are concerned with Antigone’s lapse into fascism. 62 63

Sophocles. II., 86–7, see n. 25. Ibid. 164. For Goethe and Antigone, see e.g. Steiner, Antigones.

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Similarly, for feminism, Antigone’s totemic value—her eternal exemplarity—seems always already to recoup previous appropriations, negative or positive, even if (as Simon Goldhill has suggested in his study of feminism’s relationship to Ismene), this is won with a modicum of historical and textual amnesia. As with any politicized appropriation of classical mythology, feminism invests in a selective recovery of its heroine. But to assert truly Antigone’s continual value, it might do well to acknowledge her past.

part iii

Myth and History


7

A Woman’s History of Warfare

E ll e n O’Gorman

outoi gunaikos estin himeirein mache¯s It is not womanly to desire combat (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 940)

Carlo Guercio, the giant Italian soldier in Louis de Bernie`res’ bestselling novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, gives an account of his friend’s death to his friend’s mother and wife. It is a brief and highly sanitized account, interspersed with a parenthetical narrative, the truth about Francesco’s death. ‘What were his last words, Signor?’ ‘He recommended himself to you, Signora, and he died with the name of the Virgin on his lips.’ (He opened his eyes once and said, ‘Don’t forget our pact to kill that bastard Rivolta.’ Later on, in a great spasm of pain, he grasped my collar with his hands. He said, ‘Mario.’ I took the little mouse from my pocket and placed it in his hands. In the ecstasy of his own death he clenched his fist so tightly that the little creature died with him. To be precise, its eyes came out.)1 Many thanks to the editors of this volume for their incisive comments, as well as to Charles Martindale for his Homeric expertise and to Robert Fowler for reading and responding to this paper. 1 Louis de Bernie`res, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (London, 1994), 126.

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This narrative in parenthesis, as becomes clear near its conclusion, is addressed to Francesco’s mother, but under the title ‘the things I do not tell Francesco’s mother’. In many ways this scene plays out the final page of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where, in Marlow’s encounter with Kurtz’s Intended, the romantic lie about Kurtz’s dying words is uttered in a room which appears to resonate with the horrible truth. Marlow’s motivations differ considerably from those of Carlo Guercio, but in both scenes the bereaved woman has a narrative withheld from her; in place of brutal detail and moral compromise she is given a story that tells her—what? That it was all for her sake after all, that it was all in her name. This is the key moment from Heart of Darkness: ‘The last word he pronounced was—your name.’ I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. ‘I knew it—I was sure!’2

Female complicity is here sought through the assurance that men fight wars for the sake of women. What both these scenes in different ways suggest is that this is a convenient lie in which both male narrator and female listener collude. And there is more than a hint of patronage in withholding the truth from these women. Marlow says, ‘I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether’. Thus he effectively marginalizes the woman, keeping her away from the heart of darkness at the centre of his story. Carlo Guercio, from perhaps less protective instincts, keeps the women away from the true story of death in the trenches in order to preserve for himself a space of male comradeship and male love. While these men propound the tale that it was all for the women, they also implicitly maintain that women have nothing to do with it at all. The exclusion of these novelistic women from knowledge about the true story of warfare is mirrored at the level of ‘professional’ military historiography, where authority is so often equated with experience. ‘It is not possible for a man with no experience of action in war to write well about what happens in a war.’3 When the 2 3

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth, 1995), 147. Polybius, Histories 12. 25g. 1.

a woman’s history of warfare

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historian Polybius makes this pronouncement he doubly de-authorizes women, first by claiming only for warriors the right properly to represent warfare, and secondly by considering only men for qualification or disqualification. For women, the question is simply not relevant. Contemporary military history, too, remains sufficiently entrenched in soldierly practice for the writer John Keegan to begin his history with an apologetic confession of his lack of combat experience: ‘I was not fated to be a warrior.’4 In this award-winning history of warfare, Keegan inserts an ‘interlude’ at the end of his first chapter (‘War in Human History’). The interlude, entitled ‘Limitations on Warmaking,’ concludes with this paragraph: Half of human nature—the female half—is in any case highly ambivalent about warmaking. Women may be both the cause or pretext of warmaking—wife-stealing is a principal source of conflict in primitive societies— and can be instigators of violence in an extreme form: Lady Macbeth is a type who strikes a universal chord of recognition; they can also be remarkably hard-hearted mothers of warriors, some apparently preferring the pain of bereavement to the shame of accepting the homeward return of a coward. Women can, moreover, make positively messianic war leaders, evoking through the interaction of the complex chemistry of femininity with masculine responses a degree of loyalty and self-sacrifice from their male followers which a man might well fail to call forth. Warfare is, nevertheless, the one human activity from which women, with the most insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart. Women look to men to protect them from danger, and bitterly reproach them when they fail as defenders. Women have followed the drum, nursed the wounded, tended the fields and herded the flocks when the man of the family has followed his leader, have even dug the trenches for men to defend and laboured in the workshops to send them their weapons. Women, however, do not fight. They rarely fight among themselves and they never, in any military sense, fight men. If warfare is as old as history and as universal as mankind, we must now enter the supremely important limitation that it is an entirely masculine activity.5 4 John Keegan A History of Warfare (London, 1993), xiii. Compare Keegan’s opening gambit in his earlier work, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (Harmondsworth, 1976) p. 13—‘I have not been in a battle.’—and his ensuing analysis of the usefulness of military history for (exclusively male) teachers and students. 5 Keegan, History of Warfare, 75–6.

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The first point to note about Keegan’s last word on women in warfare (his text continues for nearly 400 pages) is how his exclusion of women from warmaking (and thereby from the category of ‘mankind’) depends upon a highly specialized definition of war, excluding preparation for war, material or rhetorical support of the war effort, and even such activities as nursing, which have for centuries placed women in dangerous proximity to combat zones.6 For Keegan, ‘war’ can only be used to denote fighting ‘in a military sense’. The second point to note is how the women in Keegan’s account are complicit with their marginalization: they ‘stood apart’ from war as if of their own volition. But what might perhaps strike the reader more forcibly than either of these aspects is Keegan’s reference to ‘the most insignificant exceptions’ to his sweeping generalization. Having alluded to Helen of Troy, the Spartan women, and Boadicea, Keegan returns to his history of warfare, but even the most casual dipper into history books might be left asking ‘what about Artemisia of Halicarnassus? or the Dahomean army of eighteenth-century West Africa? or Jennie Hodgers and the other women who fought in the American Civil War? or Flora Sandes of the First World War’s Serbian Army?’7 The problem emerges that there are far too many ‘insignificant exceptions’ to the exclusion of women from warfare. And yet, curiously, they have never been emplotted into a continuous history; each individual struggle to admit women into the military is represented as an aberration without antecedent or successor. Why have these discrete examples of women in warfare remained in the margins of history? One could say that this avoidance of a historical tradition which might create a continuity to which each individual woman might appeal reflects an ambivalence towards both warfare and history. In the latter case feminists frequently draw attention to the dangers of a historical tradition which can submerge a revolution6

Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge, 2001), 102–6, considers how the presence of women in combat zones can be made invisible in statistical representations of women in the military. 7 Artemisia: Herodotus, Histories 7. 99; the Dahomey: Goldstein, War and Gender, 60–4; women in the Civil War: Goldstein, War and Gender, 108; Flora Sandes: Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-toFace Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London, 1999), 306–9.


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ary movement rather than enabling it. For some women in warfare, perhaps, empowerment can be found in a representation of their actions as innovative, without antecedent.8 So too plotting a continuous history of women in warfare might enable a more conservative integration of women into the military, but here many feminists alert us to the dangers of thus validating militaristic culture. ‘[W]e face a dilemma: putting our effort into gaining equal opportunity for those women who are used most directly by the military only perpetuates the notion that the military is so central to the entire social order that it is only when women gain access to its core that they can hope to fulfil their hopes and aspirations.’9 The feminist project with history has often been glossed as ‘writing women back into history’, in which case women’s role in warfare would seem to be long overdue for revisionist treatment. But the problem, as outlined above, is that military history appears to stand forth as the quintessentially patriarchal discourse ‘against which ‘woman’ and its multiple synonyms may be said to come up at least five to eight inches short’.10 Feminist historiography attempts to counteract the effects of this discourse by configuring the project of writing women back into history as a transformation not only of women but also of history. The challenges posed by feminist and other forms of critical theory have already transformed the discipline and practice of history, in particular through the challenge to rethink those received wisdoms which constitute the basis from which we understand the past. At the same time attempts to reconceptualize the place of war 8

So, for example, Miriam Cooke is anxious to distinguish post-modern warfare from modern and pre-modern forms, precisely in order to highlight particular irruptions of female representation as new and revolutionary. Miriam Cooke, Women and the War Story (Berkeley, 1996), 103–7. 9 Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London, 1983), 16–17. See also Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley, 2000), 33; and Jane Marcus, ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War’, in Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich and Susan Merrill Squier (eds.), Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), 124–67. 10 Katherine Kearns, Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and Feminist Theory: The Search for Critical Method (Cambridge, 1997), 147.

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in society, to redefine it as more than ‘just fighting’ and less than ‘the core of the social order’ have moved the sphere of military history beyond the traditional combat narrative. Thus the field of battle remains clear as a refuge for those historians who wish to avoid the challenges of rethinking history. The central line of resistance here can be located along the issue of representation. The Osprey Companion to Military History, published in 1996, contains a number of entries on representations of war (in drama, film, music) listing and summarizing the most prominent Western works, including the Iliad, and stating whether these works are pro- or anti-war.11 What these entries reflect is a sense that representation is an unproblematic affair, requiring no further analytic probing. The certainty assumed by military historians of a clear relationship from action to representation validates the assumptions that in this area authority continues to be grounded in experience, and that representation translates back into military action. For a historian like Polybius, as we have already seen, the authority of experience is a necessary prerequisite to writing well about warfare; earlier in his analysis, he has outlined what ‘writing well’ must entail. ‘While a bare statement of events can interest us, it is of no use whatsoever; with the addition of causes to the narrative, the usefulness of the history bears fruit.’12 Thus history leads back to praxis; the authority of experience produces the proper history which ‘bears fruit’ in its application to further action. Warrior speaks to warrior across the centuries, and the translation from writing to practice and back again is clear and unproblematic. Yet the emphasis on causes reminds us of the narratives told to the women at the start of this essay; these women are denied the bare statement of events, but they are told the cause: that the war has been fought for them. The question of causes and their proper representation lies off the field of battle, and is something in which women could be concerned, about which they could claim some experience and authority. 11

Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker (eds.), The Osprey Companion to Military History (London, 1996); The Osprey Companion to Military History has no entry under ‘feminism’. 12 Polybius, Histories, 12. 25b. 2.


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The positioning of women as (authorities for) the cause of war enables the representation of Woman simultaneously as fragile, in need of protection, and as scapegoat, bearer of blame for all evil. This is a familiar and somewhat depressing positioning of women; it is, moreover, a far from innocent position from which to write a history of warfare, traditionally a narrative which assumes its own transparency. The historian takes his own disinterested stance as read, but a woman who chooses to represent war must take up a different stance: the position of a woman already implicated in the reasons for war. This is not a simple position to adopt, since it always risks becoming complicit with the validation of warfare, but therein also lies its potential. Instead of saying that this position disqualifies the woman in advance from the traditional role of the disinterested historian, we could see this shift of position as the first move in transforming the history of warfare. The myth of Helen is an obvious choice when considering a possible role for women in interrogating histories of warfare, since women’s position as the implicit reason for war—‘this is all for you’—is made explicit in Helen’s role as the cause of the Trojan War and as the beginning of Greek history.13 She is, as many scholars have remarked, simultaneously the most beautiful and the most reviled woman. The position from which she speaks about war, therefore, is far from innocent; it risks complicity, yet this risk could also be what offers to her a more self-aware perspective as a historian of warfare. The first context in which we can look at Helen’s history is in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War, as the women of Troy await allocation to different victorious Greek generals. This is the scene of Euripides’ Trojan Women. Here women’s voices dominate the ‘action’, taking up about four-fifths of the lines of the play: as well as the female chorus, we hear the words of Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen herself. Nevertheless, this play, at first reading, seems to reinforce much of the marginalizing of women which I have already noted: these women do not narrate the war, instead they lament. The lamentation, situated invariably in the 13 Matthew Gumpert, Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical Past (Madison, 2001), 10.

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aftermath of warfare, echoes the ‘cry. . . of unspeakable pain’ uttered by Kurtz’s Intended in response to Marlowe’s false account of her beloved’s death. Within this scene of lamentation, however, the Trojan women repeatedly return to the question of the causes of their predicament, the cause of the war. Helen surfaces time and again in their speeches, as ‘hateful’ (Tro. 132), ‘detested by the gods’ (Tro. 1213), a source of ‘dishonour’ (Tro. 132), ‘infamy’ (Tro. 133), and ‘destruction’ (Tro. 771). Andromache’s extended curse of Helen, indeed, seems to be prompted by her own use of the word aition, cause (Tro. 765). In one respect Euripides’ play offers a splitting of the dual role of women in narratives of war, as he shows us on the one hand the pathos of the women deprived of their men’s protection and on the other the vituperation of the woman positioned as the cause of the war. By demonstrating what happens to defeated women he reminds us that the Trojans were not just fighting ‘for’ Helen, that they were also fighting ‘for’ Cassandra, Hecuba, and Andromache. From this perspective the Trojan women’s insistence on Helen as the ‘sole cause’ of war looks a little like anxious abjection onto one women of all the blame implicitly attached to all women for being the women that men fight for.14 Yet the causality put forward by the women of this play is not quite so univocal as at first appears. Cassandra first articulates the horrible paradox of so many men dying for one woman: ‘The Greeks, because of one woman, of one love, hunting Helen, destroyed countless men.’ (Tro. 368–9)

‘One’ is opposed to ‘countless’ in an analysis of gain and loss.15 The chorus, later, echoes Cassandra’s words: ‘Wretched Troy, you have destroyed countless men, for the sake of one woman and a hated marriage.’

(Tro. 780–1)

14 Ra’anana Meridor, ‘Creative Rhetoric in Euripides’ Troades’ CQ, ns 50 (2000), 16–29, 28, comments on ‘The omission of the Trojans’ own responsibility for their fate.’ 15 The juxtaposition of ‘one’ and ‘many’ is a recurring feature of Helen’s representation (cf. e.g. Aeschylus, Ag. 1455) but also a frequent contrast within rhetoric more generally.


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While all the women (except Helen herself) agree in positioning Helen as the one woman, the sole cause of war, there is some ambiguity about the blame to be attached to the agents of warfare here. Cassandra’s statement initially seems clear enough; because of Helen, the Greeks destroyed countless Trojan men, and for this they deserve blame. But when echoed by the Chorus, the repetition of the verb apo¯lesan/apo¯lesas, ‘to destroy’ or ‘to lose’, becomes more problematical. Does the Chorus blame Troy for losing its own men (or for destroying its own men? or for destroying Greeks?) because of one woman? Euripides’ play, as I have remarked, could be read as separating out the two aspects of women implicit in the phrase ‘fighting for women’. While the Trojan women agree in positioning Helen as the sole cause of war, they do not agree about how men should respond to this cause. Their statements about Helen, furthermore, set up a dissonance of causalities which counterpoints the universal statements of hatred and disapprobation. In English we could say the men fight ‘for’ Helen, or ‘on account of’ or ‘because of’ or ‘for the sake of’; the women in Euripides’ play say dia (Tro. 368), or huper (Tro. 370), or houneka (Tro. 372), or apo (Tro. 772), or charin (Tro. 781). Never is a preposition of cause repeated in relation to Helen, and some prepositions have more causal force than others. The effect of this is to challenge the notion that naming Helen as cause was ever going to be a simple matter. If we respond by translating each preposition into the other, by saying, for example, that dia is the same as huper, we risk missing the point that the use of a variety of prepositions could be seen to represent contestation over the proper representation of cause (a representational issue taken for granted by most historians). Yet can we really see in these colourless functional words the outlines of an important debate about the extent of Helen’s responsibility for the suffering of everyone involved in the Trojan War? Curiously enough, generations of philologists have done just that.16 Eduard Fraenkel, in his commentary on Aeschylus’s 16

Lillian Doherty, in her essay also in this volume, comments on the ironies and possible compromises facing the feminist as ‘well-trained classicist’. It seems to me that there is a feminist as well as a philological

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Agamemnon, devotes over a page of close-written text to the question of whether diai (‘because of/by means of’) means the same thing as heneka (‘on account of/for the sake of’). The grammatical discussion of whether a preposition is causal or instrumental, or both, quickly becomes concerned with the question of Helen’s guilt, and even the extent of her agency in the destruction of others: ‘Not by her hand, certainly, but by all her faults of commission and omission, for example by her having lived throughout ten years in Troy as the wife of Paris.’17 Yet the philologist’s certainty about separating out cause from instrument/agent is overturned in the Trojan women’s representation of Helen. Hecuba and Andromache, the two most prominent Trojan women of the play, bypass the elusive nature of causal/instrumental prepositions by representing Helen as an agent of destruction. In so doing, they offer their own commentary on what it means to be the cause of a war; they also introduce a narrative of warfare which casts Helen (rather than any Greek hero) as the warrior who visits the most destruction upon Troy. Indeed, the first mention of Helen in the play casts her in this light, in Hecuba’s first speech: ‘Alas, into the gulf of Troy [came the Greek ships] in pursuit of the hateful spouse of Menelaus, dishonour for Castor, infamy for Eurotas, who slaughtered the begetter of fifty children, Priam, and drove me, unhappy Hecuba, to this ruin.’ (Tro. 130–7)

The subject of the war narrative begins as ‘Greek ships’ (from line 122), while Helen appears here in familiar aspect as the prize of war. The shift to Helen as the subject of a war narrative, with the violent verb sphazei, ‘to butcher’, is a surprise; by the end of the sentence she has replaced the Greek ships as the subject of exo¯keile, ‘to run aground’.18 The placement of Helen in the sphere of warfare is response to those who would object that these are ‘just prepositions’, which involves the politics of deciding what is and is not important in the text. 17

Eduard Fraenkel, Aeschylus, Agamemnon (Oxford, 1950) on Ag. 448. Compare the famous word play on Helene¯ helenaus—‘Helen shipdestroyer’ (Aeschylus. Ag. 683). 18


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emphatic, and is continued by both Hecuba and Andromache throughout the play. Within this context, which we might term a debate on how properly to represent causes, Helen herself shows up to challenge the one aspect of causality on which the other women agree. Her speech, addressed to Menelaus as arbiter and to Hecuba as antagonist, has been described as ‘the cheapest court-room pleading’;19 she appears to lose and to be led off to her death. The assumption that she will charm her way out of the situation—implied by Hecuba’s warning to Menelaus (Tro. 1049) not to travel on the same ship as his wife—predisposes the listener to judge the speech mere sophistry. But Helen’s defence remains unchallenged at the very point where she enjoins responsibility on Hecuba herself; indeed, Helen places Hecuba’s role in the war at the forefront of her arguments: First, then, this woman brought forth the beginnings of these troubles by giving birth to Paris; secondly, the old man destroyed [apo¯lese] Troy and me, by not killing the infant, that hateful fake firebrand, that Alexander. (Tro. 919–22)

When Helen interrogates causality in this way, she picks up on some of the threads running through the other women’s speeches in the play. I have already noted the ambiguity of the Chorus’s lament, ‘wretched Troy, you have lost/destroyed countless men’, where it is not clear how much responsibility for the loss should be assigned to the agents of the war. Even Hecuba’s pathetic description of her aged husband, the father of fifty children, is echoed in Helen’s suggestion that in choosing to raise all his children, Priam should take some responsibility for the grief they subsequently bring him.20 Finally, in response to the repeated accusations of the other women, in which the disgrace of her sexual behaviour is strongly implicated 19

Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 139. Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 80, comments that ‘the critic’s condemnation of Helen’s rhetorical duplicity is always a displaced acknowledgement of her beauty’; his critic is explicitly aligned with the male character in this scene. 20 In a similar vein Herodotus, in his well-known challenge to the Helen story, suggests that Priam’s refusal to give Helen back to the Greeks (if she had ever come to Troy, that is) would have implicated him in some of the blame for the war (Herodotus, Hist. 2. 120).

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in her role as the cause of war, Helen proposes that the most respectable of women’s actions can equally be appropriated for this kind of blame. Her repetition of the verb eteken/tekousa, ‘to give birth’ or ‘to bring forth’, reminds Hecuba that her role as mother does not merely intensify her pathos as victim of war, that her own position is not as innocent as she would like to represent.21 It could be said, indeed, that Helen briefly attempts to bring together the two aspects of the term ‘fighting for women’. In both Helen’s speech and Hecuba’s earlier narrative—despite their sharp differences on the nature and ambiguities of causality—a further issue is exposed, namely the problems of defining the margins of war, margins inhabited by women. In Hecuba’s speech she moves from using the woman’s body as a metaphor for war (the ships sail into the kolpois, the ‘gulf’ or the ‘bosom’ of Troy) to using war as a metaphor for what happens to women’s bodies (Hecuba becomes a ship which Helen runs aground). In Helen’s speech even the ordinary peacetime activities of domesticity and family-building are presented under the aspect of preparations for war. Even the form of lamentation, which supposedly marks the aftermath of warfare, the temporal margin, reworks the antagonisms of war. ‘What used to be labeled civilian experience—being bombed, raped, expropriated, and salvaging shreds of living in a refugee camp—some name combat experience.’22 Helen reminds the Trojan women that their experience of defeat confers, along with the authority to speak of war and the causes of war, implication in responsibility for the war. The women of Euripides’ play present us with modes of representing warfare (lamentation and debate) which challenge the Polybian model of ‘writing well (graphai kalo¯s) what happens in a war’. These different representational strategies, moreover, redefine the 21

On the association of conception and war-making see Helen Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier, ‘Arms and the Woman: The Con[tra]ception of the War Text’, in Cooper, Munich, and Squier (eds.), Arms and the Woman, 9–24, and Nancy Huston, ‘The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes’, in Susan Rubin Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 119–36. 22 Cooke, Women and the War Story, 41.


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very subject of warfare, reconfiguring what can be accounted as ‘combat’. Such challenges are replicated in contemporary historical analyses such as Cynthia Enloe’s Does Khaki Become You? or the edited volume Arms and the Woman. We have already seen how Hecuba and Andromache write Helen into a military history by privileging causality over a more straight realism: ‘Murderous woman: with those lovely eyes you have shamefully destroyed the famous plains of Phrygia’ (Tro. 772–3). A traditional military historian would object that these lines are ‘merely’ metaphorical. We could see it as an attempt to write the feminine into military history. But in writing women back into history, do we not require at least the fantasy of their bodily presence in the past? If we let go of that fantasy, if we reframe the project as writing the feminine into history, what now does this enable or disallow us to say about past or present? To pursue this we can turn from the Trojan Women to the Iliad, the canonical text of warfare and male heroism, and to the famous, much-studied scene where Helen is first shown to the reader of the epic: She came on Helen in the chamber; she was weaving a great web, a red folding robe, and working into it the numerous struggles of Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armoured Achaians, struggles that they endured for her sake at the hands of the war god. Iris of the swift feet stood beside her and spoke to her: ‘Come with me, dear girl, to behold the marvellous things done by Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armoured Achaians, who just now carried sorrowful war against each other’.23

It is traditional by now to see in Helen’s weaving an echo of the Homeric epic and the process of poetic composition; the repetition between Iris’s speech and the description of the robe makes such an echo more resonant. Unlike the women’s speeches of the Trojan Women, we have here no challenge to the subject of warfare as traditionally constituted: the deeds of men are central to the representation. We also see, yet again, Helen’s position as cause and as prize of war; the men, central figures, struggle together for her sake. Protected and sought after, Helen is here removed from the field of 23

Homer, Iliad 3. 125–32.

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combat where Hecuba and Andromache placed her in Euripides’ play. As readers have observed, it is technically impossible to represent visually what the two armies are fighting for. We can say ‘for her sake’, hethen heineka, but we cannot show it, we cannot weave it.24 Helen has chosen a mode of representation—respectably feminine to be sure—which renders invisible her role as the cause and prize of the war. By sitting at home and weaving she appears simply to occupy her marginal (domestic) place, but within that weaving the representability of her role is already placed under question, and even begins to shift. ‘For her sake’, then, is not visible in the robe; but it is still present, as the half-line of poetry. Are we to interpret this simply as the poet, or the reader, or characters in the poem imposing back onto Helen the reductive role she is subtly challenging? I would argue that this is not the case. Helen does not challenge her role by explicit repudiation, but instead creates a representation within which it looks very different; ‘for her sake’ is still there in Helen’s representation, but not on the surface of the weaving. Rather it has been drawn to the weaver, and to the weaver’s motivation. She represents this because it is ‘for her sake’. In contrast to the challenge posed to causality in Euripides’ play, which takes the form of an explicit debate, Helen’s work here interweaves causal complicity in the war with the complicity—and the enjoyment—of representing the war. This effects an important appropriation of the war narrative; instead of the scene of men telling war stories to women for women’s sake, for the listener’s sake, we have the woman telling war stories for her own sake, for the narrator’s sake, and the role of the listener is, for the moment, vacant. ‘One day perhaps, assuming the war ends and peace returns, Helen’s tapestry may hang in a king’s halls to entertain the king and his barons. But perhaps not. Perhaps it was never intended for men’s perusal, or for women’s perusal either’.25 It would, however, be a mistake to see Helen’s work as entirely solipsistic, but rather as 24

George Kennedy, ‘Helen’s Web Unraveled’, Arethusa, 19 (1986), 5–14, 9. 25 Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom, 41; cf. Kennedy, ‘Helen’s Web’, 10.


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creating a new position for the listener or viewer of the narrative. Such a narrative cannot ‘entertain the king and his barons’ (note how Austin automatically predicates a male audience for the work) because it is a different mode of narrative from, say, the Homeric epic in which it appears. Just as Helen’s position as narrator is responsible in relation to what she narrates, so too the listener is enjoined to take some responsibility for her enjoyment of the tale. In spite of this engagement with her narrative, however, Helen’s robe reads as a monochrome account, when one compares it with Iris’s more colourful sketch. In Iris’s speech the actions are given the qualities of their emotional effects—marvellous or godlike deeds (theskela erga) and sorrowful war (poludakrun Are¯a)—while in Helen’s representation they are merely quantified—numerous struggles (poleas aethlous). For a moment the robe looks like a parody of the most technical type of history, eschewing emotive adjectives and adverbs, and ‘sticking to the facts’. But the term ‘monochrome’ which I just used reminds us that if this representation is in one colour, that colour is red, the colour of the robe she weaves (diplaka porphuree¯n). In a sense what we are offered here is a separation of the form from the content; the form, the robe, is beautiful, while the content, the numerous struggles, is depicted without elaboration. War is beautiful, this seems to suggest, but only in the mode of its representation. Indeed, I would take it further and see in this separation a comment on every sanitized account of war passed on to women in place of the real thing. Can we read Helen’s robe, not as epic or history, but as biting satire? While Helen’s appropriations and re-alignments of war stories and war narrators are subtle, the questions she implicitly puts to the tradition are far from gentle. I want to return to her verbal acknowledgement of responsibility in her speech to Hector in Book 6, speaking of all the hard work they endure ‘for the sake of dishonoured me’ (Il. 6. 356). This one explicit reference within Helen’s speeches to her position as cause and as prize of war acknowledges but does not fully accede to the similar statements made more frequently by other characters. She says that the Trojans endure hardship ‘for the sake of dishonoured me’ in Richmond Lattimore’s translation, but I would prefer to render heinek’ emeio kunos as ‘for the sake of me, bitch that I am’. When Helen calls herself a ‘bitch’,

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which she does twice in this speech, far from being merely selfdeprecating, she once more transforms and interrogates the assumptions underlying war narrative. It is as if Helen were to say ‘is it really for the sake of this that you are fighting?’26 By echoing the male narrators with ‘for the sake of me’ but then by adding ‘bitch that I am’, she first invites unthinking acceptance of what she is saying, and then adds the critical interpretation which exposes what is central to the scene of men who tell war stories to women: the simultaneous and contradictory elevation of women to the status of glittering prizes, and debasement of women as the cause of all suffering. When Helen first calls herself a bitch, she uses the phrase kuo¯n kakome¯chanos, wonderfully translated by Lattimore as ‘a nasty bitch evil-intriguing’, what I would render ‘a nasty trouble-making bitch’ (Il. 6. 344). The term ‘bitch’ is usually taken to denote the shamelessness of Helen and her sexual infidelity; we have already seen how in the Trojan Women Helen’s sexual activity is strongly associated with blame for causing the war. By this reading Helen’s appropriation of the ‘for the sake of me’ trope is rather brutally reconfigured into a bare statement of fact, expanding on exactly why Helen is a cause of the war. This reading also dictates the translation of Helen’s earlier description of herself as kuno¯pis, or ‘bitch-faced’ (Il. 3. 180)—Lattimore renders it as ‘slut’. Translating kuo¯n and kuno¯pis in this way when they refer to Helen presents us with an interpretation which grounds her firmly in the sphere of sexual, domestic misdemeanour. This interpretation is supported by the numerous occasions in the Odyssey where adulterous women are insulted as ‘bitch-faced’ or as ‘bitches’. ‘The repetitions of the insult ‘‘dog’’, ‘‘dog-like’’ indicated the disorder in the reciprocities which form the civilized society of the oikos.’27 But in drawing continuities between Helen here and the adulterous women in the Odyssey, we create a gulf between Helen and the other bitches and 26 Similarly, in her speech to Priam on the battlements of Troy (an exchange which implicitly negotiates debates about Helen’s responsibility for the war), she concludes with the ambiguous phrase ei pot’ ee¯n ge, usually rendered as ‘did this really happen?’ 27 Simon Goldhill, ‘Reading Differences: The Odyssey and Juxtaposition’, Ramus, 17 (1988), 1–31, 16.


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dogs which appear in the overtly military context of the Iliad. Helen herself interrogates a purely domestic reading of kuo¯n in referring to herself as ‘a nasty trouble-making bitch’, a term which invites us to consider why we place a boundary between sexual activity and action in warfare. The predatory force of the hunting dog, as Goldhill observes, is most easily assimilated to the drive of the hero in battle.28 Indeed, the only other female characters in the Iliad who receive the epithet are Athena and Artemis, both known for repudiation of sex and for active participation in warfare.29 Helen’s choice of self-description, therefore, does not give in to the discourse which would position her as the source of all blame, but rather marks an appropriation and a problematizing of that discourse. In some ways it mirrors Helen’s reinscription of the women of Troy into the language of causality in Euripides’ play; here she challenges the heroes of combat by describing her part in the war in the language of the battlefield. In the phrase kuo¯n kakome¯chanos the roles occupied by woman as cause, man as warrior and animal as scavenger can no longer be differentiated.30 This image of Helen, as the maker of bad things, stands as another aspect of the weaver of the beautiful red robe. But, like the robe, which both narrates the war and interrogates assumptions about how you narrate the war, Helen’s bitchiness does not simply create the trouble of the war, but creates trouble about the war, by implicitly posing the question ‘is it really worth fighting for the sake of this?’ In Troy, then, Helen makes trouble about the war, but what is often seen as most troubling is her easy ‘domestication’ into marital life in Sparta, as displayed in Book 4 of the Odyssey. ‘[W]ith the Trojan War concluded, Helen is safely at home in Sparta again . . . no longer wild; her status has been resolved. She is not wife and mistress, but simply a wife.’31 Norman Austin and other scholars, however, go on to note the difficulties inherent in the 28

Ibid. 14. Athena: Iliad 8. 423; Artemis: Iliad 21. 481. 30 The dog as a scavenger on the corpses of battle appears prominently in the opening lines of the Iliad, 1. 4. 31 Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom, 72. 29

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Spartan domestic scene, as Menelaus and Helen present competing stories about Odysseus and the Trojan War: competing, that is, on the subject of Helen and her loyalties.32 In Helen’s story her joy at Odysseus’s exploits is contrasted with the lamentation of the bereaved Trojan women; this portrayal signals Helen’s returning Greek partisanship while situating it once more in a context of responsibility. Then the other Trojan women piercingly wailed; but my heart rejoiced, since now my inclination had turned to go back back to my home. (Od. 4. 259–61)

Menelaus responds with a story which implicitly counters this representation of Helen. By his account she irresponsibly plays with the lives of Greek warriors, threatening to betray them under the eyes of her new Trojan husband, Deiphobus. (Od. 4. 274–6) No resolution is offered by either speaker, or by their listener Telemachus. Simon Goldhill remarks, ‘[T]he reader is faced with a (finally) indeterminate interchange, an insecurity in the relation between the representations and also in the relation between the representations and any supposed ‘‘master version’’ of the Trojan war.’33 What is also opened up by the difficult relations of the two stories is an ambiguity about the sharp differentiation of the Spartan palace from the Trojan battlefield. The ‘debate’ between Helen and Menelaus, since it so often raises the questions ‘which side is Helen on?’,34 suggests a continuation of the Trojan war on the home front. Indeed, any search for or resignation of a ‘master version’ about the war only serves to remind us that domination over women marks the end of the war for men, but that women’s experience of peacetime may yet be redescribed. Just as the Trojan women might seek to describe their allocation as slaves to various Greek 32

Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom, 71–89; Ann Bergren, ‘Helen’s Web: Time and Tableau in the Iliad’, Helios, 7.1 (1980), 19–34; Ann Bergren ‘Helen’s ‘‘Good Drug’’: Odyssey iv 1–305’, in S. Kresic (ed.), Contemporary Literary Hermeneutics and the Interpretation of Classical Texts (Ottawa, 1981), 201–14, 79–80; Goldhill, ‘Reading Differences’, 19– 24; Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 37–40. 33 Goldhill, ‘Reading Differences’, 23. 34 Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 39; cf. Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom, 83: ‘Where are Helen’s loyalties now?’


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generals as ‘combat experience’, so too we could look at the Spartan palace scene and ask, ‘do they call this peace?’35 In Euripides’ play Helen confronts the separation of women into reviled cause of war on the one hand and sanctified object of military protection on the other. Her attempts there to draw all women into a position of responsibility for war-making should resonate in the Odyssey as well, where our last sight of her is in the bedchamber, lying next to Menelaus. And the son of Atreus lay down to sleep in the innermost chamber of the lofty house, And by his side Helen with long robes lay asleep, shining among women (gunaiko¯n). (Od. 4. 304–5)

What this final scene with Helen shows us is the potential of expressing a subversive position on the prevailing historical opinion, not by words or even representations, but by actions. Her place by the side of Menelaus should finally answer the questions, ‘whose side is Helen on?’, but as the earlier exchanges between the two have shown, mere spatial proximity is not a reliable indicator. Indeed, the final phrase ‘shining among women’ invites us to consider Helen’s value as a wife in the context of other women: perhaps the ‘other Trojan women’ as Helen earlier called them. Is her place at Menelaus’s side so different from that of Cassandra or Andromache?36 Is this yet another form of ‘combat experience’? 35

Marcus, ‘Corpus/Corps/Corpse’ (see n. 9), 154 remarks: ‘The war is not over when it’s over in historical time. Irene Rathbone’s We That Were Young and They Call It Peace also demonstrate that patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist ‘‘peacetimes’’ are still wartimes for the exploited.’ 36 Ruth Scodel, ‘The Captive’s Dilemma: Sexual Acquiescence in Euripides’ Hecuba and Troades’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 98 (1998), 137–54, takes the same idea in the opposite direction by looking at how the Trojan women describe concubinage in terms of marriage.


8

‘Beyond glorious Ocean’: Feminism, Myth, and America

G r e g o r y Staley The Dark Continent is neither dark nor unexplorable. —It is still unexplored only because we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable. And because they want to make us believe that what interests us is the white continent, with its monuments to Lack. And we believed. They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between Medusa and the abyss. That would be enough to set half the world laughing, except that it’s still going on . . . Let’s hurry: the continent is not impenetrably dark. I’ve been there often. (He´le`ne Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’)1

dark continents Cixous’ influential essay, published in America on the bicentennial of the American Revolution, takes as its dominant metaphor a 1 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1.4 (1976), 884–5.

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notion particularly relevant to America: that of woman as unknown land waiting to be discovered and explored.2 Cixous’ ‘Dark Continent’, of course, is most immediately borrowed from Freud’s characterization of woman as equivalent to Africa; but in her use of Medusa and myth Cixous ultimately takes her Dark Continent beyond Freud, back to an essentially classical topography and mythology of woman and the world.3 Conceptually antiquity placed woman in the same place where America later would be found, on the margins of the known world in a particularly mythological space which the Greek poet Hesiod regularly characterized as ‘beyond glorious Ocean’.4 2

Cixous’ essay from the very beginning adopts the trope of a new world (ibid. 875): ‘Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily bear the mark of our time–a time during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely, the (feminine) new from the old [la nouvelle de l’ancien].’ Cf. ibid. 878: ‘It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her–by loving her for getting by, for getting beyond the Old without delay, by going out ahead of what the New Woman will be.’ 3 Freud’s words come from his essay ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’, in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, xx (London, 1959), 212: ‘the sexual life of adult women is a ‘‘dark continent’’ for psychology.’ Even in the original German, Freud quotes the phrase ‘dark continent’ in English and sets it off with quotation marks, an acknowledgement that he borrows the phrase from Henry Morton Stanley’s account of his African experiences, Through the Dark Continent, published in 1878. Cixous, born herself in Africa, perhaps in part alludes to Africa in her words, ‘I’ve been there often.’ 4 The Otherness of women in Greek ideology led to their regular association with the geographical margins of the world. Medea was from Colchis at the eastern end of the Black Sea and the Amazons had homelands both in Libya and in Asia Minor. Particularly in the 5th c. bce it was the eastern end of the world which symbolized the feminine and barbaric, as Edith Hall has demonstrated: Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford, 1989). In reaction to the Persian invasions of Greece, the Amazons began to be dressed in eastern costume since they, too, had invaded Attica in the attempt to retrieve one of their number, Antiope, abducted by Theseus (cf. W. Tyrrell, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking (Baltimore, 1984), 50–2). In her use of the myth of Medusa and the metaphor of dark continents, Cixous, however, is clearly making the West her focus. It was the realm associated with darkness, with Medusa, and was the place where, up to the time of Plato, Greek myth and

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In antiquity women had long been seen as continents, as one Renaissance commentator noted in explaining the name ‘America’: ‘I do not see why anyone should object to its being called, from its discoverer Americus . . . Amerige, meaning land [Greek ge¯] of Americus, or America, since Europe and Asia have acquired their names from women.’5 The three original continents, Europe, Asia, and Libya, had derived their names from mythical women, for reasons which not even Herodotus could explain.6 In the ancient world, however, it was the still undiscovered fourth continent which was most truly ‘dark’, a land in the West, the realm of Night and the homeland of Cixous’ Medusa. According to Hesiod, Medusa and her sister Gorgons ‘dwell beyond glorious Ocean in the frontier land towards Night where are the clear-voiced Hesperides’.7 In characterizing Woman as a continent to be explored, Cixous is simply using the dominant metaphor through which Europe ever since antiquity had conceptualized Hesperia or the West. In both Greek and Latin Hesperia is a feminine word, a substantive formed from an adjective with a noun meaning ‘earth’ (chthon or terra) understood. The very idea of ‘West’ is that of ‘Land’, a metonym for a series of ideas which in classical ideology all connote the female, a point highlighted in Hesiod’s account of the Hesperides and their birth: And Night gave birth to hateful Doom and black Fate and Death, and she gave birth to Sleep and the tribe of Dreams. And again the goddess murky

literature placed an alternative world, as James Romm has shown: The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, 1992), 128. It was in the Hellenistic and Roman periods that the South became the venue for an alternative continent. 5

Martin Waldseemu¨ller, Introductio ad Ptolemaei Cosmographiam (1507), cited in M. Dilke and O. A. W. Dilke, ‘The Adjustment of Ptolemaic Atlases to Feature the New World’, in Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold (eds.), The Classical Tradition and the Americas, i. 1 (Berlin, 1994), 122. 6 4. 45. Herodotus notes that some of these names have been connected with actual women, but even in those cases there were likewise mythical alternatives. 7 Theog. 274–83; all translations of Hesiod come from the Loeb edition, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, with some slight alterations.

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g r e g or y s t a l e y Night, though she lay with none, gave birth to Blame and painful Woe, and the Hesperides who guard the rich, golden apples and the trees bearing fruit beyond glorious Ocean. (Hesiod, Theogony 211–16)

These are the ‘dark’ attributes which men have long taught women to see as their own, as Cixous points out: ‘[women are] taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is Dark. Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid.’8 The indoctrination had already begun with Hesiod: Woman as Night, as Abyss, as land in the West. It was only after the discovery of the New World that the dark continent thought of as Woman came to be Africa. Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci worked within this tradition, representing America in their narratives as a mythologized and feminine place. For a variety of reasons, Europe projected onto the New World an essentially classical geography; indeed, explorers crossed the sea with mythology as their map, for both the words ‘Atlantic’ and ‘Ocean’ derive from ancient myths: Okeanos was a river which surrounded the world and Atlantis was an island set in its streams to the west.9 Both as land and as unknown realm, the New World came to be pictured as Woman in explorers’ narratives and in the illustrations which accompanied them, as Mario Klarer has shown. Columbus describes the earth he discovers as ‘like a round ball, upon one part of which is a prominence like a woman’s nipple’ and finds there communities of women much like the Amazons. Vespucci’s narratives are illustrated with allegoriza-

8

‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 877–8. Hesiod (Theog. 791–2) describes Ocean as a circular stream which ‘coils around the earth’; Homer (Od. 11. 13–19) places the entrance to Hades near it to the West. Atlantis, an island in Okeanos named for Atlas, who stood nearby to hold up the sky, is described by Plato (Tim. 24e) as ‘an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles’. Beyond it there were other islands and an entire continent. 10 Mario Klarer, ‘Woman and Arcadia: the Impact of Ancient Utopian Thought on the Early Image of America’, Journal of American Studies, 27.1 (1993), 1–17. Quotations above are from pp. 4 and 13. 9


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tions of America as ‘female figure which oscillates between a voluptuous temptress and an amazon-like monster’.10 When Cixous compares woman’s discovery of self with the Renaissance’s discovery of the New World, therefore, she is simply asking women to take control of a traditional discourse by making themselves not the metaphor but the reality. In The Lay of the Land, a book published in the same year as Cixous’ essay (indeed, it is reviewed in the same issue of Signs in which ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ appears), Annette Kolodny has traced the history of this discourse and its association with America. ‘America’s oldest and most cherished fantasy’, Kolodny writes, has been a masculine ‘experience of the land as essentially feminine—that is, not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification—enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction’.11 Thomas Jefferson’s description of the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, as Kolodny notes, captures perfectly the erotic charge of this fantasy: The passage of the Patowmac through the Blue ridge is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in nature. You stand on a very high point of land . . . The first glance of this scene hurries our senses . . . For the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and participate of the calm below. . . This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic.12

11

Chapel Hill, NC, (1975), 4. Kolodny’s summary of her thesis in many respects could be taken as a summary of Cixous’, as well: ‘The dynamic of almost every piece of writing examined here, in fact, appears to repeat a movement back into the realm of the Mother, in order to begin again, and then an attempted . . . movement out of that containment in order to experience the self as independent, assertive, and sexually active’ (ibid. 153). This parallel only highlights the degree to which Cixous has appropriated the mythological and psychological symbolism of America’s discovery as the model for Woman’s. 12 Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Pedem (New York, 1972), 19.

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Cixous adopts this imagery—of exploration, of the discovery of a female body, and of a landscape of desire—but she wants women themselves to ‘paint’ the scene ‘worth a voyage across the Atlantic’: I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire [her own body] so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune.13

In writing the body, women can now discover their own new world, can explore their own body as the landscape which traditionally men have envisioned it to be.

utopia This trope of discovering new worlds is central to Cixous’ account of woman’s quest, I shall argue, because America offered a model for how those on antiquity’s margins could critique the centre, a model already followed by Sir Thomas More in his Utopia. From antiquity through the Renaissance, first the West in general and then America in particular had functioned as the quintessential ‘somewhere else’, the locus of the Other which challenges the here and the now. Published in 1516, More’s essay recounts the adventures of Raphael Hythloday, a sailor who travelled with Amerigo Vespucci on his fourth expedition to the New World. There Hythloday journeys on to the island of Utopia, which has the ‘best form of commonwealth’. Thus More introduces the word ‘utopia’ into our vocabulary as both neologism and pun; it means ‘no place’ as well as ‘good place’, an ideal society in a place heretofore not known. It is no surprise that More associated the very idea of utopia with the new world; for, although he coined the word, the lands at the margins of the world to the West had long been to the ancients a concept of just that sort, a world that had no place in the classical scheme of values and experiences, a place that was not Greek. As 13

‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 876.


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James Romm has noted, the Greeks conferred on those who lived on the margins of the world ‘a unique ethical prerogative’: ‘In their eyes ‘‘normal’’ human values, as defined by those who imagine themselves at the privileged center, can appear arbitrary and even laughably absurd.’14 Cixous’ Medusa is in this ancient tradition, laughing from the margins at the perspective of men who have placed themselves in the ‘privileged center’: ‘They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between Medusa and the abyss. That would be enough to set half the world laughing . . . You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.’15 The Greek mind used space to graph or map ideas, placing Greece itself in the middle of the world and measuring the character and worth of other peoples by their distance from it, as William Blake Tyrrell has articulated:16 Less a place than an idea, [the edge of the oikoumene (inhabited world)] expresses spatially the breakdown of differences, of the categories used to define culture and to distinguish it from bestiality below and divinity above . . . As a place, the frontier is the coincidentia oppositorum (the falling in together of the opposites), and is thus populated with both subhuman and suprahuman figures: Centaurs, gorgons, the Hesperides.17

The Greeks treat the margins of the world as a sort of antiland (a term which we shall shortly meet in Cixous’ writing), the home both for cultures that are inferior because they do not observe Greek ways and for paradises where few if any Greeks can aspire to go. This latter notion applies especially to the West, where the Greeks placed perfect lands such as Elysium or the home of the Hesperides. Although the recent discovery of America served as a spur to More’s placement of his ideal society there, the Greek sources on which he drew as models would have suggested to him the same place even if Columbus had never set sail, a point confirmed by 14

The Edges of the Earth, 47–8. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 885. 16 The Greeks’ use of their word topos, ‘place’, to describe a theme or subject (paralleled by the Roman use of locus communis and the English equivalent, ‘commonplace’) highlights their spatial approach to reasoning. 17 Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking, 56. 15

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Guillaume Bude´, a leading French humanist, writing a year after the publication of Utopia: I personally, however, have made investigation and discerned for certain that Utopia lies outside the limits of the known world. Undoubtedly, it is one of the Fortunate Isles, perhaps close to the Elysian fields . . . content with its own institutions and possessions, blessed in its innocence, and leading a kind of heavenly life which is below the level of heaven but above the rable of this known world.18

After Amerigo Vespucci, one could say, ‘Utopia, thy name is America.’ But Utopia was already in Hesperia even before that word was coined and that world came to be called ‘new.’19 Cixous’ desire for a ‘new world’ for women is part of a broader trend which regularly has characterized feminist approaches to myth. In her book on the women of Homer’s Odyssey, Lillian Doherty notes that one feminist strategy for reading androcentric texts has followed ‘a utopian path, aimed at conceptualizing a world free of [the] constraints’ such texts impose on women.20 The appeal of many of the myths which the Greeks associated with Hesperia is that they represent values which have ‘no place’ in the patriarchal world which Greece located at the centre; thus America was precisely in concept ‘a world free of [the] constraints’ which patriarchal and misogynistic Greek culture placed upon women. The New World was the one place where even the Greeks had followed a utopian path. 18

From a letter to Thomas Lupset, dated 31 July 1517, cited by Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 132. 19 In a famous prophecy, the chorus in Seneca’s Medea, which dates roughly to the middle of the 1st c. ce, predicts: ‘In future years an age will arrive during which Oceanus will loosen the bonds of things and a huge continent will appear and Tethys will uncover new worlds.’ This represents perhaps the first time the ‘New World’ received that name; Christopher Columbus, it is argued, knew of this prophecy and asserted that his voyage had fulfilled it. Cf. James Romm, ‘New World and ‘‘novos orbes’’: Seneca in the Renaissance Debate over Ancient Knowledge of the Americas’, in W. Haase and M. Reinhold (eds.), The Classical Tradition and the Americas (Berlin, 1994), 77–116. 20 Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey (Ann Arbor, 1995), 40.


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imaginary zones As Catherine Cle´ment, Cixous’ collaborator in producing The Newly Born Woman, has noted, ‘Somewhere every culture has an imaginary zone for what it excludes, and it is that zone which we must try to remember today.’21 For the Greeks, that zone was on the periphery of the world, dark, frightening, unknown—in short, the abyss where Columbus found America and Cixous proposes to find Woman. Women’s adventure into the abyss (Cixous’ word in the original French, ‘abıˆme’, ultimately derives, like its English equivalent, from Greek) inevitably makes mythology central to the project of feminism; for only in myth can women find among the traditions of European culture a ‘somewhere else’ that includes them amidst all which the Greeks regularly excluded. Utopian places of this sort are by their very nature ‘never never lands’. Guillaume Bude´ had heard, he reports in a letter to Sir Thomas More, that an alternative title for his friend’s work had in fact been ‘Udepotia’, or ‘Neverland’, from the Greek word for ‘never’.22 Whether More ever entertained this alternative we cannot be sure, but ‘Neverland’ does serve as a revealing gloss on ‘No place’, highlighting the essentially mythological character of such a world. In its now more familiar and reduplicated form, ‘Never never land’, describes a remote or imaginary place, a world of fantasy. Woman’s search for this ‘somewhere else’ leads inevitably to the reading of mythology, for myths provide the maps to a new world, as Cixous argues: There has to be somewhere else, I tell myself. And everyone knows that to go somewhere else there are routes, signs, ‘maps’—for an exploration, a trip.— That’s what books are . . . If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.23 21

The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester 1986), 6. Some of the material from ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ is incorporated into this longer work. 22 Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 1. 23 Newly Born Woman, 72.

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Feminism’s search for ‘somewhere else’, its utopian drive, thus draws on the same myths which shaped the discovery of the New World.24 Queen Isabella of Spain, for example, offered special bonuses to the explorers whom she funded on the condition that they find Amazons in the New World; naturally a queen would want to validate her own reign by showing that myths about powerful women who challenged the dominance of men were true.25 For the Greeks, the zone distant from their ‘real’ world is inherently mythical, a space in which to think about societies that might be different from their own. Because the Greek world is intensely patriarchal, woman is regularly the signifier of Otherness in all its forms and is central to myths about whatever is marginal—politically, geographically, culturally. To explore the limits of the known, therefore, is to enter a mythological space that is particularly feminine, as Cixous recognizes: ‘the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive: women, or as Hoffmann would say, fairies.’26 If feminism is the discovery of a new world, then mythology provides, in Cixous’ metaphor, the ‘maps’ by which the journey must be taken: But I move toward something that only exists in an elsewhere, and I search in the thought that writing has uncontrollable resources. That writing is what deals with the no-deal, relates to what gives no return. That something else (what history forbids, what reality excludes or doesn’t admit) can manifest itself there: some other.27

24

It is surely coincidental but none the less revealing that Tzvetan Todorov, Cixous’ colleague and friend (they co-founded the review Poe´tique in 1969) published in 1982 La Conqueˆte de l’Ame´rique, which takes the conquest of America as a paradigm for ‘deal[ing] with the other’ (the English translation of Todorov’s book appeared in 1984 under the title The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. E. Leacock (New York and London). Todorov, like Cixous, uses the word abıˆme, ‘abyss’, to characterize the journey into the unknown. 25 Cf. Batya Weinbaum, Islands of Women and Amazons (Austin, Tex., 1999), 131. 26 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 880. 27 Newly Born Woman, 97. This quotation elaborates a point treated more briefly in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’.


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Paradoxically, it is not through prose, through a rational representation of the real, that women can find themselves and make their case, but through poetry, through an imaginative exploration of the mythological. It is revealing, therefore, that the books which Cixous reads, both early in life and later, are mythological, from Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, to Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Penthesilea.

antiland Cixous catalogues her mythic readings in a section of The Newly Born Woman titled ‘Sorties’, which can be rendered in English as ‘Attacks/ Ways Out/Forays’.28 Myth becomes a tool through which women can escape the world which men have constructed for them through myth, can attack it, can begin their own voyage of discovery: For a long time I read, I lived, in a territory made of spaces taken from all the countries to which I had access through fiction, an antiland . . . where distinctions of races, classes, and origins would not be put to use without someone’s rebelling. Where there are people who are ready for anything— to live, to die for the sake of ideas that are right and just. And where it was not impossible or pathetic to be generous.29

28

This is the translation by Betsy Wing. Newly Born Woman, 72. Although it is not explicit in this excerpt, it is clear from Cixous’ subsequent discussion that her readings here came from ‘a world of fiction and myths’ (p. 73), especially Greek myths. It is revealing that she most identifies with Achilles and utterly rejects Odysseus. Achilles is angry and rebellious, uncompromising. ‘But I didn’t like to catch myself being Ulysses, the artist of flight’ (p. 74). If woman is to be a mythic explorer of new worlds, we might expect that she would take Odysseus as her model. But Odysseus, as Cixous describes him, is ‘the homecoming man . . . always returning to himself–in spite of the most fantastic detours’ (p. 74). In many ways Odysseus represents the Greek conception of the feminine with his desire to return to the hearth and home, the realm of ‘woman’. By contrast, Cixous wants the new woman to leave home and therefore Ariadne represents her ideal: ‘Ariadne, without calculating, without hesitating, but believing, taking everything as far as it goes–the antiOdysseus–never looking back, knowing how to break off, how to leave, advancing into emptiness, into the unknown’ (p. 75). 29

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Myth offers an alternative reality, or an alternative to reality, the anti- to all that is patriarchal, repressive, authoritarian, greedy.30 Cixous’ mythic antiland has an ideology that sounds much like America’s, a parallel underlined in a famous poem by Emma Lazarus, a woman with the kind of resume´ a ‘newly born’ woman should have.31 Lazarus (1849–1887) was an American of Spanish and Jewish ancestry who answered Cixous’ call for women to write a century before Cixous issued it. Indeed, Lazarus was much like Cixous, one of those ‘people who are like me in their rebellion and in their hope’.32 Lazarus is best known for her poem ‘The New Colossus’, written for the Statue of Liberty, on whose base it is displayed. Liberty is the ‘new Colossus’, who is very different from the ‘brazen giant of Greek fame’; she is a ‘mighty woman’ who embodies the values of antiland: ‘Give me your tired, your poor j Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, j The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. j Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.’ Lazarus’s poem, which rejects the Greek Colossus (a statue of the Greek god of the sun, Helios, on the island of Rhodes) in favour of an alternative, American vision of fame and national identity, summarizes nicely the American reaction to classical myth during the 30

Cixous’ use of the prefix anti- to label her alternative place follows an ancient tradition. The Greeks regularly named their other worlds in this way: Antipodes, Antichthones, Antoikoi (cf. Romm, The Edges of the Earth, 128–9 and nn. 17 and 26). 31 Living and working a century before Cixous, Lazarus anticipated some of the elements of Cixous’ feminist agenda. Born the daughter of a wealthy father who was well-connected among America’s social and intellectual e´lites, Emma Lazarus began to write early and in a mythological vein; her second volume of poems was titled Admetus and Other Poems (1871). After 1880 she turned to social reform (she was moved by the plight of impoverished Jewish immigrants from Russia) and to social enlightenment (she wrote articles and essays which attempted to defend Jews from the false stereotypes from which they suffered). Although her focus was religious and cultural rather than gender prejudice, Lazarus used her writings to defend an Other. Lazarus never married and little is known about her sexuality; she did, however, write an unpublished poem, ‘Assurance’, which reads like a lesbian fantasy, a female’s exploration of the female body of the sort for which Cixous calls. See Bette Roth Young, Emma Lazarus in her World (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1995), 18. 32 Newly Born Woman, 72.


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first century of the American Republic: ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ Lady Liberty, a later descendant of the Athena who embodied Athens or the Roma who represented Rome, stands at America’s ‘sunset gates’ not just to welcome exiles from abroad but also to keep ancient mythology out. Long before Cixous took the New World as her analogue for Woman, America itself had adopted an approach to mythology that could be called proto-feminist. That is, America was aware of its utopian status within the classical world view and occupied very consciously the perspective of the Other as it explored the relevance of ancient mythology for its own sense of self. The legacy of classical mythology in America is therefore very different from that in Europe; the feminist critique did not in America need to stand in opposition to the dominant cultural and political traditions but in fact was in many ways supported by them. For America’s Founding Fathers, as for its Founding Mothers, the new world was a classical utopia, both no place for myth and a good place in myth. Geographically, America lay beyond the oikoumene, the inhabited world, and was therefore a place where even the wandering Hercules had never set foot. Just as the Romans could make the Greek Heracles into their hero, too, for his travels had taken him to the site where Rome eventually would be built, so too the later nations of Europe could connect themselves with heroic traditions through the various descendants of Greek heroes who were said to have been their founders.33 But the New World was located beyond the gates of Hercules, as Alexander the Great was reportedly advised: They say that in the Ocean there lie fertile lands, while beyond it in turn are born new shores, a new world: that nature stops nowhere—always it appears in a fresh guise just at the point where one thinks it had come to a halt. These are fictions easy of invention—for the Ocean cannot be sailed.—Let Alexander be content to have conquered as far as the world

33

See Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1949), 54 ff., for a brief discussion of this genealogical tradition. For the tradition in Britain, see T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (New York, 1970) and Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995).

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is content to have light. It was within the limits of the known world that Hercules won his claim to heaven.34

The new world is a mythical, ‘fictional’ place, one where you can imagine alternative worlds, but it is also at the same time a place not burdened by the heritage of traditional myth: Hercules never visited there to perform a Labour. America, in fact, wanted to be an antiland which embodied the kind of alternative to Greece and its myths for which Cixous herself was searching. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the 1830s and described this New World for his European peers, correctly sensed that Americans would have a ‘distaste for what is ancient’.35 Although the Founding Fathers turned to the Greek and Roman worlds as a laboratory in which to design a new system of government, they did not in general accept the ideological and political uses of myth which had supported their ancient models. As Hesiod tells us, the Muses are the patrons not just of poets but also of princes: ‘Calliope . . . is the chiefest of them all, for she attends on worshipful princes: whomsoever of heaven-nourished princes the daughters of great Zeus honour. . . they pour sweet dew upon his tongue, and from his lips flow gracious words. All the people look towards him while he settles causes with true judgements’ 34 These words are reported by Seneca the Elder (1st c. ce), Suasoria 1. 1 (here in translation by Michael Winterbottom from the Loeb Classical Library) and are said to have been spoken to persuade Alexander the Great not to continue his conquests once he had reached the Indian Ocean. 35 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York and London, 1947), 290. There were many reasons why Tocqueville took this view. He saw myth as the characteristic preoccupation of aristocratic societies, which possessed the leisure to engage in imaginative activity and which, because of their own hierarchical structures, were naturally inclined ‘to put intermediate powers between God and man’. Democracies, by contrast, are so busy pursuing success and so concerned with equality that they have neither the time nor the inclination to ponder the supernatural. Moreover, aristocratic societies favour stable and uniform religions, whereas democracies encourage a sort of doubt which ‘brings the poet’s imagination back to earth and shuts it up in the actual, visible world’. Aristocracies are backward-looking cultures which idealize what has come before, whereas ‘democracy engenders a sort of instinctive distaste for what is old’.


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(Theogony 79–86). Moreover, the Muses are the daughters of Zeus, who is both the ‘king of the gods’ and the god who ‘nurtures kings’ on earth.36 Myths are therefore songs of the Muses intended to entertain Zeus and to celebrate his accomplishments, a form of royal entertainment and propaganda, a connection which did not go unnoticed in America. Fisher Ames, a member of Congress during George Washington’s two terms as president and a leading orator and essayist between 1787 and 1807, noted that those moments in ancient history which we admire for their ‘republican liberty’ are not the ones during which myth and poetry flourished: Homer and Hesiod wrote ‘while kings governed those states’ and Rome’s greatest poetry came after the fall of the Republic.37 Myth was an instrument of politics or, more particularly, of aristocratic and monarchical power, which, in the eyes of many Americans, made it dangerous and unacceptable. No ancient hero should have been more appealing to Americans than Virgil’s Aeneas: he had sailed across the seas to find a new home, was epitomized by his piety, and had sacrificed his personal interests in favour of those of his nation.38 But Aeneas had become tainted through association with the imperial politics of Augustus, as the American poet Joel Barlow noted in the introduction to his epic poem the Columbiad (1807): ‘Virgil wrote and felt like a subject, not like a citizen. The real design of his poem was to increase the veneration of the people for a master, whoever he might be, and to encourage like Homer the great system of military depredation.’ Achilles and Odysseus did not fare much better in American eyes, as John McWilliams has noted: ‘To a people convinced that Divine Providence was creating a regenerative civilization founded upon republican politics, freeholding farmers, and Christian ethics, the conduct of Achilles and Odysseus seemed to embody everything from which they wished to escape.’39 36

‘Zeus, King of the gods’ (Hesiod, Theog. 886); ‘kings, nurtured by Zeus’ (Homer, Iliad 1. 176). 37 Works of Fisher Ames, ii, ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis, 1983), 25. 38 Cf. Meyer Reinhold, ‘Vergil in the American Experience’, in Classica Americana (Detroit, 1984), 221–49, esp. 227. 39 The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860 (Cambridge, 1989), 22.

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Mythic heroes became acceptable in America only when they had been transformed into moral exemplars, as the story of Hercules and his choice demonstrates. Perhaps Hercules’ saving grace was the fact that no ancient epic survived which featured his tale; Americans encountered him therefore primarily through prose works such as Cicero’s De Officiis (‘On Duties’), which did not seem frivolous and fictional. There (1. 118) Cicero recalls the story of Hercules’ choice at the crossroads, earlier used by Xenophon (Memorabilia 2. 1. 21–2f) as a lesson in life. Virtue and Vice, in the form of women, each seek to persuade Hercules to follow them at the fork in the road of his life. As Carl Richard has shown, John Adams was much influenced by this story. As a young man Adams recorded in his diary that ‘the Choice of Hercules came into my mind and left impressions which I hope will never be effaced nor long unheeded’; as an adult he proposed this tale as the theme for the Great Seal of America.40 In 1819 the American Whig Society, a group organized by students at Princeton University to provide both social and intellectual opportunities lacking in the college curriculum, selected the Choice of Hercules as the emblem for their diploma, a choice which constitutes ‘one of the most revealing monuments in the history of American culture’, as James McLachlan has shown.41 What this emblem reveals, in fact, is the role which the Enlightenment played in shaping the American reaction to the classics in general and to classical mythology in particular during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For the centennial of the Whig Society in 1869, students wrote an ode which offers their commentary on Hercules and myth: ‘Go hence, Herculean Youth, j Clad in the might of truth j And reason calm, j To turn with high disdain j From vice to Virtue’s train . . . ’. The Whig diploma presents Hercules’ choice as one between mythology and philosophy, the instruments in turn of vice and virtue. The woman who embodies Pleasure invites Hercules to join a scene of scantily clad nymphs and satyrs, partying in the nearby woods to the sounds of cymbals and pipes, 40

C. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 49–50. 41 ‘The Choice of Hercules: American Student Societies in the Early 19th Century’, in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society, ii (Princeton, 1994), 449–94.


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instruments associated with Dionysos and his orgia. On the other side, the woman of Virtue points to her (and our) right, where we see a student reading, surrounded by a group of philosophers. Americans, like Hercules himself, chose the ‘right’ path, that of ‘truth’ and ‘reason calm’, thereby rejecting the falsehoods of myth. As Meyer Reinhold has noted, ‘It is characteristic of eighteenthcentury Americans that in their eclectic reading in the classics they were interested primarily in the prose authors—the moralists and the historians—for their practical value in promoting moral and political wisdom. There was little taste for belles lettres as such, especially poetry‘.42 Myth was associated with falsehood and the irrational, a point made by Thomas Paine, the British man born of Quaker stock who emigrated to America on the eve of the Revolution and wrote its manifesto in his pamphlet Common Sense. In a later essay, The Age of Reason, after arguing that the story of Christ was a Christian adaptation of pagan myths about heroes, Paine asserts: ‘it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.’43 In a similar way, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, founder of several colleges, and a physician, rejected the ‘ancient fables’ as an ‘agreeable description of frauds—rapes— and murders’ which ‘shock the moral faculty’.44 Americans, creating a new nation in the midst of the Enlightenment, yearned, like Princeton’s young students, for ‘the might of Truth’ and ‘Reason calm’, neither of which could easily be found in the canonical myths of Greece and Rome. Born in the Enlightenment and located on the margins of the classical conception of the world, America was both after and outside of myth; it therefore did not see itself—its politics, its faith, its values—reflected in the myths of the ancient world.45 42

Classica Americana, 25. The Age of Reason (Secaucus, NJ, 1974), 53. 44 Benjamin Rush, Essays: Literary, Moral, and Philosophical ed. Michael Meranze (Schenectady, NY, 1988), 20. 45 Cf. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 129: ‘I think [the Iliad] a book of false glory, tending to inspire immoral and mischievous notions of honor.’ As John McWilliams (in The American Epic, cited above) has shown, Americans had great difficulty in adapting the Iliad to the American 43

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America thus constituted an outside, or the perspective of the Other on antiquity, which in its critique of myth anticipated Feminism’s own. Europe, of course, had had its Enlightenment, too, and indeed Cixous is herself in some ways a descendant of the eighteenthcentury French philosophes who created the movement. They, too, had been influenced by the age of exploration and turned to newly discovered worlds as ‘useful devices for criticizing European society and suggesting a better one’.46 What Persia had been for Montesquieu or Tahiti for Diderot, America could be for Cixous, an enlightened place, an antiland. For America in its enlightened critique of myth had already anticipated Cixous. Even before the American poet and feminist Adrienne Rich gave voice to the view, America’s Founders had read classical mythology as ‘a book of myths j in which j our names do not appear’.47

land of dreams The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that ‘the ends of the inhabited world have been given all the finest things’ (3. 106); from its very beginnings America has taken this notion seriously and has tried to realize its vision. It is thus fair to say that the American Dream was originally a classical myth. Americans were well aware of this tradition, which Thomas Bulfinch mentions in the first chapter of his The Age of Fable, a book written to familiarize Americans with the myths that they should know: On the western margin of the earth, by the stream of Ocean, lay a happy place named the Elysian Plain, whither mortals favoured by the gods were transported without tasting of death, to enjoy an immortality of bliss. This

context. In many ways the most successful attempt was James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans, in which Homer’s warriors are literally ‘embodied’ in the American Indians. Morally the Greeks were ‘savages’, albeit in some ways noble ones. 46

Leonard M. Marsak (ed.), The Enlightenment (New York, 1972), 4. These are the final lines of Rich’s poem ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (1972), in The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950–2001 (New York, 2002), 103. 47


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happy region was also called the ‘Fortunate Fields,’ and the ‘Isles of the Blessed.’48

This myth, Bulfinch suggests, ‘possibly may have sprung from the reports of some storm-driven mariners who had caught a glimpse of the coast of America’.49 Edward Everett, the first Professor of Greek at Harvard, took these myths as a prophecy which Americans were obligated to fulfil: ‘There are no more continents or worlds to be revealed; Atlantis hath arisen from the ocean, the farthest Thule is reached, there are no more retreats beyond the sea, no more discoveries, no more hopes. Here then a mighty work is to be fulfilled, or never, by the race of mortals.’50 Bulfinch and Everett were trying to share with an American audience what European intellectuals had long been saying, ever since Peter Martyr, a humanist in service of Queen Isabella of Spain, wrote shortly after Columbus’s voyage: ‘[the inhabitants of the New World] seeme to live in that golden worlde of the which old writers speake so much, wherein men lived simply and innocently.’51 When Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 1850s transformed Greek myths into salubrious tales for American children, he had Midas come to America to bestow on it his Golden Touch, creating in the process those glorious New England autumns and, by implication, a new Golden Age in America; in fact, Hawthorne wrote his tales in the immediate wake of the California Gold Rush. Mary Zimmerman likewise attempted to Americanize Midas in her recent and successful Broadway play Metamorphoses, based on Ovid’s collection of tales. Zimmerman’s Midas, a successful but callous businessman, is told by Silenus that paradise is not to be found in financial success but resides in ‘a country beyond this one . . . Over the ocean. I’ve been there . . . King, I tell you, it’s like a dream . . . .There is no time—just the blue sky above and the pretty moon at night and 48

Bulfinch’s Mythology (New York, 1968), 8. Ibid. 219. 50 ‘Oration on the Peculiar Motives to Intellectual Exertion in America,’ in Robert E. Spiller (ed.), The American Literary Revolution 1783–1837 (Garden City, NY, 1967), 316. 51 Peter Martyr, The Decades of the New World trans. Richard Eden (n.p., 1966), 8. 49

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they got meadows under their feet with the yellow flowers.’52 Hesiod’s ‘beyond glorious Ocean’ still has its alluring appeal, especially in America. If the West appealed to Christians as the Elysian Fields, a paradise for God’s chosen people, or to Walt Whitman as ‘a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain’ where both poets and immigrants could shed the burdens of the past, or as a nouus ordo seclorum in which Americans could rewind Roman history, back from evil Empire to virtuous Republic, it appealed to women because it was one of the homelands of the fabled Amazons.53 Diodorus (3. 52. 4) had told of a tradition which placed the Amazon women ‘on an island called Hesperia from its position toward the setting Sun.’ The Amazons had been created by the Greeks as a topsy-turvy society which represented a world that was in every sense not Greek. That is why the homeland of the Amazons was regularly on the margins of the world, whether in the West or South or North. For the Greeks the Amazons were a fascinating intellectual construct which asserted the powers of women only to deny them through heroic conquest at the hands of Achilles, Heracles, or Theseus. For women, however, this ‘law of reversal’ works in a very different way. The Amazons represent female desire as well, as Cixous has shown, but a desire in which the women prevail so as to preserve their independence: ‘[The hero] dominates to destroy. She dominates to not be dominated; she dominates the dominator to destroy the space of domination.’54 The Amazons have long been popular figures among the women who challenge patriarchy, from Christine de Pisan to He´le`ne Cixous and beyond. When seventy-five years after the American Revolution America’s Founding Mothers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Lucy Stone, sought to apply to women the rights which earlier the Revolution had claimed for ‘all men’, they became, in 52

Metamorphoses: A Play (Evanston, Ill., 2002), 12–13. Whitman’s line comes from his poem ‘Song of the Exposition’ (1871). For America’s use of Rome in the cinema, see Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (New York, 1997). 54 Newly Born Woman, 116. Cixous uses the phrase ‘the law of reversal’ there to characterize the Amazon’s need to ‘repeat the act that proves or symbolizes that she is not captive or submissive to a man’. 53


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Inez Haynes Gillmore’s characterization, modern Amazons: ‘The spectacle of a woman trying to do something that a man has always done–it is a primitive, fundamental joke. When the prehistoric Greeks fought against the prehistoric Amazons, possibly many of them died laughing.’55 Stanton herself used the myth of the Amazons in her speeches to characterize the feminist movement.56 Just as Bulfinch and Everett were aware that America occupied the place where the Isles of the Blessed had been situated, so too America’s feminists understood the long tradition which had placed Amazons in the New World. When Columbus reported finding an island of women, Peter Martyr readily translated this discovery into the myth of the Amazons; thereafter, the Amazon became ‘a figure ubiquitous from the inception of the mythology of the New World’, as Kathleen March and Kristina Passman have shown.57 As American women gained increasing access in the nineteenth century to the kind of classical education men had long enjoyed, they too used the language of myth to characterize their place in the world.58 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one of America’s leading intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, developed ‘an Amazonian self-image’ of the type she put into the mouth of one of her fictional characters: ‘I want to be big–Big–BIG! j I want to know everything–as far as I can. j I want to be strong, skillful, an armory of concealed weapons.’59 In her utopian novel Herland (1915) 55

Angels and Amazons: A Hundred Years of American Women (Garden City, NY, 1933), 88. 56 Cf. Weinbaum, Island of Women and Amazons, 17 and references cited there. 57 ‘The Amazon Myth and Latin America’ in Haase and Reinhold (eds.), The Classical Tradition and the Americas, 285–338. 58 Cf. Caroline Winterer, ‘Victorian Antigone: Classicism and Women’s Education in America, 1840–1900,’ American Quarterly 53.1 (2001), 70–93. Elizabeth Cady Stanton studied Greek with a tutor in order to prove herself equal to men and later continued her classical studies at a coeducational academy where she won a prize for her proficiency in Greek; see Lois W. Banner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Woman’s Rights (Boston, Mass., 1980), 11–13. 59 See Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist 1860–1896 (Philadelphia, 1980), 49. Gilman’s early novel was titled Benigna Machiavelli.

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Gilman creates a community of women of this sort, ‘an undiscovered country of a strictly Amazonian nature’ located an ocean voyage from America.

new worlds Neither America nor Woman had a place in classical myth, except as the locus of absence, of abyss. Yet, paradoxically, this absence made myth a perfect vehicle through which both could map their ideals, could create new worlds distant and different from antiquity. The Greeks, who had placed their ideal civilization at the centre of the world as they knew it, provided through their myths about alternative civilizations at the margins a map to guide those like Columbus and Cixous who were seeking to expand their horizons. Only in myth could the Greeks entertain as logical but fantastic possibilities the social ideals which ultimately America and Feminism would seek to make real. The remapping of Greek geography which began with the discovery of the New World was thus the necessary prerequisite for the rethinking of Greek ideology which movements such as Feminism have since fostered. That is why, for Cixous, the New Woman embodies a New World.

part iv

Myth and Science


9

Atoms, Individuals, and Myths

D u n c a n Kennedy Let us begin by listening to a story told about his own discipline by the biologist Steven Rose: Every society that anthropologists have studied has developed its own theories and legends to account for life and our place within it, to interpret the great transitions that characterize our existence; the creation of new life at birth and its termination at death. In most societies’ creation myths, a deity imposes order upon the confused mass of struggling life. Although our own society is no exception, we now phrase things differently, claiming to have transcended myth and replaced it with secure knowledge. For the last three hundred years, Western societies have built on and transcended their own creation myths by means of scientia, the organized investigation of the universe, made possible within the rules and by the experimental methods of natural science, and with the aid of powerful instruments designed to extend the human senses of touch, smell, taste, sight and sound.1

Some powerful notions structure this story. One is the idea of a unified ‘science’, with its rules and methods. Another is the idea of an epistemological break or leap (‘transcended’), the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’ which separates the last three hundred years 1 Steven Rose, Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism (London, 1997), 3.

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from what went before, rendering us ‘modern’ in contrast to the exploded paradigms of what becomes the ‘ancient’ world, at one bound associating ‘secure knowledge’ with the modern, and consigning ‘myth’ to the ancient. Mythos gives way to logos, story-telling to the exercise of pure reason. In this story, myth becomes the antonym of science. Rose tells his story tongue-in-cheek, for he would not distance himself so categorically from the category of ‘myth’ (my emphasis): ‘But to study, to interpret, to understand, to explain and to predict? These are the tasks of myth-makers, magicians and, above all today, of scientists, of biologists. I am of this last category.’2 Rose would be viewed by some as going over to the other side in what have come to be known as the ‘science wars’, deserting the ranks of those who hold to the realist view that science alone is capable of delivering up universal truths about the world to join those who argue that science is a cultural construct.3 Rose thus sees not the rupture between myth and science that characterizes the realist view, but a continuum. This essay will explore the relationship of myth and science from the direction of gender studies, which holds to such a continuum, in an attempt to hear the echoes of the past in the present. Feminism’s engagement with science has been played out on a number of stages. Historians and sociologists have studied the lives of women scientists and have traced the processes by which the institutions in which science is practised have either excluded women or narrowly restricted the roles they are permitted to play. Another focus has been the role of gender in what we might call the culture of science. The practice of science is often mediated in images that are tendentiously gendered, for example, the image of science as ‘conquest’, a trope that has often taken on connotations of fierce sexual aggression directed at a personified Nature gendered as female. Mary Midgley writes: 2

Steven Rose, Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism (London, 1997), 3. 3 The bibliography is immense. Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore and London, 1994) are contested by the contributors to Andrew Ross (ed.), Science Wars (Durham, NC and London, 1996); Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins (eds.), The One Culture? A Conversation about Science (Chicago and London, 2001) seek to bring the sides together and lower the temperature.

a t o m s , i n d i v i d u a l s , an d m y t h s

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The literature of early modern science is a mine of highly-coloured passages that describe Nature, by no means as a neutral object, but as a seductive but troublesome female, to be unrelentingly pursued, sought out, fought against, chased into her inmost sanctuaries, prevented from escaping, persistently courted, wooed, harried, vexed, tormented, unveiled, unrobed, and ‘put to the question’ (i.e. interrogated under torture), forced to confess ‘all that lay in her most intimate recesses’, her ‘beautiful bosom’ must be laid bare, she must be held down and finally ‘penetrated’, ‘pierced’ and ‘vanquished’ (words which constantly recur).4

However, whilst many, scientists and non-scientists alike, have welcomed the growing openness of the institutions of science to women, and the concomitant awareness of the masculine emphasis in the ways in which the culture of scientific practice is framed, they balk at the notion that the content of science might (have) be(en) affected by gendered assumptions, for to concede this would be to undermine the cherished belief that science offers objective knowledge that transcends the contingencies of history and culture, gender, or race, with the promise, as Evelyn Fox Keller has it, ‘of touching the world at its innermost being, a touching made possible 4

Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (London, 1992), 77. Many of the terms Midgley cites come from Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, but a masculinist colouring may be felt in the classical imagery of the pursuit of knowledge. Lucretius speaks of holding his reader’s attention ‘while you come to see the whole nature of things, with what shape it—or she?—stands arranged’ (dum perspicis omnem j naturam rerum qua constet compta figura, DRN 1. 949–50). There seems to be here at least the seeds of the image of a personified Nature unveiled, laid open to the voyeuristic gaze of the investigator, for which see Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Hemel Hempstead, 1989), 87–110. A masculine colouring, even though itself now unveiled, persists. Donna Haraway, one of the most prominent contemporary feminist critics of science, has recently castigated Bruno Latour’s influential constructivist study Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1987) for privileging the language of war in depicting scientific practice: ‘ ‘‘nature’’ ’, she says, ‘is multiply the feat of the hero, more than it ever was in Boyle’ (‘Modest Witness: Feminist Diffractions in Science Studies’, in Peter Galison and David J. Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford, Calif., and London, 1996), 437). See further Duncan F. Kennedy, Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature (Ann Arbor, 2002), 112–13.

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by the power of pure thought’.5 That gendered assumptions might affect the substance of science is a tendentious claim, so let us start by looking at what it might mean. In what is now a classic article that appeared in the journal Signs in 1991, the anthropologist Emily Martin has charted the ways in which medical textbooks have represented the moment of conception—what the egg and the sperm do—in ways that are reminiscent of Mills & Boon romances: It is remarkable how ‘femininely’ the egg behaves and how ‘masculinely’ the sperm. The egg is seen as large and passive. It does not move or journey, but passively ‘is transported’, ‘is swept’ or even ‘drifts’ along the fallopian tube. In utter contrast, sperm are small, ‘streamlined’, and invariably active. They ‘deliver’ their genes to the egg, ‘activate the developmental program of the egg’, and have a ‘velocity’ that is often remarked upon. Their tails are ‘strong’ and efficiently powered. Together with the forces of ejaculation, they can ‘propel the semen into the deepest recesses of the vagina’. For this they need ‘energy’, ‘fuel’, so that with ‘whiplashlike motion and strong lurches’ they can ‘burrow through the egg coat’ and ‘penetrate’ it. At its extreme, the age-old relationship of the egg and the sperm takes on a royal or religious patina. The egg coat, its protective barrier, is sometimes called its vestments, a term usually reserved for sacred, religious dress. The egg is said to have a ‘corona’, a crown, and to be accompanied by attendant cells. It is holy, set apart and above, the queen to the sperm’s king. The egg is also passive, which means it must depend on the sperm for rescue. Gerald Schatten and Helen Schatten liken the egg’s role to that of Sleeping Beauty: ‘a dormant bride awaiting her mate’s magic kiss, which instills the spirit that brings her to life’. Sperm, by contrast, have a ‘mission’, which is to ‘move through the female genital tract in quest of the ovum.’ One popular account has it that the sperm carry out a ‘perilous journey’ into the ‘warm darkness’, where some fall away ‘exhausted’. ‘Survivors’ ‘assault’ the egg, the successful candidates ‘surrounding the prize’.6

Such ideas can be seen as historically deeply embedded, as Evelyn Fox Keller has pointed out: the assumption that the egg is activated 5

Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (New York, 1992), 78. 6 Emily Martin, ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male–Female Roles’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16 (1990/1), 489–90.


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by fertilization, therefore by the entry of the sperm, resonates with the view voiced by Apollo in Aeschylus’s Eumenides that the female is not the parent, but the nurse of the seed implanted by the male within her.7 As Martin goes on to suggest, the picture of ‘the egg as damsel in distress, shielded only by her sacred garments; sperm as heroic warrior to the rescue’, prevalent up to the 1970s, has given way to other descriptions of the process of fertilization which contradict this picture, though the imagery in which these are communicated is no less ideologically loaded. The work of Gerald Schatten and Helen Schatten from 1983 referred to by Martin (an article entitled ‘The Energetic Egg’) pictures the egg, like the sperm, as an active agent, directing the growth of projections on its surface called microvilli to capture the sperm. Egg and sperm are represented as ‘partners’ (as Londa Schiebinger suggests ‘perhaps a dualcareer couple’8) co-operating to achieve fertilization. As Schiebinger observes, though this might be a more sophisticated account, it is not an example of ‘prejudice vanquished’, of gender bias transcended; as the egg is energized, so it becomes masculinized (vestments replaced by shoulder pads, perhaps), and Martin remarks that, as the egg becomes active and masculinized, it is also seen as aggressive, a sort of femme fatale out to entrap the sperm. We should note that a very strong claim is being made here: the story patterns drawn out by scholars such as Martin are not seen as an ornamental extra that can simply be discarded to get at an ‘objective’ account; the claim is that, at a fundamental level, the story pattern constitutes the explanation.9 In what might be regarded as

7

Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000), 84. 8 Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1999), 146. 9 Over the past generation or so, quite a lot of work has emerged on what we could call the ‘emplotment’ of scientific explanations. Perhaps the most famous instance of this is Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London, 1985). Along the same lines, the physicist and historian of science Gerald Holton in his book, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler

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a ‘pre-scientific’ text, such an assertion might not come as a surprise.10 A corollary to this is that the history of knowledge becomes re-configured: continuity is privileged over rupture, the ‘Scientific Revolution’ starts to lose its ontological status as a historical fact,11 and the distinction between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ becomes somewhat harder to maintain, in epistemological terms at least.12 A further corollary is that if such story patterns are still operative, there is no reason to believe that they and their successors will not continue to be so. Whilst ‘better’ descriptions may well be forthcoming in the future (in the sense that they bring into view fresh phenomena or grant existing observations a new significance), they will no less encode the ideological assumptions of the society that generates them; no final or objective account of the kind posited within a realist epistemology will be forthcoming. If biology styles itself a rationalizing, scientistic logos, the logos concerned with explaining ‘life’, then what scholars like Martin are practising is the description of this self-styled biology’s ‘biomyths’ and their discipline could be termed ‘biomythography’. In her recent book Has Feminism Changed Science? Londa Schiebinger has examined the arguments for seeing gendered to Einstein (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1973), proposed his notion of themata, preconceived patterns or conceptual templates that are applied to the phenomena of the world. Again, the claim is the strong one that the pattern constitutes the explanation: for Holton, so fundamental an idea as that the basis of matter is atomistic is a cultural prejudgement that physicists bring to their work, not an inference they derive from it. 10

As e.g. when Lucretius uses the traditional personification of the earth as a mother to provide an explanation for a phenomenon he cannot directly observe, but feels obliged to explain historically, the appearance of different species (DRN 5. 793–827); cf. Duncan F. Kennedy, ‘Making a Text of the Universe: Perspectives on Discursive Order in the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius’, in Alison Sharrock and Helen Morales (eds.), Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (Oxford, 2000), 221–3. For an extended treatment of myth in Lucretius see Monica R. Gale, Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge, 1994). 11 See Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago and London, 1996). 12 So for Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1993).


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assumptions as affecting the substance of science, and has suggested that in medicine, primatology, and biology, a strong case can be made, along the lines of work such as Emily Martin’s. Thus Schiebinger observes that ‘the egg’s cone of microvilli was documented as early as 1895, but was not considered worthy of research until some eighty years later.’13 It is in the context of a change in perceived gender relations that a different story—and hence mode of explanation—becomes plausible, and comes to see significance in a detail that has hitherto been marginalized and effectively ignored. Schiebinger similarly points to the role of ‘origin stories’ in primatology and archaeology. She applauds the call by the anthropologist Margaret Conkey for a critique of the assumptions underlying the attribution of ‘the sexual division of labour’ to apes or early hominids: ‘The debate about man the hunter versus woman the gatherer is, [Conkey] remarks, really about the origins of two Western social institutions: the nuclear family and a gender-based division of labour. To seek their origins is to accept these institutions as natural and legitimate, rather than to see them as the products of particular histories.’14 However, Schiebinger is much more circumspect when it comes to physics, and does not in the end bring forward any instance she would assert as unequivocal. ‘Empirical study’, she writes, ‘may reveal that gender does not permeate the most abstract level of human endeavor’, and for the moment is content with the much weaker holding position that ‘gender abounds in the cultures of math and physics, determining to a certain extent who gets educated, gets funded, enjoys prestige, and can build upon opportunities.’15 We might be able to see a rationale for this. Feminist 13

Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science?, 146. Ibid. 138. The geneticist Richard Lewontin has similarly criticized appeals to what are effectively aetiological fables in sociobiological accounts of the development of allegedly universal ‘human traits’ such as altruism and homosexuality as the result of selective evolutionary pressures: ‘All of the sociobiological explanations of the evolution of human behaviour are like Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories of how the camel got his hump and how the elephant got his trunk’, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York, 1991), 100. The point is elaborated in Rose, Lifelines, 233–5. 15 Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science?, 178. 14

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critiques of science are concerned to see how gender, specifically defined as a cultural construct rather than as a given of nature, affects science. Within the opposition of culture/nature that feminist studies of science negotiate, ‘culture’ is given explanatory precedence over ‘nature’, and the claim is made that it offers critical purchase in discussing discourses such as biology. But physics defines itself as, precisely, the study of ‘nature’ (physis): it concerns itself with things. Its most extraordinary contribution to the history of ideas might be taken to be its development, refinement and theorization of the idea of a ‘thing’,16 with the concomitant notions of the thing as an object and of objectivity as the ideal of physical speculation: get to know the thing-in-itself, the nature of the thing (physics aspires to be, as Lucretius would have it, de rerum natura). Physics aims to seek out things as they really are (and we should not overlook the derivation of that term from res); its preferred mode is realism. At its purest (and in a mirror image of feminist studies of science), physics seeks to dissolve the opposition culture/nature, and refer all explanation ultimately to nature. Were the feminist critique to be ‘right’, the claim of physics to be both an autonomous discourse, and fundamental to boot, would fall. The stakes are indeed high. Science, for all the critical scrutiny brought to bear upon it, is still the great success story of our culture, and ‘scientific method’ carries with it, as we have seen, an enormous epistemological prestige. Scientific method is a very broad-ranging term that in different accounts can cover experiment or the mathematization of nature; but in respect of its capacity to explain, it is often identified with reductionism. Reductionism’s goal could be seen as the discovery of fundamental or ultimate causes, and herein lies one of the most familiar ideas associated with it, that biology can be reduced to chemistry and chemistry in turn reduced to physics as a final explanation. The reductionist case is often pressed further than this: thus sociobiology seeks to reduce sociology to biology. Reductionism can be further defined as a method of understanding the whole by examining the parts: matter, for example, by reducing it to primary constituent parts such as ‘atoms’, organisms 16 See Wolfgang Mann, The Discovery of Things (Princeton and London, 2000).


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by reduction to genes, and, as in the recent work by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Susan Blackmore, culture by reduction to what they term ‘memes’.17 Reductionism is not simply concerned with fundamental things; its goal could be seen as the discovery of fundamental or ultimate causes.18 The dominant paradigm of physical reality has been atomism, and it has served as the model of ‘fundamental’ knowledge that scientists should aspire to in other fields of study, and it continues to do so even as the classical atom has lost a good deal of its intellectual currency in contemporary physics. The search for something ultimate, an end point with no internal structure, has not been abandoned; atoms gave way to electrons a century ago, and in turn, leptons and quarks are sometimes touted as ultimate, even as some physicists speculate that they are composed of yet smaller constituents. However, as the physicist Steven Weinberg writes, ‘in place of particles with definite positions and velocities [by which Weinberg means the atom of Newtonian physics19], we have learned to speak of wave functions and probabilities. Out of the fusion of relativity with quantum mechanics there has evolved a new view of the world, one in which matter has lost its central view.’20 John Dupre´ emphasizes how problematical the model of the classical atom has become: ‘[E]lementary particles have become an increasingly heterogeneous bunch since the good old days of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and some of them fail 17

Cf. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976); Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London, 1995); Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford, 1999). 18 When we recall the etymological link between Latin causa and French chose, ‘thing’, we are reminded how in reductionist thinking ‘fundamental’ things are endowed with causal power, and are seen as agents with the capacity to bring about effects. Cf. Kennedy, Rethinking Reality, 85. 19 Cf. Newton (Optics iv. 260): ‘It seems to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures and with such other properties and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that these primitive particles being solids are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces.’ 20 Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (London, 1993), 1.

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to be elementary by being composed of simpler entities, quarks. The sense of ‘‘composed’’, however, is obscure, as quarks are generally said not to exist except in such ‘‘compositions’’ ’.21 These ‘compositions’ are sometimes troped heart-warmingly as ‘families’, and in particle accelerators, quarks decay within micro-seconds of being smashed out of these compositions. They can only by a stretch be described as ‘things’ any more, and contemporary physics notoriously enlists the imagery of both ‘waves’ and ‘particles’ to characterize them. However, what atoms have always lacked in terms of visibility and their modern counterparts are coming to lack in terms of ontology, they more than make up for in a quality that is philosophically far more important, their finality. They provide a definitive point of explanatory closure, and as such have become the model for explanation, seldom acknowledged, in discourses that see themselves far removed from physics. The proponents of reductionism often advance the progressivist argument that what separates ‘modern’ science from the earlier animism of ‘natural philosophy’ is a methodology that, in reducing phenomena to their constituent ‘things’, resists the imposition or projection of human desires, hopes or fears on to the natural world, which is conceived of rather as, precisely, depersonalized, and operating without purpose or design in a purely mechanical causal fashion.22 Descriptions of the fundamental components of the physical world should therefore aspire, at least, to transcend the kind of anthropomorphism, with its attendant gender biases, that feminist critics of the sciences have detected in what they see as the stories that structure explanation across a range of scientific discourses. 21

John Dupre´, ‘Metaphysical Disorder’, in Galison and Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science, 103. 22 Cf. Rose, Lifelines, 52, on the use of mechanical metaphors (e.g. the heart as pump) in biology: ‘the temptation to rely on mechanical and industrial metaphors for living processes goes back to the transformation in scientific thinking that came with the Newtonian revolution of the seventeenth century, itself of course intimately connected with the birth of modern capitalism and industrialization. Before that time, the metaphor trade tended to be in the opposite direction: the physical worlds of our own Earth and the cosmological universe were described in language usually reserved for living organisms, as when inanimate forces (the wind, rivers, and so forth) were ascribed intentions and goals.’


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Londa Schiebinger, as we have seen, is extremely cautious about conceding gender bias in respect of the substance of physics, though she does assert that ‘fundamental concepts in any field should not be taken for granted but should be set within historical frameworks of meaning.’23 Let us accept her invitation in respect of physics and frame our question thus: does reductionism escape its historical legacy? With Greco-Roman atomism, we have an example of a proto-reductionist strategy that seeks to explain the world around us in terms of the activity of primary particles operating way below the threshold of our senses. Epicurean atomism held that these minuscule pieces of matter had only three properties: size, shape, and weight. With weight, it was thought, came movement, and it is through their movements that these atoms become enmeshed in compounds to form the visible objects of the world around us. The Greeks referred to these particles using the adjective a-tomos, that which cannot be divided, indivisible; in that sense, atoms are ‘individuals’. When Lucretius comes to write on Epicurean atomism in Latin, he eschews transliteration of the Greek in favour of a variety of terms that include corpora, ‘bodies’, thus eagerly embracing an explicitly anthropomorphic representation of these primary particles.24 The atom is completely solid, impenetrable, and collides randomly with other atoms, stereotypically masculine qualities, it might be concluded. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, and rather look in a bit more detail at how Lucretius represents them (DRN 2. 116–41; my emphasis): multa minuta modis multis per inane videbis corpora misceri radiorum lumine in ipso et velut aeterno certamine proelia pugnas edere turmatim certantia nec dare pausam, conciliis et discidiis exercita crebris; conicere ut possis ex hoc, primordia rerum quale sit in magno iactari semper inani. dumtaxat rerum magnarum parva potest res exemplare dare et vestigia notitiai. Hoc etiam magis haec animum te advertere par est 23

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Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science?, 189. Lucretius, it should be added, reminds his readers that they must not think that the atoms are actually animate, 1. 1021–8. 24

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d u n c a n ke n n e d y corpora quae in solis radiis turbare videntur quod tales turbae motus quoque materiai significant clandestinos caecosque subesse. multa videbis enim plagis ibi percita caecis commutare viam retroque repulsa reverti, nunc huc nunc illuc, in cunctas undique partis. scilicet hic a principiis est omnibus error: prima moventur enim per se primordia rerum; inde ea quae parvo sunt corpora conciliatu et quasi proxima sunt ad viris principiorum, ictibus illorum caecis inpulsa cientur, ipsaque proporro paulo maiora lacessunt. sic a principiis ascendit motus et exit paulatim nostros ad sensus, ut moveantur illa quoque in solis quae lumine cernere quimus, nec quibus id faciant plagis apparet aperte.

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You will see many minute bodies mingling in many ways throughout the void in the light itself of the rays, and as it were in everlasting conflict engaging in struggles and fights, battling in troops without any pause, kept occupied with frequent unions and partings; so that you may conjecture from this what it is for the first-beginnings of things to be perpetually tossed about in the great void. To this extent a small thing can offer an illustration of great things and the traces of a concept. And for this reason even more it is fitting that you give your attention to these bodies which are seen to be jostling in the sun’s rays, namely that such turmoil indicates that there are secret and unseen disturbances lurking below in matter. For there you will see many things set in motion by unseen blows change their course and turn back forced to give ground, this way and that in all directions. You can be sure that all get this erratic movement from their first-beginnings. For in the first place the first-beginnings of things move of themselves. Then those bodies which are formed from a small combination, and are, as it were, closest to the forces, of the firstbeginnings, are set in motion by the impact of their unseen blows, and they themselves in turn assail those that are a little larger. Thus the disturbance makes its way upwards from the first-beginnings and gradually emerges to our senses so that those objects also are set in motion which we are able to perceive in the sun’s light, whilst it is not clearly obvious by what blows they are made to do this.

In this famous passage where the motion of atoms is compared to that of motes of dust in a sunbeam penetrating into a darkened room, Lucretius says (116–20) that ‘you will see many minute


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bodies mingling in many ways throughout the void in the light itself of the rays, and as it were in everlasting conflict (velut aeterno certamine) engaging in struggles and fights (proelia pugnas edere), battling in troops (turmatim certantia) without any pause, kept occupied with frequent unions and partings (conciliis et discidiis).’ For the movement of atoms, Lucretius consistently employs the language of warfare. Their characteristic activity is imaged through the verb turbare in 126 and the noun turbae in 127; and involves blows (plagis, 129; ictibus, 136) and collisions (repulsa, 130; inpulsa, 136). As ‘individuals’, they are autonomous, and move of themselves (133, prima moventur enim per se primordia rerum). A similar picture emerges at 5. 436–42, where Lucretius describes the chaotic motion of the atoms before the formation of the earth; ‘but a sort of strange storm, all kinds of particles gathered together into a mass, and their discord (discordia, 437), exciting battles (proelia miscens, 439), threw into confusion (turbabat, 439) their intervals, directions, connections, weights, blows, meetings, movements, because, on account of their differing shapes and various forms, not all when joined together could remain so or make the appropriate motions together.’ The behaviour of Lucretius’s atoms has political overtones: he uses the term motus of their movement (2.127; 138), ‘a common euphemism for political convulsions’.25 When the atoms come together to form compounds, their movement within the compound is restricted by their interaction with other atoms. The term Lucretius regularly uses for such a compound is concilium, which is also the word for a political assembly, and Don Fowler has remarked on how the ‘society’ formed by Lucretius’s atoms is ‘strongly republican’ in flavour.26 In so far as a reductionist outlook is brought to bear on this, we are dealing not with metaphor, but with homology. In this passage in Book 2, Lucretius goes on to argue (133–40) in classic reductionist fashion that a chain of causation runs from the movement of the microscopic atoms to the movement of things in the world we are 25

R. G. M. Nisbet and M. Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace Odes Book II (Oxford, 1978), 11 on Horace Odes 2. 1. 1 (motum ex Metello consule). 26 D. P. Fowler, ‘Lucretius and Politics’, in M. Griffin and J. Barnes (eds.), Philosophia Togata (Oxford, 1989), 146–7.

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able to observe with our senses: the movement of the motes of dust in the sunbeam is ultimately the effect of the movement of the constituent atoms. This chain of causation, which extends up to the level of the human, positively encourages a homologous subtext to be read off: untrammelled individualism lies at the root of civil disturbance. When Lucretius turns to speculate on the question of human origins, his thoughts are similarly structured by the assumption that human beings are, first and foremost, individuals out for themselves, in contrast with ‘Golden Age’ or ‘Golden Race’ representations in Plato and others, which suggested that the human race in early times was just and peaceable, and required no laws (DRN 5. 958–65): Nec commune bonum poterant spectare, neque ullis moribus inter se scibant nec legibus uti. quod cuique obtulerat praedae fortuna, ferebat sponte sua sibi quisque valere et vivere doctus. Et Venus in silvis iungebat corpora amantum; conciliabat enim vel mutua quamque cupido vel violenta viri vis atque inpensa libido vel pretium, glandes atque arbita vel pira lecta.

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Lucretius remarks of primitive humans that ‘they were unable to look to the common good (nec commune bonum poterant spectare), nor did they know how to manage their mutual relations in accordance with custom and law. Whatever booty fortune gave to each, that he bore away, each taught to be strong and live for himself at his own will (sponte sua sibi quisque valere et vivere doctus). And Venus coupled the bodies of lovers in the woods; for either mutual desire brought each female into union, or the violent strength of the man and his enormous lust, or an inducement—acorns and arbutus berries or choice pears.’ Sexual relations are promiscuous, and are instigated, if not by mutual desire, then by male violence (violenta viri vis atque inpensa libido) or bribery (pretium, 962). The term used of bringing male and female together (conciliabat, 964) is etymologically associated with concilium, the term Lucretius deploys for the compound formed by interlocking atoms. These primitive collisions and couplings in due course give way to friendship amongst neighbours, a process of joining, as atoms do into compounds (tunc et amicitiem coeperunt iungere aventes j finitimi inter se nec laedere nec violari, 5. 1019–20), and eventually to


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contracts (foedera, 5. 1025), the same term as is used to characterize the formation of atomic compounds. Lucretius’s imagery endows the reductionist tradition it helped to inspire with a strongly masculine character—just as when he resorts to holistic forms of explanation, whereby a system with many components may collectively exhibit emergent qualities that are absent at the level of the individual component viewed in isolation, his preferred imagery, that of a personified ‘Nature’, is feminine.27 Earlier we saw how Emily Martin drew attention to the way in which anthropomorphism, and its attendant gendered assumptions, featured in descriptions of the activities of the egg and the sperm. Indeed, this was her key tool of critique. Reductionist claims, it should be emphasized, are not made in respect of the egg and the sperm, but they often are in respect of genes, and here, for all of ‘modern’ reductionism’s principled resistance to it, anthropomorphism seems rife as well. The infamous example from Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene bears another repetition: The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes . . . Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities of our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.28

Although Dawkins seeks to forge ‘selfishness’ into a quasi-technical term as the book goes on, it never escapes this memorable characterization at the beginning. The point would be an amusing one were it not for the rather bold metaphysical assumption we can see at work here, that the parts are more real and significant than the whole they make up: we are but machines created by our genes. The extreme reductionism espoused by Dawkins results in a curious flip-over here: people become depersonalized while the things that make them up are endowed with the characteristics of people.

27

Cf. Kennedy, Rethinking Reality 87–93, where I also discuss a latterday counterpart, James Lovelock’s so-called ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, named by William Golding for the Greek goddess of the earth. 28 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 2–3.

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Dawkins develops the point even more forcefully in his recent book Unweaving the Rainbow (my emphases): The individual organism . . . is not fundamental to life, but something that emerges when genes, which at the beginning of evolution were separate, warring entities, gang together in co-operative groups, as ‘selfish co-operators’. The individual organism is not exactly an illusion. It is too concrete for that. But it is a secondary, derived phenomenon, cobbled together as a consequence of fundamental, even warring agents.29

Dawkins’s metaphysical reductionism, here felt strongly in the repeated term ‘fundamental’ and in the (extraordinary) statement that ‘the individual organism is not exactly an illusion’, seems to be centred on the suggestion that the parts are more real than the whole because they are causally active. They are self-moving movers, while the wholes they compose are mere passive outcomes of their activity, or, as Dawkins puts it, ‘cobbled together as a consequence of fundamental, even warring agents’. Ancient atomism’s characterization of its indivisible entity haunts these modern discussions. As I have remarked, the imagery of which we have been talking is deeply embedded; in Dawkins’s term ‘warring’ the residue of Lucretius can be detected. For Fox Keller, the gene is a combination of the atom of the physicists with a Platonic soul, ‘at one and the same time a fundamental building block and an animating force’.30 Although the classical atom may have lost a good deal of its currency in contemporary physics, the masculine bias it expressed carries on in those discourses—and these are not only ‘scientific’—that continue to use it as a model. Lucretius’s staunchly Republican Roman atoms may work together with more regard for constitutional niceties than do Dawkins’s ‘selfish co-operators’ who ‘gang together in co-operative groups’, but again his reductionist assumptions mean that there is also a homologous political subtext at work in Dawkins; ‘If you wish . . . to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and 29

Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (London, 1998), 308. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, 2nd edn. (New Haven and London, 1995), 9–10. 30


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altruism, because we are born selfish.’ However theoretically fundamental Lucretius finds the atom, friendship (amicitia) and the institutions of civil society seem of particular urgency to him, as they do to Dawkins, to counter what they believe to be the dictates of nature. The behaviour attributed to primary units in reductionist analysis interacts with the political ideologies specific to that society so as to ‘ground’ behaviour in ‘nature’. As Donna Haraway has argued, theories of animal and human society based on sex and reproduction, notably, of course, Darwinian evolution, have been powerful in legitimating beliefs in the natural necessity of aggression, competition, and hierarchy, and she concludes: ‘It is difficult to imagine what evolutionary theory would be like in any language other than [that of] classical capitalist political economy.’32 Of course a society’s political ideology need not be viewed as monolithic (and does that image owe some of its force to the solid, impenetrable atom of reductionist thought?); not all political philosophies track back to the individual. Conversely, biological theories that are unsympathetic to individualism are also wary of the claims of reductionism. Steven Rose argues that the competitive, selfish genes postulated by ultra-Darwinism ‘are not the genes of the molecular biologists’. Rather ‘they are a bit like atoms were before the days of nuclear physics; hard, impenetrable and indivisible billiard balls, whose mode of interaction with one another and with their surrounding medium is limited to a collision followed by a bounce. The sole activity and telos of these genes is to create the condition for their own replication.’ Such isolated, competitive units could never bring about ‘anything like a harmoniously functioning organism’, and he offers a very different picture of the gene, one in which communicative relationship and collaboration—Rose calls it ‘molecular democracy’—is the key.33 Reductionism’s goal, the discovery of fundamental causes, purports to be value-neutral, to seek out things as they really are, to 31

Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 3; my emphasis. Donna Haraway, ‘Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic, Part II: The Past is a Contested Zone’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 4 (1978/9), 60. 33 Rose, Lifelines, 307. 32

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create, therefore, a clear and final distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, with ‘nature’ granted an ultimate primacy. Feminist critics of reductionism argue in classic constructivist fashion that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are never finally distinguished, but operate within a feedback loop. Complete depersonalization is never achieved, and in the course of their anthropomorphic representation as people, the argument goes, primary units and their so-called ‘behaviour’ cannot but take on an ideological colouring from those social or cultural traits attributed to them that are deemed to be characteristic of human beings (or at least a certain section of them, such as Dawkins’s ‘Chicago gangsters’), and those story patterns into which they are inserted. Thus Fox Keller argues that ‘much of contemporary evolutionary theory relies on a representation of the ‘‘individual’’— be it the organism or the gene—that is cast in the particular image of man we might call ‘‘Hobbesian man’’ . . . autonomous and a priori competitive.’34 According to such critics, social imagery is implanted in representations of nature in such a way as to re-import that same imagery as natural explanations of social phenomena— now reinforced by the epistemological prestige of science (realist, reductionist science, that is) and thus ‘naturalizing’ the gender roles that are encoded in these representations. For Donna Haraway, ‘sciences . . . act as legitimating metalanguages that produce homologies between social and symbolic systems. That is acutely true for the sciences of the body and the body politic. In a strict sense’, she concludes, ‘science is our myth.’35 This form of critique, which sees science resolutely from the perspective of culture, results in a flip-over of assumptions no less remarkable than that we have just seen in Dawkins. For Mary Midgley ‘[m]yths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.’36 Thus in these critiques myth is not, as is sometimes supposed, the opposite of science, or something that science has transcended and consigned to the past in its pursuit of the truth, but

34 35 36

Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, 115–16, 144. Haraway, ‘Animal Sociology’, 60; my emphasis. Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (London, 2003), 1.


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remains part of it—as Midgley puts it, the part that decides science’s significance in our lives. There is a need for some caution at this point. Are we simply dealing with a reversal of Dawkins’s reductionist assumption that biology is primary and determines social behaviour with a correspondingly reductionist assumption that the social or the political is primary and determines what we count as ‘biology’? Something like this seems to be happening in Mary Midgley’s account of what she alternatively calls (in deference to Lucretius) ‘social atomism’ or ‘individualism’, which she describes as (my emphasis): the idea that only individuals are real while the groupings in which they live are not.37 Each citizen is then a distinct, ultimately independent unit, linked to the others around it only externally, by contract. The roots of this idea are of course political. But individualist theorists have for some time claimed that the view is scientific in a sense that roots it in physical science.38

Similarly, when Schiebinger asserts, as we saw earlier, that ‘the debate about man the hunter versus woman the gatherer is . . . really about the origins of two Western social institutions’, we look to be dealing with a social reductionism that is the mirror image of the physical reductionism it is contesting: rather than culture being reduced to nature, nature is being reduced to culture. The key term here is ‘really’, which, in an extraordinary piece of discursive compression, encodes the assumption that the debate is being ‘led back’ (reducere) to a ‘thing’ that is regarded as primary, and, in principle, irreducible—precisely, a reification—whether that ‘thing’ is ‘culture’, ‘nature’, ‘ideology’, ‘society’, ‘gender’, ‘science’, or ‘myth’. In a decisive intervention into the representation of the atom, Lucretius imaged it as a principium, ‘the thing that occupies the first place’, a ‘principle’. Within such modes of argumentation, these reifications take on the qualities of the classical atom: singular, with no internal structure, and not subject to analysis, that is, to being broken up into constituent parts. 37

It has become traditional in this context to cite Margaret Thatcher’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ Cf. Rose, Lifelines, 296; Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry (London, 2001), 153. 38 Midgley, Science and Poetry, 2; for Midgeley on Lucretius cf. ibid. 23–6.

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As long as we construct hierarchies in our discourses, as long as we attempt to explain one thing in terms of another or appeal to something as a principle, our sense of ‘reality’ is going to migrate in that direction. And if ‘principles’ collide, as they do in the science–culture ‘wars’, we may recall that conflict is embedded in their representation. Realism has its distinctive direction of signification and employment of grammatical number: what is discursively represented the complex and the multiple (sciences, as it may be, or cultures) is seen as the effect of the simple and the singular (culture, as it may be, or science). Antirealism seeks to resist the pull of reduction by emphasizing plurality. Recall how Donna Haraway wrote of how ‘sciences . . . act as legitimating metalanguages that produce homologies between social and symbolic systems’, only then to sink back into a realist mode: ‘That is acutely true for the sciences of the body and the body politic. In a strict sense, science is our myth.’ For anti-realists, language—or, as Haraway puts it, ‘symbolic systems’—is irreducible: ‘things’ are the effect of our descriptions, and language is intrinsically anthropocentric in that anthropomorphism, however occluded, is always going to be a feature of our descriptions of things whenever agency is attributed to them. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has argued that only reductionism explains, everything else merely describes, and he has cautioned against the extension of physical reductionism to other phenomena.39 Explanation seeks finality; descriptions endlessly proliferate. The two perspectives coexist in the term ‘mythology’. Mythology can be a body of myths, expanding as time passes. Mythology can also encode the assumption that there is a logos, rationalizing and scientistic, that can explain myths, thus establishing a hierarchy of logos over mythos, which rests upon the realist assumption that mythos can be reduced to logos in a way that allows a thousand stories to be explained in terms of a single thing, say, ‘ritual’ or ‘civic identity’. Whether our preferred descriptions are couched in terms of ‘culture’ or of ‘nature’, a desire for finality (in science, in science studies, or in discourses beyond), it seems, ‘masculinizes’ us all, men and women alike—as a resistance to, or postponement of, finality ‘feminizes’ us. 39 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York and Oxford, 1986), 15–16; Other Minds (New York and Oxford, 1995), 98–9.

10

The Philosopher and the Mother Cow: Towards a Gendered Reading of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

A li son Sharrock The new sociology of science stresses the role of stories and paradigms in the construction of scientific truths about the world. I shall therefore begin with a story. When I was a very young and nervous Head of Department in the mid-1990s, one of only two other female HoDs in my institution was a neuroscientist, who was even more conscious than I was of functioning in a male-dominated world, but was rather more confident in joking about it. She loved to tell the story of how her elder son, who would have been about 8 or 9 at the time, reacted when asked whether he was going to be a scientist when he grew up. ‘Oh no,’ he said scathingly, ‘science is for girls!’ From the perspective of the world-weary feminist academic, the innocent ignorance of the child is both delightful and telling. He purports to despise this high-status intellectual activity, not because he wants to be a yob instead, but rather because he associates it so strongly with his mother that he assumes it must be a soft, soppy, weak-minded, and girly sort of activity. Not one for real men. The implied readers of this story (the world-weary feminist

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academic and the slightly embarrassed male colleague) view it from the vantage-point of knowing better, knowing that ‘really’ science is for boys.1 As we ‘all know’, science is for boys, while myth is for girls. The story of the Boy Who Didn’t Want to Be a Scientist, in its subversion-through-inversion of the dominant ideology, is paradigmatic of the social forces which have shaped, at a quite basic level, the philosophy and the discourse of science in many ways throughout the Western intellectual tradition. It is a discourse which privileges science over myth, reason over emotion, control over empathy, and all those other oppositional constructs which are so familiar to feminist theory. My use of this fable stands in a tradition of feminist and other enquiry into these forces, which seeks to draw attention to the situatedness of perceptions of science in the modern world. It is my aim in this essay to explore what light may be thrown on Lucretius’ own text by interrogation of it in a manner which has some affinities with that applied by feminists to modern scientific work. Part of what I am trying to do with Lucretius is to see how a feminist or gender-sensitive approach might affect what we read in the text: both how we might explore, identify, and respond to its own (masculine) agenda, and also how we might (if we might) see features in it which could be released as having feminine resonances. Implicit in my essay is some degree of connection between the reading of an ancient philosophical poem and a modern intellectual discourse and practice which would frame itself as wholly separate from the world of poetry and from what might be perceived by its practitioners as the distant past. At one level, it would clearly be naı¨ve to treat Lucretius’ poem on the world as ‘the same’ as modern science;2 my defence would be that Lucretius’ text, for all its 1 This opening paragraph, and indeed my whole essay, must acknowledge a strong general debt to the work of Duncan Kennedy, especially in his negotiation of the interactions between scientific constructionism and classical literature in Duncan Kennedy, Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature (Ann Arbor, 2002). Kennedy’s contribution to this volume also does some of the work of my essay for me, such that I respectfully recommend the reader to read his paper first. 2 Certain features of Lucretius’ poem encourage modern readers to get excited about his modernity and to treat him as an inspired prophet of the post-Enlightenment ‘truths’ about the world. Our conventional use

g en d e re d r e ad i ng o f l uc r e ti u s

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aesthetic beauty and poetic swirliness, exhibits underlying traces of a mental universe which have also shaped other texts in the mainstream of the scientific tradition. Interestingly, surprisingly, there seem to be ways in which DRN betrays a patriarchal agenda closer to that of the long tradition of scientific discourse (to which I will apply the shorthand of the ‘rape of Nature’) than it is to the conventional patriarchal discourse of his own day.3 I would add that DRN is being read very positively in the present day precisely because of the contemporary high valuation of science and also the contemporary interrogation and deconstruction of scientific discourse. A second strand to my response (to the objection to treating Lucretius’ poem in such a way as to imply that modern science has affinities with poetry) is to say, simply, ‘well, they are not so separate’. I must now confront an issue which hits at the heart of its own thesis, already implied in the title, and perhaps at the discourse of this whole volume and the wider feminist project. The risk we take in identifying a feminist reading, whether of a text or of the world, or indeed in doing anything at all as women or men (i.e. as gendersensitive beings), this statement included, is that we play into patriarchal hands. ‘The Philosopher and the Mother Cow’: this title might seem to proffer a heavily and straightforwardly gendered opposition, between male reason and female unreason/emotion; male humanity, female animality; male seriousness, female trivia. As soon as we identify one of those ‘gendered oppositions’, or notice how certain features like force or reason tend to be gendered of the term ‘atom’ to refer to Lucretius’ semina rerum (‘seeds of things’) or principia (‘first principles’) is among the tricks played on us by the critical tradition. Lucretius, I would say, is much less modern than he sounds. For the modernizing reading, see particularly W. R. Johnson, Lucretius and the Modern World (London, 2000). More balanced but still tending towards the same direction are Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1994) and Gordon Campbell, Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura, Book 5, lines 772–1104 (Oxford, 2003). 3

Cf. the argument of Pamela Gordon, ‘Some Unseen Monster: Rereading Lucretius on Sex’, in David Fredrick (ed.), The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body (Baltimore, 2002), 86–109, that Lucretius’ treatment of male sexuality was firmly opposed to that of his contemporary society. I have deliberately avoided ‘Lucretius on Sex’ in this essay.

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‘masculine’ while bodiliness or passivity are gendered ‘feminine’, we potentially create precisely the segregated conditions which we sought to oppose. That way of thinking explains how science comes to be ‘for girls!’ or indeed ‘for boys’. But the identification of that very risk itself may play into the patriarchal agenda, since it implies a win–lose situation, a competitive mode of analysis. The violent and confrontational nature of the sentence in which I introduced the ‘issue’, at the beginning of this paragraph, will not have been lost on the reader.4 It is a problem, also, which goes to the heart of contemporary work on feminist science.5 What is it? Can it exist, or will be it wholly negative and self-destructive, and so play into the hands of those who would say ‘I told you so’? It is easy enough to do feminist science while the goal is simply to expose the tribulations of women studying and working in scientific environments, whether academic or commercial, but it gets much harder when the question comes to be about the discourse of science and even—perish the thought—the content of science itself, which holds itself as absolute truth about 4

An alternative strategy which I considered at this point is to reject the requirement to confront issues, to turn away from the search for answers as being a masculinist drive to control the world. But that way lies still further trouble, because the worst thing that could happen to feminist thought would be to abandon intellectual rigour. Apologies for the masculinist metaphor, there, but the stakes, it seems to me, are high. (And for that one.) Just because all the words we have for positive intellectual activity are ‘male’ (power, force, strength, importance, etc.), we must not despair of our capacity to speak and to think, even with these imperfect tools. The reader will note that I have sought to soften (feminine metaphor) and partially to undermine (hmm) the impact (masculine?) of this point by presenting it in a footnote. 5 Some fascinating work on feminist science has also informed my reading of Lucretius. In addition to those works mentioned by Kennedy, I draw the reader’s attention to Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, 1995); Nancy Tuana (ed.), Feminism and Science (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), particularly the chapter by Keller; Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1994) and Cynthia Freeland (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (University Park, Pa., 1998) have also been influential on my thinking.


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the world. We can expose the masculinist agenda of the traditional paradigms for scientific enquiry, but can we put anything in their place? ‘Science’ has always been figured, in the Western intellectual tradition, as the dominance of nature by the mind, which penetrates its secrets and, knowing it (‘in the biblical sense’), gains power and control over it. Could things be different?6 Some feminist scientists have taken primatology as an example of a specifically feminist science, one based on co-operation, empathy, and living amid nature rather than on dominance, knowledge, and control. Fair enough, but the risk is there, too, that we essentialize and so limit female activity, and that we undermine its importance and significance precisely by identifying it as female. I hope that, in a small way, my reading of the gendered complexities of Lucretius’ scientific text might contribute some widow’s mite towards a way of reading (or even doing?) science which allows communication to be made up of multiple interacting voices. The aim of this essay, then, is to explore some of the readerly options in approaching Lucretius’ poem ‘on the nature of things’ from a gendered perspective.7 One element in Lucretius’ 6 It is important to remember that a project like Keller’s is not about trying to say that ‘male science’, for the want of a better term, discovers things which are in any sense wrong (she uses the example of Boyle’s Law, which is of course ‘right’ and useful), but rather that the way we perceive of science is affected by the metaphors we live by, and so affects the questions we ask, and what satisfies us as answers. It is a matter of paradigm shift, not denial. 7 The works which I have found most helpful in this field are Don Fowler, ‘The Feminine Principal: Gender in the De Rerum Natura’, in G. Giannantoni and M. Gigante (eds.), Epicureismo Greco e Romano (Naples, 1996; also available as Appendix C in Fowler’s Lucretius on Atomic Motion: A Commentary on De rerum natura 2. 1–332 (Oxford, 2002); Georgia Nugent, ‘Mater Matters: The Female in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura’, Colby Quarterly, 30 (1994), 179–205; Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, 1994), Barbara Clayton, ‘Lucretius’ Erotic Mother: Maternity as a Poetic Device in De Rerum Natura’, Helios, 26.1 (1999), 69–84; Pamela Gordon, ‘Some Unseen Monster: Rereading Lucretius on Sex’, in Fredrick (ed.), The Roman Gaze, 86–109; Alison Keith, Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic (Cambridge, 2000), esp. 36–41. Charles Segal, Lucretius on Death and Anxiety: Poetry and Philosophy in De Rerum Natura

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representation of gender (to use a shorthand) that I would like to suggest is indeed that ‘female myth undermines male science’, that in the interstices of this scientific ‘male’ text we can see glimpses of alternative points of view which might reasonably be categorized as ‘feminine’.8 But this is hardly going to give us a tidy answer when— as we must—we refigure scientific discourse such that the opposition science/myth breaks down. The opposition male/female, by Lucretian analogy, will perhaps do so likewise. Moreover, there will be throughout this essay an underlying tension which has pervaded so much of Lucretian study—that is, between ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’ (which for our purposes may be taken as standing also for ‘science’). It is an easy slippage for that opposition to be reconfigured in gendered terms, between gentle, ‘female’ poetry and hard, ‘male’ philosophy/science, as Segal is inclined to do (for example) in his powerful and sensitive reading of Lucretius on death, although he is not quite explicit about the gendered implications of his paradigm.9 What I am doing is partly exploring and celebrating that opposition, partly exposing and undermining it: I hope that is not too much of a contradiction to be useful. It seems to be hard not to read Lucretius ‘against himself’, to see strands in his thought which we could equally well describe as ‘opposing’ or ‘interacting’, depending on the preferred metaphor. (Princeton, 1990) is also extremely useful, although Segal does not explicitly identify the gendered implications of his work. Nugent’s article is one of the most sustained general feminist readings of Lucretius, but is sadly difficult to access in Britain. I am very grateful to Georgia Nugent for sending me a copy of the paper, and recommend interested readers to hunt it out. 8

This might look somewhat like a reading of ‘anti-Lucrece chez Lucrece’—the argument that Lucretius just couldn’t help himself from undermining everything he was trying to say, and that he was a religious poet really. I do have some sympathy with this, now rather unfashionable, view, which I see as relating quite closely to the constructionism of Kennedy, Rethinking Reality. 9 Cf. e.g. Segal, Lucretius on Death and Anxiety, 46: ‘One result of such resonances is a continual shifting between the objective, distancing, thirdperson analysis of death in the framework of Epicurean physics, and a warmer, more affect-laden first-person or second-person discussion rooted in the literary tradition.’ He does not actually say anything about gender, but his sentence says ‘male’ and ‘female’ pretty clearly.


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Whether we take the association of women with myth as something to celebrate or something to unmask and demystify (or even, as I would, as both), it is worth noting that the association itself derives in part from a dominant strand in Western thought which awards men a privileged status with respect to reality.10 Men, in public life and in discourse, somehow manage to become more real. They are more likely to have full names and identifiable biographies, more likely to be credited with effects on the world around them, less likely to be taken as representative of the rest of their sex, less likely to be associated with (and turned into) countries, trees, ships, cars, statues, etc. In this regard, I think we can see something interestingly gendered in Lucretius’s presentation of personification, reification, and realism. Several scholars have noted the extent to which Lucretius plays into the common trope of masculinist thought which associates the material, the bodily, the solid and earthy with the ‘feminine’, and the spiritual, the cerebral, the rational and abstract with the ‘masculine’.11 Here I would ask the reader to make a mental distinction between the ‘material’ and the ‘real’, for it seems to me that in discourse of this nature, while it is clearly the case that the female sits closely with the body (an association, incidentally, perpetuated by the modern scholarly tradition in Women’s Studies), it is the male which sits closely with the person. This is what I mean by saying that ‘men are more real’. If the abstract is associated with the male, it is in an active rather than a passive way: ‘men do’ abstract thinking, for example, but women ‘are abstractions’. It seems to me that Lucretius is much happier to accept personifications if they are female ones; that the people accorded ‘real’ status in the poem are only himself, Memmius, and (although to a lesser extent, since he is also deified/reified) Epicurus;12 but that the 10

I have discussed this tendency with reference to Propertius in my ‘Constructing Characters in Propertius’, Arethusa, 33 (2000), 263–84, and to Ovid in my ‘Ovid and the Discourses of Love: The Amatory Works’, in P. R. Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge, 2002), 150–62. 11 Nugent, ‘Mater matters’: is an especially powerful account of this process in Lucretius. 12 There are other philosophers mentioned, who are real-ish, but dead.

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atoms get some kind of peculiar high status with respect to reality, and as a result, perhaps, can support some degree of personification despite apparently being gendered male;13 and that all this shows a poem which conforms to certain sets of patriarchal agenda, such as are in keeping with the Western scientific tradition of the dominance of the mind over nature, although they are by no means necessarily the typical Roman patriarchal agenda.14 While I would be loath to argue for any direct influence of Lucretius on later scientific writing, I think it is worth noting that an attitude to nature and knowledge which to some extent conforms diachronically with a masculinist standpoint manifested in later scientific discourse can coincide with attitudes which are in other ways quite different from the conventional masculinity of their own day. But perhaps this should not surprise us: the scientist is a peripheral figure in many cultures, and it is only within the modern academic world that scientific prowess is associated positively with masculinity. But, to return to Lucretius, I would stress that there are none the less some undercurrents in the text which might reflect an alternative view of the world and offer a viewpoint which is not patriarchal. If so, we will have to agree with Fowler (‘Feminine Principal’) that this undermining of the patriarchal position is part of Lucretius’ poem also. It is more or less a commonplace of Lucretian scholarship to note the activity of Nature, although critics vary in the implications they draw from her role.15 Some readers would see Nature’s creative, nurturing role, so strongly and emotively characterized, as causing something of a deviation from Epicurean orthodoxy, since it returns divine agency by the back door. Perhaps, however, we might nuance the point: it is extremely difficult to talk about the world, especially in powerful poetic language, without using determinist vocabulary (as critics of Darwin and his successors have shown well), but in Lucretius’ mental universe a discursive structure of this nature is acceptable precisely because the personification is female, and women are hardly real anyway (this is an exaggeration, of course,

13

See also Kennedy in this volume. See esp. Gordon, ‘Some Unseen Monster’, Clayton, ‘Lucretius’ Erotic Mother’. 15 See Clayton, ‘Lucretius’ Erotic Mother’, Nugent, ‘Mater Matters’. 14


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but one based on truth). The female and the metaphorical sit happily together (that is, the female as the metaphor, not the female as user of metaphor), and can slip in and out of direct personification without too much trouble—this is an inverse of the phenomenon we see happening so creatively (if problematically) in Roman love poetry.16 So Venus can be a woman, a goddess, a statue, and a generative force all together; Earth can be a mother; Flora can scatter flowers in spring (5. 739); and Nature can be the active, driving force of the poem and everything in the world, despite its total absence of teleology.17 Lucretius will parade the personification of Nature even in close proximity to some of his most explicitly anti-theistic moments. Take, for example, 2. 1090–1104 Quae bene cognita si teneas, natura videtur libera continuo dominis privata superbis ipsa sua per se sponte omnia dis agere expers. nam pro sancta deum tranquilla pectora pace quae placidum degunt aevum vitamque serenam, quis regere immensi summam, quis habere profundi indu manu validas potis est moderanter habenas, quis pariter caelos omnis convertere et omnis ignibus aetheriis terras suffire feracis, omnibus inve locis esse omni tempore praesto, nubibus ut tenebras faciat caelique serena concutiat sonitu, tum fulmina mittat et aedis saepe suas disturbet et in deserta recedens saeviat exercens telum quod saepe nocentes praeterit exanimatque indignos inque merentes? If you come to know these things and hold onto them, Nature will be seen to be completely free and independent of arrogant masters, doing her will herself, of her own accord, without the gods. For, by the holy hearts of the gods in tranquil peace which lead a calm life and serene existence, who is powerful enough to rule the heights of the universe, who to hold in his hand the firm reins of the abyss to guide them, or who can turn all the heavens together and blow over the fruitful earth with ethereal fire, or be present in all places and at all times, so that he might make shadows with clouds and 16

See Maria Wyke, ‘Mistress and Metaphor in Augustan Elegy’, Helios, 16.1 (1989), 25–47; and Alison Sharrock, ‘Womanufacture’, Journal of Roman Studies, 81 (1991), 36–49. 17 Just to take one example among many, consider 1. 56 unde omnis natura creet res, auctet alatque.

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shake the peaceful tracts of sky with his thunder, then send bolts and often cause his own house to shudder, and retreating into the wilderness rage as he plies his weapon, which often passes by the guilty and kills the innocent who do not deserve it?

The first extraordinary thing about this passage is the way that the fully personified Nature takes on anthropomorphic characteristics in contrast with the denial of those to the unnamed quis; the second is that the anthropomorphic characteristic that she takes on is precisely freedom from control by the gods; the third is the threatening, brooding presence of the Unspeakable. Obviously, it is Jupiter Himself, who cannot be named but must be implied, in order to be denied all the traditional attributes which are thus negatively named. Nature is the female principal that can stand up to the thunder god: one possible feminist reading of this could appropriate it for celebration of liberty, but the nagging alternative is that Nature can only do this because she isn’t real. She, as driving force and agent of life, isn’t real in Lucretius’ philosophical (theological) epistemology, because there is no driving force or agent of life: she isn’t real in Lucretius’ gendered epistemology because she is female. Jupiter, by contrast, is too threatening to be allowed a personification. Because, as a male, he comes close to the reality of personhood, he cannot be allowed the pseudo-reality of personification. We might compare the later scientist for whom ‘nature’ is a woman who is ‘real’ as regards matter and bodiliness, but precisely not real as a person. We ought to compare that hymn to Jupiter in denial with the procession of the Magna Mater (2. 600–43). It is one of the ‘setpieces’ in which Lucretius revels in visual and poetic extravagance, depicting in detail the extremes of worship which the Earth, as ‘Great Mother’, inspires. At the end of the passage, his response to his own display of religious/artistic fervour is quite calm: quae bene et eximie quamvis disposta ferantur, j longe sunt tamen a vera ratione repulsa (‘however well and excellently they are portrayed, yet they are far removed from true reason’, 2. 644–5)—because, as we already know, the gods live a life apart and are unaffected by our worship. It’s all just a matter of vocabulary, Lucretius says: people like to call the sea ‘Neptune’ and grain ‘Ceres’, and even Bacchi nomine abuti j mavult quam laticis proprium proferre vocamen


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(‘prefer to misuse the name of Bacchus rather than to call drinks by their proper name’, 2. 656–7). That’s fine by him, and fine for Earth to be called mother of the gods, as long as this does not bring the taint of religion. Nature, Earth, and even Venus, as far as Lucretius is concerned, can get away with this, but male entities cannot. A few hundred lines later, he himself affirms that it is quite right to call Earth ‘mother’ (2. 998). The briefest mention of a pater who drops his seed into her lap engenders a celebration of Earth’s generative power.18 There are, however, no such extended celebrations of Bacchus as wine or Vulcan as fire, although both substances feature positively in the poem. An account of the tales of Pan created out of the effects of the echo is resoundingly dismissed (4. 580–94).19 The Phaethon story (5. 395–410) receives an equally scathing response. If any male entity can be allowed to ‘be’ a god in the Lucretian universe, then there is only one candidate: Epicurus. In the prologue to Book 5, he is duly deified as the embodiment of wisdom, more worthy than Ceres or Bacchus to stand for bread and wine. He is greater than all the heroes of myth. At this point, I begin to be unsure just how well Epicurus does hold onto his reality. Another aspect to the presentation of Nature, Earth, and even Venus which exempts them from threat as feminine principals is the manner in which they are fetishized throughout the poem. (Here again the female characters are personifications, not people.) The prevalence of generative language in DRN sets the background against which the most pervasive representation of the female in the poem is as a womb. There are indeed some magnificent celebrations of fertility, and also some which are quite scarily fetishizing, the most extreme example being the creation story in Book 5. Here primitive Earth is covered in wombs from which burst forth new creatures (5. 805–17), which are then suckled as the Earth squeezes out a milk-like liquid for them from her orifices. The simile which ‘proves’ the point, by Epicurean analogy, is—rather banally—of a new mother whose milk has come in. It is almost a metaphor by 18

The passage is probably Ennian, with the reference to caeli . . . templa, but that does not materially affect the point. 19 Nice point that he says that people believe these stories because humanum genus est avidum auricularum: they like to hear marvellous tales, and they like to turn what they hear (the echoes) into the marvellous.

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direct association, halfway towards being a tautology. The generative force is thus reduced to the essential gynaecological body parts.20 It seems, then, that there are lots of mothers in DRN, but often only wombs and breasts with bodies and souls just there to give the reproductive organs something to hang onto. At this level, motherhood is completely depersonsalized, reified into its function.21 It should come as something of a surprise, then, that the illustration of the argument that no two examples of a species are identical should take the form of a moving exposition of maternal grief at the loss of a child, a loss which negates the normative function of femininity in DRN (production of new life). nam saepe ante deum vitulus delubra decora turicremas propter mactatus concidit aras sanguinis expirans calidum de pectore flumen; at mater viridis saltus orbata peragrans novit humi pedibus vestigia pressa bisulcis, omnia convisens oculis loca, si queat usquam conspicere amissum fetum, completque querellis frondiferum nemus adsistens et crebra revisit ad stabulum desiderio perfixa iuvenci, nec tenerae salices atque herbae rore vigentes fluminaque ulla queunt summis labentia ripis oblectare animum subitamque avertere curam, nec vitulorum aliae species per pabula laeta derivare queunt animum curaque levare; usque adeo quiddam proprium notumque requirit. (DRN 2. 352–66) For often before the revered shrines of the gods, by the incense-burning altars, a calf falls slaughtered, breathing forth the warm river of his blood from his chest; but his bereaved mother, wandering around the green groves, has recognized on the ground the footprints of his cloven hooves, searching all around with her eyes, if only she might ever find her lost baby, and stopping 20

The modern descendant of this passage is the creation-scene in The Magician’s Nephew, but at least C. S. Lewis is explicit about the mythical (and intertextual) status of what he says, and is also less fetishizing of female body parts. 21 See also Nugent, ‘Mater Matters’, Keith, Engendering Rome, 36–41. Clayton, ‘Lucretius’ Erotic Mother’, offers a more positive reading of maternal roles in the poem, but only metaphorical ones.


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she fills the leafy woods with her complaints and frequently returns to the fold, pierced by longing for the calf, nor can the tender willows and the grass thriving in the dew nor any rivers gliding past at the tops of the banks delight her soul and take away her sudden care, nor can the sight of calves over the happy pastures distract her mind or alleviate her care; on and forever she keeps seeking her own, known child.

The point at issue is the nature of the relationship between species and individuals. The proof that individual instantiations of a species are not identical with each other is illustrated by observation of the ability of mothers to recognize their own children, even though to an outsider all ‘children’ look the same. This issue, indeed, has had many ramifications through the ages: from the racist insinuation that all members of a particular ethic group are ‘the same’ to the tender assimilation of all babies to each other. Animals, most explicitly, are designated ‘all the same’, and indeed it could be held to be one of the defining differences between animals and people. The unfortunate implication of less-than-full humanity to members of other ethnic groups from the dominant one (or just the speaker), and indeed to babies, is all too prevalent.22 But why does individual identity matter in Lucretius’ scheme of things? Moreover, why does he choose to illustrate it with a scene of death? He could, after all, have offered a joyful, frolicking sort of image. And why use a cow? The story of the mother cow and her lost baby springs from a generalizing statement about mothers and children: nec ratione alia proles cognoscere matrem j nec mater posset prolem (‘nor by any other process can the young recognize its mother, nor the mother her young’, 2. 349–50). He could have slipped into a pretty story of babies who recognize their mothers from the earliest days of their life.23 Instead he chooses loss. Let me look briefly at the presentation of the scene. 22 We have a lovely children’s story, from the Ivor the Engine series, in which the train driver and the station master (Dai) are discussing sheep, whom Dai claims are ‘all the same’. Evans (the train driver) points out one that isn’t, because it has no mother, and Dai grudgingly takes it in to look after it. He becomes very attached to the lamb, caring for it like a mother. When it is necessary for the young ram to rejoin the flock, Dai wipes away a tear and responds to Evans’s repetition of his (Dai’s) earlier words about sheep being all the same by saying ‘Mine wasn’t, and he was very special’. 23 That this was known even to men in antiquity may be seen from Virgil’s famous line in Eclogue 4. 60, referring to the good omen of early

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The story begins not with the mother but with the calf ritually slaughtered at the altar. At this point, we do not know that the ‘mother þ baby’ pair will be the victims, the cows, rather than some humans who happen to be involved in the sacrifice (perhaps prayer or thanksgiving for the life of a child). For a moment any question of context is forgotten, as the calf breathes out its lifeblood.24 Then, at mater, the scene shifts to the mother cow, already orbata (‘bereaved’) although she does not realize it yet, as she wanders through the groves looking for her lost child. The word orbata is an authorial comment, the only word to intrude on the strong focalization with the cow. An animal of extraordinary intelligence, she even recognizes her baby’s hoofprints,25 and searches determinedly everywhere she can think of, like any mother whose child is lost, crying as she goes. She even rushes back home again and again, hoping he might be there, but he is not. Somewhere around line 361, she comes to a realization of her loss, although it is a painful, empty realization, without the beginnings of peace which can come from at least the certain knowledge of what has happened. Now nothing gives her comfort or alleviates her pain, least of all the sight of other babies playing in the fields. Her baby was unique, and special, and her grief is inconsolable. I have played the story around rather heavily perhaps, but I would argue that I have only drawn out what is in Lucretius’ text. Whatever implications one is willing to take for the effect on Lucretius’ philosophy of death, I think the story’s pathos, in its own terms, is undeniable. But it does seem to me possible that the story comes recognition (and smiling) in a new baby. Babies actually don’t smile for several weeks, whereas they do recognize their mother from the first few days, but that’s probably a detail that we couldn’t expect many ancient men to know. 24

Such emotive writing about sacrifice is not, however, out of keeping with positive Roman representations of its own religion. Cf. Horace, Odes 3. 13. 25 There is a textual problem in line 356. The manuscript reading non quit cannot be right, because it requires an infinitive, nor can the nonsensical alternative readings. Linquit is offered by the corrector of Q. Conjectures include noscit, novit, and quaerit, the last of which would remove the cow’s success with the hoofprints, and leave her only searching. The point remains the same, however.


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some way to undermining Lucretius’ Epicurean project. Its conclusion might be that individuals do matter, that people (including readers) might care; that the generative force is not impersonal but is bound up in (or comes into conflict with) individual grief as well as individual pleasure—that is, pleasure in an individual, rather than pleasure of an individual, which is the proper Epicurean pleasure. The problem with that reading, however, is that the cow’s status as a philosopher is undermined by the constraints of her representation. She’s just a cow, and a female one at that. The story is obviously heavily anthropomorphizing. It is followed by a series of other little examples of baby animals and their mothers recognizing each other—although the text refuses to return to the human mother referred to, slightly ambiguously, just before this passage. Could it be that by making her an animal, and not only that, but a silly, slow, foolish, domesticated animal, Lucretius is making the grieving mother into the very antithesis of the philosopher? Perhaps the cow grieves because she does not have the benefit of Epicurean philosophy. She grieves because she does not understand that death is not to be feared. But whose death? It is one thing to weave spells of psychological protection against fear of one’s own death, but quite another to protect oneself against the grief of bereavement. Could it be, then, that the cow’s grief itself undermines Epicurean philosophy? Or at least shows that there are other ways of looking at the world, and that Lucretius has not given all the answers in his directly didactic passages about death. He has told us to look with ataraxia, or appalling selfishness, at the sufferings of others (prologue to Book 2, end of Book 6). But in this story he is showing us that people care about other people, as individuals. Understanding the ‘nature of things’ will not take that care away, because the very individuality of ‘things’ is part of that lesson itself and of what makes us care.26 26

When Lucretius does confront the process of grieving, his approach is still from the point of view of the dead person (3. 894–911). He imagines the griever pitying the dead, which in Epicurean terms is ridiculous, because the dead know nothing of their loss. But he cannot by this means destroy the power of loss which his discussion evokes—the griever’s loss. Could it be

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There is another story which must be allowed to link up with the mother cow: Iphigeneia, another victim dead at the altar, another grieving parent (DRN 1. 84–100).27 It is a story which seems to make us question, right at the beginning, the efficacy of the lesson against fearing death. The account of how the innocent virgin Iphigenia was sacrificed on her father’s orders so that the Greek fleet could pursue its voyage of aggression to Troy is told in order to persuade the reader that it is ‘religion’ which is impious, not Lucretius’s poem. It does its job fairly well. But it must be recalled when we get to the mother cow. The scenes are set in similar ways, with a victim, the altars, and blood poured out on the ground. In the Iphigenia story, however, the focalization remains closely tied to the victim herself, with her father receiving only the oblique comment that she maestum simul ante aras adstare parentem j sensit (‘at the same time, she realized that her sad father was standing beside the altars’, 89–90), and that it did her no good to have been the first to call Agamemnon father (94). Iphigenia’s mother, and the web of tragic myth which that story evokes, are wholly suppressed, but after we have read about the mother cow, it is hard not to ask the question of how the first victim’s mother might have felt also. that the imagined interlocutor has the point—the grief of death is not so simply laid aside? Epicureanism is just another comfort-blanket against the struggles of living and dying. On the plague, see David Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge, 1998), 162. Although a very pro-Lucretian reader (who also thinks that Lucretius would have changed the ending a lot, to make a better moral, if he had lived to do the final revision), even Sedley sees that Lucretius’ do-it-yourself lesson would be very hard to learn from the poem. It may have told us about not fearing death, but it hasn’t done much for not fearing pain. On the funeral passage: it’s called ‘this cloying overpersonalization of death’ by Segal, Lucretius on Death and Anxiety, 70, even though his general point is that Lucretius offers two voices in what he says about death—detached and involved. 27 For discussion of how the ‘digressions’ in didactic may link together to make cognate images or even continuous narrative, see my ‘Love in Parentheses: Digression and Narrative Hierarchy in Ovid’s Erotodidactic Poems’, in R. K. Gibson, A. R. Sharrock, and S. Green (eds.), The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris (Oxford, forthcoming).


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She too did not know that her child was to be killed at the altar. If Sedley is right that the Iphigenia story relates to the objection in Empedocles to animal sacrifice (in case you kill your child who has been reincarnated as a bull), then the connection between the two digressions is all the stronger, and acknowledges its allegiance to a non-Epicurean tradition.28 Female personifications are also on the receiving end of a tendency in Lucretian discourse to structure the world around penetration. It is not literal sexual penetration that interests me here, but rather the prevalence of the image elsewhere—the mind which penetrates the nature of things (especially the mind of the Man Himself, Epicurus), like a hunting dog (1. 404, in this case it is the mind of the reader which is to sniff out the truth); the spear which proves the infinity of the universe by its incessant penetration of new space (1. 968–73); water spouts and flames which are forced upwards (2. 203); and horses in a race (2. 265). None of these images is particularly surprising, poetically powerful though they may be, at least to readers who have experienced the long scientific tradition of the relationship of scientist to subject matter as one of exploration, penetration, dominance, and knowing every nook and cranny. Where it seems to me more remarkable is in the activity of the atoms, those fundamentals of Lucretius’ universe. Nominally, of course, the atoms are gendered neutral, both grammatically and by implication from their lack of other direct characteristics such as colour, odour, or sense. The neutral things, however, are at some level the real workers in the poem, the only entities which really make things happen, rather than just metaphorically, imagistically, making things happen, which is the only way that such action is performed by Earth, Nature, and Venus (who perhaps stand for the forces of agency rather than actually being those forces). I said 28

Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, 30. See also Keith, Engendering Rome, 107–11, on the fetishization of the dead female body. She sees the Iphigenia-story as an erotic myth which has it both ways, since the reader is meant to experience the voyeuristic pleasure but also to be aroused to sympathy for Iphigenia and abhorrence towards the religious viewpoint which sacrificed her. The female is associated with body, sexuality, and death (also dirt, earth, disgust), and loses out by having her generative force reassigned to the (male) Greek fleet.

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above that ‘the atoms get some kind of peculiar high status with respect to reality, and as a result, perhaps, can support some degree of personification despite apparently being gendered male’. In suggesting that the atoms are gendered male, I am basing this interpretation on the attribution to them of features which are traditionally associated with masculinity. Such an interpretation requires a certain degree of buying into the very oppositional structures and reifications which feminist discourse (at least in some of its manifestations) has attempted to explode. My case, however, is that this is precisely what Lucretius does: his ‘neutral’ is not really neutral at all once he comes to talk about it; nor is the insensate nature of the atoms really senseless in his discourse. But this implied masculine gender and implied personification (in the sense of presenting an abstract in the guise of a real thing) are acceptable to Lucretius’ philosophy because the atoms, unlike women and nature, are solidly and unproblematically real, indeed the only real thing. They too are penetrators: particles penetrate void.29 This makes me wonder whether ‘void’ is being gendered female, although it too, as inane, is grammatically neuter. Nothing exists, and because of its existence movement, and thus all activity, is able to happen. That ‘nothing’ is the space in which the atoms can do things, the gaps, the interstices, the fissures of the universe which cannot be seen or perceived, but which create the conditions in which things can be.30 This is a story of the female which has been told in many places and ages. It is the female as necessary but invisible, an open, passive, containing space in which action can happen. It must have affinities with Cixous’ ‘in between’ abstract space in which she situates ećriture feminine.31 The risk in such a reading, as ever, and as has been said of Cixous, is that we perpetuate the genderimbalances on which it is based. I would suggest that perhaps what we need is an updated version of the feminist second-wave strategy of celebrating things female: we need to accept the risk, and work with it, to make the identifications anyway, and try to mould them 29

Discussed also in Nugent, ‘Mater Matters’. See particularly 1. 329–69. 31 He´le`ne Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1.4 (1976), 875–93. 30


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in a useful way for the increase of sensitivity and understanding of texts and the world. This gendering of atoms and void can be seen particularly, and in Roman terms, in the discussion of solidity: atoms are hard, but the matter they make up gets softer as they have more void among the particles (1. 565–779). Huc accedit uti, solidissima materiai corpora cum constant, possint tamen omnia reddi, mollia quae fiunt, aer aqua terra vapores, quo pacto fiant et qua vi quaeque gerantur, admixtum quoniam semel est in rebus inane. at contra si mollia sint primordia rerum, unde queant validi silices ferrumque creari, non poterit ratio reddi; nam funditus omnis principio fundamenti natura carebit. sunt igitur solida pollentia simplicitate, quorum condenso magis omnia conciliatu artari possunt validasque ostendere viris. So it happens that although the bodies of matter [i.e. atoms] are most solid, yet all things can be explained, things which are soft, air water earth and vapours, how they come to be and with what force each is borne, since void is once mixed in among things. But on the other hand if the first principles of things were soft, reason could not explain from where strong flint and iron could be created; for all nature would completely lack the framework of foundation. Therefore there are solids, flourishing in their simplicity, in whose denser conglomeration can all be packed tight and show their powerful strength.

Lucretius explicitly rejects the alternative possibility of the existence of atoms which are mollis, because otherwise it would be impossible for any hard substances to have their validas . . . viris, ‘strong powers’ (nothing, of course, directly to do with the word vir, except by Lucretian word play). But if this reading of atoms and void as male and female entities has any validity, then we should pay attention to a passage at 1. 1008–20: Ipsa modum porro sibi rerum summa parare ne possit, natura tenet, quae corpus inane et quod inane autem est finiri corpore cogit, ut sic alternis infinita omnia reddat,

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alison sharrock aut etiam alterutrum, nisi terminet alterum eorum, simplice natura pateat tamen inmoderatum, nec mare nec tellus neque caeli lucida templa nec mortale genus nec divum corpora sancta exiguum possent horai sistere tempus; nam dispulsa suo de coetu materiai copia ferretur magnum per inane soluta, sive adeo potius numquam concreta creasset ullam rem, quoniam cogi disiecta nequisset.

Nature herself ensures that the universe cannot procure a limit for itself, since she forces bodies to be bordered with void and void with bodies, so that thus by alternating she might render the universe infinite. If either of them were to place a limit on the other, then that one would stretch out without boundary in its pure form, and neither sea nor earth nor the bright temples of the heavens, neither the race of mortals nor the holy bodies of the gods could persist for a least moment of time; for torn from their gathering the abundance of matter would be set free and would be carried through the great void, or perhaps they would never have gathered together and created any thing, since they would be too scattered to be forced together.

A feminist reader might want to respond to this passage in a positive, recuperative way: it might offer a paradigm of the world in which the male and female principles are mutually dependent and co-operative in creating the activity of things. The funny thing about these atoms—colourless, senseless, deathless, and genderless as they officially are—is that they are also the subjects of some of the most entertaining pieces of personification in the poem. The atoms get all the best lines; the void, by contrast, gets no lines at all. Not only are the atoms cast as epic heroes, given ceaseless action and guaranteed victory, but also they come alive. Several times they are anthropomorphized. On one occasion (1. 919), they are cracking up with laughter at the stupidity of Lucretius’ implied interlocutor who thinks, with Anaxagoras (or Lucretius’ satirical representation of his position), that there are tiny particles of all kinds of things mixed up in things, rather than the ‘truth’, which is that the atoms are first principles of a different nature from the multitude of material items which they can form, not miniature versions of them. Lucretius’ laughing atoms are a satirical picture, of course, deliberately absurd, but it is hard to resist the implication that they are laughing with him. A later


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passage develops the same idea further. At 2. 976–90, Lucretius has just been arguing for the insensate nature of the atoms, against the notion that they must be sensate in order to produce sensate matter. Again the atoms burst out laughing, and even start discoursing on themselves as first principles, and on the nature of things. Now, of course this personification is being explicitly rejected by Lucretius, reduced to absurdity, but it is also creating a very close analogy and fellow-feeling between the atoms and the Lucretian position. (The atoms also [don’t] go into Council to work out how they ought all to join together: 1. 1.021, 5. 419.) They laugh, with Lucretius and anyone else in the philosophical know, at the idea that they might be able to laugh at things. It seems to me, then, that the atoms make the most acceptable male personifications. They do so, I imagine, because they are absolutes, more real than reality—and perhaps also because they are Lucretius’ mates. It often seems to me, and has seemed to critics in the past, that Lucretius’ poem works against itself, its glorious images and strong sense of commitment belying the ataraxia which is its stated aim. I suspect, even, that the message of the poem may be that Epicurean ataraxia needs to be balanced with a more intensely personal ethic, although I realize that many modern critics would not accept this position. Of course, Lucretius does insist on the absolute truth of his message, especially when he is talking about it explicitly, and indeed it seems plausible that he refuses to consider any chinks in Epicurean orthodoxy, even from later Epicureans, as argued by Sedley.32 The totality of the poem, however, forces the reader to question the certainties of orthodoxy. It would be hard to ignore entirely the tendency towards self-undermining which lurks below the surface of the work. This tension may perhaps also be designated a kind of ‘feminine writing’.33 I mean that a style of argument which refuses 32

Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom. In the French-feminist strand of thought under the sign of which the present volume comes into being, there is something ‘feminine’ about a style of writing which is anti-teleological, swirly, poetic, repetitive, metaphorical, and imagistic. In Cixous’ works which are particularly influential in moulding this way of thinking (‘Coming to Writing’ and the ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ and her Coming to Writing and Other Essays, trans. Sarah Cornell 33

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to give absolute answers, which sows the seeds of its own undoing, refuses even to be pinned down about what it might mean, might be— if not ‘feminine’—then at least in contrast to the phallogocentric tradition of Western philosophy and science. Here again, as I have warned before, there are risks: it is risky to associate the feminine with lack of rigour, with being wrong, with woolly thinking. Reclaiming it as a valuable way to read both poems and science takes care, but may bring rewards. The ‘mother cow’ offers an alternative view of the world to that of the philosopher, a view in which suffering is real, and atomic theory will not save us from grief. If we take the view that the female perspective on DRN changes the substance of the argument (the philosophy, the physics, the ‘message’, not just the medium), we might indeed be suggesting that the ancient example implies the possibility of a feminist science which is different, one which insists on tensions and relativity. We might have to say that Lucretius the poet offers us this reading. The danger of such a position is that we then are forced to imply that poet ¼ female and philosopher/scientist ¼ male, which inevitably undermines the poet ¼ female side of the dichotomy. Since the mother cow is the representative of the poet ¼ female side, we are in big trouble, and seem simply to reinforce the dominance of the philosopher/scientist ¼ male. Can the philosopher take up the subject-position of the mother cow? I’m not sure that it would be possible. But this way lies despair, because every feminist analysis is always already undermined by its association with the mother cow. Maybe the answer lies in accepting and living with the undermining, but still doing feminist analysis anyway, because the process brings personal and intellectual growth, even if it doesn’t bring answers.

et al., ed. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), it is the bodiliness of writing which characterizes the feminist project, but in the process of assimilation of this doctrine to literary criticism the creative mode has infected also the process of reading—which is what most of us mortals actually get to do, a passive activity thus (perhaps) rendered active. By this means, ‘reading as a woman’ may involve a particular sensitivity to such strategies of imagistic invention in texts—or even (this is problematic) to the construction of them.

11

Science Fictions and Cyber Myths: or, Do Cyborgs Dream of Dolly the Sheep?

G e n e v i e v e Liveley Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance. (Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’) A strangely potent tie is kinship, and companionship as well. (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound)

Here is a story from ancient Greece.1 An animated bronze man is made by Hephaestus to guard the island of Crete, which he walks around three times a day, throwing missiles at any strangers. His body is made of indestructible bronze but beneath the tendon in his ankle is a red vein covered by a thin membrane, his only vulnerable point. One day, the Argo carrying Medea and the Golden Fleece try to land and, as the monster hurls rocks at the Argonauts to prevent My thanks to those who have been good to think and drink with while working on this piece: Ben Corrigan; Duncan Kennedy; Miriam Leonard; Charles Martindale; Ellen O’Gorman; Vanda Zajko. 1 See L. Coupe, Myth (London, 1997), 1–4.

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their safe anchorage, Medea employs her magic powers to wound his ankle, ichor flows out of the wound like molten metal, and he crashes to the ground like a felled tree. The seemingly indestructible metal man is destroyed and the Argo saved. Here is a second story, from nineteenth-century Europe. A young Swiss student, Victor Frankenstein, discovers the secret of animating lifeless matter and, by assembling body parts plundered from graveyards and animating them with electricity, creates a monster. The monster, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Here is a third story, from the middle of the last century of the second Christian millennium. A game is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game is for the interrogator to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. When a machine then takes the part of A in this game, the interrogator cannot distinguish the performance of the machine from the performance of the man or woman. The machine convincingly impersonates a human using artificial intelligence.2 Here is a fourth story from the last century of the second Christian millennium. It recounts how in the year 2029, the rulers of Earth attempt to assure the future by changing the past. They send a Terminator—a cyborg monster, part human and part machine— back in time to destroy Sarah Connor, future mother of the man who will seek to overthrow them. The seemingly indestructible metal man is destroyed and the future saved. Here is a fifth and final story, from the last decade of the second Christian millennium. In the year 1990 the first ever patented animal OncomouseTM—a trademarked genetically engineered rodent—is promoted by biotech company Du Pont (‘where better things for 2

There is much debate about the obscurity and ‘careless syntax’ of Turing’s test. For a full discussion see A. Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London, 1992), a biography whose title transforms Turing himself into a cyborg, the human embodiment of an Enigma decoding machine. The Turing test, as it became known, was to establish the foundation of research and testing in artificial intelligence (AI) well into the 1980s. See N. K. Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago, and London, 1999).

s ci e n c e fi c t i o n s a n d cy b e r m yt h s

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better living come to life’) as a ‘little murine smart bomb’, and a new ‘tool-weapon’ to fight the biotechnical war against breast cancer.3 Mythographers of the cyborg assume that this monstrous hybrid, part human and part machine, part being and part metaphor, has no significant history before ‘being spat out of the womb-brain of its war-besotted parents in the middle of the last century of the second Christian Millennium’.4 For most science writers and theorists, the history of the cyborg begins in 1960 with a neologism coined by the research scientist Manfred Clynes and the clinical psychiatrist Nathan Kline to refer to a technologically enhanced man or ‘cybernetic organism’—a fusion of organism, machine, and code—capable of surviving and working in hostile alien environments. Others might posit the genesis of cybernetics with the publication of Alan Turing’s classic 1950s paper ‘Computer Machinery and Intelligence’, or perhaps look further back to 1947 and the publication of a theory of self-regulating or ‘cybernetic’ systems (from the Greek kybernetes) developed by the pioneering research scientist Norbert Wiener. Historians of science fiction might push back the imaginative history of the cyborg to the nineteenth century,5 locating its genesis with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—or, to give its full title, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The casual ‘or’ of this alternative title, however, emphasizes both the kinship of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (to give the author her alternative title) to Aeschylus and other classical myth-makers, no less than the kinship between Victor Frankenstein and his Promethean ancestor, inviting us to push back the imaginative history of the cyborg from the 3

D. J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleManß_ Meets_OncomouseTM (London, 1997), 83. 4 Ibid. 51. 5 See S. C. Fredericks, ‘Greek Mythology in Modern Science Fiction’, in W. Aycock and T. Klein (eds.), Classical Mythology in Twentieth Century Thought and Literature (Lubbock, Tex., 1980). Fredericks traces a history of the ‘Promethean’ and ‘Odyssean’ modes of science fiction, reviewing science fiction as a new mythology. Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (London, 1973)—revised and reissued in 1986 as Trillion Year Spree—makes precisely this move, even though Aldiss’s subtitle may remind classicists of Lucian and his True History, a text that could be figured as a point of origin for the first ‘science-fiction’ narrative.

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nineteenth century ce to the ninth century bce, from Shelley to Homer. Frankenstein’s monster reminds us that the genealogy of the cyborgs of the second Christian Millennium may be traced back to the mythical monsters of classical Greece, and that in the narratives of Homer, Hesiod, Apollodorus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Pausanias, an alternative and ancient history for the cyborg may be mapped. While the goddess Athena, born from the womb-brain of her warbesotted parent in the Olympian prehistory of ancient Greece, may seem an obvious mythic archetype for the figure of the cyborg, it is the ‘cybernetic’ creations of the god Hephaestus that claim the closest kinship with modern cyborgs. Hephaestus, the classical mythographers tell us, was the creator of miraculous automata: tripods that moved of their own accord to and from feasts on Mount Olympus (Iliad 18. 373–9), golden robotic slave-girls who helped him with his work inside the inhospitable volcanic environment of his home and workshop (Iliad 18. 417–21), and gold and silver watchdogs who guarded the palace of Alcinous (Odyssey 7. 91–4). Modern commentators and scholiasts, as Christopher Faraone has observed,6 are unwilling to take Homer’s descriptions of these creatures ‘at face value’, preferring to rationalize mythic descriptions of animated statues and mechanical artworks as being ‘realistic’ and ‘lifelike’ rather than genuinely animated. Faraone notes that in such euhemerizing interpretations of the Homeric descriptions of Hephaestus’s works ‘the adjectives ‘‘undying’’ and ‘‘unaging’’ refer not literally to biological life, but rather to the durability of the rust-proof metals from which they were fashioned’.7 Such ‘demythologizing’ rationalizations of these Homeric narratives seek to explain away rather than to explain the significance and symbolic potential of Hephaestus’s automata, denying the opportunity to see in such mythic descriptions of animated and mechanical statues new possibilities for interpretation and meaning. It is possible to see how this rationalization might be convincing in the case of Alcinous’s watchdogs—so realistic that they frighten 6

C. A. Faraone, ‘Hephaestus the Magician and Near Eastern Parallels for Alcinous’ Watchdogs’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 28 (1987), 257. 7 Ibid.


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away enemies as effectively as if they were real guard dogs—but it is less obvious to see how tripods that only appeared to move of their own accord might be useful at Olympian feasts, or how realistic golden slave-girls might have offered effective assistance in Hephaestus’s workshop. It seems clear that Hephaestus’s automata are supposed in the Homeric epics to be animate, self-moving, and thus—in Wiener’s scientific terms—even ‘cybernetic’. Could these archaic automata be the ancestors of the cyborg? Homer offers no account of how these automata might have been animated, but in a comparative study of Near Eastern apotropaic statuary and Hephaestus’s mythical metal creations, Faraone identifies a common ‘recipe’ for animation:8 hollow statues are first cast in metal and then animated with pharmaka—that is, with organic animal and vegetal matter, minerals, and gems, supplemented with written codes and commands inscribed on pieces of papyrus.9 Might the animated statues of Hephaestus thus be seen to parallel the apotropaic statues and magical talismans of Near Eastern ritual no less than the cyborgs of the second Christian millennium— cybernetic fusions of organic and inorganic material, animated with diverse pharmaka, including the codes of DNA and the computer commands of artificial intelligence (AI) programmes? While some of Hephaestus’s automata may appear ostensibly more robotic than cybernetic in character, the stories of Talos the bronze giant suggest that here, indeed, the first recognizable cyborg, hybrid of man and machine, metal and flesh, may be identified. Although they disagree upon the genealogy of the bronze giant, the competing mythological sources for the story of Talos or Talus agree upon the details that confirm the status of this animated metal humanoid, possessing powers of self-regulation as 8

Ibid. 263–4. Thus, according to an Oxyrhynchus fragment cited in Faraone, ‘Hephaestus the Magician’, ‘Hephaestus made a bronze lion and put into this pharmaka beneficial to mankind’. See also ibid. 264 n. 19: ‘Among the Greek magical papyri . . . are several recipes for the construction of figurines that seem to come alive at some point in the process; some of these recipes prescribe the insertion of some special material into a hollow part of the statue; e.g. a hieratic papyrus inscribed with a logos (?) is inserted into a statue in order to animate it (V 385f).’ 9

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a ‘proto-cyborg’. According to Apollonius Rhodius, as the Argonauts sought to tie up in the harbour of Crete: Bronze Talos broke off rocks from a great cliff, preventing them from attaching their lines to the land when they sailed into the sheltered harbour of Dikte. Among the line of semi-divine men, Talos was the last survivor of the bronze race of humans born from ash trees, and the son of Kronos had given him to Europa to guard Crete by walking around it three times [a day] on his bronze feet. The rest of his body and limbs were made of indestructible bronze, but beneath the tendon in his ankle was a red vein covered by thin skin which marked the boundary between his life and death. (Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4. 1638–50)

Richard Buxton, in his study of the myth of Talos, draws attention to the different oppositions and categories that are destabilized by this mythic monster, highlighting in particular ‘the oppositions between divine/heroic, natural/artificial, and even human/animal’.11 However, a series of key oppositions between organic/inorganic, self/other, mind/body, male/female, reality/appearance, whole/part, active/passive, truth/illusion may also be traced in this story. In Apollonius’s narrative, Talos is semi-divine, part mortal and part immortal, part god and part man; the bronze monster appears to be wholly made of impenetrable, inorganic metal, but, in reality, is vulnerable in one penetrable, organic part of his anatomy; he is paired in this story with Medea, whose monstrous magic conquers his monstrous violence, the power of her mind—‘not exactly telepathic, not quite telekinetic’—overcomes his superior physical strength.12 Talos’s veins flow with ichor rather than blood, marking him out as something other than human. Despite its obvious correlation with human blood, ichor is consistently

10

Apd. 1. 9. 26; Ap. Rhod. Arg. 4. 1635–88.; Pau. 8. 53. 2ff. See R. Buxton, ‘The Myth of Talos’, in C. Atherton (ed.), Monsters and Monstrosity in Greek and Roman Culture (Bari, 1998), 83–112, for a convincing reconstruction of the fragmentary and competing versions of the Talos myth. 11 Ibid. 89. 12 Ibid. 87. See M. Dickie, ‘Talos Bewitched: Magic, Atomic Theory and Paradoxography in Apollonius Argonautica 4. 1638–88’, in F. Cairns and M. Heath (eds.), Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar, 6 (Leeds, 1990), 267–96.


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contrasted with and distinguished from ‘ordinary human blood’.13 Yet the presence of musculature, skin, a vein, and a life-giving fluid akin to human blood flowing through that vein, also marks Talos out as something other than non-human. The ichor flowing through and from the vein(s) of this metal man signify his monstrosity and his mortality, his hybrid status as man and machine, human and other—his identity not as a robot but as a proto-cyborg. In her ground-breaking and now ‘classic’ analysis of feminism in the post-modern Western world, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’,14 Donna Haraway proposes some provocative ways of rethinking human subjectivity, invoking the term ‘cyborg’ as a metaphor for the late twentieth-century subject. She identifies the semi-organic, semitechnological figure of the cyborg, an artificially constructed being, as a symbol of and for the post-modern, post-human self. In the hybridization of animal and machine that characterizes the cyborg, Haraway sees a model for the contemporary subject as an individual who is not identified according to an organic or natural definition—particularly of gender—arguing that, in the figure of the cyborg, category distinctions are collapsed, boundaries are transgressed, and definitions are blurred, as the possible conditions for any mode of unified subjectivity are denied. As part of her cyborg ‘genealogy’ Haraway acknowledges her indebtedness to a variety of ‘story-tellers’ or ‘theorists for cyborgs’. Among those whose influences are explicitly recognized the sciencefiction writers Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany are named, together with the feminist writers and theorists Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig. Haraway’s cyborg myth is clearly influenced by the genderfree (or ‘post-gender’) utopias of feminist science fiction, but it is also informed by the psychoanalytic writings of the French feminists, who, she claims: ‘for all their differences, know how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment . . . from imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies’.15 It is story-tellers such as these who, for 13

See Buxton, ‘Myth of Talos’, 105–7. D. J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991), 149–81. 15 Ibid. 174. 14

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Haraway, explore what it means to be embodied and engendered in a high-tech post-modern world, and who constitute the mythographers of the cyborg. Yet, like Haraway’s cyborg mythographers, the classical mythographers from Homer to Ovid—‘for all their differences’—also knew ‘how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment . . . from imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies’. Furthermore, the cyborg mythographers with whom Haraway claims kinship write within a clearly delineated literary tradition in which explicit appeals to the figures and narratives of classical mythology are common. The classic work of science fiction by Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2, and Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacra (originally entitled The First Lady of Earth) reinscribe the Pandora/Pygmalion/Galatea myths. Hermes has provided the theorists Michel Serres and William Grassie with a potent myth and metaphor through which to explore the hermeneutics of science and science fiction. Prometheus has performed a similar role for Ihab Hassan in his analysis of ‘posthumanist’ culture. The cyborg movie Blade Runner is reread by D. Cifuentes as ‘Theseus’ struggle with the Minotaur’, and by Jay Clayton as a revision of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story, in which the Tyrell Corporation’s cyborgs are ‘replicants’ not only of Frankenstein’s monster, but also of the monstrous Medusa.16 Indeed, in a self-acknowledged ‘resolute over-reading’ of cyborg images represented in a collection of ‘mainline publications’ (Science magazine, American Medical News, and Time magazine), Haraway herself invokes Plato’s allegory of the cave, the Oresteian Trilogy, and the story of Pygmalion and Galatea,17 alongside ‘heroic quests’ and ‘masculine parthenogenesis’ in a chart mapping the classical myths that ‘are crusted like barnacles’ onto popular representations of cyborg figures.18 In a cyborgian hybridization of modernity, postmodernity, and classicism, Haraway’s cyborg mythographers (and 16 See G. Kolata, Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead (London, 1997), who reads the science-fiction clone fantasy The City of Lost Children as a retelling of the Prometheus myth and its ‘cloning’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and H. G.Wells’s Dr Moreau. 17 Haraway, Modest_Witness, 253. 18 Ibid. 255.


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Haraway herself) re-member classical myths—fusing science, fiction, and myth into one body. In the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ and her more recent cyber-text Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleManß_Meets_Onco mouseTM, Haraway sees a positive resistance to and redefinition of conventional polarities and their attendant hierarchies embodied in the figure of the cyborg. Among the hierarchical dualisms persistent in the Western tradition, Haraway identifies a series of key pairings between self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/ partial, and God/man—all of which, she claims, are radically destabilized by the monstrous hybrid of entity and myth that is the cyborg.19 However, cyborgs do not reinscribe or re-embody the traditional binarisms and polarities between such categories. Essential to the identity of the cyborg is its hybridity, the monstrous fusion of different species and categories—human and animal, man and machine, metal and flesh, masculine and feminine. The cyborg is neither robot nor animal, neither machine nor organism; ‘The cyborg is a cybernetic mechanism, a hybrid of machine and organism’,20 fusing the organic, the mechanical, and the written in one body. Indeed, according to a revision of Haraway’s definition of the cyborg in Modest_Witness: The cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices. Cyborgs are not about the Machine and the Human, as if such Things and Subjects universally existed. Instead, cyborgs are about specific historical machines and people in interaction.21

As Haraway’s own competing definitions demonstrate, seeking a comprehensive definition of the ‘cyborg’ is problematic—not simply because the cyborg metaphor is supposed to undermine taxonomy, but also because published definitions offer opposing, confusing, and often incomplete classifications. New biotechnological developments and new science-fiction texts require definitions of the 19 21

Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 177. Haraway, Modest_Witness, 51.

20

Ibid. 149.

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cyborg to be revised regularly. Some cyborg classifications place the genetically engineered clone Dolly the sheep alongside a digitally enhanced Lara Croft, the Terminator, and silicon-sculpted porn stars. Other categorizations of the cyborg would include any organism augmented by chemicals, prostheses, or implants. As the editors of The Cyborg Handbook maintain,22 ‘Anyone with an artificial organ, limb or supplement (like a pacemaker), anyone reprogrammed to resist disease (immunized) or drugged to think/behave/feel better (psychopharmacology) is technically a cyborg.’ Cyborgs are most familiar to us from the mythic narratives of twentieth-century science fiction: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and its film translation Blade Runner, Star Trek, Terminator, and Kubrick and Spielberg’s cinematic chimera A.I, to name but a few. Yet for Haraway the cyborg is emphatically ‘a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’,23 a living being as well as a metaphor—the distinctions between reality and representation, fiction and fact, revealed as another set of polarities that the cyborg redefines. This idea supports perhaps one of the most challenging tenets of Haraway’s controversial thesis, the idea not only that cyborgs exist beyond the realm of metaphor and myth, film and fiction, but also—as clear distinctions between monstrous other and human self are dissolved—that we are cyborgs and that cyborgs are us. According to Katherine Hayles’s influential study of posthumanism: Cyborgs actually do exist: about 10% of the current U.S population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints, drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin. A much higher percentage participates in occupations that make them into metaphoric cyborgs, including the computer keyboarder joined in a cybernetic circuit with the screen, the neurosurgeon guided by fiber optic microscopy during an operation, and the teen gameplayer in the local videogame arcade.24

22

C. Hables Gray, H. J. Figueroa-Sarriera, and S. Mentor (eds.), The Cyborg Handbook (New York, and London, 1995), 22. 23 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 149. 24 Hayles, How we Became Posthuman, 115.


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Thus, according to Haraway’s cyber myth, ‘By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.’25 In the late-capitalist, patriarchal, Western world, our daily dependence, direct and indirect, upon high technology renders us all part of an integrated technological circuit: this configures us all as cyborgs, whether or not we have prosthetic limbs, breast implants, or use pharmaka to think/behave/feel better. For Haraway, then, the cyborg of contemporary science fiction, of modern medicine, modern mechanized production, and modern war (‘a cyborg orgy’) becomes ‘a fiction mapping our social bodily reality’ and ‘an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings’.26 Haraway signals three ‘crucial boundary breakdowns’ concomitant with technological developments in the late twentieth century that make her self-avowedly ironic ‘political-fictional (political-scientific)’ cyborg story possible.27 These include, first, the blurring of distinctions between humans and animals, particularly primates, brought about by the widespread acceptance of Darwinian theories of evolution and the related ideological recognition of ‘animal rights’; secondly, the synthesis of human, animal, and machine brought about by new advances in biotechnology and cloning, including the development of xenotransplant procedures and the use of increasingly sophisticated machines capable of replicating biological functions; and thirdly, the fusion or confusion of human and machine brought about by advances in computer technology such as the development of machines capable of demonstrating ‘artificial intelligence’, or succumbing to debilitating computer ‘viruses’. One response to these boundary breakdowns, Haraway suggests, might be to ‘see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artefacts associated with ‘‘high technology’’ and scientific culture.’28 Haraway’s response to scientific innovation, exemplified in the figure of the cyborg, however, is to embrace the new possibilities and perspectives that it promises. From one perspective, a technoscientific, post-modern, 25 27

Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 150. 28 Ibid. 151. Ibid. 154.

26

Ibid. 149–50.

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and post-human world implies the domination of technology over nature, machine over animal, ‘hard’ science over ‘soft’ humanity. Yet Haraway claims that a world of cyborgs need not necessarily entail the strengthening of dichotomies between human and animal, man and machine, man and woman. Rather, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.29

In declarations such as these, metaphor is translated into myth. Haraway’s cyborg metaphor is reconfigured as cyber myth. But how potent is this new myth for feminist resistance? And what are the ideological implications of Haraway’s insistence on our kinship with the illegitimate and monstrous character of the cyborg? Does her cyborg manifesto seek to construct a classical genealogy for her myth—or for her feminism? Central to Haraway’s thesis is her belief that science is one of the principal and most influential ‘representing machines’ of our time.30 Pushing the boundaries of the view that contemporary sciencefiction narratives provide a new mythology for a new technological age, Haraway maintains that science and technoscientific discourses provide the images, figures, landscapes, and languages in and with which twentieth-century myths are formulated.31 She insists, moreover, that the anti-science position adopted by many feminists denies women a historic opportunity to influence and inscribe the 29

Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 154. D. J. Haraway, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (London, 2000), 26. See S. Kember, Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (London and New York, 2003), 178. 31 From this perspective, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Dawkins’s selfish genes, and Lovelock’s Gaia are no less myths or science fictions than Gibson’s Neuromancer, Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, or the Judaeo-Christian story of Creation. 30


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‘codes’ that will program their place in a post-modern, post-human, world. Stressing the political potential and potency of feminist engagement in technoscientific practice and technoscience studies, she claims that, ‘There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination.’32 Indeed, presenting her cyborg myth as a demonstration of one such way in which this technoscientific ‘myth system’ might be appropriated for feminist political purposes, Haraway suggests that the discourses of science and technology, ‘including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imagination’,33 can offer a way to rethink and reconstruct contemporary feminist politics. At a time in which ‘feminism’ is increasingly contested as a term and as a point of political affiliation, when post-modern discourses argue for the socially and historically contingent configuration of class, race, sex, and gender, the possibility of a unified affinity between ‘feminist’ identities and feminist politics is challenged. Contemporary feminism(s) and post-feminism(s) offer contradictory, competing, and incomplete perspectives that destabilize and deny the grounding of a feminist identity according to any essentialist or ‘natural’ definition. Haraway, however, suggests that the hybrid figure of the cyborg promises a new way to approach and reconfigure these fragments of feminism. She claims: The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work well. . . . Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos.34

Her ‘cyborg feminism’ thus represents an attempt to renegotiate a way around the political, ideological, and epistemological gridlock that threatens to disable the feminist movement in the twenty-first century. Her cyborg myth imagines a world of lived social, political, and bodily realities in which feminists ‘are not afraid of their joint kinship’ with others—with men, with cyborgs, and crucially with women of other 32 34

Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 181. Ibid. 173.

33

Ibid. 163.

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classes, races, or political, sexual, and ideological persuasions—and in which they are ‘not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints’ but rather struggle to see from different perspectives at once, ‘because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point[s]’.35 Haraway’s model of cyborg feminism has its own feminist critics, however. Teresa Ebert in her Marxist critique of Haraway’s manifesto fundamentally disagrees with Haraway’s claim that the late twentieth century is a new age requiring new myths and new feminisms. She draws our attention to the point that cyborgs are the products and tools of an advanced capitalist and patriarchal economy, and questions the idea that such tools might be useful to Marxists or to feminists seeking to dismantle the social, political, and ideological structures of that economy. While Haraway acknowledges that her cyborgs may be viewed as the ‘offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism’,36 she also invokes Luce Irigaray’s Speculum as an illustration of the way in which the cyborg could be employed as a ‘tool’ for re-imaging and reclaiming the female body and the body politic in the late twentieth century. ‘The speculum served as an icon of women’s claiming their bodies in the 1970’s,’ she observes, but that old-fashioned hand tool is inadequate as instrument, icon, and metaphor for twenty-first century negotiations of body politics—particularly of cyber body politics.37 In a chapter she subtitles ‘The virtual speculum in the new world order’ in Modest_Witness, Haraway asks, ‘What is the right speculum for the job of opening up observation into the orifices of the technoscientific body politic?’38 A new imaginative tool, a new technological icon for a new technological age, is needed, she suggests—the cyborg. Aligning the speculum and the cyborg in this way, Haraway succinctly demonstrates that feminists can successfully repossess and employ ‘the master’s tools’ to open up the gendered body and the body politic to new scrutiny. The foundation of the gynaecological speculum as symbolic and material tool, she reminds us, lies originally with ‘the displacement of the female midwife by the specialist male physician and gynaecologist’, and 35 37

36 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 154. Ibid. 151. 38 Ibid. 169. Modest_Witness, 193.


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the mirror as ‘the symbol forced on women as a signifier of our own bodies as spectacle-for-another in the guise of our own supposed narcissism’.39 By implication, then, criticisms that the foundation of the cyborg as symbolic and material tool lies originally with militarism and patriarchal capitalism need not necessarily prevent its re-appropriation as a feminist tool. Genealogies and foundation stories play an important role in Haraway’s cyborg myth, tracing where the cyborg has come from so as to understand better where it may be going to, or at least so as to project better an imaginative telos for its mythic narrative. Indeed, throughout her work, she seems anxious both to resist and to construct a genealogy for her cyborgs, a foundation story for her myth. Thus she appears to offer competing and not obviously reconcilable accounts of the origins of the cyborg. Sometimes she maintains that, ‘the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense—a ‘‘final’’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘‘West’s’’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation.’40 The lack of an origin story in this sense means that no myth of original creation by some paternal figure, no myth of separation from original unity with a maternal figure, no Oedipal narrative, no Adam or Eve story encodes or explains the family drama of the cyborg. Thus: Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate . . . The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.41

Yet, at other points in her narrative,42 Haraway concedes that cyborgs ‘are the illegitimate offspring’ of Western militarism, capitalism, socialism, and patriarchy—describing precisely the dysfunctional parentage that concerns those wary of the technoprogeny of Haraway’s cyber feminism. Her defence, that ‘illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins’ on the grounds that ‘their fathers, after all, are inessential’, is not entirely reassuring either.43 Nor does she expand upon the presumably 39 41

Ibid. Ibid. 151.

40

Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 150–1. 42 43 Ibid. Ibid.

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‘essential’ role of the mother in this hetero-normative, biologically coded model of cyborg reproduction—the very model that the cyborg is supposed to subvert. Perhaps the ‘illegitimate’ cyborg does not escape the Freudian family drama as completely as Haraway would like us to believe. In Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleManß_Meets_ OncomouseTM, Haraway introduces us to some of our cyborg ‘kin’, among them the trademarked and patented OncomouseTM, a ‘primal cyborg figure for the dramas of technoscience’, genetically engineered to carry an oncogene—a gene that produces breast-cancer tumours in humans—and to take part in a heroic quest in the search for a cure for cancer. According to Haraway, OncomouseTM is one of us: OncomouseTM is my sibling, and more properly, male or female, s/he is my sister. . . S/he is our scapegoat; s/he bears our suffering; s/he signifies and enacts our mortality in a powerful, historically specific way that promises a culturally privileged kind of salvation—a ‘cure for cancer’ . . . If not in my own body, then surely in those of my friends, I will some day owe to OncomouseTM or her subsequently designed rodent kin a large debt.44

Alongside this representation of the ‘technobastard’ Oncomouse, in which the cyborg is made mythical scapegoat, Haraway emphasizes kinship. She returns repeatedly to the question: ‘Who are my kin in this odd world of promising monsters?’—a question that also shapes the discourse of her cyborg manifesto as she seeks to map a genealogy both for her cyborg myth and for her cyborg feminism.45 Although Haraway criticizes the tendency ‘among contemporary feminists from different ‘‘moments’’ or ‘‘conversations’’ in feminist practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole’,46 the discourse of her own cyborg feminism engages in apparently similar tactics of validation and teleology, both affirming and denying her kinship with other feminists, resisting and recognizing the relation 44

Haraway, Modest_Witness, 79. Haraway (ibid. 52) argues that: ‘cyborg anthropology attempts to refigure provocatively the border relations among specific humans, other organisms, and machines.’ 46 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 156. 45


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of her cyborg myth to other myths of late twentieth-century feminism. Thus her appropriation of Irigaray’s ‘speculum’ as a symbolic prototype for her cyborg simultaneously acknowledges her ideological kinship with the French feminist movement while positing herself and her cyborg as part of the ‘next generation’ of feminists. In a related and appropriate hybridizing cyborg strategy, Haraway explicitly defines her own feminist myth in opposition to the narratives and myths offered by second-wave pagan and ecofeminists like Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich at the same time as incorporating them into the teleology and genealogy of her own project; ecofeminists are represented as the (poor) relations of cyborg feminists, cyborgs as the telos of postmodern feminism. ‘They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological,’ she observes of Daly et al., ‘[b]ut their symbolic systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood . . . as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century.’47 The preoccupations of these ‘eco-mythographers’, she suggests, are rooted, not in the past or in nature, but in the high-tech world of the late twentieth century—a world that is already the world of the cyborg, a creature of nature and science, of the past and the present. While Haraway argues that one of the benefits of her cyborg myth for contemporary feminism would be the political and ideological model of effective affinity and unity through difference—the potential for kinship through hybridization—that it offers, her manifesto makes clear the sharp division in identity between those feminists who privilege the ‘natural’ in their discourses of gender and feminism, and those who privilege the ‘scientific’. Throughout Haraway’s cyborg writing criticism of the ‘goddess’ myth of second-wave feminist thinking, as particularly identified with the writings of Mary Daly, is implicit. Daly’s theory that ancient cultures worshipped a ‘Goddess’ before her myths and traditions were assimilated by the patriarchal order of Christianity is dismissed. A return to the conditions of this mythical, primal past, Haraway argues, is neither desirable nor possible. Any utopian gyn-ecological myths of a lost matriarchal golden age lack both 47

Ibid. 174.

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potency and relevance in an advanced technological era—in ‘our mythic time’. ‘We cannot go back ideologically or materially,’ Haraway claims, ‘It’s not just that ‘‘god’’ is dead; so is the ‘‘goddess’’.’48 Given this resistance to the myths of late twentieth-century feminism and her criticism of appeals in some second-wave feminist thinking to a mythical, primal past, it seems inconsistent—and illegitimate—of Haraway to appeal to classical myth in the configuration of a genealogy for her cyborg. In particular, she draws an explicit relationship between the monstrous cyborg and two ‘monstrous’ figures from classical Greek myth—the Centaur and the Amazon. The cyborg monsters of Haraway’s myth, like the Centaurs and Amazons, articulate questions of boundaries and definitions, testing and redefining the limits of kinship, community, and identity. Akin to the Amazons and Centaurs, the cyborgs are imagined to destabilize traditional dichotomies and force us to rethink the possible conditions for unified subjectivity. Cyborgs it seems, like the monsters of ancient Greek myth, embody otherness and pollute boundaries yet also evoke affinity and reinscribe margins. Positing a relationship between the cyborg, the monsters of ancient Greek myth, and the monkeys of Darwinian stories of evolution—and collapsing temporal distinctions as she does so— Haraway writes that: Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centred polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman . . . The evolutionary and behavioural sciences of monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late twentieth-century industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.49

The role of Haraway’s monsters, related to that of the Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greek myth, is to articulate new questions about boundaries and definitions, testing and redefining new limits of kinship, community, and identity in Western imaginations. Like the Amazons and Centaurs, and even more like Hephaestus’s Talos 48

Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 162.

49

Ibid. 180.


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or Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborgs of our ‘mythic time’ are seen to destabilize traditional and ‘troubling’ dichotomies and dualisms between self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. Yet, although Haraway may be seen to appeal to the classical tradition of mythology in order to establish the legitimacy of her modern myth through its association with two potent and enduring mythological icons, her emphasis upon the kinship of the cyborg to its ancient Greek cousins also highlights the illegitimacy of the cyborg as a ‘technobastard’ who is not a direct heir to the classical tradition. The cyborg’s ancestry and history may lie in the dust of ancient Greece, but in the post-modern world of ‘promising monsters’, the cyborg has more obvious kin. As monstrous others in Western imaginations, Amazons and Centaurs have been seen to define limits, to reinforce dichotomies, and to establish boundaries even as they have appeared to transgress and pollute them. The cyborg, however, is not the monstrous other that destabilizes and defines the limits of community and identity in our mythic time but the monstrous kin that denies us and our posthuman selves the conditions of a unified subjectivity, the monstrous self that defies organic definitions of gender and the hierarchical dualisms that dominate Western imaginations—and persist in contemporary feminist thinking. The Centaur and Amazon of classical myth have served as imaginative resources to describe and reinscribe social, political, geographical, and anatomical boundaries, as fictions to map the conditions and the identity of the ancient Greek male—and, by default, female. The cyborg serves a related imaginative function in the interrogation and inscription of twenty-first century borders and identities. Yet the symbolic and imaginative force of the cyborg is very different from these mythical, monstrous ‘others’. Cyborg imagery and cyborg mythologies remind us that, The machine is not an it . . . The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.50

50

Ibid.

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The cyborg thus represents a new mythic figure, performing a new symbolic function not simply for the subjects of a new technological age but with us. Haraway’s cyborg myth allows for our ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries’ but also demands our ‘responsibility in their construction’.51 Amazons, Centaurs, bronze giants, and other monsters may have performed an important symbolic function— and in the terms of a familiar trope, have been ‘good to think with’—in the past. But the new material and imaginary conditions of our post-modern, post-human lives renders cyborgs not just ‘good to think with’ as critical instruments of inquiry and imaginative investigation—but alongside, together with. For we are all cyborgs now.

51

Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 150; emphases in original.

part v

Myth and Poetry


12

Putting the Women Back into the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

Lillian Doherty Before there was feminist thought, there were women’s traditions and women’s genres, forms of expression practised by specific groups of women within larger cultural formations. These oral traditions have been largely effaced, or at least muted, in the canons of literate cultures and in the intellectual movements or disciplines they have identified as central, including history and literary criticism. Even in anthropology and folklore studies, women’s genres have only recently been seriously studied as distinctive elements within more generalized bodies of folk tradition.1 My essay seeks For generous suggestions and responses to questions related to this paper I would like to thank Wendy Doniger, Lori Garner, Ann Gold, Lindsey Harlan, Joseph C. Miller, Laurie L. Patton, Gloria Raheja, and Richard Saran. I am also grateful to the audiences at the University of Bristol, University College Dublin, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the conference on Feminism and Classics IV in Tucson (May 2004), whose responses to oral versions of this paper helped me to improve it in various ways. Finally, I thank the editors and anonymous referees of the present volume for their very helpful suggestions. 1

In the ethnography of South-East Asia, which I have sampled most widely in the research for this paper, work focusing on women’s traditions,

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l i l l i a n do h e r t y

to recover possible traces of women’s traditions in a fragmentary Greek work of the archaic age—the Catalogue of Women attributed to Hesiod—and to consider how and why these traces have been effaced, both in the composition of the Catalogue itself and in the practice of classical scholarship. Since the 1970s there have been a variety of explicitly feminist voices within both classical studies and anthropology. They have been in the minority, however, and despite widespread acceptance of the importance of gender as an analytic category, scholars who identify their work as feminist or who see it as contributing to feminist activism are few. It may be that the field of classics, with its overwhelmingly masculine canon, tends not to attract many students committed to a feminist agenda.2 But even within anthropology, which studies living human groups in which women are as numerous as men, feminists seem a somewhat embattled minority. The 1995 volume Women Writing Culture, for example, was generated as an explicitly feminist response to an earlier ‘authoritative’ collection, Writing Culture, from which the work of women anthropologists had been entirely omitted.3 Although feminism is not to be equated with the study of women, the absence of the former can often be correlated with inattention to the latter, especially in carried out beginning in the 1980s, began to be published in the 1990s; see in particular Arjun Appadurai, Frank Korom, and Margaret Mills, Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions (Philadelphia, 1991); Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley, 1994); and Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1996); Kirin Narayan, in collaboration with Urmila Devi Sood, Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (New York, 1997). For a survey of the situation in a different sub-field (that of African oral traditions), see Thomas A. Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), ch. 7. 2 I could not help noticing the modest numbers of scholars attending the two explicitly feminist conferences at which I read versions of this paper; moreover, the great majority of those attending were women. 3 See Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon (eds.), Women Writing Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), esp. 3–5; James Clifford and George Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986).

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c catalogue of women

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overviews of a discipline. Thus while an appreciable number of recent ethnographic monographs focus on women, collections of papers surveying the field as a whole or specific sub-fields tend to include at most one or two studies of women’s activities.4 An important lesson of feminist anthropology, and of women’s studies since the 1980s, is that women do not comprise a uniform class or group, even within a single society, so that studies of them must take account of racial and class divisions as well as of individuals who resist prevailing norms. Given the differences among women in living groups, it may seem overly simplistic to hope to recover traces of ‘women’s traditions’ in the scanty material surviving from archaic Greece. But as a feminist classicist I see the effort as a necessary corrective to the tacit assumption in much classical scholarship that the cultural products of the ancient world were shaped in a purely masculine milieu and that the masculine genres that survive had no feminine counterparts. I grant in advance that whatever traditions I uncover are likely to be aristocratic, since what survives of archaic Greek poetry tends to focus on the activities of ‘heroic’ males and their families. It follows that whatever women’s perspectives may be uncovered will tend to be shaped by the privileges of membership in an upper class. It cannot be assumed, moreover, that women’s perspectives will necessarily differ from men’s, even on the question of women’s relative importance. But the documented existence of distinctive women’s genres in the traditional villages of modern India encourages me to ask whether the Hesiodic Catalogue, with its striking emphasis on female ancestors, might not have incorporated elements of a women’s tradition. The value of the exercise, like that of Ellen O’Gorman’s essay in this volume,5 lies in the recovery and recognition of women’s agency in areas from which it has been elided. Myth is important to feminism because it is one element of literate culture that has the potential to incorporate women’s traditions and perspectives. By this I do not mean simply that at some 4

e.g. the Annual Review of Anthropology, a journal of review essays meant to give an overview of the most important developments and debates in the field, has included only an occasional essay on feminist research over the past ten years. 5 Ch. 7, looking at the woman’s role in warfare.

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time in the distant past men’s poetry incorporated a women’s tradition once and for all—for example, by reflecting vestiges of ‘matriarchal’ social or political organization.6 Rather, because myths are stories that combine an imaginative fluidity with an authoritative force, and because they are told in a variety of contexts even when they are also written down, they provide a point of entry for women’s perspectives and concerns in the discourse shared by women and men. Women’s versions may be derided as ‘old wives tales’ and marginalized, but they have had a surprising longevity in cultures with active oral traditions: witness the women’s tales and songs collected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists (especially women anthropologists) in a variety of rural settings worldwide, not excluding Greece and Italy.7 Although in retrospect we see the introduction of writing as exercising a chilling effect on such oral diversity, this may be because the loss of oral variants is only definitive for periods in the distant past. A more serious challenge to the survival of women’s traditions in the present seems to be posed by the centralization and globalization of the mass media, which suppress local variants by removing the occasions and incentives for their performance.8 The distinctiveness of women’s traditions seems to be tied to a degree of gender segregation, in performance contexts and/or in daily life. When daily tasks are segregated, work songs tend to be gender-specific. In some cultures, women perform only, or primarily, with and for other women because it is considered shameful for them to perform for men. Women anthropologists working in such cultures, who initially are often treated as ‘honorary men’, have 6

It has been plausibly argued that some Greek myths, whose origins are traceable to the Bronze Age, may reflect a greater prominence or influence of women in that age; but it has also been shown that some of the female figures in these myths are given enhanced roles in the later genre of tragedy. See Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York, 1975), 94. 7 A Greek example is John Petropoulos, Heat and Lust: Hesiod’s Midsummer Festival Scene Revisited (Lanham, Md., 1994). An exemplary study of European fairy tales is Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (New York, 1995). 8 See e.g. Narayan, Mondays, 16.


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found that they had to live among the women and observe their strictures for gendered behaviour (including, e.g., veiling and segregation) before they could be accepted as women; only at this point were they invited to participate in women’s rituals or trusted as confidantes.9 Class or caste is also an important determinant of who performs for whom, or who may be present at a given performance. Often, to be sure, the content of women’s traditions is altogether distinct from men’s, and may even be kept secret: hence our uncertainty about what went on at the Thesmophoria, a Greek women’s religious festival from which men were banned (and at which stories must have been told).10 But there are often significant areas of overlap, where both genders use a common store of material and shape it in distinctive ways. Epic, with rare exceptions,11 is not a women’s genre; yet the myths that are central to the classical Indian epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, are also found in women’s songs. Women’s versions of mythic material, where they can be compared to men’s, tend to differ in a variety of ways. Prominent among these is genre: whereas men’s performances are often public and of some length, women’s are often private and shorter, made to fit specific ritual occasions or rare intervals of leisure. A related difference involves plot: the plots of the shorter genres may be considered 9

See esp. the account of Gloria Raheja in the preface to Raheja and Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words, pp. xvii–xxvi. 10 Although a number of scholars have seen the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as somehow related to the Thesmophoria, there is no agreement on the specifics of this relationship. For an intriguing ‘excavation’ of the Hymn highlighting its treatment of relationships between women, see Ann Suter, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Ann Arbor, 2002). Narayan, Mondays, 18, cites a case in which male priests who volunteered versions of women’s ritual tales ‘got the plots and characters hopelessly garbled, to the stifled amusement of women listening in’. 11 A few of the professional bards who performed oral epic in the South Slavic tradition were women. See Celia Hawkesworth, Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia (New York, 2000), 51–62. Hale, Griots and Griottes, 226–33, describes African performances of epic stories in which male and female griots take complementary parts.

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mere episodes or digressions in the context of longer ones such as epic.12 Significantly, in women’s versions female characters often play more central roles and provide a greater share of the focalization. Thus Rama’s foster-sister Santa, a minor character in literary versions of the Ramayana, plays a central role in many women’s tales about Rama and Sita, in which as an elder sister she has the authority to ‘command, criticize, and admonish her younger brother’.13 Still more striking is the fact that in women’s versions, crucial decisions that advance the plot may be attributed to female characters instead of to the males who make them in men’s versions.14 But women’s and men’s traditions, while distinct, do not exist in isolation from one another. Even in the most segregated of cultures, women’s songs may be overheard by men or reported to them by female relatives.15 One sensitive article on women’s songs about Sita and Rama was inspired by the scholar’s memories of hearing them in his home as a boy, when he was still young enough to be included in the audience for women’s performances.16 In the dialogues of Plato likewise, the male characters are aware of the content of stories and songs they claim children hear from ‘old women’.17 A fortiori, men’s songs are likely to be overheard by 12

For a discussion of systematic differences between domestic and public performances of the ‘same’ tales in one region of India, see A. K. Ramanujan, ‘Two Realms of Kannada Folklore’, in Stuart H. Blackburn and A. K. Ramanujan (eds.,) Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India (Berkeley, 1986), 42–51. 13 Velcheru Narayana Rao, ‘A Ramayana of their Own: Women’s Oral Tradition in Telugu’, in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley, 1991, 114–36), 121. 14 Ibid. 122. 15 Cf. e.g. the comment of Raheja and Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words, 38: ‘Women may not sing with men, but they often sing at them and very often in close proximity to them.’ Lila Abu-Lughod describes the use of poetry as a more private form of communication between men and women in Veiled Sentiments: Honor & Poetry in a Bedouin Society, 2nd edn. (Berkeley, 1999), while Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Gender and Genre, ch. 3, documents the appropriation and transformation of women’s ritual songs by men in the Chhatisgarh region of Madhya Pradesh, India. 16 Narayana Rao, ‘Ramayana of their Own’, 114 and 117. 17 Plato, Lysis 205c–e, Hippias Major 286a; Republic 2. 377c speaks of ‘nurses and mothers’.


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women because there are fewer strictures on men’s performing in public. It follows that there is give and take between the parallel traditions, with each expressing distinctive viewpoints but taking account of, sometimes even answering, the other. These findings would indicate that in a living oral tradition, it is the norm rather than the exception for a multiplicity of ‘women’s genres’ to exist side by side with the ‘men’s genres’. In the study of classical literature, the notion of a women’s tradition has been applied thus far only to the study of Sappho and the other women poets whose works survive in fragmentary form.18 Are there other surviving works that might reflect the existence, and possibly the influence, of lost ‘women’s genres’? The Odyssey may provide a clue that the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women was related to, or descended from, one or more such genres.19 With the cleverness for which he is celebrated, Odysseus is portrayed as interrupting the tale of his adventures to his hosts the Phaeacians in Book 11 of the Odyssey just after a long description of the famous women he saw in the Underworld. The first member of his audience to speak up is the queen, Arete, who recommends increasing the guest-gifts her people are bestowing on the hero. Is it accidental that the section of his tale for which the queen rewards Odysseus bears a striking resemblance to the Catalogue of Women?20 Or would an early audience have recognized that the account of famous women had a special appeal to the queen because 18

See esp. Marilyn B. Skinner, ‘Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why is Sappho a Woman?’, in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York and London, 1993), 125–44. A recent exception to this exclusive focus on surviving fragments of women’s poetry is Laurie O’Higgins’ study of women’s cultic expressions of mockery and obscenity and their relationship to the Greek comic tradition: Women and Humor in Classical Greece (Cambridge, 2003). 19 For a fuller version of this argument, see Lillian E. Doherty, Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey (Ann Arbor, 1995), 65–9. 20 Scholars have long noticed the similarity between this passage and the Hesiodic Catalogue; it includes some of the same ‘heroines’ and uses the same dual emphasis on the women’s courtship and the children who were born to them.

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it belonged to a genre that incorporated women’s traditions? In the Odyssey passage, the catalogue excerpt is simply addressed to a woman; but in its focus on female characters who are the daughters and wives of mythic heroes, it resembles the Indian women’s tales. There are even some traces of female focalization in the descriptions of Tyro and Epicaste (Od. 11. 235–40 and 271–80). The Hesiodic Catalogue is a highly problematic work. Although I intend ultimately to approach the problems as opportunities, it is important to identify them at the outset. In the first place, its authorship, date, and place of composition are uncertain. In antiquity it was attributed to Hesiod and it clearly belongs to the formal oral tradition from which his poems descend, but differences in the use of formulaic epithets and the inclusion of ‘late’ mythic details such as the divinity of Heracles have led scholars to doubt that the Catalogue was composed by the author of the Theogony and Works and Days. M. L. West has postulated that it received its final form in Attica in the sixth century bce.21 A more serious difficulty is the highly fragmentary state of the work. Until the discovery of the Oxyrhynchus papyri beginning in the late nineteenth century, the only surviving fragments were those preserved in other authors, who cited it under the titles of Gunaiko¯n Katalogos (that is, Catalogue of Women), Ehoiai, or simply ‘Hesiod’. Although the papyri have given us much more of the text, many of the recovered fragments are inscrutable: they preserve parts of lines, parts of names, parts of stories. For a scholar whose primary interest is in literary texts, this is intensely frustrating. It is true that the formulaic nature of the language often makes 21

Martin L. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford, 1985), 168–71, seconded by Robert L. Fowler, ‘Genealogical Thinking, Hesiod’s Catalogue, and the Creation of the Hellenes’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 44 (1998), 1–19. Richard Janko, by contrast, dates it to the early seventh century in Homer, Hesiod, and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in Epic Diction (Cambridge, 1982), 85–6, 200, 221–5. For a fuller discussion of the issue of dating, see Ian Rutherford, ‘Formulas, Voice, and Death in Ehoie-Poetry, the Hesiodic Gunaikon Katalogos, and the Odysseian Nekuia’, in Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink (eds.), Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 82–3 and nn.


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it possible to restore part of a line with reasonable assurance; but this assurance can become inflated, leading the highly competent editor to recompose whole blocks of lines. The omnipresent brackets in the published Greek text (there is no published translation) are used to flag reconstructed parts of lines and must serve to remind us that much of this text, however plausible, is the work of its modern editors, M. L. West and R. Merkelbach.22 The same caveat extends to the arrangement of fragments in a narrative sequence. West outlines the organizing principles and much of the specific argumentation for this arrangement in his book The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women.23 A final difficulty is the uncertainty surrounding the genre of the work and its antecedents. This is compounded by the fact that other works thought to belong to the same genre have been almost completely lost.24 Recent discussion has focused on the possibility that the genre was a hybrid, combining ‘true catalogue poetry’—that is, lists of famous women—with genealogies.25 The alternative title Ehoiai is the plural of the formula used to introduce and connect 22

Reinhold Merkelbach and Martin L. West, Fragmenta Hesiodea (Oxford, 1967). The revised edition, published as ‘Fragmenta Selecta’ within the Oxford Classical Text’s volume of Hesiod edited by Friedrich Solmsen, Hesiodi Theogonia, Opera et Dies, Scutum, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1990), includes fragments recovered after 1967 and is thus an indispensable supplement to the first edition, but the apparatus is considerably abbreviated and the testimonia are omitted. I will cite the first edition as ‘Merkelbach and West 1967’ and the revised edition as ‘Merkelbach and West 1990’; where fragments are identical in both versions, the date is not given. 23 See n. 21. 24 A few tiny fragments exist of the Megalai Ehoiai, which from its title is assumed to have been a longer work of the same genre as the Catalogue. The Naupaktia Epe¯, of which equally little remains, was described by Pausanias (10, 38, 11) as being ‘about women’ (epesin pepoie¯menois es gunaikas), but most of what we know of it comes from the scholia to Apollonius, Argonautica, since it included a narrative of the voyage of the Argo. Its version of this narrative, in so far as we can reconstruct it, includes Medea but does not seem to emphasize women’s roles. See George L. Huxley, Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 68–73. 25 This idea of M. L. West’s (Hesiodic Catalogue, 35, 167) has been developed most fully by Rutherford, ‘Formulas’ (above, n. 21).

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many sections of the work: e¯ hoie¯, ‘or such as’ (‘such as’ being in the feminine). An individual section dealing with a single female figure may be referred to in ancient authors as ‘the e¯hoie¯ of so-and-so’; as an example, the ‘Alkme¯ne¯-e¯hoie¯’, describing how Alcmena came to sleep with both Zeus and Amphitryon on the same night, can be found in lines 1–56 of the Aspis, the Shield of Heracles (another ‘pseudo-Hesiodic’ work). The original intent of the phrase e¯ hoie¯, with its emphasis on a quality or qualities of the woman, must have been to identify exemplary women and either explicitly or implicitly to compare them with one another. In its surviving form, however, the Catalogue has come to incorporate genealogies of such length that this original use of the formula is lost or at least attenuated. In the view of M. L. West, the formula has assumed a new function, that of introducing or returning to a collateral branch of a family. In addition to the genealogies, the Catalogue incorporates narrative digressions about specific mythic ancestors, many in the form of brief asides, and a few detailed narratives, such as Atalanta’s race and the wooing of Helen. In an essay on the act of interpretation, Hans-Jost Frey notes that ‘the fragment, which does not fulfill the presupposition of wholeness, is not a popular object for literary scholarship and perhaps not even a possible one.’26 He goes on to explain that this is because of the role that the desire for control of meaning has played in traditional literary studies. Starting with the premise that the work is a finished whole, we seek to describe the conceptual order that its wholeness evokes for us. There is a related tendency to attribute this finished whole to a single author and to see its coherence as a projection of the coherent personality that produced it. Thus West, while analysing the strands of tradition that went into the Catalogue, concludes that in its final form it was the work of a single Attic poet of the sixth century, whose detailed knowledge of local Attic legends and use of Attic dialectal forms reveal his origins.27 In recent years this model of interpretation has been called into question even in classics, first with the work of Parry and Lord on the 26

Hans-Jost Frey, Interruptions, trans. Georgia Albert (Albany, NY, 1996), 32. Orig. pub. as Unterbrechungen (Zurich, 1989). 27 West, Hesiodic Catalogue, 168–71.


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oral traditions behind ‘Homer’ and later with the insights of literary theory concerning the role of the reader in interpretation and the related phenomenon of intertextuality, in which a text’s meaning can be altered by the mere existence of other texts. Yet in classics the older model is still strong, and even those of us who seek to use the new approaches feel obliged to demonstrate that what we find is really ‘there in the text’. This may help to explain why so few classicists have ventured to write about the Catalogue of Women. But when I began to read systematically what has been written about it, I quickly encountered a further difficulty. Strange as it may seem, almost none of these scholars even acknowledges that the Catalogue is about women.28 This is especially striking in the work of West, for whom the Catalogue has two components: a comprehensive set of heroic genealogies and enough interpolated mythic material to build them up into ‘a compendious account of the whole story of the nation’.29 He acknowledges that the proem, ‘which survives in fragmentary form (F 1)’, ‘calls upon the Muses to sing . . . of ‘‘the women . . . who were the finest in those times . . . and unfastened their waistbands . . . in union with gods’’ ’. ‘But’, West adds, ‘these legendary unions between gods and mortal women were only a starting-point for extensive heroic genealogies. The poem could be considered as being about those celebrated women, or more broadly as being about the genealogy of heroes.’30 Once he has identified the work as essentially a genealogy, he never returns to the possibility that it is ‘about’ the women it singles out, and none of the parallel genealogical works he cites from other oral traditions has anything to do with women—at least to judge by West’s account of them.31 Late in the book, he raises the possibility that the 28 A forthcoming collection on the Catalogue, which I have not been able to consult, may correct this imbalance: Richard Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge, forthcoming). 29 West, Hesiodic Catalogue, 3. 30 Ibid. 2 31 Ibid. 11–30. By contrast, in The Bedtrick (Chicago, 2000), 263–4, Wendy Doniger studies the ‘patriline’ of ancestors of Jesus as given in Matthew’s gospel and shows that at three crucial junctures it is the initiative of a woman of doubtful virtue that ensures the continuation of the line.

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‘Ehoie-form’ of the genealogies, introducing each branch with a female ancestor, may have originated in Locris, where according to a fragment of Aristotle the form of inheritance was matrilinear.32 But for West this is just a minor point about the possible geographical origins of the Catalogue or of the genre to which it belongs. As he and Merkelbach have reconstructed it (and there is no serious challenge to their reconstruction), it is a text composed by men for men. The bulk of West’s own study is devoted to piecing together the details of the genealogies, which luckily correspond in many instances to those given in the Library of Apollodorus (another ‘pseudonymous’ work of much later date that survives more or less intact). But these genealogies are considered only as expressions of men’s relationships with one another, including the ethnic and even political relationships among the cities and regions of Greece. At the risk of emphasizing null results, let me describe a few more of the frustrations I encountered in reading the secondary literature on this poem. Obviously in classical studies our evidence is such that masculine perspectives predominate; yet I think we need to keep reminding ourselves that this androcentric perspective is a skewed one, not a picture of a totality. Recent work by Robert Fowler and Jonathan Hall,33 informed by a sophisticated and fully contemporary understanding of ancient texts as discourse, nevertheless seems to take for granted that the discourse was shared by men only. There may be multiple voices within the tradition, reflecting the perspectives of different social classes or ethnic groups; it may even be possible to reconstruct the emergence and evolution of ethnic consciousness in groups such as the Argives or the Ionians, but not, apparently, to consider the possibility that women within these groups had any role in shaping that consciousness or the practices that dovetailed with it. Hall points out that repeatedly in the Catalogue a normative patrilineal scheme is disrupted by cases of West makes no attempt to distinguish between bilateral genealogies like those in the Catalogue, which include both male and female ancestors, and purely patrilineal ones; both types exist, e.g., in India (Richard Saran, University of Michigan, personal communication). 32

West, Hesiodic Catalogue, 168; Aristotle fr. 547. Fowler, ‘Genealogical Thinking’ (see n. 21); Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, 1997), 40–51. 33


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matrilineal inheritance (mother to son) or uxorilocal residence (a husband settling with his wife’s people, for example, Menelaus with Helen in Sparta). Hall even identifies these anomalies as ‘fracture points’ in the genealogies, ‘nodes which contradict or challenge [their] internal logic’. But he never goes on to ask whether women—as opposed to the men who ‘exchanged’ them—might have had a stake in the way such contradictions were either emphasized or suppressed. Deborah Lyons, who discusses the Catalogue in her book about Greek heroines, Gender and Immortality,34 obviously acknowledges and even focuses on the presence of women in the genealogies, and she makes the important point that many of these figures received cult and were thus perceived as belonging to a different category of being, somewhere in between mortal and divine. But Lyons too assumes that the tradition is devoid of women’s perspectives. In her view most of the women ancestors in the Catalogue are mere ciphers or ‘place-holders’; even their names are not ‘distinctive’ or individualized, and unless they suffer in dramatic ways, ‘they essentially have no story’.35 Admittedly, many of the narrative excurses in the Catalogue are about the feats of male heroes: for example, the Boreads’ pursuit of the Harpies, the shape-shifting of Periclymenus and his defeat at the hands of Heracles. And it is true that many of the women are simply named in passing and have no stories of their own. But quite a few, including those least known to later accounts of mythology, have very interesting ones, and many of these are told at least in outline.36 What is more, several authors who summarized the content of the Catalogue in antiquity used language suggesting that the women were then seen as more central to the work. Lucian refers to its subject as gunaiko¯n aretas, ‘the excellences of women’; Servius’ commentary on Virgil describes Hesiod’s heroines as actively ‘desiring marriage with strong men’; and Dio Chrysostom goes so far as to suggest that Hesiod ‘praised the women, leaving it to 34

Deborah Lyons, Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient Greek Myth and Cult (Princeton, 1997). 35 Ibid. 54–5. 36 See e.g. that of Mestra, discussed below.

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Homer to praise the men’.37 Could the Catalogue of Women really be about women after all?38 As for the genealogical content, surely it is worth considering why this systematic genealogy of a patriarchal culture accords such prominence to women throughout. Although the opening lines emphasize the women who slept with gods, they are not the only ones singled out for attention. The account of each family line begins with a woman—sometimes with one who merely married into it. Usually the daughters of a couple are listed before the sons; sometimes the daughters’ children are also listed before the sons’. Robert Fowler has argued that each major lineage outlined in the poem can be traced back to a male founder (Aeolus, Perseus, Heracles), and that women are used as links between lineage segments to provide mythic precedent for social or political affinities between historic groups.39 This may well reflect the thinking of the men who gave the Catalogue its extant form; but it assumes that the genealogies, like the attendant narratives, are only or primarily of interest to men, for whom their ‘point’ is establishing a precedent in the past for relationships to other men in the present. I would argue, by contrast, that both the genealogical and the narrative components of the Catalogue may have been at home in a women’s tradition which may have differed from, while overlapping with, the ‘public’ androcentric tradition. Even in a patrilineal system, women can be as interested in genealogy as men—sometimes more interested. This is true of relationships through males as well as through females, but women may be more likely to preserve knowledge of relationships through females that tend to become obscured in public contexts by patrilineal systems of naming and 37

Lucian, Diss. c. Hesiodo 1; Servius on Aeneid 7. 268; Dio Chrysostom [¼ Dio Prus.] 2. 13. Cf. also the comment of Maximus of Tyre that Hesiod wrote about ‘the loves of women’, gunaiko¯n ero¯tas. These references are collected, but not translated, in the opening section of Merkelbach & West 1967 (above, n. 22), 1–3. 38 Exceptions to the trend I have noted in modern scholarship are Mary R. Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth (London, 1986), 34–7, who notes that ‘Hesiod’s catalogue attributes to women a significant role in this formal history’, and Rutherford, ‘Formulas’, 89, who acknowledges ‘the primary position given to female characters’. 39 Fowler, ‘Genealogical Thinking’, 5–6.


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inheritance. Since I began researching my own father’s family, about which he himself knew very little, the major breakthroughs have come through contacts with ‘lost’ female relatives, some of whom had been compiling information for years.40 Even those who were not interested in genealogy per se recalled oral traditions—often transmitted from mother to daughter—that gave substance to (and sometimes qualified) the bare facts of public record, which focused on the males of the family. Granted that ours is a radically different society from that of archaic Greece, there are enough continuities in women’s domestic roles to make the comparison plausible. As primary caregivers for children and elders, women perforce observe the relationships that are at the core of family life; they may be the repositories of family secrets. Greek New Comedy and its Roman adaptations insist on women’s superior knowledge of intimate matters, including most notoriously the paternity of children.41 Although women in patriarchal cultures tend to adopt prevailing attitudes about the superior importance of men, they may also ‘think back through their mothers’.42 There is thus nothing implausible in postulating a women’s genealogical tradition in which female ancestors were at least as important as the males. Of course, knowledge does not necessarily issue in poetry: women may have known these things without transposing them into verse. Yet our lack of evidence for such poetry does not prove that it never existed. A tantalizing phrase in Plato’s Lysis refers to ‘the sorts of things old women sing’ in describing a musty family tradition about the descent of an ancestor from Zeus and the daughter of the deme’s founder.43 Even if transmitted informally,

40

Some of these contacts were originally lost because my father’s mother and grandmother died young; he was raised by his father and paternal grandfather. 41 The relevance of New Comedy to my argument was suggested by Ariana Traill (personal communication). Some examples include the parentage of the babies in Menander’s Samia and Terence’s Hecyra, and that of the twins Glykera and Moschion in Menander’s Perikeiromene¯. 42 Virginia Woolf’s phrase in A Room of One’s Own. 43 haper hai graiai aidousi, Lysis 205d, cited as evidence of women’s role in the transmission of oral traditions by Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989), 109.

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by word of mouth, women’s genealogical traditions may have found their way into men’s genealogies or influenced the forms they took. Likewise, just as women in our society are the primary authors and readers of novels with female protagonists (including, e.g., romance novels), women in traditional societies have tended to tell each other folk and fairy tales in which the protagonists are women. It thus makes sense to assume that there were women’s versions of the stories we find in the Catalogue, and that their existence was known to the men who compiled the work in the version we have. The dismissive tone of Plato’s speakers when mentioning ‘old wives’ tales’ helps to account for the loss of such materials from the written record, as well as for modern scholars’ lack of interest in recovering their traces. Women as well as men who have been trained in a masculinist, text-based tradition may be oblivious of the very possibility that such traditions existed. Are we then reduced to speculation in our search for women’s genres outside the lyric tradition? Or is there some textual evidence—the kind that classicists have been taught to seek—to support their existence? I believe there is, in the form of the Odyssey passage I have already mentioned, in which Odysseus addresses an account of famous women to an audience that includes the Phaeacian queen Arete. In fact, the Odyssey passage in its narrative context can provide evidence both of women’s genealogical knowledge and of their interest in stories that highlight female characters. In a valuable attempt to trace the history of the Catalogue’s genre, Ian Rutherford has pointed out that the ‘catalogue of heroines’ in Odyssey 11, which on the surface is a list of unrelated women—those whom Odysseus happened to see in the Underworld—includes ‘some hidden genealogical connections’ (among the women, and between them and other characters in the Odyssey): ‘Tyro was mother of Neleus, and Chloris married Neleus and gave birth to Pero, who was wooed by Melampus; Tyro was also grandmother of Melampus, [and] although that relationship is not mentioned, it seems to provide a background to the story of Theoclymenus later in the Odyssey.’44 Tyro is described in the Odyssey 44 Rutherford, ‘Formulas’, 94. Tyro, Chloris, and Pero are female figures; Neleus and Theoclymenus are male.


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passage (11. 235–53) as actively seeking the love of the river Enipeus; the divine lover who comes to her is not Enipeus but the greater god Poseidon, who disguises himself as Enipeus, presumably to gratify the woman’s desire as well as his own. Several complete lines and parts of lines, admittedly formulaic, appeared in both the Odyssey passage and the Catalogue, which also described the encounter between Tyro and Poseidon.45 The Catalogue’s version of the story adds the interesting information that Tyro tried to dissuade her father, the impious Salmoneus, from creating artificial thunder and lightning in emulation of Zeus; presumably this is meant to explain why she was saved when Zeus struck Salmoneus with the real thing. Reared in the house of Cretheus, who was to become her human husband, she attracted the attention of Poseidon. The Odyssey thus alludes to the tradition represented by the Catalogue, and does so in a way that emphasizes both the female characters’ roles in the stories and the interest of female characters in hearing them told. Moreover, if we consider that Odysseus’ account of the ‘famous heroines’ in the Underworld is framed by the epic narrator’s account of the Phaeacians in Books 6 to 13, there is further evidence of a women’s perspective combining genealogical knowledge with praise of women. For the genealogy of Arete and her husband Alcinous, who is also her uncle, is given in full by Athena when she appears to Odysseus as a little girl to guide him to the palace (7. 54–68). If this genealogy is compared to the Underworld account, there is a striking parallel between the stories of Tyro—the most fully represented of the ‘heroines’—and of Periboea, who was the grandmother of Arete, the queen to whom Odysseus is addressing his tale. Like Tyro’s father Salmoneus, Eurymedon, the great-grandfather of Arete and Alcinous, perished for ‘reckless’ behaviour while ruling the Giants, but his daughter Periboea, like Tyro, attracted the attention of Poseidon and bore Nausithous, who continued the line. When one of Nausithous’s sons died prematurely, leaving a single daughter—Arete—the other son, Alcinous, married her. Athena adds: ŒÆ Ø Ø ‰ h Ø Kd Łd ÆØ ¼ºº, ‹ ÆØ ~ı ª ªıÆ~ØŒ Iæ Ø ~NŒ ı Ø: 45

Frs. 30–2, Merkelbach and West.

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S Œ æd Œ~æØ Æ ŒÆd Ø Œ ºø Æø Œ ÆP~ı `ºŒØØ ŒÆd ºÆ~ ø, ¥ ÞÆ Łe S N æø ØÆÆØ ŁØ Ø, ‹ fi Ia ¼ ı: P b ªæ Ø ı ª ŒÆd ÆPc ÆØ K Łº~ı ~ƒ ~P æfi Ø ŒÆd Iæ Ø ŒÆ ºØ: Y Œ Ø Œ ª ºÆ æfi Kd Łı ~ fi ø, Kºøæ Ø ØÆ ºı NØ ŒÆd ƒŒ ŁÆØ ~N Œ K łæ ŒÆd c K ÆæÆ ªÆ~ØÆ: He [Alcinous] honours her [Arete] as no other woman on earth is honoured Of all those who now keep house for their husbands. Thus has she been honoured at heart and is so still By her own children and by Alcinous himself And by the people, who look upon her as a god And greet her with words when she walks through the town. For she has no lack of good sense And for those of whom she thinks well she settles disputes, even for men. If she should think well of you in her heart There is hope that you will see your friends and arrive At your high-roofed home and your fatherland. (7. 67–77)46

It seems significant to me that this statement is presented as the peroration to a woman’s genealogy and is put into the mouth not only of a female god, but of one who has disguised herself as a human girl. Moreover, in this guise Athena confirms the advice of Nausicaa that Odysseus approach the queen rather than the king; there is agreement among the female characters that Arete is the ‘power behind the throne’. Although Alcinous does in fact approve Arete’s proposal to increase Odysseus’ guest-gifts, an old courtier is portrayed as calling upon Alcinous to ratify it ‘in word and deed’ (11. 344–6). There is thus apparently a difference of opinion between women and men about whose decision counts, but the Odyssey foregrounds the opinion of the women. These parallels and dovetailings between the Odyssey passage and the Catalogue suggest to me that the traditional materials of which the Catalogue is composed—both the stories of famous women and the genealogies highlighting their role in the continuation of heroic lines—might be at home in a women’s tradition. The consensus among the Phaeacian women that Arete has power ‘even 46

Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.


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among men’, combined with the recital of her genealogy and the implication that she is pleased by an account of famous heroines linked by ties of blood, one of whose stories echoes that of her own grandmother: all of this conjures up a context in which the materials of the Catalogue are known to and valued by aristocratic women. Although this evidence from the Odyssey is indirect, it is ‘textual’ enough to satisfy my expectations as a well-trained classicist. At the same time, I cannot overlook the equally textual—albeit fragmentary—evidence of masculine focalization in the Catalogue. Even if we acknowledge that the poem is about ‘the excellences of women’, female voices are largely absent from its narratives. Ian Rutherford has found that in the surviving fragments no human female is given direct speech (Athena may be the speaker of one passage, fr. 43a, 41–3.)47 This fact alone is not conclusive, since direct speech by characters is rare in the work; the Catalogue was cited by one ancient grammarian (who would have had access to the entire text) as an example of a narrative told entirely in the third person.48 Third-person narrative need not be neutral: it may include ‘embedded’ focalization by characters. Yet while some of the characters represented in this way in the Catalogue are female, more are male. In the story of Atalanta’s race, for example, which contains two of the five direct speeches identified by Rutherford (an announcement by Atalanta’s father Schoineus of the terms of the marriage contest and an appeal by the winner Hippomenes to Atalanta during the race49), there are several indications of embedded focalization by males. In the lines leading up to the race, ‘amazement seized all those looking’ (75, 8); some if not all of ‘those looking’ are male, since the participle is masculine, and the implied object of their gaze is Atalanta. If West’s hypothetical reconstruction of lines 7–10 is basically correct, they are gazing at the tunic covering her breasts as 47

‘Of all the characters that speak, none is a woman,’ Rutherford, ‘Formulas’, 88. 48 Diomedes (4th or 5th c. ce), in Keil (ed.), Grammatici Latini, i. 482, included in the Testimonia to Merkelbach and West 1967 and cited by Rutherford, ‘Formulas’, 87. 49 Schoineus speaks in fr. 75, 13–25 (the length of the speech is unclear, since both its beginning and its end are lost) and Hippomenes in fr. 76, 9–10 (the speech may have continued beyond this point).

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the wind stirs it. The fragments of the race include one allusion to Atalanta’s motives: ‘She for her part was running in rejection of the gifts of [golden Aphrodite]’ (76, 5–6); yet this is immediately balanced and capped by an evocation of Hippomenes’ desperate situation: ‘but his race was for his life’ (76, 7). The end of the race, as far as we have it, is described from Hippomenes’ point of view: ‘He threw the third [apple] to the ground, j And with it he escaped death and [black] fate; j he stood catching his breath and . . . ’ (n b e æ wŒ ½A ~ Æ j f HØ K ıª ŁÆ ŒÆd _ Œ\½æÆ ºÆØÆ, j I ø ŒÆd [ . . . , 76, 21–3). Here the frag_ ment breaks off, so we do not know whether Atalanta’s reaction to the outcome was explored. A more frustrating silence in what remains of the work concerns the reaction of Helen to her father’s choice of Menelaus as her husband. This silence is especially egregious because the courtship of Helen, drawn out at great length, immediately preceded the conclusion of the Catalogue and was evidently the culminating instance of courtship in the work. What is more, the failure of Helen’s marriage precipitated the Trojan War, which seems to have been portrayed in this conclusion as the catastrophe that brought about the end of the age of heroes. Here masculine focalization in the courtship narrative seems to dovetail with the frame of the work as a whole. The dominant perspective in what remains of the closing lines is that of Zeus, and his plan to decimate the human race is described in lines that evoke the opening of the Iliad: ‘the bronze was to hurl to Hades many heads/ of heroes who were to fall in the struggle’ (. . . ººa Ø Œ Æºa Ie ÆºŒe Nł[Ø] j _ _ ø æ!ø K œBØ ø, Cat. 204, 118–19); compare I]Ð æ~ __ __ the wrath of Achilles, which ‘hurled to Hades many strong souls j of heroes’, Iliad 1. 3–4. Perhaps it is not merely the hazards of time but the text itself that has elided Helen’s perspective, since the focalization in the substantial surviving fragments of her courtship narrative is altogether masculine. Suitor after suitor is described as ‘wanting greatly to be the husband of Argive Helen’,50 and calcu50

One of two equivalent formulas with this meaning, ºÆ XŁº j `æª ¯º Ø

ÆØ or ƒ æø " ¯º Ø

ÆØ MıŒ Ø, appears in frs. 199, 200, and 204 (twice in the latter: lines 42–3, 54–5).


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lating his chances of winning her based on his wealth (since Tyndareus, Helen’s foster father,51 gives her to the man who offers the most gifts, pleista poro¯n, fr. 204, 87). The clever Odysseus is described as making a token bid but sending no gifts, since he foresees that no one will match Menelaus in wealth (fr. 198). Tyndareus demands an oath of the suitors, to the effect that all of them together will punish the man who dares take Helen by force (bie¯, fr. 204, 82). As for Helen herself, her beauty, like that of Atalanta, is emphasized at the beginning of the passage (fr. 196, 5–6), and at the end it is noted that she bore a daughter, Hermione, ‘unlooked for’ (or ‘unhoped for’, fr. 204, 94–5)—perhaps because a male heir was expected? But nothing is said of Helen’s attitude toward the marriage.52 The narrative then shifts suddenly to the divine plane, where Zeus is creating dissension among the gods by proposing to decimate the human race. The final fragmentary lines of the poem as we have it seem to describe a catastrophic change in the human condition, accompanied by changes in the weather and the mysterious appearance of a ‘dread serpent’ (deinos ophis, 204, 136). The point seems to be that the end of an era has come, precipitated by the Trojan War. That Helen was blamed to some extent for leaving Menelaus can be seen from fragment 176, 7, which Merkelbach and West place earlier in the Catalogue: ‘thus Helen disgraced the bed of fairhaired Menelaus’. But no surviving passage gives an account of her feelings for either of her two husbands. In the Catalogue fragments themselves, then, we seem faced with the same elision of women’s perspectives that characterized the scholarship on the poem. Does this negate my identification of elements in the poem that would also be at home in a women’s tradition? I think not. I began by describing a situation that can be seen as normative for living oral traditions, in which an array of men’s and women’s genres present the same mythic material in diverse ways. If we postulate such a situation for archaic Greece, we can identify the Catalogue as representing the ‘men’s tradition’ 51

Zeus is her actual father. Another courtship sequence in the Catalogue in which the focalization is strikingly masculine is that of Alcmena, fr. 195; in this case the passage is preserved in its entirety. 52

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without denying that a parallel ‘women’s tradition’ existed. What I am arguing is that even as we acknowledge its masculine framing and focalization, we keep sight of the alternative: a set of versions in different generic forms, including informal word-of-mouth transmission, that would have given greater space to female focalization and the experiences of women. There is a further reason, intrinsic to the subject of the Catalogue, for insisting that women’s versions of this material once existed. For a genealogy, however it may elide the female perspective, is a record of sexual unions between females and males. Gender segregation may be the cultural norm, but if the culture is to reproduce itself men and women must be brought together. Thus the Catalogue features stories of courtship: narratives that rehearse the obstacles to union and the ways in which they may be overcome. As I have shown, the poem as we have it presents at least some of these stories from the male perspective; but there are traces of female focalization in the Atalanta story and in some others.53 In what remains of this essay I will focus on such traces, which acknowledge the existence of women’s desires and refusals, as a possible reflection of women’s versions. The period of courtship and marriage is the stage in a woman’s life at which she is asked most pointedly to assent to the patriarchal order. If her marriage is arranged, she must accept her father’s authority to arrange it; at the same time, in most gender systems, she must accept her husband’s authority over her for the rest of her life. This helps to account for the centrality of courtship in many women’s genres, including European fairy tales and the Telugu women’s songs about Sita and Rama (several of which focus on Sita’s wedding and that of her sister-in-law Santa). The overt scenario is that the father, solicited by prospective grooms, chooses a husband for his daughter, while the daughter has nothing to do but 53

I do not mean to suggest that all focalization is either masculine or feminine or that gendered focalization necessarily reflects the sex of the author. Clearly, male poets are capable of using female characters as focalizers. But the choice of focalizers is often an indication of the intended audience of a work; and in the parallel examples I have cited from living oral traditions, female focalization is often correlated with female composition and performance.


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acquiesce. Machinery is set in motion—the father and the prospective husband, or his father, reach a contractual agreement; gifts and promises are publicly given. Yet if the bride is essentially unwilling, her unhappiness can undermine the success of the marriage—or even, in unusual cases, derail it altogether.54 In such a system, acknowledgment of the woman’s desires may be more at home in a women’s tradition; but a realistic male perspective must also include the possibility of female resistance. Thus it makes sense for a men’s tradition to include narratives like that of Atalanta in which the woman’s initial reluctance is overcome. It is true that in many of the courtship accounts in the Catalogue no attention is paid to the woman’s desires: she is given in marriage by her father or chosen by a god who desires her beauty. Yet some other accounts clearly include either a statement about the woman’s attitude toward the match or actions of the woman that imply a distinct attitude. In fact, the opening lines of the poem, which ask the Muses to sing of ‘the tribe of women’, make the women subjects of active verbs: they ‘loosened their belts . . . mixing in love with gods’ ( æÆ Iºº Æ ½. . . j Ø ª ÆØ Ł} [Ø, fr. 1, 4–5).55 _ __ This complements Servius’ description of the poem as portraying women ‘desiring marriage with strong men’ and the comment of Maximus of Tyre that Hesiod described ‘the loves of women’ (gunaiko¯n ero¯tas).56 The focus then seems to shift to the male gods who sought union with these women, who are enumerated in the fragmentary lines that follow. It certainly seems paradoxical that accounts of women’s unions with gods, in which the women ought to have the least power of resistance, should include the 54

A fascinating modern example is given in Lila Abu-Lughod’s study of gender relations and poetry among the Bedouin, Veiled Sentiments (above, n. 15), 101–2. A young Bedouin woman made her unhappiness at her first marriage so evident—first by screaming, then by hiding from the groom and running away—that it was decided she was ‘possessed’ and could be granted a divorce. 55 For the active translation of allusanto here, see the Supplement to LSJ, s.v. analuo¯. 56 See above, n. 37. That the genitive in Maximus is subjective rather than objective, i.e., that it is the women who feel the desire, is clear from the context.

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clearest acknowledgments of their desires. To the men who incorporated these stories into heroic genealogies, the point was evidently to claim divine origin for their ancestors; yet from a woman’s perspective, such a union might be a wish-fulfilment fantasy, in which a highly attractive and powerful suitor is overcome with passion for a woman of inferior status but of undeniable beauty and ‘excellence’. There is more evidence of such a perspective in fragment 31, as reconstructed with the help of Odyssey 11, whose words it partly matches. This fragment describes how Tyro was seduced by Poseidon in the shape of the river Enipeus, with whom she was in love. The much fuller Odyssey version of the episode is striking for its portrayal of female desire: there is no question that Tyro feels eros for the river (potamou e¯rassat’, 11. 238), whose company she seeks (po¯lesketo, 240). The fact that Poseidon tricks her, and in fact puts her to sleep during the sexual act, is problematic, and I do not mean to suggest that such a fantasy would be an empowering one for a woman to entertain; but it is not necessarily just a male fantasy. The god who comes to Tyro is more powerful than the one she desired; he takes the trouble to assume a shape that is pleasing to her, and the detail of putting her to sleep at least means that she suffers no pain; perhaps it even implies that the encounter is like a pleasant dream.57 Another of the ‘heroines’ seen by Odysseus in the Underworld, Iphimedia, was also loved by Poseidon; although no description of their encounter survives in the Odyssey or the Catalogue fragments, the Library of Apollodorus (which used the Catalogue as a source) describes her as acting on her desires still more overtly than Tyro did: ‘going continually to the sea’s edge she scooped water into her genitals with her hands.’58 In this version, a god apparently does 57

For a fuller analysis of this scene, see Lillian E. Doherty, ‘Tyro in Odyssey 11: Closed and Open Readings’, Helios, 20 (1993), 3–15. The account of Alcmena’s sexual encounter with Zeus (fr. 195), which resulted in the birth of Herakles, describes a divine lover taking the place of a mortal husband; once again the god is disguised, this time as the husband (the Catalogue does not say so directly, but assumes audience knowledge of the story). 58 Apollodorus 1. 7. 4, trans. Michael Simpson, in Gods and Heroes of the Greeks: The Library of Apollodorus (Amherst, Mass., 1976), 33.


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come in answer to a woman’s prayers. Both the Odyssey and the Library describe her as the wife of Aloeus (a mortal) before describing the tryst with Poseidon, and her sons are known as the Aloeadae. So in this instance the fantasy may be about extramarital rather than premarital sex. A more subtle variation on the theme of the woman and the divine lover may be found in the story of Demodice, daughter of Agenor. In fragment 22, Demodice refuses all of her many suitors despite their offers of splendid gifts. But in the Library Demodice is described as the mother of four sons by the god Ares, and one of these, Thestius, is the father of Leda, who is named with her children and grandchildren in fragment 23 of the Catalogue.59 What is the missing link between these two fragments, assuming they originally appeared in this order? Evidently Demodice, who refused all her human suitors, attracted a divine suitor. Given the admiration expressed in the poem’s opening lines for ‘the women . . . who were the finest in those times . . . and unfastened their waistbands . . . in union with gods,’60 it is unlikely that Demodice’s union with Poseidon was seen as in any sense a punishment for her refusal to marry; it might even have been seen as a reward.61 To be sure, the gods do not marry mortals, so their unions with such women in myth tend to be brief. In some versions these unions have tragic consequences for the women: a case in point is that of Creusa as described in the Ion of Euripides (NB a tragic drama from a much later era). The Catalogue does not seem to have avoided tragic stories altogether, since it included, for example, Apollo’s discovery of the infidelity of his lover Coronis,62 and a brief mention of the murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes.63 But rarely in 59

Leda’s name appears in full (23a, 5 and 8); so do those of her grandchildren Electra, Iphimede, and Timandra (lines 16–17, 31). Clytemnestra and Orestes are clearly referred to, although their names are truncated (27–30). 60 The translation is that of M. L. West in Hesiodic Catalogue (above, n. 21), 2. 61 Cf. Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth (above, n. 38), 34: ‘[Demodice] held out, apparently, for a god instead [of a human suitor]’. 62 Fr. 60, from the scholia to Pindar’s third Pythian ode. 63 Fr. 23a, 30. Deianira is also described as ‘doing a fearful deed’ in sending the poisoned shirt to Herakles, fr. 25, 20–4, but, as in later versions, there is no suggestion that her intent was to kill him.

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the extant fragments do we find overt expressions of blame for a woman’s sexual behaviour, or accounts of a woman’s punishment for such behaviour.64 (One woman whose father intended that she be punished for a premarital seduction or rape—the language is ambiguous—actually became the wife of the man designated to kill her.65) This absence of blame and punishment may have been characteristic of the genre: in the context of a genealogy, sexual unions cannot be primarily tragic because they are seen in retrospect as essential to the family’s continuation. And since the heroines commemorated in the Catalogue are foremothers of men as well as of women, the work’s positive ‘spin’ need not be attributed to women. Yet in a culture that included a misogynistic strand from very early on,66 such absence of blame is remarkable. A tantalizing but highly fragmentary example of a courtship story in the Catalogue that seems to make room for a woman’s initiative is that of Mestra,67 daughter of Aethon (also known as Erysichthon), in fragment 43a. It is possible to reconstruct the story only in part, with the help of other extant versions which may have differed from it in crucial details.68 A Hellenistic paraphrase of the myth says that Mestra was a pharmakis, a sorceress, capable of 64

The most notable exception to this is the statement that all three daughters of Tyndareus abandoned their husbands (fr. 176); but the quotation is introduced in its source, a scholion to Euripides’ Orestes, by the claim that this behaviour was imposed by Aphrodite as punishment for the impiety of Tyndareus. Alcyone is punished, equally with her husband Ceyx, for impiety; infatuated, they address one another as ‘Zeus’ and ‘Hera’ and are transformed into birds (fr. 10d, Merkelbach and West 1990, an anonymous summary from a papyrus). Although they are described as ‘enamoured of one another’ (al]le¯lo¯n erasthentes), this is not explicitly represented as the cause of their impiety. 65 Fr. 12, another paraphrase from the Library. 66 A case in point is the tirade attributed to Agamemnon’s ghost at Odyssey 11. 427–34, shortly after the catalogue of famous women discussed above. 67 Appropriately, her name means ‘courted’ (as does the final element in some other heroines’ names, e.g., Klytaimestra, ‘famously courted’). 68 e.g. Noel Robertson, ‘The Ritual Background of the Erysichthon Story’, American Journal of Philology, 105 (1984), 369–408, notes that there is no mention in the Catalogue version of Aithon/Erysichthon’s crime against Demeter.


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transforming herself into a variety of animals; her father Aethon, afflicted with insatiable hunger for his impiety to Demeter, sold her repeatedly in animal form to pay for food and she escaped from her owners to return to her father.69 A later account confirms that Hesiod in the Ehoiai ‘relates that [Mestra] was sold to feed Aethon’;70 but the extant fragments suggest that she was ‘sold’ not as an animal but as a bride, for the sake of the gifts—largely in the form of cattle and goats—that her suitors gave her father (fr. 43a, 20–4). In lines 31–2, Mestra may be described as using her shape-shifting ability to escape from her husband and return to her father’s (and mother’s) house.71 A dispute then arises between Aethon and Sisyphus, a famously clever figure who has apparently arranged a marriage between Mestra and his son Glaucus; a female god (probably Athena, given later references to Athens) is called in to adjudicate the dispute, since ‘no mortal could judge it’. In the next fully legible lines, ‘although he [presumably Sisyphus] surpassed other men in clever contrivances, j he had no knowledge of Zeus’ intent, j that the Olympian gods would not give Glaucus offspring for his sake j from Mestra and seed to leave after [him] among men’ (I]æ~ ø b æh Œ Æ æÆ[Æ , j I]ºº

h ø XØØ ˘e ; ÆNªØØ, j ‰ h ƒ ~Ø ˆºÆŒøØ ª ˇPæÆø j KŒ & æ ŒÆd æ Æ IŁæ!Ø Ø ºØ [ŁÆØ, fr. 43a, 51–4). Instead, Poseidon abducts Mestra, ‘taking her far from her father over the wine-dark sea, j . . . although she was very clever’ (kaiper poluidrin eousan, ibid. 55–7). She bears at least one son to Poseidon on the island of Cos before returning to her 69

The source is a scholion to the Hellenistic poet Lycophron, cited as fr. 43b, Merkelbach and West 1967. 70 Philodemus Peri Eusebeias (fr. 43c, Merkelbach and West). 71 The passage is very fragmentary; the words that are clearly legible say, ‘but she, being freed . . . darting away, a/the woman at once . . . j . . . in the halls; [there] came after [her] . . . ’ (m b ºıŁ[}] Æ . . . j . . . IÆÆ Æ, ªıc ¼Ææ . . . j . . . K]d ªæØ Ø_ BºŁ[ . . . , fr. 43a, 31–3); in a plausible emend_ ation proposed by Lobel, she ‘[became] a woman [once again] inthe halls [of her father]’, ªıc ¼Ææ Æ[PØ ª j Ææe K]d ªæØ Ø, 32–3. If it was Sisyphus or his son who ‘came after’ her, the phrase para me¯tri, ‘beside [her] mother’, in line 34 may describe where he found her; in any case, it seems to add the point that at home, she would have spent her time ‘beside her mother’ in the women’s quarters.

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‘fatherland’; further mention is made at this point of her ‘ill-fated father, whom she cared for’ (ibid. 69). As in the stories of Atalanta and Demodice, although the Catalogue version is focalized by the male characters there are hints of Mestra’s attitude and implicit praise of her extraordinary abilities. To be sure, except for the phrase ‘beside her mother’, there is no mention of her relationships to other women. She uses her skill entirely in the service of her father; when she escapes, she returns to his ‘halls’, and even when abducted to a distant island by Poseidon, she manages to return. Surely this tenacity in a famously clever woman bespeaks a will to return. The story resembles that of Demodice in providing a divine ‘suitor’ when the bride has rejected all mortal ones; but Mestra seems to resist Poseidon as well (he is said to ‘tame’ her, edamasse, 55), out of loyalty to her father. In some versions of the myth, her shape-shifting ability was the gift of Poseidon,73 but the internal chronology of the Catalogue version does not seem to allow for this. In the context of a genealogical work that acknowledges the obstacles to courtship, Mestra’s story, told at length, raises the possibility that a daughter’s loyalty to her father may prevent her contracting a successful marriage. By contrast with Tyro and Periboea, who survive the destruction visited on hubristic fathers because of their own piety, Mestra makes extraordinary efforts to preserve her father’s life when he is already suffering divine punishment. Only a god can detach her from this purpose, and he is said to use force, abducting her ‘although she was very clever’. In the logic of the Catalogue, with its emphasis on the ‘excellences of women’, the abduction should probably be seen as a compliment to Mestra, 72 It is unclear whether the passage from lines 70 to 82 continues the story of Mestra or describes a different woman (see apparatus to these lines in Merkelbach and West 1967). The woman in this passage is also described as highly intelligent (‘her mind was equal to those of the goddesses’, noeske gar isa thee¯si, 72); she also sleeps with Poseidon and gives birth to the hero Bellerophon; in a scholion to the Iliad Mestra is the mother of Bellerophon. Robertson, ‘Ritual Background’ (above, n. 68), 383 and his n. 31, argues that the woman described in 70–82 is not Mestra. 73 e.g. Philodemus, Peri Eusebeias, quoted in fr. 43c, Merkelbach and West 1967.


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the god’s recognition not of mere physical beauty (although that too is described, 43a, 4 and 19) but of remarkable intelligence and loyalty. It is easy to see the potential for a women’s version of this story in which Mestra’s perspective would be given full play, and in which the pitting of her wits against those of Sisyphus might emerge as a mainspring of the plot. Perhaps rather than deplore the fragmentary condition of the Catalogue, we should be thankful that its incompleteness forces us to think in terms of potentially divergent traditions and versions. Rather than impose upon it the ‘presupposition of wholeness’,74 which has informed traditional literary scholarship, we should use its incompleteness as a reminder that what is missing from the versions we have may be as significant as what is there. I am not urging that we simply discard traditional methods of reading; in adducing textual evidence from the Odyssey for the existence of a women’s tradition that paralleled the Catalogue, I am myself invoking such methods. In fact, I am asking that the text’s own announcement of its subject matter, and its foregrounding of women throughout the genealogies, be taken more seriously than hitherto. But by relying too exclusively on texts, ancient and modern, in which male focalization predominates, we risk falling into the trap of assuming that a world could ever exist in which women were merely the objects of male discourse rather than participants in a shared discourse. This trap can be avoided by looking outside the text, to living oral traditions that remind us of the presence of women’s stories. 74

Frey, Interruptions (above, n. 26), 32.


13

Reclaiming the Muse

P e nn y Murray Reading through the newspaper one morning last year my eye was caught by a rather beautiful photograph of a painting by BurneJones, with the caption, ‘ARTIST’S MUSE: Victorian masterpiece expected to fetch £800,000’. The painting, being previewed at Sotheby’s before sale, was described as being ‘inspired by his lover, Maria Zambaco’, but its title, Cumaean Sibyl, was not mentioned. What was felt to be important about this ‘masterpiece’ was its depiction of the artist’s muse, a theme guaranteed to appeal to the sensibilities of the modern reader. This image of the Muse as loved object who inspires the male artist, whilst she herself remains silent, is deeply engrained in contemporary culture, despite the best efforts of feminist critics to expose the implications of such imagery: man creates, woman inspires; man is the maker, woman the vehicle of male fantasy, an object created by the male imagination, incapable of any kind of agency herself. In short, this image of the Muse denies woman’s active participation in artistic creation and silences female creativity.1 The modern paradigm is perhaps most memorably 1

See e.g. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven 1979); G. Greer, Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London, 1995); S. Gubar, ‘The Blank Page and Female

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expressed in the writings of Robert Graves, who developed an elaborate mythology surrounding the White Goddess, an idealized, all-powerful female figure, whom he identified with the Muse, the quintessential source of poetry. ‘The function of poetry’, he declared, ‘is religious invocation of the Muse’, which he explained thus: The true poet must always be original . . . he must address the Muse and tell her the truth about himself and her in his own passionate and peculiar words. The Muse is a deity, but she is also a woman, and if her celebrant makes love to her with the second-hand phrases and ingenious verbal tricks that he uses to flatter her son Apollo she rejects him more decisively even than she rejects the tongue-tied or cowardly bungler. Not that the Muse is ever completely satisfied. Laura Riding has summed her up in three memorable lines: Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift: It is so nearly what would please me I cannot but perfect it. A poet cannot continue to be a poet if he feels that he has made a permanent conquest of the Muse, that she is always his for the asking. (The White Goddess, 442)

The implications of this passage are spelt out more clearly a little later on: The reason why so remarkably few young poets continue nowadays to publish poetry after their twenties is not necessarily. . . the decay of patronage and the impossibility of earning a decent living by the profession of poetry. . . The reason is that something dies in the poet. Perhaps he has compromised his poetic integrity by valuing some range of experience . . . above the poetic. But perhaps also he has lost his sense of the White Goddess: the woman whom he took to be a Muse, or who was a Muse,

Creativity’, in E. Abel (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference (Brighton, 1982); M. Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte¨, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, 1980); R. Parker and G. Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London, 1981); A. Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–78 (New York, 1979); M. Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London, 1985), esp. 199–209, 239, 224 ff.

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turns into a domestic woman and would have him to turn similarly into a domesticated man. Loyalty prevents him from parting company with her, especially if she is the mother of his children and is proud to be reckoned a good housewife; and as the Muse fades out, so does the poet . . . The White Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual ‘other woman’, and her part is difficult indeed for a woman of sensibility to play for more than a few years, because the temptation to commit suicide in simple domesticity lurks in every maenad’s and muse’s heart’ (ibid. 447).2

Graves’s vision of the Muse can be seen as the culmination of a long tradition of the objectification of the female which stretches back to classical antiquity. And, not surprisingly, the gendering of creativity implied by the imagery of artistic inspiration derived from the Greeks is a subject of lively debate amongst classical scholars. A recent volume edited by Efie Spentzou and Don Fowler, Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature (Oxford, 2002) explores this theme at length, and I should like to quote from Alison Sharrock’s article in that volume, which succinctly captures some of the themes at the centre of the book. Talking of Ovid’s invocation of the Muse, she observes amongst other things that invocation ‘enacts the fetishising and objectification of ‘‘poetry’’ as ‘‘woman’’ (goddess and whore) which is subliminal in so much of the discourse of poetics’ (p. 208). Speaking of the Muse she says: her relationship with the poet is sometimes overtly, more often covertly, shot through with erotic undertones. She includes hints of the ‘goddess courting a mortal man’ . . . and also elements of the passive desired object . . . Even when not eroticized, the relationship between poet and ‘Muse’ is a gendered one. Poets are practically all men, and the ‘poet’s voice’ is a male voice: Muses are all women. In this regard, the ancient and modern practice of calling Sappho ‘the tenth Muse’ should be deeply troubling . . . because it has the effect, albeit subliminal, of crossing out or undermining the active creative function of woman poets. It is only a small step from calling a woman poet ‘a Muse’ to constructing her as ‘poetry’ rather than ‘poet’, as the page who ‘is a poem rather than being someone who writes a poem’.

2 For discussion and critique of Graves’s views see e.g. L. Feder, Ancient Myths in Modern Poetry (Princeton, 1971), 358–64.

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All this is very true of Ovid’s use of the Muse figure and indeed of many other invocations and evocations of the Muse in classical authors, especially the Roman poets, discussed by the contributors to Cultivating the Muse. But there is an alternative story to tell. For the antique Muse is a far more ambivalent and multi-layered figure than the ubiquitous modern paradigm of the Muse as mistress would suggest. What I aim to do in this essay is to explore some of the more positive implications of the Muses’ gender in the ancient sources and to highlight some moments in the history of reception when Muse imagery has been used as a means of empowering women rather than oppressing them. Germaine Greer discusses some of these issues in the opening chapter of her book on women poets, Slip-shod Sibyls, which includes a critique of the Gravesian interpretation of the function of the Muses which I have just sketched out. One point which she emphasizes is the power of the Muses in classical mythology, which Graves himself documents in his mythical handbook, The Greek Myths. I quote Greer: The Muses collected the limbs of dismembered Orpheus and buried them at the foot of Mount Olympus. The Muses sang more sweetly than the Sirens, whose wing-feathers were plundered to make them crowns, at the weddings of Cadmus and Hermione, Peleus and Thetis, and the funeral of Achilles. The Muses taught Aristaeus the arts of healing and prophecy and the Sphinx the riddle which Oedipus eventually answered. The Muses stabled Pegasus, who made the spring of Hippocrene for them by striking the earth with his hoof. As teachers, performers and critics the Muses were experts. In them doing and being would appear to be fused; though they may be descendents of the White Goddess, they traffic, not in ‘dark wisdom’, but in intelligence and expertise. The classic concept of the muse enables the female poet; the twentieth century distortion of the classic scheme silences her. (Slip-shod Sibyls, 4–5; my italics)

Greer rightly argues that one of the nails in the coffin (or, as she puts it, a significant stage in the ‘castration of the muse’) is the moment when the grand and distant divinity enthroned on Parnassus dwindled into the poet’s love object—as soon as the Muse is identified with an embodied woman she loses her power. Greer goes on to emphasize that ‘poetry is, of course, a matter of intellect; though the matter may be provided by the unconscious, the form must be

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forged and apprehended by the conscious. Neither conscious nor unconscious is actually gendered’, but the image of the Muse personifies inspiration and the source of creativity as female. Why the creative function of the human mind should be gendered female is a question worth thinking about, and it is one to which I shall return. But for the moment I want to focus on the Muse as an emblem of female capability. I shall begin by looking at the society of eighteenth-century London, when the Muse was a favourite theme in art. This was a time when women were beginning to participate actively in the public sphere, and to contribute in significant ways to the transformation of the cultural life of the period, not least through their role as patrons, producers, and consumers of literature and the fine arts. The learned ladies of the Bluestocking circle, described by Hester Thrale as ‘the female Wits—a formidable Body, and called by those who ridicule them, the Blue Stocking club’, were dedicated to the participation of women in intellectual life, and played a vital part in the development of the culture of leisure and the Polite Arts which were considerd to be the hallmark of civilized society.3 Literary ladies and other eminent women were frequently honoured with the title of ‘Muse’ or ‘Sappho’, and female celebrities were depicted in the guise of Muses and other appropriate figures from classical mythology. Thus Sir Joshua Reynolds’s famous portrait Mrs. Siddons as Tragic Muse represents the celebrated actress as the Queen of Tragedy, in the guise of the Tragic Muse, which she herself had played on stage when she appeared as Melpomene at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1785. Angelica Kauffmann, well known as a painter throughout Europe and one of the founding members of the Royal Academy, seems to have had a particular fondness for Muse allegories, and even presents herself as her own Muse. Of course, 3

See J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture (Harper Collins, 1997), 76–80; R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Harmondsworth, 2000), 320–38; S. H. Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990); G. Kelly (ed.), Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 6 vols. (London, 1999); G. Kelly, ‘Bluestocking Feminism’, in Eger et al. (eds.), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere: 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2001), 163–80.

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representing a woman as a Muse is not in itself an unequivocal compliment, and in the hands of a male artist the theme could take on humorous, not to say risque´, connotations. Reynolds’s portrait Mr. Garrick, between the two Muses of Tragedy and Comedy (1762) turns the Muse figure into something of a joke, on a par with the mock heroic invocation of the Muse in literature, as we see the renowned tragic actor clearly showing his preference for the easy-going, coquettish figure of Comedy, and apologetically bidding goodbye to Tragedy.4 The mythologized renderings of living women also contrast strongly with the individualized portraits of their male counterparts, who are customarily depicted with all the regalia of public office, which serve as a means of indicating their actual status in society. Nevertheless Muse imagery could still be used in positive ways to celebrate feminine achievement, particularly when, as in the case of Mrs Siddons, the subject of the portrait was a practising artist in her own right. The art historian Gill Perry has explored the complex ways in which the conventional system of allegories and symbolic codes could operate in eighteenth-century female portraiture, and shown how the Muse could signify active forms of creativity in the sitter, as well as the traditionally passive role of inspiring the male poet or artist. For example, Angelica Kauffmann was able to use conventional allegorical figures—Poetry, Music, Painting, and so on—to dramatize her own ideas about the role of the female artist. One such painting is The Artist in the Character of Design (1782), in which she shows herself as the allegorical figure of Design with the Muse-like figure of Poetry by her side. In keeping with the academic theory of the time advocated by Sir Joshua Reynolds, she elevates her own art, design, to the same level as poetry, suggesting that it, too, is inspired, whilst at the same time conveying the idea that she is her own source of inspiration.5 Similarly the image of Sappho

4 See e.g. D. Shawe-Taylor, Genial Company: The Theme of Genius in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture (Nottingham 1987); C. Grant, ‘The Choice of Hercules: The Polite Arts and ‘Female Excellence’ in EighteenthCentury London’, in Eger et al. (eds.), Women, Writing, 88–9. 5 See G. Perry, ‘The British Sappho’, Oxford Art Journal, 18:1 (1995), 44–57.

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provided a quasi-mythological role model for contemporary constructions of femininity, and could be used as an analogue for the female creative artist. Kauffmann’s portrait Sappho (1775), which bears more than a passing resemblance to the artist herself, depicts the poet inspired by Cupid and actively engaged in the process of writing: the classical imagery enables Kauffman to say something about herself whilst also promoting the value of painting as an intellectual activity.The figure of Sappho, like that of the Muses, could be used in a number of different ways and interpreted on a variety of levels, but the popularity of these allegorical or mythological portraits at a time when women were actively involved in forms of creativity traditionally personified as female can hardly be accidental. This was the context in which Richard Samuel exhibited his painting The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (Fig. 13.1), at the Royal Academy in 1779, in which the Muses are unquestionably

Fig. 13.1. Richard Samuel,The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, 1779. (Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.)

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used as icons of feminine capability. The painting is the subject of an illuminating article by Elizabeth Eger, ‘Representing Culture: the Nine Living Muses of Great Britain’,6 who interprets it firmly within its eighteenth-century context. The nine women, draped in classical garb and depicted as living Muses, formed a veritable pantheon of modern intellectuals, and were involved in a wide range of activities. They were: Charlotte Lennox, poet and novelist; Elizabeth Carter, poet and translator of the Stoic Epictetus; Elizabeth Montagu, ‘queen of the Bluestockings’, a wealthy literary patron, and author of a famous essay, ‘The Genius and Writing of Shakespeare’; Catherine Macaulay, historian and educationist; Anna Barbauld, writer and critic; Hannah More, poet and playwright, and a close friend of the great tragic actor David Garrick, who nicknamed her ‘Nine’ because she was for him the embodiment of all nine Muses;7 Angelica Kauffmann; Elizabeth Griffith, actress, playwright, and novelist; and Elizabeth Linley, singer, and wife of the playwright and politician Richard Sheridan. The novelty of Samuel’s painting is that it depicts living women as Muses, whilst at the same time evoking the ethereal mythological figures of earlier famous portrayals of the Muses such as Raphael’s Parnassus (1511) and Poussin’s Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus (c.1630–2). But, as Eger points out, the eighteenth century saw the Muses as emblems of female power rather than as passive enablers of male artists: ‘as more and more women participated in the creation and cultivation of polite and professional culture, the means to represent their achievement and authority tended to be found in classical myths and histories of civilization’ (Eger, 109). Thus one Wetenhall Wilkes, in his ‘Essay on the Pleasure and Advantages of Female Literature’ (London, 1741) asked: ‘If it were intended by Nature, that Man should Monopolize all Learning to himself, why were the Muses Female, who . . . were the Mistresses of all the Sciences, and the Presidents of Music and Poetry?’ Again, James Barry in his Letter to the Dilittanti Society, first published in 1798, the year after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death says:

6 7

In Eger et al. (eds.), Women, Writing, 104–32. See A. Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford, 2003), 3, 50–1.

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If anyone should start a query, why the ancients, who reasoned so deeply, should, in their personifications of the sovereign wisdom, have chosen Minerva a female; why the Muses, who preside over the several subordinate modes of intelligence etc. are all females . . . such queries could have been well and pertinently answered by the eloquent, generous, amiable sensibility of the celebrated and long-to-be-lamented Mary Wollstonecraft . . . who would have found some matter for consolation, in discovering that the ancient nations of the world entertained a very different opinion of female capabilities, from those modern Mohometan, tyrannical, and absurd degrading notions of female nature at which her indignation was so justly raised.8

The significance of the femininity of the Muses seems to have been a much discussed topic in the eighteenth century, and Eger convincingly argues that Samuel’s painting ‘can be read as belonging to a tradition that celebrated the feminine icon of the Muse as a powerful example of what women might be and do’ (p. 111). She, like Greer, points out that ‘images of the muses or muse in the twentieth century have tended to be of voiceless sources of male creativity rather than vivid practitioners of the arts’—a view which has obscured some of the more positive portrayals of the Muse in the classical tradition. What the eighteenth century saw, and what we seem to have forgotten, is that the Muses were not simply passive inspirers of poetry or empty allegorical figures, but patronnesses of intellectual life, presiding over all the arts which constituted civilized life.9 So—what about this classical potrayal? First of all, we cannot talk about a universal classical portrayal. There are almost as many different Muses as there are authors, not to mention the changing iconography of the Muses and the changing contexts in which they

8

The Works of James Barry, ed. Edward Fryer, 2 vols. (London, 1809), ii. 594, quoted by L. Eger, ‘Representing Culture’, in Eger et al. (eds.), Women, Writing, 104. 9 See R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (London, 1953), 228–30; P. Murray, ‘Plato’s Muses’, in E. Spentzou and D. Fowler (eds.), Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration, 29–46, and ‘The Muses and their Arts’, in P. Murray and P. Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City (Oxford, 2004), 365–89.

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appear. The significance of the Muses’ gender will also, surely, be variable. One thing that should be remembered is that they are, or at any rate begin as, goddesses, so the complex question of belief has to be somewhere in the background of our interpretations. The invocation of the Muse is in one sense, of course, the history of a ‘fading metaphor’, as we have often been reminded; neverthless it needs to be emphasized that in Greek culture, at any rate, the Muses are invoked not just as ‘literary’ figures, but as deities who are worshipped in cult with efficacious powers. W. D. Furley has discussed the evidence we have for the religious hymns sung by the Greeks and suggests that the strategy behind the composition and performance of such hymns was to attract the attention of the divinity addressed in a favourable way: hymns are sung for the pleasure of the gods, and the Muses have an important role to play in that process. Thus a famous cult hymn which was actually performed at a festival of Apollo in Delphi, the Athenian Pythais festival in either 138 or 128 bce begins with an invocation to the Muses: ‘Listen, fair-armed daughters of loud-thundering Zeus who received thickly wooded Helikon as your lot, come here and sing of your brother Phoibos of the golden hair.’ Apollo, the subject of the hymn, is not invoked directly, but through the mediation of the Muses, in keeping, Furley notes, with Menander Rhetor’s advice to the hymnist to seek the Muses’ help in invoking Apollo, since one is uncertain how most effectively and politely to address him. The Muses provide a bridge between the human poet and the world of the gods. In this particular hymn the poet calls on the aid of the Muses as ‘beings qualified by divinity, expertise in singing, and kinship with Apollo’.11 Yes, they are subordinate—they are 10 See under Mousa/Mousai in LIMC vi. 657–81 and vii. 991–1059; P. Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Berkeley, 1995), 268 ff. and 327 ff.; P. Murray, ‘The Muses: Creativity Personified?’, in E. Stafford and J. Herrin (eds.), Personification in the Greek World (Aldershot, 2005), 147–59. 11 W. D. Furley, ‘Praise and Persuasion in Greek Hymns’, JHS 115 (1995), 29–46. See also J. Bremer, ‘Greek Hymns’, in H. S. Versnel (ed.), Faith, Hope and Worship (Leiden, 1981), 193–215; W. D. Furley and J. M. Bremer, Greek Hymns: Selected Cult Songs from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period, 2 vols. (Tu¨bingen, 2001).

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daughters of Zeus and inscribed within a patriarchal system, just as they are in Hesiod’s canonical description of their activities in the proem to the Theogony.12 But that is not to deny the Muses all agency; given the religious context in which they are invoked, it is difficult to see them as figments of the imagination or merely subject to the poet’s whim. A lot of work currently being done on the relationship between ‘real’ cult hymns and hymns sung, for example, by choruses in Attic drama, both tragedy and comedy, also makes it difficult to assume that references to the Muse in those genres operate solely on the level of metaphor.13 It would be a mistake, therefore, to regard the Muses as nothing more than passive fantasy figures, since whatever their status within the divine hierarchy, they remain powerful vis-a`-vis mortals simply by virtue of their divinity. Apropos the divine status of the Muses, I want to draw attention to some remarks of Nicole Loraux in her essay, ‘What is a Goddess?’14 ‘A goddess’, she says, ‘is not a woman—that is, when thinking about the goddesses we must always ask ourselves the question, ‘‘to what extent does the divine take precedence over the feminine in a goddess?’’ ’ And again, ‘The word thea is a feminine form, and in sculpture the thea was always represented as a female; yet there is no evidence that in a goddess the feminine attributes had greater importance than the divine . . . who can say 12

See e.g. M. Arthur, ‘The Dream of a World without Women: Poetics and the Circles of Order in the Theogony Prooemium’, Arethusa, 16 (1983), 97–116; A. Bergren, ‘Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought’, Arethusa, 16 (1983), 69–95; E. Stehle, Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1997), 199–207. 13 See e.g. A. Henrichs, ‘ ‘‘Why should I dance?’’ Choral Self-referentiality in Greek Tragedy’, Arion, 3.1 (1994/5), 56–111; C. Calame, ‘Performative Aspects of the Choral Voice in Greek Tragedy: Civic Indentity in Performance’, in S. Goldhill, and R. Osborne, (eds.), Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 1999), 125–53; C. Calame, ‘Choral Forms in Aristophanic Comedy: Musical Mimesis and Dramatic Performance in Classical Athens’, in Murray and Wilson (eds.), Music and the Muses, 157–84; E. Stehle, ‘Choral Prayer in Greek Tragedy: Euphemia or Aischrologia?’, ibid. 121–55. On lyric poetry, see below, (n. 37). 14 In P. Schmitt-Pantel, (ed.), A History of Women in the West (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 19–20.

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whether epiphany is not a form—the theomorphic form—of metamorphosis?’ These observations seem particularly pertinent to one of the few myths we have concerning the Muses’ activities: their punishment of the legendary Thracian bard Thamyris, who boasted of his musical prowess and dared to challenge them to a contest. In return for his arrogant pride they maimed him and deprived him of his musical skills, both his wondrous singing and his ability as a lyre player. This story, first told in Homer’s Iliad (2. 594–600), is a classic tale of hubris, like the punishment of Niobe whose six sons and six daughters were all killed by Apollo and Artemis because she boasted that she had produced more children than their mother, Leto (Iliad 24. 602–9): any mortal foolish enough to challenge the superiority of a god would suffer such consequences. Why the story of Thamyris should suddenly appear in the Catalogue of Ships is an interesting question, especially since other such tales of human folly inserted into the poem seem to have at least some relevance to their context. Kirk speculates that this ‘otherwise gratuitous elaboration’ may be motivated by the professional singer’s pride in his art: ‘Thamyris went too far, but at least an almost divine power in song is suggested by his story.’15 The episode certainly illustrates the power of the Muses which (with Loraux’s observations in mind) derives more from their divinity than from their gender. Other authors who treat the story of Thamyris include Hesiod (Ehoiai fr. 65) and Aeschylus, who may have composed a Thamyris, or at least referred to the bard’s encounter with the Muses as a mythological exemplum in one of his other plays.16 But the most famous version of the story was that dramatized by Sophocles in his play Thamyras (the spelling of the name varies in different traditions). Only a few fragments remain, mostly relating to musical themes, including fr. 241: ‘For gone are the songs resounding from the striking of the harp’, and fr. 244: ‘breaking the horn bound with gold, breaking the harmony of the strung lyre’, both of which would seem to refer to the bard’s loss of his musical powers. The secondcentury ce writer on theatrical antiquities Pollux, (4. 141) speaks of 15

G. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary (Cambridge, 1985), 216. See E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition through Tragedy (Oxford, 1989), 135–6. 16

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a special mask for the actor playing the bard, who was blinded during the play, with one blue eye and one black, to represent his blindness. According to the Life of Sophocles, 5, the poet himself played the role of Thamyras on stage, which may well have contributed to the fame of the legendary bard and to the popularity of the myth as a theme in classical art.17 When thinking about the power of the Muses we would do well to ponder the significance of a tragic poet taking the part of a poet-musician blinded by the Muses and deprived of his art as a punishment for his presumption of more than mortal powers. A different twist is given to the story in the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus, where the Muse apears in a quite different guise. In this play, whose complicated plot need not concern us, the Thracian king Rhesus is the son of one of the nine Muses (she is not named) and the river-god Strymon. After his murder the Muse appears ex machina cradling her son in her arms and lamenting his death with that sensual intensity of grief that only a mother can know.18 Like Hecuba, the paradigm of mourning and motherhood, she mourns her loss in song, remembering the child whom she bore who now lies dead before her, ending her lament with the familiar tragic topos: Such pain to have children who may die. To bury a child. If you had any idea, You’d choose to live a life barren. (980–2, trans. J. M. Walton)

This thoroughly humanized and feminized Muse is presented here as the embodiment of tragic suffering, and she traces the cause of her sorrows back to the overweening arrogance of Thamyris. For it was while she was crossing the river Strymon for the contest with the Thracian bard that she was raped by the river-god and subsequently gave birth to Rhesus. As in traditional versions of the story, 17

See LIMC s.v. Thamyris; P. Wilson, ‘The Musicians among the Actors’, in P. Easterling and E. Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors (Cambridge, 2002), 42–3. 18 See N. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1998); I. Lada-Richards, ‘Reinscribing the Muse: Greek Drama and the Discourse of Inspired Creativity’, in Spentzou and Fowler (eds.), Cultivating the Muse, 82.

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Thamyris was punished for his hubris (the Muses blinded him), but the emphasis in this play is on the Muse as tragic victim; her divine power cannot remove her suffering. The sexual aspect of the contest between bard and Muses seems already to have been a part of the tradition even before this play, at least according to the fourth-century commentator Asclepiades, who summarizes the plot of an earlier drama thus: They say that Thamyris was wonderful in appearance, his right eye being blue, his left black, and that he thought that he excelled all others in singing. When the Muses came to Thrace, Thamyris became angry with them because he wanted to cohabit with them all, saying that it was a Thracian custom for many women to live with a single man. So they challenged him to a singing contest on these terms: if they were victorious, they should do whatever they wished with him, but if he won, he could take as many of them as he chose. This was agreed, but the Muses won, and put out his eyes.19

Some think that the rather bizarre inclusion of the theme of polygamy in this synopsis suggests a comic version, others that it derives from tragedy or a satyr play, but in the absence of further evidence we can only speculate about its significance. What we can say, however, is that these various treatments of the Thamyris legend illustrate the complex interplay of divinity, gender, and power in the myth, and suggest that these issues need to be thought about each time the story is told. ‘To what extent does the divine take precedence over the feminine in a goddess?’ is a question which has no easy answer. Of course, if one wants to see the Muses as figures of power (and I think there are many instances where we can) the root problem we are faced with is the gap between the symbolic function of the female in the male imaginary and the actual reality of women’s lives. In Virginia Woolf’s words, the ‘paradoxical combination of social oppression and poetic licence’ gives rise to a very queer, composite being . . . Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose 19

Trans. and discussed by E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 135–6.

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parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. (A Room of One’s Own, 45–6)

There are various ways of dealing with this gap between image and reality. One is to jettison the whole vocabulary and system of imagery, abolishing the Muse for good ‘along with all the other retro, primitive, unevolved sexist myths’.20 Alternatively, and more productively, one might think about why this imagery of inspiration has persisted and why the image of the Muse has remained so central to the discourse of creativity in the Western tradition. It is easy to say, and the claim is not without justification, that the male poet’s invocation of the Muse is an act of appropriation or control: the poet objectifies his source of inspiration as a passive female figure, whilst simultaneously appropriating her creative powers and silencing her in the process. The mythology of the Muse is no doubt a convenient way of explaining a man’s relationship to his art in a patriarchal culture; but there is surely more to it than that. After all, the Muse is, amongst other things, a metaphor for the mysterious aspects of creativity, for that alchemical activity of the unconscious which cannot be summoned to order; as such the Muse is neither goddess nor whore, but genderless, a symbol of the creative drive which incorporates and transcends both sexes. Again, the notion of the unattainable Muse expresses something of the obsessional nature of artistic activity, for, as Francine Prose has observed, ‘unrequited desire may itself be a metaphor for the making of art, for the fact that a finished work so rarely equals the initial impulse or conception, thus compelling the artist to start over and try again.’21 Seen in this light the eroticization of the relationship

20

F. Prose, The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists they Inspired (London, 2003), 9. 21 Ibid. 23. Joseph Brodsky, ‘The Poet, the Loved One and the Muse’, TLS 26 October 1990, 1150, deploring the modern conception of the artist as perpetual Don Juan, speaks of the poet’s obsession with language: ‘As for the Muse, that angel of language . . . it would be best if biographers and the public left her alone, and if they can’t they should at least remember that she is older than any lover or mother, and that her voice is more implacable than

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between artist and Muse may be more than a legitimizing strategy on the part of the male; rather it becomes a compelling metaphor for the link between eros and creativity, which applies as much to the female creative artist as to the male. Thus May Sarton, who of all female poets of the twentieth century probably engages most deeply with the figure of the Muse, declares in her semi-autobigraphical novel Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing that all poems are love poems, regardless of their content. ‘In the presence of the Muse’, her alter ego Hilary Stevens says, ‘the sources of poetry boil; the faculty of language itself ferments . . . the poet becomes a lover.’ For Mrs Stevens, poetry is written out of desire, and begins in dialogue with the Muse, but ‘conquest is not the point’. The elusive Muse who comes and goes as she pleases both is, and is not, incarnate, indeed she describes the perfect Muse as one who could not be approached in the flesh. Mrs Stevens’s Muse shares many of the features of Robert Graves’s inspiring goddess, and the novel as a whole is presented as a female response to ‘the question posited at such huge length . . . in The White Goddess—who and what is the Muse?’22 For Sarton, no less than for Graves, the erotic relationship between poet and Muse is central to the creative process, regardless of the sex of the artist involved. One of the commonest metaphors for describing artistic production is that of pregnancy and childbirth, and the use of sexual imagery for mental creativity goes back at least as far as the fifth century bce. Thus in Aristophanes’ Clouds Strepsiades is roundly told off by one of Socrates’ pupils for kicking on the door of the Thinkery and causing his thought to miscarry—the implications of the metaphor are well brought out in the translation by Kenneth McLeish: ‘My mind was pregnant with thought—and now it’s miscarried’ (Clouds 135–7). In the Frogs Dionysus laments the abysmal quality of tragic poets writing after the death of Euripides and says that there isn’t a truly fertile (gonimos) poet among them. Later on in the same play (Frogs 1058–9) Aeschylus tells Euripides the mother-tongue.’ For further discussion see Murray, ‘The Muses: Creativity Personified?’ (n. 10, above) 150. 22 M. Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (New York, 1975), 125, 154–5, 146, 182, 83.

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that the poet should beget (tiktein) suitably dignified language in which to express noble themes and sentiments. In the parabasis of the Clouds Aristophanes exploits this metaphorical field in a more elaborate way when speaking of his first play Banqueters: since he was a young unmarried mother at the time he composed the play he had to give his baby to someone else to bring up, a reference to the fact that this comedy was actually produced by Callistratus. Again, McLeish captures the flavour of Aristophanes’ imagery well, though, significantly, he introduces the figure of the Muse, who is not there in the original Greek: When you saw my first play, how you cheered At my characters Nasty and Nice! You remember? My Muse was a blushing young girl, Too young to have children and call them her own. But she bore me a play, in another man’s name, And you loved it, adored it, and gave it first prize. (Clouds 528–32)

In Aristophanes’ text the playwright imagines himself rather than his Muse as the blushing young girl whose play is his child, an image which McLeish renders less striking by interjecting the feminine figure of the Muse. As Edith Hall has shown, Old Comedy is full of metapoetic figures such as Poetry, Music, Tragedy, and Comedy, personified in female form, whom the male poet has to ‘master’ in order to produce his art.23 So, for example, in the parabasis of Knights the chorus speak of the difficulty of the comic poet’s profession, personifying Comedy as a mistress who grants her favours to few: ‘Comedy’s tough, doesn’t fall for the first man who asks’ (Knights 516–17, again in McLeish’s translation). And in his play Pytine (‘Wineflask’) Aristophanes’ great rival Cratinus presents himself on stage as married to Comedy, who complains of his behaviour and wants to divorce him because he has abandoned 23 See E. Hall, ‘Female Figures and Metapoetry in Old Comedy’, in F. Harvey and J. Wilkins (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athenian Old Comedy (London, 2000), 407–18; Murray, ‘The Muses: Creativity Personified?’; A. Sommerstein, ‘A Lover of his Art: The Art-Form as Wife and Mistress in Greek Poetic Imagery’, in E. Stafford and J. Herrin (eds.), Personification in the Greek World (Aldershot, 2005), 161–72.

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her for Drunkennes. Cratinus defends himself by claiming that no one who drinks only water can beget (tiktein) good poetry (fr. 203). Comedy, which typically tends to take metaphor literally, to turn abstract into concrete, exploits the ribald, sometimes obscene, possibilities of such imagery to the full, usually constructing the male poet as the active agent who begets his poetry by seducing the female art-form of which he is the practitioner. Plato, however, sees a deeper meaning in this nexus of imagery and returns again and again to the relationship between sexuality and creativity. His most sustained treatment of this theme occurs in the Symposium where Diotima, the priestess from Mantinea, initiates Socrates into the mysteries of eros (206 b–212 b). The purpose of love, she says, is to give birth in beauty. All of us are pregnant, whether in body or soul, and when we reach a certain age we naturally desire to give birth, but we can only do so in the presence of beauty, for what love wants is reproduction and birth in beauty. Some (inferior) people are simply pregnant in body, while others are pregnant in soul, and when they find beauty these people will bring forth poetry, laws, wisdom, and ideas. The final goal of love, however, is to ascend from earthly to heavenly beauty so that when the vision of Beauty itself is revealed to the lover (who is now, of course, the lover of wisdom) he will give birth not to images of virtue but to true virtue. Several things are striking about this remarkable passage of the Symposium, not least the curious reversal whereby the lover is pregnant before intercourse takes place; perhaps even stranger is the fact that the language of pregnancy and childbirth is used almost exclusively of the male (the only female example used is that of Alcestis at 208 d). Yet, as David Halperin has suggested, it may not be accidental that Plato has put this speech into the mouth of a woman.24 The use of female figures to license male speech is a 24

D. Halperin, ‘Why is Diotima a Woman?’ Platonic Eros and the Figuration of Gender’, in D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin (eds.), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton, 1990), 257–308. On sexuality and creativity in Plato see also M. Burnyeat, ‘Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration’, BICS 24 (1977), 7–16. For a different interpretation see L. Irigaray, ‘Sorcerer Love’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 20–33.

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noteworthy feature of classical Greek culture; but the absence of the actual feminine should not lead us to interpret Plato’s strategy here as a straightforward attempt to appropriate the feminine. Perhaps Diotima is a woman because her account of eros, and in particular her view that the true aim of erotic desire is procreation, would be regarded by Plato’s Greek audience as authentically female. From that point of view Plato’s use of the figure of Diotima to develop this extraordinary imagery of male pregnancy and birth, and her exploration of the deep interconnection between eros and creativity, could be read as an acknowledgement, albeit at an unconscious level, of the peculiar power of female fecundity which the male himself lacks. Like Diotima, the Muse is a figure through whom the male artist asserts his imaginative powers, but rather than deploring this fantasy of appropriation, we could look for a positive significance in the femininity of the Muses. Experts tell us that the Muse is a Greek invention: although other cultures ascribe divine origins to poetry and song, there seems to be no equivalent for these goddesses who specialize in song.25 According to the myth of their own origins (Pindar fr. 31) the Muses were created in order to hymn the praises of Zeus’s newly ordered world, whose beauty was incomplete without the harmony of their singing. Their function is to bring delight and pleasure to the world of the gods, and to bestow the gifts of poetry and song, the essential prerequisites of civilized society, on human beings. In comparison with the other gods of the Olympian pantheon the Muses have few myths of their own, but a motif that is often associated with them is that of the contest: so, for example, the Sirens who ventured upon a contest with them were punished by losing the feathers of their wings (Paus. 9. 34. 3); the nine daughters of Pierus who presumed to rival the Muses were changed into chattering magpies (Ovid, Met. 5. 294–314, 662–78); the Muses were complicit in the punishment of Marsyas, who was flayed alive for challenging the superiority of Apollo;26 and it must surely be 25

See M. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 1997), 170. 26 The evidence is mostly iconographical: see LIMC s.v. Mousa/Mousai, vi, 669–70. Hyginus, Fab. 165 refers to the Muses as arbitrators of the contest between satyr and god.

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significant that the story most frequently attested is their punishment of Thamyris, a myth that dramatizes the power of the Muses in relation to their human subject. In the mythic imagination the Muse is a powerful figure, but historically speaking the relationship between poet and Muse has been differently configured, with the Muse typically envisaged as a mute presence behind a man’s song. Even so, there are ways of reinventing the figure without replicating the tired old scheme of active male/passive female, indeed the multiplicity of Muses and the ambiguity of classical Muse imagery invites us to do so. In their anthology The Muse Strikes Back: A Poetic Response by Women to Men, K. McAlpine and Gail White present a collection of poems to counter the Gravesian ‘silent Muse’ in which women poets retell their stories from a female perspective, rejecting their traditional role as passive objects of male desire. Amongst the many Muse poems in the volume are included some lines from the Prologue of the seventeenth-century colonial poet Anne Bradstreet, who was herself entitled ‘The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America’. Comparing her male contemporaries unfavourably with their ancient Greek counterparts, she recognizes the symbolic potential of the figure of the Muse: But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine And poesy made Calliope’s own child; So ’mongst the rest they placed the arts divine.27

A more serious exploration of the diverse ways in which modern women writers have re-visioned the Muse in order to express their ideas about their own creativity is provided by Mary DeShazer in her book Inspiring Women: Re-imagining the Muse.28 Through her study of the works of, for example, Louise Bogan, H.D., and May Sarton, she shows how the Muse can be transformed from the traditionally passive source of inspiration for the male artist into a powerful image of female creativity. These different women writers envisage the Muse in various ways, some using motherhood as a metaphor for creativity, some invoking female lovers, others calling 27 28

McAlpine and White (Brownsville, Tex., 1997), 87–8. (New York and Oxford, 1986).

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forth strong female figures from their literary or mythological heritage, or even becoming their own Muses, but central to their enterprise is the re-visioning of the Muse as an active rather than a passive force. Thus May Sarton, for whom the Muse is a potent symbol throughout her life, recognizes in the end that the Muse is a part of herself, an insight which she articulates in her poem The Muse as Medusa, which closes with the following stanza: I turn your face around! It is my face. That frozen rage is what I must explore— Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place! This is the gift I thank Medusa for.29

In terms of the visual arts we can see another kind of reclamation of the image of the Muse in the works of Angelica Kauffman and Samuel Richardson’s Nine Living Muses which I have already discussed. A modern parallel for these eighteenth-century artists is provided by Maud Sulter, whose Zabat (1989) is the subject of an article by Sue Malvern.30 This work, Malvern tells us, consists of nine life-size cibachrome photographic prints depicting individual living black women as the nine Muses of mythology, their gold frames designed to suggest the presence of monumental works of art exhibited in museums. As with Samuel Richardson’s earlier painting, all Sulter’s contemporary Muses are writers, artists, and performers themselves, so that here again we see the ancient allegorical figures re-animated as authoritative and inspirational role models for female (and in this case, black) creative artists.31 29

May Sarton, Collected Poems 1930–1973 (New York, 1974), 332. See also e.g. ‘Pruning the Orchard’, ‘Of the Muse’, ‘Letters from Maine’, ‘After a Winter’s Silence’ and ‘Moose in the Morning’ in Halfway to Silence (London, 1993), 33, 39, 44–53, 58, 59. 30 ‘The Muses and the Museum: Maud Sulter’s Retelling of the Canon’, in M. Wyke, and M. Biddiss (eds.), The Uses and Abuses of Antiquity (Berne, 1999), 227–41. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for drawing my attention to this article. 31 A more trivial, but in its way no less telling example appeared in the magazine Country Life, 24 October 1996 which featured an electronically updated version of Samuel Richardson’s 18th-c. painting. The ‘Nine Modern Muses’ of the 1990s (who included not a poet or a writer amongst them) are said to have the same qualities of ‘social poise and accomplishment’ as

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In various ways, then, creative artists in the modern world have re-imagined the mythology of the Muses and seen their femininity as a source of empowerment for their mortal counterparts. What has not been sufficiently recognized, however, is that this potentiality is already there in the ancient figure. If we want to tell the story in a different way and get beyond the gendered paradigm that silences female creativity we could begin by looking at some instances in Greek literature where women lay claim to the inspiration of the Muse. In Euripides’ Medea, for example, Medea, having persuaded Creon to allow her one day’s delay, tells the chorus of her plans to kill her enemies (not at this stage mentioning her children), and the chorus respond by saying that if Apollo had granted women the gift of song, the myths of old would have been told in a different way: The Muses of ancient bards will cease to hymn our faithlessness. Phoebus lord of song never endowed our minds with the glorious strains of the lyre. Else I could have sounded a hymn in reply to the male sex. Time in its long expanse can say many things of men’s lot as well as of women’s.’ (421–30)32

The chorus sing, prophetically as it happens, of a future when women will have a voice and the past will look different. Later on in the same play when Medea has just made her famous speech before killing her children, in which she says that her thumos has overcome her reason, the chorus comment: Oft ere now I have engaged in discourses subtler, and entered upon contests greater, than is right for woman to peer into. No, we too possess a muse, who consorts with us to bring us wisdom: not with all of us, for it is some small clan, one among many, that you will find with a share in the Muse. I say that those mortals who are utterly without experience of children and their 18th-c. couterparts, and are described thus: ‘experts to the last woman, each of our present day Muses is characterized by a passion for her field of endeavour combined with serene dignity. They are gracious in their determination to succeed; their independence of spirit is an example to others.’ 32

Trans. D. Kovacs (Loeb edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1994), but I have substituted ‘Muses’ in l. 421 for the Greek Mousai, which Kovacs translates as ‘poetry’. For discussion of the ode see B. Knox, ‘The Medea of Euripides’, Yale Classical Studies, 25 (1977), 193–225.

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have never borne them have the advantage in good fortune over those who have. (1081–93)33

Here they lay claim to the wisdom that comes from the Muse, which they referred to in the earlier ode. Of particular interest are lines 1085–6: ‘No, we too possess a muse, who consorts with us to bring us wisdom.’ Commentators usually compare Aristophanes’ Lysistrata 1124, where Lysistrata says that though she is a woman she is not stupid: ‘although I am a woman, I have a mind’, and that line itself is a quotation from Euripides, Melanippe the Wise fr. 483. In the Medea passage what interests me is the language, for Muse is almost a metonym here for wisdom or intelligence (as is indicated by the oscillation between ‘muse’ and ‘Muse’ in Kovacs’s translation). In the context of Euripides’ play the chorus’s words are a prelude to their own articulation of the topos that it is better not to have children than to suffer the pains that they bring, hence they are claiming wisdom for themselves. But, interestingly, later feminist interpretations which sought to reclaim Medea from the monstrous mother demonized by patriarchal culture looked to this passage to build up an image of Medea as an extraordinary artist, honoured by her compatriots as one of the few outstanding women to possess the gift of poetry.34 The examples discussed above are not, of course, straightforward references to Muse-inspired activity on the part of women, since in all cases the words are spoken or sung by male citizens impersonating female characters in the context of dramatic performance. But they do suggest that the Muses’ province is not exclusively male, and raise some interesting questions about the gendering of creativity. What, if any, are the implications of the gender of the Muse here? Is the Muse who consorts with females different from the 33

Trans. Kovacs. For discussion of the text see also D. Mastronarde, Euripides: Medea (Cambridge, 2002), 346–8. For other such claims to female sophia see e.g. Eur. Helen 1049. 34 See A. Heilman, ‘Medea at the Fin de Sie`cle: The Re-vision of Myth in Feminist Writings by Mona Caird, Amy Levy and Vernon Lee’, forthcoming in Historicising Sexual Politics: Victorian Engagements with the Past, special issue of Victorian Review, guest edited by Ann Heilmann. I am grateful to the author for sending me a copy of this paper prior to publication.

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muse who consorts with males? How important is it here that the gender of the Muse is female? We might ask the same questions of Sappho’s use of the Muse figure. Like male poets, Sappho too invokes the Muse, as in the following fragments: here (once again) Muses leaving the gold (fr. 127) here now tender Graces and Muses with beautiful hair (fr. 128)35

We don’t have the contexts for these invocations, and so have to imagine plausible settings. Perhaps the goddesses are invoked here for the performance of a wedding song, just as Alcman’s Partheneion, composed by a male poet for a chorus of young girls to perform, begins with the words: Come Muse, Calliope daughter of Zeus, begin the lovely verses: set desire on the song, and make the dancing graceful.36

Or perhaps they are preludes to cult songs of a more private nature relating to Sappho’s group, whatever form that took. Elsewhere Sappho speaks scathingly of someone who has ‘no share in the roses of Pieria’ (i.e. the Muses’ gifts). Plutarch, who quotes the lines, tells us that they were addressed to a woman who was wealthy, but amousos (‘uncultured’ or ‘ignorant’): Dead will you lie and never memory of you Will there be nor desire into the aftertime—for you do not Share in the roses Of Pieria, but invisible too in Hades’ house 35

Cf. frr. 103 and 124. Unless otherwise stated, translations of Sappho are taken from Anne Carson, If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York, 2002) and based on the text edited by E.-M. Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta (Amsterdam, 1971). 36 Fr. 27, trans. M. Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 120. Cf. Eur. Trojan Women 511–15, where the female tragic chorus invoke the Muse to sing, on which see Lada-Richards, Reinscribing the Muse, 84.

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You will go your way among dim shapes. Having been breathed out. (fr. 55)

By contrast Sappho describes herself as a ‘servant of the Muses’ (moisopolos) in fr. 150: ‘it is not right that there should be a lament in the house of the Muses’ servants . . . this would not become us’ (my translation), words which, according to Maximus of Tyre (Orations 18. 9), Sappho spoke to her daughter when she (Sappho) was dying. As with all aspects of Sappho’s poetry, controversy surrounds the interpretation of these fragments, in particular the meaning of the term moisopoloi. Some scholars argue that the phrase ‘in the house of the Muses’ servants’ implies cult worship of the Muses on the part of Sappho and her companions, or at least some kind of insititutional association, whether of a religious or educational nature; others that it refers to a shared interest in poetry and musical performance, without necessarily implying an official basis for the organization of such activity. But whatever scenario we envisage, the Muse is not merely a figure of speech in Sappho’s poetry, for we cannot easily separate out the religious from the secular in this early period, nor can we draw a clear distinction between cult song and ‘literary’ poetry.37 The Muses, like their sister-goddesses, the Graces, have as much reality for Sappho as her beloved Aphrodite. These divinities are invoked with an easy familiarity in Sappho’s songs of love and feminine beauty, suggesting a world in which the desiring female subject—whether goddess, mythical figure, or mortal—is celebrated for her qualities, and where, at least arguably, relationships are presented in a less hierarchical manner than in the corresponding world of men. Lyn Hatherly Wilson, for example, detects in 37 On this see A. Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton, 2002), 13–15. On the question of cult worship of the Muses see, most recently, A. Hardie, ‘Sappho, Lesbos and the Archaic Cult of the Muses’ (forthcoming), which contains a summary of the controversy and bibliography. I am most grateful to the author for sending me an advance copy of this important paper. For alternative views see e.g. C. Calame, ‘Sappho’s Group: An Initiation into Womanhood’, in E. Greene (ed.), Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches (Berkeley, 1996), 113–24; Stehle, Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (n. 12 above), 262–318.

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Sappho’s references to the Muses, fragmentary as they are, a different kind of relationship from that envisaged between male poets and their inspiring divinities, suggesting intimacy and co-operation rather than dominance and subordination. Individual readers will find her interpretation more, or less, persuasive, depending on their own sensibilities, but it would be hard to disagree with Wilson’s general observation that there is an affinity between Muse and female poet which is not available to men: ‘The male poets’, she says, ‘can usurp some of their attributes but they cannot, in the way that Sappho can, be like these female divinities’.38 So great is that affinity, Wilson argues, that in the course of time Sappho was actually identified with the goddesses whom she cultivated, through the figure of the tenth Muse. Thus an anonymous epigram in the Palatine Anthology (9. 571) celebrates the achievements of the great lyric poets of Greece, eight of whom are male, and concludes with the lines: ‘Sappho was not the ninth among men, but the tenth in the list of lovely Muses’. Here Sappho is differentiated from her fellow poets and put in a class of her own, a way of acknowledging her unique status as a female poet amongst men; but that does not automatically turn her into a passive figure. Calling a woman the tenth Muse is not always an unambiguous compliment—as Germaine Greer remarks, the history of women’s poetry is littered with tenth Muses39—but Sappho’s case is different. For Sappho has always been recognized as one of the great poets of the Western world, and whatever fantasy and prurient speculation may have surrounded her sexuality, the quality of her poetry has never been in doubt.40 She was the poetess as Homer was the poet, 38

L. H. Wilson, Sappho’s Sweetbitter Songs: Configurations of Female and Male in Ancient Greek Lyric (London, 1996), 158–62, 161. For invocations of the Muse in other female poets see J. Balmer, Classical Women Poets (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996), 13 and 30. 39 Slip-shod Sibyls, 117, and see 102–46 for discussion of Sappho. 40 See e.g. M. Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 13–23. Robert Graves, for whom Sappho is a rare example of a truly female poet, records the following anecdote: ‘I once asked my socalled Moral Tutor at Oxford, a Classical scholar and Apollonian: ‘‘Tell me, sir, do you think that Sappho was a good poet?’’ He looked up and down the street, as if to see whether anyone was listening and then confided to me:

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and to call her a Muse does not in itself deny her agency any more than the labelling of Homer as divine: it all depends on how the image is used, and how we choose to interpret it. For the Muse, as we have seen, can be an empowering image for the female creative artist. Sappho’s canonical status, both as a poet in her own right, and as a role model for other women poets, is repeatedly evoked by her identification with the Muse; and her creativity is celebrated through the, for once, appropriate imagery of childbirth in an epigram commemorating her by the Hellenistic poet Dioscurides, which ends with the words: Greetings wherever you are, lady, greetings as to a god: for your songs, your immortal daughters, are with us still.41

But perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the symbiosis of Sappho and the Muse, and the loveliness of both, is the following epigram by an anonymous author in the Palatine Anthology: Come to the radiant precinct of bullfaced Hera, Lesbian women, make your delicate feet turn. There set up beautiful dancing and your leader will be Sappho with a golden lyre in her hands. Lucky ones in the glad dance: surely you will think You hear Kalliope’s own sweet singing.42

In the modern world the figure of Sappho offers women poets a model of feminine creativity who stands at the beginning of the Western poetic tradition; and the divine power of the Muse in classical myth translates into the suggestive potential of metaphor. Eavan Boland has written of the importance of poetic tradition to the woman poet and of her profound responsibility towards the past.43 This is evident in the complex and sophisticated use of classical myths and motifs in her own poetry, which Rowena Fowler ‘‘Yes, Graves, that’s the trouble, she was very, very good!’’ (The White Goddess, 447). 41

Palatine Anthology 7. 407, trans. Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, 13. 42 9. 189, trans. Carson, If not, Winter, 362. 43 E. Boland, Object Lessons (Manchester, 1995), passim, but esp. 235–48.

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discusses in this volume. In her poem The Journey, a reworking of the Underworld scene in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Boland describes herself falling into a reverie, the book beside her open at the page where Aphrodite ‘comforts Sappho in her love’s duress’. A figure appears at her side, who leads her downwards: and as we went on the light went on failing and I looked sideways to be certain it was she, misshapen, musical— Sappho—the scholiast’s nightingale

They arrive at a river and gradually her eyes make out the crowd of women and children of the past, suffering and silent, and Sappho says to the poet who comes after her: ‘there are not many of us; you are dear and stand beside me as my own daughter. I have brought you here so you will know forever the silences in which are our beginnings, in which we have an origin like water.’

Other poems, such as ‘Tirade for the Mimic Muse’ or ‘Tirade for the Lyric Muse’, reject the traditional male construction of the Muse as an icon of feminine passivity, exposing it for the fantasy that it is. But, as Boland says in Envoi: My muse must be better than those of men who made theirs in the image of their myth.44 44

E. Boland, Collected Poems (Manchester, 1995) 120–2, 55–6, 130–1, 123. I should like to thank Carmen Bugan for the interesting discussions we have had about Muses and women poets.

14

Defying History: The Legacy of Helen in Modern Greek Poetry*

E fi Spentzou The classical Greek heritage has been a deeply troubling and unsettled part of modern Greek identity ever since the creation of the modern Greek state in the 1830s. Ancient Greek symbols offered the reassurance of a respectable currency in dealings with the ‘civilized’ (read European) world outside. Their credentials were solid and the young state needed respect. As a result, the liberated Greeks found their loyalties divided between a glorious but distant and often irrelevant past and a familiar but vilified present, that encompassed resonances from the Byzantine heritage and also recent, even if confused, memories of a common identity that united the people throughout the long Turkish occupation.1 *In their indictment of male single-mindedness, these new Helens meet the modern Daphnes explored in Fowler’s contribution to this volume. This essay is much indebted to the audience and participants of the original Myth and Feminism conference in Bristol, the editors of this volume for their constructive comments, and Jim Samson for reading and engagingly responding to an earlier draft of it. 1

Martin Herzfeld, Ours Once more: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin, Tex., 1982) deals extensively with the deepseated ambiguity of modern Greek culture and the modern Greek

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This duality is still very much alive in Greece today, a cause of much confusion but also a source of vibrant creativity throughout the two hundred years that have elapsed since the formal creation of the first modern Greek state in 1831. The stories woven around Helen of Troy (or of Sparta, depending on our angle!) represent a microcosm of the troubled and inspired itinerary of classical myth in the cultural mosaic of modern Greece, and it is to some of these stories that I wish to draw attention in this essay.2 Most of the stories I have in mind have had a literary life of about two or, at most, three decades. This is a very small segment of the heroine’s long and turbulent literary life, but, as I hope to show, it is a segment that speaks of complex and far-reaching issues that lie at the heart of the political as well as the cultural life of modern Greece. The stories on (and of) Helen that I study here make their appearance (and their contribution) at a time when, as we will see, the long-standing dialogue between the intelligentsia and the ghosts of the classical past is at a particularly transitional stage, experiencing a fluidity triggered to a large extent by landmark changes in Greek society before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Colonels’ dictatorship (1967–74). Additionally, but not irrelevantly, Helen’s stories are implicated in yet another ground-breaking development in Greek society, as feminine expression and, on an institutional level, feminist movements acquire an altogether new significance within the wider political discourses of the period, creating meaning consciousness. Particularly illustrative is his distinction between the ‘Hellenist’ model which seeks to build an image of a modern Greece predominantly linked to its ancient past, and what he calls the Romeic model, which locates the vitality of modern Greece in its links with Eastern Orthodoxy, Byzantium, and the explicitly non-Western part of Europe with which modern Greeks (Romioi, as they were called often derogatorily) blended so thoroughly in the melting pot of the Ottoman empire. See also Vassilis Lambropoulos Literature as National Institution: Studies in the Politics of Modern Greek Criticism (Princeton, 1988) for an elaborate discussion both of modern Greek literature as a political institution and of the complex politics of aesthetic criticism in contemporary Greece. 2

In fact, the very first story about Helen we have is her very own story woven on the web she was preparing when Iris, sent by the gods, met her in her chamber: a personal story enmeshed in a broader visual narrative about women and warfare, which is dealt with by O’Gorman in this volume.

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where other hitherto dominant discourses are faced with difficulties of signification. There will be more discussion of all this later; for the time being let us hold on to the following thought: the woman ‘who killed many men and destroyed a thousand ships’ is still capable of stirring debates and putting men’s ideologies to the test in our own time. Helen seems to have always been there in the Greek world. What is more, her story comprises multiple layers of abductions and a significant element of mystery. There were stories about her that date before her time in Troy (where her literary history begins) and even her very existence in Troy has been contested. Matthew Gumpert, in his recent extensive study of Helen’s literary representations and transformations, points to the unreliability of chronologies and aptly captures the elusiveness of her life and form: ‘With Helen it is hard to know, then, where to begin, or where to end. Helen has always already been abducted; she is always to be abducted again. It is also possible that she was never abducted at all.’3 Gumpert’s extensive exploration of the ancient incarnations of Helen underlines this uncertainty; Helen’s identity, origins, marriages, and past adventures can never be confirmed. Throughout antiquity her stories comprised a collection of conflicting and contradictory myths.4 For Gumpert, Helen’s instability is perfectly understandable. She has never really had an essential identity. She has been a graft (‘a chimera, a griffon, a sphinx’) from the start. Her ever-changing stories are acts of unrelenting and violent poetic pursuit by authors, triggered by ‘aggressive desire and an aversion’ for the past going hand in hand with ‘adoration, reverence, idolatry’, both sets featuring as constituent drives within the wider framework of a culture that, for Gumpert, has been fundamentally ‘mutilated, amputated, and incomplete’ from its very beginnings.5 3

Matthew Gumpert, Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical Past (Madison, 2001), 10. See also pp. 3–23 for an extensive and perceptive discussion of this quality of ‘undecidability’ associated with the wife of Menelaus (or is it of Paris and so Priam’s daughter-in-law?). 4 See Gumpert, Grafting Helen, part 1, for an extensive exploration of this elusiveness. 5 Ibid. 260.

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This is a very perceptive and suggestive way of thinking about Helen’s undecidability. However, it does not promote adequately one consistent and intriguing trend in her ancient Greek stories that keeps her always, it seems, at a certain distance from both her suitors and her readers. Throughout her ancient Greek incarnations, Helen seems to remove herself (or rather is removed—by her own makers?) from direct touch and even direct sight. At her very first public appearance in Greek literature, high up on the Trojan walls in Iliad 3, she is already beyond the reach of Greeks and spellbound Trojans alike. In Odyssey 4, she charms everybody, and the reader too, with her witch-like spells. In Euripides’ Helen, she is just a vain phantom, and the deluded possession of Paris (31–5), while in his Orestes she is a ghost-like figure fleeing a most certain death, as if the poet has lost the power—or the will—to bring the myth to an end, as I have argued elsewhere.6 In fact, as this latter play draws to a close, Apollo intervenes (ll. 1635–7) and explains to the baffled crowd wondering about Helen’s sudden disappearance that ‘Helen must leave before she grows old and weak’, encouraging Menelaus to reconcile himself to the impossibility of possessing her.

helen and her modern greek suitors It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss at length the representations of Helen in classical literature, a task already attempted with acumen by the critics.7 However, the instances I have just highlighted from her classical literary life are crucial for our understanding of Helen’s modern Greek incarnations. Let me spell out the significance of the aforementioned passages for the modern suitors of Helen. By divine decree, the queen of Sparta is promised immortal fame; indeed, boundless and immortal is exactly how she features regularly in modern Greek literature, as the spellbound 6

Efrossini Spentzou, ‘Helen of Troy and the Poetics of Innocence: From Ancient Fiction to Modern Metafiction’, Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly, 16 (1996), 301–24. 7 Substantial overviews of her representations and transformations in antiquity and beyond can be found in Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 3–98; Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca, NY, 1994); Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca, NY, 1989).


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poets (modern Trojan Elders) compete in adoration. From many possible examples, I choose a short poem by I. M. Panagiotopoulos from 1952, where a prodigious and ephemeral Helen emerges from the poet’s address, as an appropriate exemplification of my argument: ¯ ÆØ ŒÆ Æ % ØÆ % øÆ,

Æ % ØÆ ÆÆ,

Œ% ø % Æ Æ% ª ı ÆººØ & Æ ŒÆ ø Æ%Ø' ŒÆØ %Æ % Øª : (¯º in ˘øØÆŒ ˚º) You are the sorrow with the lavish faces and the lavish names, with a body which changes its fitting like a dress . . . Memory made of countless other memories and discovery of the most recent moments.9

It is strikingly hard to retain a reliable image of such an elevated Helen in our mind; we can only catch brief glimpses of her and even then she is never the same. She is the ancient past and the most recent present, a protean body with many forms, faces, and names. The same obfuscatory veneration envelops Helen in a roughly contemporary poem by Aggelos Sikelianos: ` ŒÆº % —º Ø Æ'Æ øº )ı 'Æ ø,

Æ Æ ŒıÆ%Ø ıº Œº!Æ ªØÆ Æ ıøØ %ª ı ÆØ!Æ! (from " ˙ —Æ%' )%) Not of Pentelic marble nor of brass shall I erect Thy deathless idol, but from a tall column made of cypress wood that my work may be fragrant throughout the ages. 8

For more on the inscrutable modern Helen see Karelisa Hartigan, ‘Helen so Fatefully Named: The Continuity of her Myth in Modern Greek Poetry’, Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 4 (1983), 17–24; also Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 239–50, for whom this process of grafting and literary stealing that engenders modern Helen becomes increasingly widespread and dynamic as poetic plundering is enlisted in the making of history and the creation of nationhood. 9 Unless otherwise stated, the English translations of the modern Greek poems are my own.

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Sikelianos’ remarkably intense relation with ancient Greek mythology is widely acknowledged in the literature. The poet reaches an understanding of Greek myth rather as an initiate would come to an understanding of the divine in the course of the famous ancient Greek mysteries. Communication with the myth had for Sikelianos the significance and power of a ritual. The poet takes on the role of a seer whose ultimate ambition is not rational comprehension but inspired participation in the sublime.10 This burning desire for a quasi-religious ‘partaking’ of Greek myth, implicit in the above extract, becomes transparent in the lines that follow: ˚ÆØ 'Æ Œ ø Æ%Ø ŒŒº Ø, ŒÆØ Æ 'Æ ) Œº ø

Æ%Æª, Æ %, ıº!Æ! and . . . I shall build a massive church, and in it I shall lock Thee fast with mighty adamantine gates of iron.

In the poet/priest’s ‘possessed’ mind, Helen’s figure blends with that of Mary, mother of Christ, with the two archetypal females inextricably linked in the title of the sonnet: The Virgin of Sparta. Yet the prophet’s inspired fervour should not distract us from our own line of inquiry: as in the poem by I. M. Panagiotopoulos cited above, admiration again blends with obsession and again Helen is removed from clear view, hidden inside a shower of gifts and a cluster of extravagant images, smothered in an oppressive adoration. Takis Sinopoulos, also composing his Helen poems in the 1950s (1953), follows suit, though his description of Helen is somewhat more nuanced. Unlike the poems we have just considered, Sinopoulos’ collection allows Helen a voice; but what she says is deeply unsettling: — ø Æ Æ ; —Æ%Æ ı ª Ø 'ÆØ 'Æ ı;

10

For an illuminating overview of this aspect of Sikelianos’ relation to Greek mythology, see Edmund Keeley, Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Myth (Princeton, 1983), 43–53.


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˚Ø ÆŒ Æ % ŒÆØ% ÆªÆ ı%Ø ªÆ Æ º ı Œø Æ Æ Æ º ı ºø ı ØºØø Æ: &ı Øº

Ø % ŒÆØ Ø ÆÆ ªØÆ ÆØ Æ% Ø Ø ªı% ı %ı: (From: ˙ ø ¯º) Where am I heading, reckless as I am? Father who gave me birth, what will my death be? You, my transient lover. . . mingled your limbs with my pale, obedient limbs under the night forests . . . you speak to me and dress me in poems and stanzas so that I cannot be reached by time’s bridges.

Her soliloquy continues in another poem: ˚Ø ª! Æ Æ ØŒ% ÆºÆ ºŒ% ÆÆı'!: &Æ Æı ı% Æ'Æ% Æ Ø Æ%Æ: ¿ ØŒ% ØŒ%Æ Æ% ı Æ ªØ Æ Øºı , % % ÆŒ% ı% ÆÆ Ø: (From: ˙ Æ ¯º) I, struggling with all my strength to surface from the bitter poem. A chimera only keeps me imperishable . . . Oh my life, bitter, most bitter from reigning concerns and dragging, terrible memories.

Rare as it is, Helen’s terse expression of her feelings demands some scrutiny. Helen feels loved and flattered by the attention. Yet this attention stifles her as she struggles to recognize herself amidst the waves of adulation and worries that death—her literary decline—is fast approaching, even though her poems have kept her immortal for centuries. It is tempting to think that Helen’s so explicitly metapoetic uneasiness reflects or betrays some of the poet’s own insecurities. And yet Sinopoulos ultimately dismisses the disquietude and chooses to carry on with the delusion, regardless. As he glosses this choice, he also offers a more explicit account of what he and the other poets we met above gain in return for their offerings: ) ÆÆªø%ø ¯º ı . . . ªØ ªØÆ ı ı ı Æ

362

e fi s pe n tz o u ) %Ø ø. ˚Æ %Æ . . . %ØÆ Æ 'ºÆ Æ ŒÆº ØÆ Æ Ø Æ Ø %ØÆ ŒÆØ % ŒØ Ø%Æ ªØÆ Æ % %. ª ı Ø Æ. ˚ÆØ ø % : ˙ (From — Æ ªØÆ ¯º)

I recognize you, my own Helen . . . please never ever leave for the realms of loss . . . I am waiting for you. Look, I brought you . . . gems from the sea . . . reeds from the river banks, and rocks and dreams and haziness, . . . as offerings to you. This I call waiting in hope; or else, birth of a poem.

The deal struck between the poet and Helen is now laid bare. She is his Muse, he is her saviour from the oblivion of the everyday and the ordinary. A question hangs, though: which of the two, if either, has the better deal? With this concern in mind, we now turn to a landmark in Helen’s modern Greek travelogue, namely the homonymous poem from Ritsos’s Fourth Dimension, a series of dramatic monologues written between 1958 and 1975 (though the majority of them were created during the Colonels’ dictatorship). Most feature classical Greek figures, many of them—though with some notable exceptions— young, less foregrounded by classical literature, or female. The poem on Helen was written in 1970, while Ritsos was exiled in Samos by the dictatorial regime. Once again classical Greece was recruited as a panacea to divert attention from the pressing problems of the present. But such manipulation usually comes at a price and antiquity seemed to inspire less and less as the present became increasingly oppressive. Ritsos’ poem seems to expose the impotence of the classical past, its irrelevance to present realities. Even a cursory glance at Helen’s painfully long monologue provides a clear answer to my question above: Helen seems to have got the rough side of the deal. She is a shocking spectacle. She is old, fat, ugly, decrepit, with swollen legs and hunched shoulders, an invalid stuck in bed, or left in front of the window when (very often) her servants, who make no effort to hide their contempt for her, forget to put her back in bed. Alienated from the past and from her dead loved ones, she is plagued by fears: of the empty house, her isolation, the night, the servants, the silence, her own face, which she no longer


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recognizes, her own withering body. This is an exceptionally powerful—if bleak—poem; in fact, only through a complete reading can we appreciate the shattering force of this stream-of-consciousness at its peak. For the purposes of this essay, however, I will highlight only some of its pithiest moments, germane to my argument. ¯ª!, ø %Ø, ØÆ% Æ ÆŒ ÆºØ %Ø ı Æ Æ 'Æ Æ (Æºº Æ, ÆÆ . . . . . . ŒØ Æªªı%%). ¯ Ø %ŒºØ , Øª , ø —Ø Œ%Æ , ' ı,— Œ' Øª Øª (ŒÆØ ÆŒ ) , ÆØ, Æ , %øØ , Øº, ı%ł ` . . . ŒØ ºº , ªØÆ %ª ÆÆ ı ŒØºÆ Æ Æ ººı ÆÆ Ø Æ, Æ ºÆ . ºØ Æ'!, Æ%ÆºÆØŒ, Æ%ª%ØŒ, Ø% Æ

Œ ı ÆŒ%ØÆ. + %Æ Æ ,%Æ,— ø Æ )% º %Æ ŒºØ Ø Æ ØÆ, º ºŒØŒ— ø Æ%Æ : ˇ Æ Æ Æ %Ø øª Æ ºı%Æ ø º ø. [ˇØ º] ØÆı Ø ÆºØ Ø º ø 'Æı Æ ! ı Æ Ø ÆÆ ı Æ ÆØ%! Ø ªºØ Ø. ,Æ ØÆı º'Ø . . . ,Ø ÆŒø ı Æ%ı Ø º Æ ªºÆ Øº ı ˆØÆ Æ %Ø !%Æ Øø % ø ı—Æ % ø — Æªªø, łÆø, . . . Ø ÆØ Æ % ø; I still held on to my former beauty as though by a miracle (though also with dyes, herbs . . . cucumber water) . . . so enclosed, taut—the fatigue of it, my God—tensed every moment, even sleeping . . . k All those stupid battles, heroics, ambitions, arrogant gestures, . . . more battles, for objects already determined by others, in our absence. k . . . words . . . innocent, seductive, consoling, ambiguous always in their pretence of accuracy. k After Troy, our life in Sparta’s so dull, boring, provincial: shut up indoors all day amid this, the piled-up booty. . . . The slave-girls . . . are reading old letters from my admirers or the verses great poets devoted to me . . . with crass pomposity. . . These days

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I can hear the servants moving my heavy furniture . . . The Symplegades [Crushing Rocks] are more internal k . . . I take hold of my face—the face of a stranger—what’s inside this face of mine? (trans. R. Dalven)

The stern images are alarming and shocking in the extreme. This is Ritsos’ most explicit and most extensive engagement with the classical heritage, and it has attracted some vigorous and welldeserved critical attention. For all the richness of Ritsos’s work, the main feature noted by his fellow Greeks, especially in the decades before the 1967 dictatorship, was his powerful political voice. In a country with an extraordinarily polarized and inflammatory political climate, Ritsos has been received predominantly as a representative of the anti-establishment par excellence and as an author with a remarkably iconoclastic vision.11 Such associations make Fourth Dimension an intriguing meeting place for two unlikely bedfellows, the moment of interaction between two diametrically polarized, and often mutually hostile, worlds. And as such, the reception was scrutinized by the critics for signs of Ritsos’ characteristic revolutionary and condemnatory mentality. Significant signs of a military spirit in confrontation with a major tool of the establishment were indeed located. More than once and in more than one way, the power of the past to dictate is transcended in Ritsos’ recreation of the famous myths of the Trojan War, the common denominator of the greater part of the monologue. For Kostas Myrsiades, Ritsos ‘infuses ancient myth with contemporaneity’.12 The psychology of these figures is somehow extended as they live in a deliberately atemporal setting. Successive wars of modern Greece (the symbolic totality of Greek history) are accommodated within the ten years of the Trojan War, the immediate subject matter of Fourth Dimension. For Myrsiades, Ritsos, through his unconventional reworkings, gives modern Greeks the opportunity to participate in ancient myths. Ritsos dares to respond to the challenge of the past, confronts the past as a modern Greek’s

11

Cf. here Lambropoulos, Literature as National Institution, 174 ff. Kostas Myrsiades, ‘The Classical Past in Yiannis Ritsos’ Dramatic Monologues’, Papers on Language and Literature, 14 (1978), 450–8, 451. 12


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right, and carves out opportunities for contemporary generations.13 The past is no longer the overwhelming lump of past excellence that sticks in the collective throat of modern Greece, as the novelist George Seferis often appears to feel in his poems. The difference in mentality is striking. Dominating the Greek literary scene from the 1930s until his death in 1972, Seferis often looked upon the classical past with nostalgia, which, however, did not prevent him from recognizing its distance from us. Disenchanted by contemporary problems, mainly the traumas in Cyprus, a place with which he felt a special affinity, he constantly looked to the past for better men and a way to escape the stalemate that had gripped his world. But his efforts were in vain, as he admits in Mythistorima, 3: ˛ Æ Æ% %Ø ŒºØ Æ %ØÆ ı ı Æº ı ÆªŒ! . . . ˚Øø Æ ØÆ: ÆØ ŒºØ

Øº! Æ ı º ªı%Ø Æ Øº Ø ˜ ø ºº Æ : I woke with this marble head in my hands, it exhausts my elbows . . . I look at the eyes: neither open nor closed, I speak to the mouth which keeps trying to speak . . . That’s all I’m able to do. (trans. E. Keeley)14

This insurmountable sense of a barrier plagued Seferis throughout his poetry. It compelled him, in the King of Asini, to search for a whole morning in the grassed and ruined site of a seaside castle for signs of a king mentioned fleetingly in one line of the Iliad. The search is in vain, 13

For a reading of Fourth Dimension in a similar vein see M. Colakis, ‘Classical Mythology in Yiannis Ritsos’ Dramatic Monologues’, Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly, 5 (1984), 117–30, esp. 125–30. 14 Interestingly, Seferis’s Helen features Teucros, Ajax’s brother, in a protagonistic role, as he meets Helen in Egypt on his way to Cyprus and is thus made aware that the woman they fought over for ten years on the plains of Troy was nothing more than an idol. According to some critics, Seferis’s poem was based on Stesichorus’s Palinody (which, in turn, was picked up by the Platonic Phaedrus 243a), and expresses the need of Seferis to transcend (with the help of Socratic Phaedrus) the world of illusionary appearances in order to reach a realm of substance, that evanescent Truth that Seferis strove to discover throughout his poetry.

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as the castle, fading in the morning sun, stands deserted in the middle of a landscape devoid of life. Seferis’s agonizing search for a solid past culminates in a mask or garment that obstructs his view, fuelling a fear in him that this mask or that garment hides nothing but a void beneath it, a fear that so much suffering, and so much life went into the abyss, all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen, to borrow a phrase from his own ‘Helen’, in Edmund Keely’s translation. Where ‘aristocratic’ Seferis deferentially hesitates, militant Ritsos continues to probe the ancient myths, reshaping the stories to make them speak for our present condition.15 But this is only part of the picture of Fourth Dimension, which far from conveys a uniform understanding and a unanimous response to the past. Many figures appear troubled by, even crushed under, the weight of their misfortune, but others, such as Clytemnestra and Chrysothemes, acquire a much more flattering image than their counterparts from the ancient world. Ritsos’ stories foreground the personal plight, but also the personal values and thoughts, of figures such as Ismene and Chrysothemes (the lesser known siblings of Antigone and Electra respectively).16 Ritsos’ redesigned figures take up a front-of-stage position; the familiar epic and tragic stories are filtered through the lens of their often frenzied minds. Public concerns are reduced to a single tune, almost elegiac in this respect, with the plot refracted through the protagonists’ narrow emotions and particular perspectives. An encroaching but ubiquitous individualism holds the story of the Trojan War (the main subject matter of the collection) in its grip. In a recent, perceptive study of Ritsos’ Orestes, Dimitris Tziovas remarks on the momentum gained by the strife between social will and individualistic desires. ‘In Orestes the protagonist is seeking to articulate and defend his individual freedom against the illusion of justice and the social imperative.’17 Tziovas notices 15

For an interesting juxtaposition of the two poets’ attitudes to the classical past with the myth of nostos (return) as a study case, see Edmund Keeley ‘Nostos and the poet’s vision in Seferis and Ritsos’ in P. Mackridge (ed.), Ancient Greek Myth in Modern Greek Poetry: Essays in Memory of C. A. Trypanis (London and Portland, Ore., 1996), 81–96. 16 Cf. Colakis, ‘Classical Mythology’, 121–4. 17 Dimitris Tziovas, ‘Ritsos’ Orestes: The Politics of Myth and the Anarchy of Rhetoric’, in Mackridge (ed.), Myth in Modern Greek Poetry, 67–80, 75.


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the multiplicity and unpredictability of the hero’s individual inclinations and the corresponding ‘anarchy of form’ as an appropriate expression of his untrammelled individualism. Characters such as Orestes and also Philoctetes, he suggests, have access to real choices which, however, are framed by the myth, whose restraining and normalizing power constrains this individual energy and dictates the ultimate outcome in these esoteric dramas. It is about time we revisited Helen’s monologue with this ongoing confrontation between individual will and mythic collectivity in mind. The glorious days of the Trojan expedition are long gone in Helen’s old age, and very few, if any, remember the actual facts, let alone realize their significance. The servants read dusty scripts that celebrate the old achievements with crass pomposity and countless errors; they mock because they do not understand the old readings. Then there was life but that life has gone. The anniversary celebrations of the Trojan victory back in Sparta are a sad, soulless reproduction of an atmosphere of past pride and success, and Helen no longer feels part of them. Her house gradually gets stripped of its history, as the servants haul down the heavy furniture every evening. Read through the spectacles of a somewhat cynical, somewhat anti-establishment generation of the 1970s, this decaying Helen, by her mere wretched presence, decries the abuse of the classical symbolism and exposes the irrelevance of the classical past, while the problems of the present are left to fester beneath a shiny facade. But there is more to read in this desperate outburst. The conflict between individual voice and collective edicts is extraordinarily poignant in the case of Helen. Her individual voice is truly anarchic, to use Tziovas’ characterization. It is also a gripping novelty. In the long course of antiquity, poems were written, stories woven by mesmerized artists, but we rarely glimpse Helen’s own reaction to her legendary image.18 In Ritsos’ poem, though, Helen bursts into a lengthy and frenzied soliloquy, as if to make up for the lengthy silence to which she has been consigned since ancient times. Such a prolonged emphasis on Helen’s feelings is unique in the literature associated with her. We saw I. M. Panagiotopoulos and Takis 18

But notice Ovid’s Helen in the Heroides 17, as a notable exception.

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Sinopoulos showering Helen with images of eternal beauty. In their time, Helen (and her antique story and era too) is centuries old, but such down-to-earth realities do not temper the romantic zeal of the poets, even if some inklings of unease appear briefly in Sinopoulos’ verses, as we have seen. Ritsos, however, is better placed than most to notice Helen’s predicament. Her ‘house arrest’, elaborated by the other poets, would have become an all too disturbing metaphor for his own exile during the dictatorship. So his Helen puts an abrupt halt to the male fantasies, and reveals unsparingly the ordeal of the immortal but ageing diva. With this extra dimension of the poem in mind, let us focus again on the details of Helen’s portrait. Eternal beauty oppresses the Spartan Queen, her stomach muscles clenched, her jaw set in an artificial smile. She would love to have been left to age peacefully, and yet her distorted body terrifies her with its decay. The fatigue of the tales on which her life is built—‘swans, and Troys, and loves, and deeds of valor’— numb her mind. Her past lovers/poets are now old, with white hair, distended bellies and still strangely voracious. She buckles under the eternal, ethereal meanings that weigh on her aged shoulders, meanings that reflect nothing of her own feelings and desires, if indeed anything is left of them inside her. She longs to efface the prestigious, significant memories and return to the insignificant, fleeting images of her childhood. She slips into a terrible seclusion and isolation. If she ever did, she no longer feels part of any family or any community, least of all Sparta. She is shut in, locked in, without ceremonies, without newspapers. The relentless succession of entrapment images might recall Sikelianos’ poem mentioned early in this essay. In his self-centred outburst of adoration he promised he would keep Helen in the church he had built in her honour. Ritsos’ Helen could be seen to be facing the consequences of this honour, in a helpless vigil, day and night, as life gradually but steadily abandons her ruined body and heart. It should not be difficult to see such an iconoclastic discourse as part of the recent trend in modern Greek letters to call into question the classical world. However, Helen’s monologue transcends this framework. In this rare outburst, Helen also exposes the irrelevance of ancient myth to her female concerns, and delivers a vehement complaint about the continuing neglect of female expression in


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classically-inspired literature. It is important to realize, though, that the two indictments in Helen’s monologue are far from unrelated. To return briefly to where this essay started, the Greek fight for liberation fuelled the already idealizing adoration of classical Greece by Romantic Europe. That Greece was pictured as a charming, mellow, slightly languid, somewhat oriental, beautiful but tame woman, like those to be found in the paintings of artists such as Alma Tadema and Frederick Leighton: pleasing fantasies of obedient, domestic bliss. These fantasies no doubt fed into the image of Helen, the exemplary Greek woman, destined for immortality ever since Apollo decreed it in Euripides’ Orestes. The modern Greek poets were not found wanting. I have briefly discussed the quasireligious devotion of modern Greek poetry to Helen. Not only is she the representative of classical Greece in modern times; she is a goddess, a Muse, even the Virgin Mary (as in Sikelianos’ sonnet), a figure floating across centuries and half-dissolving into the vastness of her significance. In Matthew Gumpert’s own words, ‘Perhaps Helen is modern Greece’s Transcendental Addressee, and its Transcendental Memory.’19 And yet, Helen’s devastating indictment, addressed to poets, lovers, and readers through Ritsos’ dramatic monologue, brings this common fate to an end. Ritsos’ Helen has had enough and wants to renounce her crushing transcendence. The oppression of her adoration crushes her. This Helen would die to live, so to speak, as a woman of her (our) time. It is significant, I think, that she does indeed die in Ritsos’ poem, as soon as her monologue comes to a close. ˙ ªıÆŒÆ ŒÆ'Ø Œ%Ø, ÆªŒ!Æ ÆŒı Ø ÆªŒØ %ÆŒØ, ªıº Æº : ˇØ ı%%Ø ÆØÆ, ªÆØÆ, '%ı Æ, ˚Ø ºø Ø% : ˚ÆÆ Æ Ø ªØØ : " `, Æ , ŒÆ, ŒÆØ ŒØ Œ%Æ Œø Æ Æ ı ØÆ ı: ˚ÆØ ºØ ºø: `ÆØÆ ŒØºÆ Ø Æ ıºÆŒ: . . .´ºÆ Œ% Æ %: . . . ¨ Ø %ÆªØ Ø Æ%Æ %, Œ %Æ Æ ı% ı— Æ ªºø Æ—'Æ ªÆÆ ºØ %ØÆ : . . . & Ø ÆÆ ŒÆ ºÆ: `ºı Øø: The woman is sitting in bed with her elbow propped on the little zinctopped table, her chin resting on the palm of her hand. The maids scurry in 19

Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 244.

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and out, screaming and shouting. Someone is telephoning in the corridor. Women from the neighbourhood begin to arrive, keening, hiding objects under their skirts. More telephoning, The police are already on their way up. . . . They lay out the corpse on a bier. . . . The house will remain sealed for forty days, and after that its contents – or what’s left of them – will be sold at auction. . . . Suddenly everything vanishes. Absolute silence. (trans. R. Dalven)

A tortured and protracted life draws to a close. Interestingly, Helen ‘dies’ in the early 1970s, a time that roughly coincides with the period when the uncontested hegemony of classical myth in modern Greek letters is reassessed in a series of imaginative and daring ways. Classical myths are not ignored, but their transcendental meaning is no longer self-evident.20 Even more significantly, poetry appears to lose its traditional privilege (as well as duty) to speak on behalf of the modern Greek collective spirit.21 Somewhat out of favour and one step removed from the collective Greek consciousness, poetry turns its attention to the realms of private life and expression. A so-called ‘private vision’ was dominant in poetry during the 1980s. In an essay on contemporary Greek poetry, John Chioles is distinctly ambivalent about this ‘private vision’ and the poetry that engenders it: ‘The bad news is that [poetry] has virtually become useless to a wider public; it is no longer invested with danger. . . . Post-1974 Greek poetry concerns itself with urban boredom, with highly personal states of mind, with the failure of nerve, with the fragility of urban neuroses.’22 And yet, in spite of such expressions of disappointment, this period boasts some new poetry of remarkable lucidity and poignancy, capable of dissecting with precision and panache the inner space that gradually emerged as a result of 20

See e.g. Dimitris Maronitis, Dialexeis (Athens, 1992), as cited in Karen Van Dyck, ‘Bruised Necks and Crumpled Petticoats: What’s left of Myth in Contemporary Women’s Poetry’ in Mackridge (ed.), Myth in Modern Greek Poetry, 121–30. 21 See e.g. Dimitris Tziovas, ‘i wra tis pezografias kai i eksantlisi tis poiisis’, Porfyras, 47 (1988), 68–71. 22 John Chioles, ‘Poetry and Politics: The Greek Cultural Dilemma’, in Nadia Seremetakis (ed.), Ritual, Power, and the Body (New York: Pella, 1993), 152.


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poetry’s inward retreat. This was by no means an exclusively female coterie.23 However, several talented women poets are prominent in the poetry of this period: Katerina Aggelaki-Rook, Kiki Dimoula, Nana Isaia, Jenny Mastoraki, Rhea Galanaki, among others. Female expression and concerns were by no means unheard of in earlier modern Greek poetry, but the corpus of women poets such as these makes for a gendered discourse of unprecedented range and self-awareness.24 Their gendered conscience often acquires an emphatically anti-establishment expression. Ritsos in some ways comes as close to that anti-establishment, gendered conscience as any male poet could, as his Helen has just demonstrated. His political marginalization maps easily onto the women poets’ sense of periphery. However, there is a significant difference here between Ritsos and these modern poetic voices. Where he appropriates the classical myth for the needs of the present, the women poets in the 1970s articulate a wholesale antipathy towards ancient myth. They seem to want to register a breach with this ever so powerful ideological tool, before they can contemplate ways of engaging with it afresh. Kiki Dimoula sums up the dissatisfaction in ‘The Sign of Recognition’ () ÆÆªø% ø, 1971): ºØ º ŒÆı'Æ ªÆº Æ, ˇ ª! % ø! ªıÆŒÆ Æı'Æ: )ºØ ŒØ %Œ: ` ÆŒ%Ø ÆÆ: ¨Æ%% ŒÆ ø Ø ºÆ% ÆÆŒÆ' Ø Æ 'ı ' Æ ø%Æ Ø% ı , ø Æ%Ø %Æ Æ Ø: ` Œ ŒÆ'Æ%Ø Ø%: Æ Ø 'ªøÆ Æ %ØÆ ı

23

A landmark publication made its appearance in 1971, during the Colonels’ dictatorship, presenting work by six young and largely unknown poets: Katerina Aggelaki-Rook (who was the only one of the six who had already published work), Tasos Denegris, Nana Isaia, Dimitris Potamitis, Lefteris Poulios, and Basilis Steriadis. 24 Karen Van Dyck, Kassandra and her Censors: Greek Poetry since 1967 (Ithaca, NY, 1998), offers one of the most engaging studies of post1967 Greek poetry with special emphasis on the work of three female poets, namely Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki, and Maria Laina.

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Æ Ø Æ% %Ø ˜ % ØÆ % Æ ıª Ø %Ø ı, ØÆ ºÆ%Ø Æ%ªÆ%Æ: : ˆØÆ Æ Æ %ØÆ ı, ı Ø ı ºº ÆØ! ªø%ø, ºø ªıÆŒÆ: ) ºø ªıÆŒÆ ªØÆ ÆØ ºø:

Everybody calls you a statue, I call you a woman. You adorn a park. And you deceive from the distance. Someone might think that you have sat up, recollecting a beautiful dream you have had, ready to dash into living it. But the dream becomes clear once one draws near: Your arms are tied behind you with a marble rope. . . . You cannot weigh in your hand even a rain-drop or a tiny daisy. . . because of your tied hands, which you have had for as many centuries as I know you, I call you woman. I call you woman because you are captive.25

Every classical woman lives in a metaphorical gaol for Dimoula, trapped in forms and meanings created by others for her and in spite of her. From afar, such women are often proverbially attractive, like Helen. But Dimoula knows that their fame is also their prison, immobilized as they are in an expressionless posture that immortalizes their confinement. In a slightly earlier example of the same aversion, Katerina Aggelaki-Rook provides a striking reversal to the pivotal myth of Iphigeneia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. In her ‘Refusal of Iphigeneia’, the young girl dares the unthinkable;26 she refuses to be sacrificed, not because she is afraid to die, but because she cannot see the rationale of men’s military world. She cannot make sense of the necessity of the Trojan War, of so much upheaval in a world of ‘vineyards’, ‘fields’, and ‘olivegroves’, where ‘geraniums grow big and unfettered in wood-carved loggias’. 25

And not just for the modern Greeks: cf. Menelaus in Euripides Helen 703–6, 806–8, 947–9, unwilling to let go the memory of the Trojan War, and Helen in it. 26 Unlike her famous counterpart in Euripides’ homonymous play.


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It is this inflexible but also incomprehensible logic of myth that often seems to frustrate the Greek women poets of this period. These frustrations and the corresponding absence of myth from contemporary Greek women’s poetry emerge centre stage in Karen Van Dyck’s study of some characteristic samples of female poetic discourses from Greece during the last thirty or so years.27 Her explanations for the dearth of myth in these discourses centre on the overwhelming certainties traditionally associated with Greek myth. Myth, she explains, provides explanations for the world and shelters us from the chaos we fear by providing an illusion of external order, even if a disturbing one. Yet myth can also be repressive, for in sheltering us it also seals the fate of the world. For Van Dyck, the contemporary Greek women poets strive to reach ‘the edge of myth’, beyond its repression and towards their own more fluid kind of writing.28 The inflexibility associated with classical Greek myth seems to be peculiarly associated with modern Greek reception. Undoubtedly modern Greek literature has been refreshed and enriched through its intimacy with ancient myth. Yet my commentaries above suggest that this very same intimacy can carry certain penalties. This is all the more apparent when we compare our Greek examples with the reception of classical myth in other national literatures, as indeed we learn from Rowena Fowler’s and Greg Staley’s essays in this volume.29

27

Van Dyck, ‘Bruised Necks’. Christopher Robinson’s ‘Helen or Penelope? Women Writers, Myth, and the Problem of Gender Roles’, in Mackridge (ed.), Myth in Modern Greek Poetry, 109–20, is a study of myth in the poetry of women from an earlier generation such as Zoe Karrelli and Melissanthi. As such it provides an interesting prequel to Van Dyck’s, that follows immediately afterwards in the same volume, as he maps out the challenging dilemmas of the slightly older women who try to blend two conflicting urges in their poetry: their wish to partake of mainstream Greek expression, which traditionally valorized the Greek myth, and their desire to register their dissatisfaction with Greek myth which, they feel, boycotts their efforts to find a personal voice. 29 In Fowler’s study, metamorphosis and shape-shifting, two major drives in classical myth, become positive expressions of women’s aversion to fixity and finality. In Staley’s examination of American nation-building 28

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the modern greek helens And yet, although thwarted, Helen comes back in rather unexpected forms in this body of female poetry. The latest threads of her long history in Greek letters are found in this poetry, and they are invested with remarkable positive energy. Ritsos’ Helen longed for life after the Great War, but she was a figure implicated in grand causes, and so her life in Sparta could only be a crushing delusion, a disappointing aftermath, monotonous and incredibly boring. It could, however, be suggested that such introspective, ‘aftermath’ scenes do not sit comfortably in modern Greek poetry. Most of the greatest modern Greek poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were writing against a background of wars, occupations, and ethnic conflicts. This perpetual state of instability kept Greece in constant and urgent need of a strong front and a robust sense of collective identity that could respond to any immediate threat or danger. Our adoring poets of the 1950s wrote against this background too. Unsurprisingly, the female voice was often suspended in this literature of sustained emergency, whose reflexive reaction was to return to the classical, the secure, the long-established, in a quest of male bonding. But as Ritsos’ Helen ‘dies’, a new cohort of confident female poetic voices emerges. These voices produce the kind of positive meaning that was not available to the Helen of the male poets (including Ritsos), a Helen trapped in grand narratives of the nation. The female personae know how to claim successfully a life ‘after war’, since they build it on a very different foundation. Above all the life they envisage is not framed by a big vision; its ultimate goal has little to do with victory, gallantry, or fame. The ad hoc anthology that follows should be read with the analysis of Ritsos’ Helen suggested earlier in this essay in mind. The excerpts are brought together intentionally; as a whole they can be seen to produce a counter-monologue with concerns strikingly similar to Helen’s. literature, the fantastic elements of myth, broadly alien to the rationalism at the heart of an emergent national psyche, nevertheless feed an alternative dimension of that same psyche, to be valorized in later American (especially feminist) history.


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,Æ ØÆ ÆªÆ Æ Ø!ÆØ ºØ ı ı %Æ Œ ı ! Æ %ªÆ %Ø % Ø Ø ØŒ : ˆ%!Æ Æ ØÆ ØÆØ Æ Æ Œ

Ø % Æ %ÆºØ ŒÆØ Æ Ø % Æ %Ø ø ø ı 'Æº ÆØ Œ : The eyes love to concentrate on tiny folds of the visible world while, inside, the workshop interprets the images . . . As they grow old, the eyes linger on a cloud, a little patch of water that glints, and leads them beyond the beauty of the scenery to a place where the eye is the world. (From ‘Stories of the Eyes’ ( % ÆØ!), in The Triumph of a Steady Loss (ˇ ¨%Æ Æ'% Æ!ºØÆ), 1978, by Anghelaki-Rook)

*** , ŒºØ ı ªŒºØ ÆÆØ Ø ÆØı Æ Ø! ÆÆ Æ % øÆ Æ ØÆ ø Œ%ø, Æ ŒÆ%Ø

ı

Æ Ø Æ%ÆØÆ , Æ º ÆÆ ı ª! ı: ‚Æ Æ%Æ % Æ Æ ' ŒÆØ ŒÆØ ø Æ ÆıØ ŒÆØ ØÆ ıªŒ%Æ

Æ %, %!Ø ı %ı ı ªøØ ı ÆºÆŒ!Ø ŒÆØ ŒØ Œ ıºª : My head gets used to the empty, the walls are emptied from faces, the prints of the nails remain together with the cobwebbed fibres, the delicate threads of my Ego. Wind comes from deep down, restrained but terrible, he eats away the rocks of my pride, or softens and makes the void blessed. (From ‘My Head’ (, ºØ ı), as above)

***

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e fi s pe n tz o u &ºÆ: — ŒØ, Ø: — " Œ Æ , ı ŒÆØ: — " %ŒÆ , ı ıºØØ Æ Æ%Æ%! Ø %' Ø: — " Øª , ı øØ 'ØÆ Ø ªÆØ,

!Ø: — " Œı Æ :

Speak. Say something. . . . Say ‘wave’ as it does not stop, say ‘boat’ which sinks if you overload it with intentions. Say ‘moment’ that cries help as she drowns, don’t save her, say ‘I did not hear’. Drag a word from the night, at random . . . (from ‘The Periphrastic Stone’ (˙ %Ø%Æ ØŒ %Æ) in The Little of the World (, ºª ı Œ ı, 1971) by Kiki Dimoula)

*** ` ªºØ Æ )Øø ı ¨ ÆØ Æ ł%Ø 'Æ ø Æ 'ºÆ Æ Æ ˚ÆØ Æ: & Æ ı ÆØ ØÆ ÆººØ!ØŒ ‚Æ % Æ , % Œ ÆØŒ , : —ºıø, /øÆÆ Æ ºª ŒÆØ ø: If you take me out of this venerable silence of mine, I will be like a dead fish, dragged out of the sea, unburied. Inside, I am a different, starry night, a tree ecstatic, supplicating. . . . I am getting richer, as I get poorer in words and speech. (From the ‘Case of Silence’ (—%ø Øø, 1968) by Maria Kentrou-Agathopoulou)

*** )ı ºø % ø ı ø 'Æ º ŒÆØ ÆØ Æı


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ı ªø% Ø: , ÆØŒ % ø ı: …Ø: % ø ı [ÆØ] `ı %Æ ØŒ % Æ ŒÆØ Æ 'ŒÆ ı%Œ ŒÆ ¯ÆØ ª%Ø % ø ø Æ ø Øª ! I often look at my face as you would look at it, and it is not the face that you had met . . . my solitary face. No, my face is the one with which I went past walking and when I rested nobody was there. It is the rugged face of moments lost. (From ‘The Meeting with a Poem’, )ıÆ Ø Æ, 1982) by Nana Isaia)

*** +%Æ %%ª ŒÆØ º%: ˛%ø . . . ¸ª Æ ºÆ: Æ ÆÆ ø ºıºıØ! Æ Æ%ÆÆØ, — ŒºÆ ªı%Ø ŒºØÆ%Ø ø ÆØ ' ø

Æ Ø ŒºØ º Ø: …Ø, ÆØ ºı : —% Æ º Æ ÆØ ' ÆÆ, Æ Ø ı ŒÆØ ø ººø, ŒØ Æ !% Æ Æ ı Æ % Ø ºÆ %: /'ŒÆ ÆØ ŒÆØ Æ Æ Æ'%!ı: …Ø, ÆØ ºı : ) ø !%Æ ı!Ø: I have been curious and studious. I know. . . a little about everything. . . . The names of the flowers when they wither. . . how easily the padlock of feelings turns with whichever key of forgetfulness. No, I am not sad. . . . I walked for long along the feelings, mine and the others’, and

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there was always space amongst them for the wide time to pass. . . . I was afraid of loneliness and imagined people. . . . No, I am not sad. The night falls at the right time. (From ‘I Have Gone Past’ ‘(—%Æ Æ’, 1971) by Kiki Dimoula, Little of the World collection as above)

*** Writing ‘out of myth, next to myth, at the edge of myth, despite myth’,30 the female poets offer a liberating antidote to Helen’s souldestructive anxieties. Seeking to articulate an identity based on personal and private experience, these more recent voices often define themselves through the present, the tiny details of the everyday, confidently oblivious of the grand scheme of things that so tortured Helen in Ritsos’ poem. They do not panic in an empty room; for them an empty room can be a ‘room of their own’, free of the furnishing of history, where they can write their selves unfettered by the burden of the past. Unlike Helen, who despairs of the servants reading her books with mistakes, these women do not fret about the deceptive accuracy of speech. They are happy with the transience of the words, as they do not feel compelled to trumpet to the world some sacred Truth. Sometimes, they may even discover wealth in silence—where Helen was suffocated by it—as they are not on a mission to represent anything. Unlike Seferis’ classical figures, noted above, they show us the inside of their mask, and confidently demonstrate the others’ ignorance. They acknowledge sorrow in many forms, but they are not sad that the day draws to a close. The new Helen is tentative, and knows how to make sense and construct meaning through incompletion, misunderstanding, instability, and contradiction. She is also not one but many. The old Helen, crushed by the enormity of the expectations built around her, can now be found in many soliloquies, many consciences, many attempts at self-definition. The ‘monologue’ I assembled from fragments (with the outburst of Ritsos’ Helen in the background) indicates that in the contemporary Greek female poets’ idiom, one voice seems to start just as another stops. In their corpus, Helen recognizes parts of herself in the others. Her sense of self is grounded in connectivity and not in defensive isolation. 30

Van Dyck, ‘Bruised Necks’, 128.


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The messages from this metamorphosed Helen resonate broadly. In the context of the new-found political stability that succeeded the dictatorship, Greek myth as a vehicle for collective identity seems to be losing its dominance in recent literature. As political emergencies recede, and more insidious anxieties emerge, the pedigreed certainties of myth fall some way short of responding to an era that is forced to coexist with the undecided. I wonder whether this is not a sign of a growing realization that modern Greek identity and representation is becoming a personal, private matter, free of (as well as deprived of) the assistance of the time-honoured, collective values that supported this identity for so long. If gender plays into this interpretation, it is not a matter of crude biology. Ritsos, deprived of voice and in exile, was clearly able to convey with admirable sensitivity female loss and inner female longings. Yet it may be that women, traditionally deprived of a public voice, are better adjusted to explore this quiet, inner realm, and in doing so they may even have some capacity to change the political landscape. Through the multiple correspondences between Helen’s last monologue and the new monologues of contemporary Greek women poets, we may hear the beginnings of a new story. History might be made, they seem to tell us, without the help of a thousand ships.


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‘This tart fable’: Daphne and Apollo in Modern Women’s Poetry

R o w e n a Fowler Contemporary women poets offer us a serious, engaged, and formally satisfying encounter with classical myth. The past is revealed as a constant presence which the poet must both escape and confront; as Jorie Graham writes in ‘Euridyce on History’: ‘not to touch. j To touch. j For the farewell of it. j And the further replication’ (Swarm, 110). If myth is something we can call on to give voice to our own concerns, it also calls on us to bear it witness; to Eavan Boland the figures of myth appeal directly, ‘crying remember us’ (‘Suburban Woman: A Detail, III’). My essay seeks to account for the continuing vitality of one particular myth by exploring how the story of Daphne and Apollo provides an insight into women’s experience as subjects and makers of poems. I trace a body of women’s writing that keeps faith with its original inspiration while discovering women’s physical, emotional, and intellectual experience at the heart of myth: in the ambiguous relationships of female figure and natural landscape, movement and stasis, aversion and desire. The two poets my essay discusses in detail, Jorie Graham and Eavan Boland, claim the artistic and interpretative powers of metamorphosis: to transform and be

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transformed. In their work, classical myth, as allusion or persona, enables an individual lyric voice to be heard even as it mutes the sense of an intrusively autobiographical speaker. One formulation of the function of myth in modern writing has been to ‘comprehend history, understand violence and question traditions’.1 Myth, as both theme and method, was at the heart of Modernism; its central trope, metamorphosis, shaped and defined Modernist texts from The Waste Land and Ulysses to The Tower and Mrs Dalloway. Male writers turned themselves into trees to find a momentary respite from time and history or to tap for themselves the dryad’s mysterious privileges of access: ‘I stood still and was a tree amid the wood, j Knowing the truth of things unseen before’ (Pound, ‘The Tree’). The prestige and influence of Modernist appropriations remained so powerful that it was difficult for their successors to deploy myth otherwise than ironically or nostalgically. As I have argued elsewhere,2 Virginia Woolf’s sense of exclusion from a classical education gave her a special relationship with the Greek world which was both distant and intimate, a way of thinking about myth untinged by belatedness or irony. Sylvia Plath’s engagement with the classical tradition indicated both an accommodation with Woolf’s distinctive version of Modernism, and a fresh departure. Her recourse to metamorphosis as the source of artistic power may fail her at times (‘On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad’) or, perhaps more disturbingly, run amok (‘On a Plethora of Dryads’), but remains essential to a mature poem such as ‘Tulips’, which, with no explicit classical references, nevertheless grows directly out of the metamorphic tradition. To withdraw into impregnability would be at the same time to retreat altogether from the human condition; should we preserve our virginity at the cost of our humanity? Plath’s now-classic poem of sexual demurral, ‘Virgin in a Tree’,3 finds no comfortable answers in the Daphne/Syrinx myth: 1

Lillian Feder, Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry (Princeton, 1971), 416. On Woolf and metamorphosis see my ‘Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf’s Greece’, Comparative Literature, 51 (1999), 217–42. 3 Collected Poems (London and Boston, 1981); Plath’s poem was written in response to Paul Klee’s etching Jungfrau traümend (also known as Jungfrau im Baum) (Paul-Klee-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum, Bern). 2

.1. Paul Klee, Jungfrau im Baum (Virgin in a Tree), 1903. (Paul-klee-Stiftung, Kunstomuseum

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rowena fowler How this tart fable instructs And mocks!

Feminist scholarship and criticism of the 1970s addressed the ways women seemed to be fixed in myths in attitudes of beauty and blame, the occasion of men’s wars and obsessions. It looked again at the configuration of classical landscapes, whether in the Ovidian tradition (woman transformed into landscape) or in postOvidian metamorphoses of that tradition (landscape eroticized as woman). It questioned the convention whereby women’s bodies provide images for men’s minds. The project for both readers and writers was then (in the words of Margaret Homans) to gain access to ‘the real powers of actual women emerging from male fear and envy’ and ‘to recover women’s voices that have been lost or repressed but only in such a way as to avoid replicating the structures that brought about the repression in the first place’.4 Women were drawn to particular female figures—Persephone, Antigone, Philomela— and to patterns and situations which can be re-written or reversed: ‘it is not Orpheus who turns back to Euridyce, but rather she who turns away from him, because she wants to go deeper into the living cave’.5 They spoke as strong women (Amazons) or vulnerable men (Philoctetes); they tended to prefer Sybils to Muses and to reject the vigil at the loom in favour of the voyage out. Of all mythic patterns, metamorphosis continued to hold out the most allure for women poets, who responded in two broadly distinct modes. On the one hand we can recognize a renewed depth of feeling and a return to sonority and lyricism and to a literate, cultured, readerly style. The characters of the myth may be re-imagined in ways which encourage self-identification without overt autobiographical or confessional reference. Such poems need not be read dramatically or ironically, but neither do they claim to voice a specific or identifiable contemporary personality. In Linda Pastan’s ‘Sacred to Apollo’, for example, there is no available distance between the author and the lyric ‘I’; the poet enters into and expresses herself as and for Daphne: 4

‘Feminist Criticism and Theory: The Ghost of Creusa,’ Yale Journal of Criticism, 1 (1987), 153–82. 5 Gayle Green and Coppe´lia Kahn, Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism (London and New York, 1993), 102.

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. . . I feel the green root of the bay, nourishing or aching with the season.

Louise Glu¨ck approaches the myth from a rather different angle, speaking in a dramatized lyric voice which invests all the poem’s emotion in the bond between Daphne and her father, Peneus, and prompts the reader to look afresh at the rejected and perplexed Apollo: When the god arrived, I was nowhere, I was in a tree forever. Reader, pity Apollo: at the water’s edge, I turned from him . . . (‘Mythic Fragment’)

The second mode of women’s poetry was more directly linked to the rise of feminist criticism and was fuelled by overtly political strategies of reclamation, revision, and impersonation. At its crudest, the result was a particular kind of urgent but often ephemeral and metrically undemanding poem, drawing on the alternative energies of goddesses and Amazons and offering a right of reply to the silent or muted victim. In such poems, as Alicia Ostriker has pointed out, there was ‘no trace of nostalgia’6—but although they made an immediate impact, especially in performance, they do not necessarily stand up well to rereading or reflection. An example might be the early work of the post-Beat poet Anne Waldman, with her invocation to a menacing tutelary Artemis: ‘Command your spike deep in my heart j So I may ride, hunt, speak, shine’ (‘Artemis’). Much of Waldman’s energy has been generated by her relationship to classical literature and myth, which she continues fiercely to oppose and rewrite, as in her rambling epic Iovis: ‘A. needed a woman and caressed a tree’ (‘Letter to Miss Idona Hand’, l. 145). In the last two decades of the twentieth century the two modes have both converged and evolved in unexpected ways. One kind of poem springs from a post-modern fascination with the new disembodied technologies and media: here the tone is cool, wise-cracking, 6

‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,’ Signs, 8 (1981), 68–90.

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much concerned with surfaces and appearances, the language crosscut with fragments of raw information and popular culture. Alice Fulton would be a prime example: ‘While Apollo hardened j with love for her, Daphne j stripped the euphemism from the pith.’7 Fulton’s mythic characters are transformed into aviators and Hollywood stars; with a hick Apollo (‘he called any place outside Parnassus ‘‘Darke County, Ohio’’ ’) and cheerleader Daphne: ‘Give us an A, j Give j us a P! End the yell with a good freeze.’ Other writers, such as Ruth Padel and Jo Shapcott, are also essentially metamorphic in the post-modern mode, deriving an exuberant energy from their sense of the poet herself as shape-shifter. Shapcott’s ‘mad cow’ persona runs cheerfully amok, discovering a happy coincidence in classical myth and topical scandal; elsewhere she gives full rein to her poet’s sense of being able to change form at will, as in the opening poem of My Life Asleep: Watch as I stretch my limbs for the transformation, I’m laughing to feel the surge of other shapes beneath my skin. (‘Thetis’)

These poets have a sophisticated sense of the classical tradition and its contemporary possibilities. Padel herself is a classicist, and it is striking that so many of today’s most interesting and original women poets—Fleur Adcock, Rachel Hadas, Martha Kapos, Anne Carson, and A. E. Stallings, for example—have a formal education in, or a professional academic connection with, classics. Stallings’ Daphne stops her pursuer in his tracks by seizing the initiative in both poetry and magic, invoking the spell of the ancient languages: ‘Poet, Singer, Necromancer— j I cease to run. I halt you here.’ Through a kind of radical scientific punning she returns the botanical terms to their Greek roots:

7

‘A Sequence Reimagining Daphne and Apollo,’ in Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun (eds.), After Ovid (London, 1994); repr. in Sensual Math (New York and London, 1995). On Fulton see Sarah Annes Brown, The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes (London, 1999), 148, and Ovid: Myth and Metamorphosis (London, 2005), 46–7 and 62–3.


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Find then, when you seize my arm That xylem thickens in my skin And there are splinters in my charm. (‘Daphne’)

The story of Daphne and Apollo, played out in very different accents, has a special resonance for contemporary women writers. In thinking about the reasons for its appeal, I have identified and tried to connect four strands: its variety, elusiveness, physical impact, and associations with the origins of poetry and the making of poems. There is no one original of this various and durable myth,8 but a multiplicity of versions and influences, many deriving ultimately from Ovid and mediated through later European literature with its moralized and Christianized traditions, and through the visual and other arts. Where music tends to bring out the pace and movement of the story and its ethereal quality, the iconographic tradition emphasizes a particular moment in the process of transformation; the medium itself—marble, canvas, paint, tapestry—offers a specific gloss on the physical quality of the metamorphosis and the conjunction of body and tree. The meaning of the myth remains elusive, and its interpretations diverse. In what Charles Martindale terms ‘typical Ovidian ambivalence’ there is a fusion of the ‘witty, the erotic and the grotesque’.9 Ovid’s reader is poised between horror and reassurance; like the fellow rivers who rush round to Peneus after his daughter’s transformation we are still unsure ‘gratentur consolenturne’ (Metamorphoses 1. 578)—whether to congratulate or console. Later versions of the story alternate between these possibilities, or leave them unresolved. Women writers and readers, more interested in the struggle within

8

For a useful account of Ovid’s treatment of the Daphne myth see Peter E. Knox, ‘In Pursuit of Daphne’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 120 (1990), 183–202 and 385–6; see also Kathleen Wall, The Callisto Myth from Ovid to Atwood: Initiation and Rape in Literature (Kingston, Ontario, 1988) and Mary E. Barnard, The Myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to Quevedo: Love, Agon, and the Grotesque (Durham, NC, 1987). 9 Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1988), 4.

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Daphne herself than in the struggle for her, have been particularly exercised; becoming a tree is different from becoming a cow or a bear—should we react to it as solace or doom? Daphne’s transformation appears grotesque, freakish, but it may also hold out hopes of regeneration, as Eavan Boland discovers: who fled the hot breath of the god pursuing, who ran from the split hoof and the thick lips and fell and grieved and healed into myth. (‘The Women’)

The myth’s curious mixture of violence and tenderness, which may promote either resistance or healing, is a natural result of the striking conjunction of tree and woman: wind with breath, leaves with hair, limbs with branches, bark with flesh. The woman’s body and voice is enabled to transcend the boundaries of the human, or even the animal, and to enter into a realm of nature without being subject to natural processes. This is one way for a woman to be a poet; Anne Sexton found an uncomfortable but rightful accommodation ‘Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree’: ‘blood moves still in my bark bound veins’. It is also a way for all women to think about their bodies. Metamorphosis helps us to think about aspects and phases of experience (sex, childbirth, old age), in which we conceivably remain ourselves, however odd we might look or feel. James Elkins’s account of the relationship of metamorphosis to pain reminds us that Ovidian metamorphosis is usually painless. Subjects undergoing transformation feel strange (Daphne feels numb and heavy) but in a way which is experienced as thought and idea more than physical sensation: ‘although it is sensual, it does not present itself as a matter of feeling’.10 Elkins emphasizes the Ovidian sense of estrangement from self that is ‘painless and dazzling’. Women, however, may dwell on and internalize physical processes; Anne Carson, in a prose essay included in her volume of poems Men in the Off Hours, writes that in classical myth woman ‘swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is

10 Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 26.


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penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses’. Carson distinguishes women’s ‘pliant, porous, mutable’ boundaries from men’s bounded, and therefore purer, self-definition. If, however, as Charles Segal has suggested, all cyclical changes and physical processes are to be understood as symbolically female,12 the story of the evergreen offers ways for both women and men to confront their own mutability. I would argue that women do in fact, for complex cultural and biological reasons, retain a particular sense of the way experience affects and is reflected in their bodies. Metamorphosis should therefore be best understood as an authentic and continuing experience: shape matters. Here I would follow Marina Warner13 and Caroline Walker Bynum (rather than, say, Judith Butler, who views the self as primarily performative). Bynum emphasizes the integral connection between shape and story: ‘For my self is my story, known only in my shape . . . I am my skin and scars . . . The power of myth demands that ‘‘this really happened’’: the horror and pain come because the wolf was (is?) Lycaon, the tree was (is?) Daphne.’14 The simultaneous and overlapping roles and phases of women’s lives, the metamorphosis of the nubile girl into the ‘spreading’ matron, inform Jenny Joseph’s account of the Daphne myth, in which middle-aged housewives laden with shopping are already the stolid, ignorable, but not ignoble, future selves that the shapely younger girls will one day become: Nobody asks what they have done all day For who asks trees or stones what they have done? They root, they gather moss, they spread, they are. (‘Women at Streatham Hill’)

Joseph’s carefree girls in their ‘grass-green haze’ have as yet no inkling that ‘Like Daphne j Your sap will rise to nourish other things’. The poet’s tone is wry, gently admonitory, assuaging some 11

‘Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity’, Men in the Off Hours (New York, 2000), 130–52, 133. 12 ‘Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the Metamorphoses’, Arion, 5 (1998), 9–41. 13 In Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford, 2002). 14 Metamorphosis and Identity (New York, 2001), 177.

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of the dourness of Plath’s Virgin, bound in her tree ‘Till irony’s boughs break’. The myth continues to carry a special charge for women because of the physical price exacted for their fulfilment through childbirth, and because of their intractable and painful relationship to their ageing bodies; as the African-American poet May Miller wrote when she was already in her eighties: The race is run. untouched Daphne stands a laurel tree . . . Given to the strict wind the seed meets earth to grow the stronger trees, so unlike gods and men weakened in their own increase. Yet none walking the autumn wood can escape the image of Daphne green among bronzed leaves and the wind-blown seed. (‘Laurel Tree’, 1–2, 15–23)

The story of Daphne is also the story of Apollo; it is about courtship and evasion, attraction and fear. One kind of sexual-political reading, resisting the allegorization of rape, would emphasize that it is a story of male violence in which the rhetoric of desire and pursuit, and the purely literary reading of the topos of raptus, mask the actual power relations of men and women.15 Feminists are also uneasy with the argument that women’s suffering in art and myth may be taken to stand for all aspects of vulnerability and helplessness within a universalized human condition. As an emblem of military victory as well as distinction in poetry, the laurel is associated with explicitly male achievements. It brings together, as Leonard Barkan has shown, public triumph and sexual tragedy: 15

See Froma Zeitlin, ‘Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth’, in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (eds.), Rape (Oxford, 1986), 122–51, and Amy Richlin, ‘Reading Ovid’s Rapes’, Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (New York and Oxford, 1992), 158–79. One of the first commentators to read the Daphne myth in terms of a modern response to rape was Leo C. Curran, ‘Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses’, in John Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan (eds.), Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers, (Albany, NY, 1984), 263–86.


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‘A quintessential prop of public Rome is infused through the link of metamorphosis with a private story of unrealized love.’16 Ovid’s version of the myth is an exploration of origins—of a prize for poetic virtuosity that also signals a man’s failure as a lover and a woman’s violent escape from rape. No reader can forget the nightmarish feeling of Apollo’s breath on the back of Daphne’s neck; yet this is the breath which, as wind, draws out the tree’s response. If we follow Joseph Farrell and tease out the pun on the Latin ‘liber’ (bark/book), Daphne has been transformed into text.17 Apollo gets poetry; Daphne becomes poetry. What, then, for a woman poet is the laurel? Although (unlike Syrinx) Daphne is not transformed into a musical instrument for a male player she is still, as a tree moved by the wind, unable herself to originate sound or discourse. Her branches can only be coaxed by the breeze into an ambiguous wordless expressiveness that neither her pursuer nor we can be certain of interpreting: ‘factis modo laurea ramis j adnuit utque caput visa est agitasse cacumen’ (‘the laurel seemed to wave her head in full consent’, Metamorphoses 1. 566–7). (Richard Strauss’s wordless strings in his Daphne, or Britten’s unaccompanied oboe in the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, may be the best ways for this aspect of the myth to find a voice.) Daphne’s grief is beyond the capacity of the woman’s body either to contain or to articulate. Yet this provides a cue for women poets interested in finding images for the ways language might be renewed by being stalled, or stripped to its essences. Martha Kapos, for example, imagines herself as a Daphne whose body goes into ‘abeyance’ for Apollo but otherwise blurts out: I am speaking to you now only through the vocabulary of leaves: (‘Tree Poem for Apollo’).

16

The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven and London, 1986), 85; on the association of laurels, poetry and power see also pp. 209–11 and 225. 17 ‘The Ovidian Corpus: Poetic Body and Poetic Text’, in Philip R. Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds (eds.), Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its Reception (Cambridge, 1999), 127–41, 133.

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Amy Clampitt, in her late poem ‘Syrinx’, moves towards an ideally expressive silence, exploring a range of vocal sound beyond syntax and even beyond consonantal phonetics: . . . pure vowel breaking free of the dry, the merely fricative husk of the particular, (A Silence Opens)

In the poetry of Jorie Graham and Eavan Boland the Daphne myth infuses contemporary encounters with other phases and ways of being, inside or outside the self. Graham’s ‘At the Long Island Jewish Geriatric Home’ (in Erosion, 1983) initially shocks and surprises us by bringing the myth indoors, from the realm of the supernatural and the classical to a setting that is precisely, pathetically, localized. As the poet attempts to prise her grandmother free from a state of senile, bedridden immobility, she recalls a tree that once stood in the old woman’s orchard with a branch shaped ‘exactly j like a woman’: running, one raised thigh smoothed by wind, and hair (really the shoreline where the limb is almost torn away) unraveling. She looks like she could outrun anything, although of course she’s stuck . . .

Now that the sap has dried out and the branch is no longer the conduit of the processes of life, woman and myth are moribund; they remain stuck in the past: ‘in this j memory, j and in the myth it calls j to mind, j and in this late interpretation j stolen . . . ’ The myth is evoked explicitly, and for Graham, rather discursively, though she is uncomfortably aware of her misappropriation; ‘stolen from j a half-remembered tree.’ Although we are supposed to be both reading a text and recovering a body, these operations are not quite simultaneous; the autobiographical story of the grandmother and


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her tree comes first, and remains primary; the myth hangs in the air, secondary and derivative (‘stolen’), though offering perhaps a dry scrap of consolation. In the more recent ‘Prayer (‘‘From Behind Trees’’)’ Graham returns to the mythic potential of the dead or broken tree, this time ‘attempting to enact a realistic description of metamorphosis’,18 by first emptying the landscape of any human or divine presence other than the observing ‘I’. ‘The branchful of dried leaves blown about’, which is the poem’s starting point, may be seen (or not—there are no question marks) as transforming itself into a path, a snake, a drama. ‘Peering,’ the poet tries to position herself in relation to any vestigial immanence in nature: to ‘discern, j how the new gods walk behind the old gods at the suitable distance.’ In Graham’s ‘Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne’ the process of metamorphosis itself gives the poem its shape and subject. A series of numbered cinematic ‘freeze-frames’ (Graham studied film at New York University) suspends the pursuit and holds off the transformation. The numbers are part of the spell; as Mark Jarman puts it: ‘Graham’s use of numbers to separate single lines both suggests sequence and allows her to interrupt sequence with non-sequitur.’19 The title of the volume, The End of Beauty, signifies, at one level, that Graham is suspicious of ends and endings; she locates beauty in the processes of art, not its finished products. ‘The paradigm for this step-by-step process is Penelope unweaving as she weaves’,20 and this is made explicit in one of the other dual self-portraits in The End of Beauty, which alternately spins out and dismantles the distance between Penelope and Ulysses: ‘the shapely and mournful delay she keeps j alive for him’ (‘Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay’, frame 17). The poems become a kind of endless re-enactment, both ceremonial and frightening, of the myths they shadow. ‘Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne’ alternates looking and writing, withholding and releasing energy, and (since all self-portraits require mirrors of some sort) reflects the gaps and resistances that separate 18 Jorie Graham, note on ‘Prayer (‘‘From Behind Trees’’)’, in Never (New York, 2002), 51. 19 Mark Jarman, ‘The Grammar of Glamour: The Poetry of Jorie Graham’, New England Review, 14.4 (1992), 252–61. 20 Helen Vendler, ‘Indigo, Cyanine, Beryl’, London Review of Books, 23 January 2003, 13–15, 13.

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introspection and self-knowledge: ‘she would not be the end towards which he was ceaselessly tending’ (frame 9). Graham here takes the myth of Daphne and Apollo as an ‘allegory of consciousness’.21 The self-portrait ‘recasts personal identity as interpersonal relations’;22 through it the poet’s psyche is revealed not as an integrated unit but as a variety of dramatic tensions and repeated gestures. It pursues the logic of what happens ‘when an intense openness to sensory experience, allied to a fierce regard for the liberty of individuals, confronts the fixed gaze of another’s point of view’.23 The process is gendered in that the male stands for single-mindedness and closure whereas Daphne, in refusing to ‘give shape to his hurry by being j its destination’ seems to inhabit ‘a realm of feminine experience that lies outside of narrative’.24 Yet the process of abstraction and displacement from self can also be taken to stand for any individual instance of self-cleavage; as in the Ovidian Metamorphoses, Graham’s mythic characters, both male and female, experience transformation as essentially self-reflexive. The mythic pursuit is suspended in time and rendered as wordless sound and refracted colour; the self remains visible but cannot be rendered into persona or exemplum: ‘part of the view not one of the actors, she thought, j not one of the instances, not one of the examples’ (frame 14). In spite of the attenuated poetic means—the abstract vocabulary and sparseness of metaphor—the poem is moving and exhilarating. It sets itself the challenge of finding words that ‘catch’ their subject—there is a philosophical and ethical ambivalence in Graham about modes of capture—and of holding a steady gaze that takes in without distorting its subject. Can the subject be seen and desired if it is not caught, not delineated?: ‘and the air all round them neither full nor empty, j but holding them, holding them, untouched, untransformed’ (frame 15).

21 Bonnie Costello, ‘Jorie Graham: Art and Erosion’, Contemporary Literature, 33 (1992), 373–95. 22 Thomas J. Otten, ‘Jorie Graham’s—s’, PMLA 118.2 (2003), 239–53. 23 Peter Sacks, ‘What’s Happening?’, New York Times Book Review, 5 May 1996, 18. 24 James Longenbach, ‘Jorie Graham’s Big Hunger’, Modern Poetry after Modernism (New York and Oxford, 1997), 158–76, 168.


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Graham returns to the Daphne myth in ‘Daphne’ (from Swarm, 2000). Now, in place of the long, roving, self-reflexive lines of ‘SelfPortrait’, we find fragments: short, fractured lines with caesura-like extra spaces between words and extra leading between lines which focus the attention on isolated actions and moments. The trope of the swarm of bees, which shapes the whole volume, brings together unit and multiplicity, identity and collectivity, as Graham attempts to make the boundaries of the poetic self more fluid and expansive.25 Some of the poems are bound up within the volume as ‘The Reformation Journal’ and the figure of Reformation/re-formation hints at the possibility of a Christian reading in spite of (or in addition to) the pervasive allusions to classical myth. In place of the triadic self-portrait, Graham here conjures up Daphne alone and attempts to dismantle her into a re-formed self which is attentive and assenting and which both anticipates and incorporates her sense of an ending: ‘Carry acceptance in you j the aftersound of something felled.’ The poem grows out of a sequence of imperatives enjoining the poet herself to a kind of selfabnegation which is also ultimately a triumph of eloquence: ‘Bend low to your high office. j Lean back j for the leafing-over.’ The other poet I want to discuss, Eavan Boland, also discovers the possibilities of contemporary eloquence in classical myth. Having, through her schoolgirl acquisition of Latin, stumbled across a power in language to which she herself could aspire and which was both ‘moving and healing’,26 she returns in particular to Virgil and Ovid and to the stories of Daphne and of Demeter and Persephone and (more recently) Cupid and Psyche: See as a god sees what a myth says: how a woman still addresses the work of man in the dark of the night: The power of a form . . . And see the difference. This time—and this you did not ordain— I am changing the story. (‘Formal Feeling’, The Lost Land, 65–6) 25

Joanna Klink, ‘To Feel an Idea’, Kenyon Review, 24.1 (2002), 188–201. Eavan Boland, ‘In Search of a Language’, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester, 1995), 75; see also her poem ‘The Latin Lesson’. 26

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Classical myth and metamorphosis have afforded Boland an escape from the Yeatsian re-mythologizing which left Irish women the choice of role of old crone or Helen of Troy—Mother Ireland or Kathleen-ni-Houlihan. Resisting such oppositions, she brings her own life and work together so as to claim for the contemporary woman poet a status as emblematic in its own way as that of the Romantic or Modernist (male) poet. Boland’s work is more directly rooted than Graham’s in autobiographical experience and in her sense of the overlapping existences of poet, mother, daughter, and wife. Her poems typically move between places, historical periods, times of life, and hours of the day, as in ‘The Women’ where, as she goes from kitchen to study, from day to evening, she recognizes ‘The hour of change, of metamorphosis, j of shape-shifting instabilities. j My time of sixth sense and second sight’. Boland’s first Daphne poem, ‘Daphne with her Thighs in Bark’, belongs to the volume Night Feed of 1982 which is full of imagined and actual metamorphoses, especially the physical and mental transformations of women in childbearing and lactation. For Boland a woman’s reproductive life is inescapably metamorphic, though not necessarily calamitous, for, perhaps surprisingly, ‘Appearances j Still reassure’ (‘It’s a Woman’s World’). In ‘Daphne with her Thighs in Bark’ she sees herself as suffering from post-metamorphic stress—a poet who has turned into a housewife, forever fixed in the forest of her suburban kitchen with its scrubbed pine table and branching racks of utensils. Like Plath’s, this is a cautionary reading of the myth. Her advice to the next woman in Daphne’s situation is, punningly, to ‘Save face, sister’. (This rather strained wit is unusual in Boland.) It is the fixity and the finality rather than the domestic metamorphosis itself that the poet deplores. The only trees that people are unequivocally content to be turned into are those of Baucis and Philemon, where, in place of the violence and flux of so many Ovidian transformations there is continuity, slow change and the sense of an ending; Boland has a beautiful poem (‘What Love Intended’) which commemorates a long marriage through the ‘two whitebeams j outside the house gone, with j the next-door-neighbour’. Elsewhere in her work, however, ornamentalized women, trapped in a terrible suspension of life as sculptures or constellations, plead to be made


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human ‘in cadences of change and mortal pain j and words we can grow old and die in’ (‘Time and Violence’). As Boland’s housewife and mother who is also a poet is poised between two worlds, so the suburb, part town, part country, stands for and sustains her hybridity. Although ‘a place where the writ of poetry does not run’, Boland’s Dublin suburb is revealed as a site of unexpected depth and magic, especially at dusk when outer and inner landscapes meet and merge: ‘I could imagine that I myself was a surreal and changing outline, that there was something almost profound in these reliable shadows, that such lives as mine and my neighbours’ were mythic, not because of their strangeness but because of their powerful ordinariness.’27 ‘Suburban Woman: A Detail, III’ is another Daphne poem of unstable outlines and fading definition. In the half-light of an autumn evening the contemporary denim-clad woman senses a mythic past which appeals to us to be acknowledged and remembered: ‘Look at me, says a tree. j I was a woman once like you, j full-skirted, human’. ‘Daphne Heard with Horror the Addresses of the God’ also takes place at dusk—in early summer this time, rather than autumn, and with the conservatory (that liminal space between house and garden) an indistinct and mesmerizing mass of greenery: I thought the garden looked so at ease. The roses were beginning on one side. The laurel hedge was nothing but itself, and all of it so free of any need for nymphs, goddesses, wounded presences— the fleet river-daughters who took root and can be seen in the woods in unmistakable shapes of weeping.

Behind the unrhymed eight-line stanzas, in what Boland would call the ‘metrical shadows’, is the suggestion of a ceremonious ottava rima. The title and the last line of the poem invoke Daphne directly; the second stanza banishes goddesses, nymphs, and river daughters to the woods beyond the laurel hedge. The poet wards off explicit allusion while keeping alive the suggestive power of 27

Eavan Boland, ‘The Woman, the Place, the Poet’, ibid., 168.

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metamorphosis; the dark presences of myth and history are conjured up through an old tale retold, an Irish girl carried off by sea by a man of different race and status. Boland remains alert to the political and material conditions in which myths are made and used; they do not exist, as she once was made to feel women existed and Ireland with its non-classical past existed, ‘Outside History’ (In a Time of Violence, 1994). In stanzas 2 and 3 the wedding and the bride’s journey out to the ship take place off stage, related by the unnamed ‘you’ of the poem while the poet contemplates with satisfaction her well-tended garden. Here, where it might seem ‘The laurel hedge was nothing but itself’, the poet still discerns the shadow and gesture of ‘wounded presences’. Contemporary women’s poetry draws on classical myth with ingenuity and precision. In the work of poets such as Graham and Boland it is discovering a new voice, in which shape-shifting finds its formal correlative in linguistic and metrical transformations and in the creative tension between the poem rooted in the page and poised in flight.

16

Iphigeneia’s Wedding

E l i z a b e t h Cook She had known about the blood. Other girls talked about it and she had seen it—watery smears on the swollen, protruded vulvas of creatures—a sow, a ewe, a bitch. Each time she had witnessed it she’d felt herself tighten in a recoil of anticipated pain. So sore it looked. Then along would come a boar, a ram, a dog—drawn to the scent of this sore place as if it were a dish of food—and mount the squealing creature. Pump babies into her. Blood: sacrifice. They went together. In went the knife, out came the blood; and the blood-sperged earth would sigh in delight and blossom and fruit. Over the space of a year she watched and felt her body ripen, fizz and stir; like the way green grows at the beginning of spring. The haze begins as so quiet a whisper you think you may be imagining it, then the green gathers to a roar until the whole world shouts it. Her breasts swelled and developed a new, exquisite tenderness. Hairs began to grow around her cleft, framing a place she had known little of before but into which she could now place her thoughts. A new centre of gravity; an eye. As powerful in its way as the invisible eye she felt pulsing in her brow whose gaze swept truer and wider than the clear green eyes that others found lovely in her. This eye of her vulva had a gaze and an orbit of its own, though she had not settled into a way of

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interpreting the information it gave her. Two secret eyes: a heaven eye and an earth eye. The data they received was different but of equal importance. She needed them both and treasured a new kind of balance in herself as she negotiated their different claims. She had watched bees as they swarmed together to form what appeared a single creature. The gathering was at first diffuse, then it darkened into a stripe or a swirl (as would cream, poured into another liquid) until a distinct form emerged and the struggles on the periphery seemed accidental. For weeks her body had felt a hive in which individual cells were changing places (as a dark worker bee will clamber over his fellows to enter the centre), constantly moving and regrouping. In her body a new shape forming and she alive in a way which confused her. Then the blood. But the blood was not the answer. She woke up early in the morning and took her hand from between her legs (where lately she had liked to sleep with it) and found it bloody. Yet she had felt nothing—not pain, nor sense of anything issuing from her. It seemed to bear no relation to her. Concluding this (though she could not have said where it did come from if not from her) she closed her legs tightly and returned to a dreamless sleep. When she woke next it was full daylight and she lay in a shallow puddle of blood, the bedding soaked through, her thighs caked and sticky. This was nothing like the blood she had seen on female animals— the blood that showed the males it was time to mate. She had expected that, feared it a little. But this must be something other. Maybe a god had fingered her. Had some brute of a god entered her, having first charmed her into sleep, then pushed his giant way in, leaving her terribly wounded? The absence of pain the one concession his divinity had made. She did not want to tell her mother—a mother who alternated between lavish displays of affection and terrifying, seemingly arbitrary rages. Some inner knowledge—upper eye knowledge—told her that Queen Clytemnestra’s response to her daughter’s quiet bleeding would not be helpful. She felt that her mother would try

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to sweep her up, maybe even dress her up, into some humiliating travesty of womanhood. Only Artemis might help. Though she had never met the goddess —her goddess — in an embodied way, she had recourse to her daily. Artemis was all that her mother was not. Where Clytemnestra loved opulence—her dark beauty set off by rich, deep-dyed fabrics, splendid gold, big stones inset, Artemis loved what was spare—her metal silver, her jewels, if any, moonstones, her colours—those of trees and bark, olives, greens, soft browns. Artemis never advertised her presence whereas Clytemnestra needed always to make her mark. In her presence her daughter had no air and the new earth eye went blind. So Iphigeneia found her place in quietness, in gentleness, in a private discipline. The mother required tribute; the daughter found a path for herself in service, though it was not her mother whom she served. Each time she lit a votive light to the goddess of moon the clear flame that burned within her swelled. Artemis’ aim, the point of her arrow, was an inner aim. It could be found in contemplation and containment. It was containment she needed now. This abundant still-flowing blood breached the limits of her body in a way she did not like. It was so independent of her will, even of her sensation. How act without clear edges? She felt that this spreading was not an honest way in which to relate to the world. Great goddess Artemis. Goddess of dark, of moon, of the inner quest, hear me. Help me to close this wound and make me whole again. She made offerings: fir cones, feathers, the white transparent bones of rabbits. She made libations of icy spring water. Could she reach the source and bathe herself, Artemis would stanch the blood. If she could get there without leaving behind her a trail like a wounded animal. *** Clytemnestra knew she should feel pride when men expressed their admiration for her eldest daughter. But she was accustomed

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to such compliments being for herself. ‘She is as lovely as her mother was at her age’ is not a sentence calculated to gladden a handsome mother. When Agamemnon had said ‘She should have her choice of all the princes of Achaia, as Helen did,’ Clytemnestra replied, ‘She is too young. She is not ready. She prefers climbing trees with boys to the company of men.’ This was not true. Iphigeneia preferred to climb trees on her own. *** When her mother asked to see her she felt sure she must have found out. The bleeding had stopped after a few days but she had watched her blood feathering its way down the stream as if it were a message being carrried. When she buried the bloodied rags that no washing had made clean she felt as if she were burying a small murdered animal; even possibly a child. So, when the call from her mother came, Iphigeneia felt something like guilt—a confusing, unclear emotion which was new to her. When she approached her mother, holding her head high as was her custom, she felt that she was imitating her usual stance. As if the bloody transgression of her limits had introduced duplicity. *** Her mother was in queenly mode. Iphigeneia curtsied. A princess to her queen. ‘Sit here child’, said the queen, patting a thick tussocky cushion next to her. ‘What do you think about getting married?’ Iphigeneia started. Was this to be a punishment for her secret life? First Artemis had rejected her, not healing her quickly when she had asked for it; now her mother wanted to get rid of her. ‘I want to stay here. With you,’ she lied. ‘A wife must leave her family behind and enter her husband’s. My home is here in Mycaenae.’ ‘A girl in your position cannot always choose her destiny. Your father has sent for you. You are to travel to Aulis where the whole


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fleet awaits your marriage. Nothing else will release the winds that will carry them to Troy. Artemis requires you to marry Achilles.’ ‘Artemis?’ She could not disguise her astonishment. That Artemis, the chaste goddess whom she felt she had lost and whom she longed to get back to, should require her to marry! Clytemnestra had expected the astonishment to be at the other name and that was what she heard. ‘Yes, Achilles. Without him we have no chance of victory. And without his marriage to you, they’ll never reach Troy to find that victory. I can understand your amazement. He is said to be out of the ordinary. A wonder. Though in age hardly more than a boy, he is already a big man.’ There was an invitation to something in her mother’s eyes which Iphigeneia did not like. Clytemnestra, a little flushed now, continued. ‘We have no choice in this. The sooner we can reach Aulis, the sooner this can be accomplished. Think what you will need (you are yourself a dowry but your father will provide another). Do you know what it is a wife must do?’ The girl knew exactly what it was her mother was asking, but she did not want to hear it from her. Feeling trapped, she looked sideways, to where the open door framed pale sky. ‘You will have to bear him children. Do you know how it must be?’ ‘I have seen animals’, she replied. ‘I know what to expect.’ Clytemnestra thought how gruff her daughter had become. How awkward. She who so often moved with the grace of a deer. ‘Is your body ready to bear? Has the blood come?’ Shame, like duplicity, is new to Iphigeneia, but now it comes—a hot, dirty sponge thrown at her by a jeering lout. Now she would really like to break away. The rectangle of light at the door calls to her. ‘Oh, that came long ago’, she says, and bolts. *** Agamemnon sent Odysseus and Talthibius to escort them. Talthibius rode ahead, bearing a splendid azure flag.

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The journey to Aulis took five days. She knew it was coming to an end when she smelt salt on the air. She tasted it with a quickening appetite. When they came to a sheltered stream, she insisted—with a command that surprised her—that they stop and set up camp.

‘We are nearly there, madam,’ said Talthibius. Your husband and the entire Greek fleet are waiting for you.’ ‘Then I must be ready to meet them,’ she replied. ‘I must meet them as a princess, not a dusty traveller who looks like a suppliant. I need to bathe, dress, prepare.’ Odysseus’ response was suave. ‘Forgive me. I’m just a brute of a soldier, ignorant of the needs of women. We will rest here during the morning—will that be enough?—then we will all be your servants.’ Iphigeneia bathed alone. No blood issued now and it seemed to her strange that it ever had. She felt herself sealed, complete. The idea that a man would soon enter her seemed an impossibility. Both inner eyes had stopped receiving and she was left without knowledge or instinct while at the same time her senses were alive, ready to receive whatever came. She could not quite believe that Artemis wanted this marriage and, when she prayed to the goddess, she felt no answering clarity. Yet at this moment she was clear; not clear about anything, ignorant as she was of what was to come, but clear as a blade of grass is clear, or dew on a leaf. Simple. After she had bathed, she oiled herself, wondered how it would be to have hands other than hers or a maidservant’s do this; felt her body reach out to meet the imagined stranger’s hands. Then she dressed in the white, gold-edged robe she had chosen. Only then did she show herself to the others. She took the reins as they rode into Aulis. The sight of the two thousand ships tethered restively in the bay was completely unexpected. The scale and reality of the expedition shocked her with its predatory intent. At her entry a hush fell on the troops. She felt the anxiety of their waiting as if it were a membrane about to burst.

Did this adventure of marriage always require that a daughter betray her father?


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Her father embraced her with tears. ‘Don’t think you’ll be losing me, father. I will always be your child.’ At which words Agamemnon wept the more. Clytemnestra had also availed herself of the halt to make herself fine. She had not seen her husband for weeks and, though she knew his bed would have been well supplied, she hoped his edge might also be keen. She wanted her splendour to shock him so that he would long to be alone with her. But he barely glanced at her. It was only their daughter he saw. She knew that Iphigeneia had always been more beloved to him; she felt herself to be ugly and ridiculous with her big jewels and heavy perfumes, her vivid rustling garments. She looked at her child, straight and simple as a crocus, and felt that her own body was becoming its tomb, her flesh coarse as boar’s meat, dark, pungent, an adult taste. Not one that her husband craved. In a voice of frigid civility she asked, ‘When is our child to meet Achilles? At which Agamemnon collected himself. ‘Soon. Soon. All is being made ready.’ And again he clasped his daughter to him and would have stayed like this—stroking the head which was crammed into the hollow beneath his shoulder—if Odysseus had not insisted, ‘Sir, the troops are eager to see your daughter and the full rites performed. Only by giving your daughter in this way will the fair winds we need be provided.’ ‘I am anxious’, said Clytemnestra, ‘to meet our new son.’ *** Now she was here and the sea air plucking at her senses, Iphigeneia’s seeing had come back to her. She saw how her mother was with Odysseus: a kind of habit of conquest, a desire to make every man want her regardless of what she wanted with him. Doubtless her mother would be like this with Achilles too. The thought made her flush with a sense of possession that surprised her. She did not want to be delivered like a gift. She wanted to see him first, unobserved by others. She wanted to see him before he had seen her.

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‘Talthybius, will you show me him?’ The herald shot a glance at Odysseus who returned the slightest of nods. ‘Go on then, but not for long.’ She put on a dun-coloured cloak which completely covered her bright dress. With her face scarved against the wind she could have been any one of the women who provided the camp. Talthybius took her to a small corral where Achilles was grooming his horses, polishing the coat of a tall grey till it gleamed like the pelt of an immortal. The man also seemed to gleam with a strong radiance. This is the man that Artemis has chosen. How could she not have wanted him for herself? What goddess would not choose such a man, beautiful and powerful as the swiftest, finest animal can be and as a human seldom is? As lacking in guile as an animal too. She watched the sure way his large hands swept over the horse’s flanks. That this man would be hers to touch, to caress; that she would be his. This was the culmination which her body had been humming its way towards. A hum which now wanted to burst into song. Into flame. The glory of it! But Clytemnestra, uninvited, had followed. For some minutes she had stood beside her daughter and the herald, admiring the way the man in the corral handled the horses. Then, not content with silence, she lifted the barrier and entered. The horse immediately shied and Achilles turned on the intruder with fury. He did not recognize his commander’s wife but Iphigeneia felt it would have made no difference if he had. ‘That was a stupid thing to do. You wouldn’t want to fall under these hooves.’ For a moment Clytemnestra looked vexed, but she summoned a coquettish smile. ‘Forgive me for the intrusion. But as your future mother I have to meet you.’ Alarm now mixed with anger on Achilles’ face. ‘I already have a mother’, he said. ‘And when you marry my daughter you will acquire another. That is the way.’


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He did not even glance at Iphigeneia. Instead he glared at Clytemnestra. ‘What makes you think that I’ll marry your daughter? When I marry, I will do the choosing. Not even my own mother can tell me who it should be.’ Now Clytemnestra stopped smiling. ‘We have travelled day and night, at Agamemnon’s bidding, to be here so that you can be married to our daughter as Artemis commands. How dare you insult us and the gods.’ ‘Then Agamemnon should consult me before dragging me into his plans.’ Iphigeneia tightened her cloak as if it could lessen the smart. Could she have done so, she would have wrapped herself up into a cocoon so as to become invisible, and burrowed the cocoon into the earth where her humiliation and hot anger might be calmed in darkness. She wanted only to be away from them all. ‘Let me alone. I need to pray. I will be safe.’ This time as she picked her way through the confusion of the camp she hardly noticed the soldiers, snarling with boredom and impatience to see war, and they paid no attention to her—a drab and muffled figure who protected her face from the sand in the wind as they all must. The wind that had so long kept the fleet from sailing made progress hard as she approached the shore. The sky was messy with gulls, their cries, like the soldiers’, smothered by the gale. She came to the harbour: row on row of dark ships rising and falling, clashing and jostling, the empty rigging making a highpitched clatter like the drumming of the beaks of the slim, hungry birds the ships resembled, pecking at the sea. She wanted to be free of them too, to get beyond the harbour with its men and women clamouring and making claims. She wanted to be herself again, not a chattel to be traded. She heard what Achilles had said and recognized its rightness. She too would choose. If denial was her only choice, then she would deny. At the edge of the harbour there were rocks. She clambered over these and crossed a small beach to where the cliff thrust itself out into the bay. She climbed the cliff, bloodying her hands, then hauled

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herself over the lip at the edge of the turf. A gorse bush, still hanging on to its yellow flowers in spite of the wind, gave her some shelter as she sat, shaking at first from the effort of climbing. She looked back at Aulis. From her beacon point she caught little parcels of sound from the camp. They tugged at her, then let her go. She imagined death might be like that at first—little gusts from the world of the living which were then snatched away. Like the thought of a future as Achilles’ wife; for a few brief moments she had been busy with it, then the wind tugged it away and she knew it had never been going to be. Sadly, for she would have liked to have experienced a warmer, more human destiny, she made her way back. Her light was so contained now, her inner being so quiet, that even if her cloak had fallen, no one would have noticed her retrace her steps. *** When she returned to the camp Achilles was there. Did he now, after all, want her? A spasm of hope pierced her calm. Clytemnestra was with him. Their expressions showed there was to be no rejoicing. They greeted her in silence and Iphigeneia could see that her mother had been weeping. The queen embraced her, holding her tightly, rocking her, kissing her head and crying while Achilles looked on. ‘Lady’, he said at last, ‘I have come to offer you my service. We have both been the victims of a trick. You were brought here, not, as you believed, to be my wife (I knew nothing of this) but to be a sacrifice. I have been used as bait to fetch you so that Artemis can have you.’ Iphigeneia went very white but she remained standing and did not shake. Her mother’s serious grief was new to her, she had had no idea that her mother was capable of such feelings or that she, her daughter, could provoke them. It touched her—made her almost feel the elder, wanting to be the comforter. And Achilles, she felt from his look that he might now choose her. She had very little interest in the expedition to Troy and little doubt that the pursuit of Helen was a pretext. Men went to war when they chose to; they would always find a reason. To her it would be no tragedy if the fleet never sailed.


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But Achilles had said so that Artemis can have her. The words resonated inside her and seemed to open a highway in her body to a future she could claim. The goddess had not failed her. The connection she had thought lost had guided her to this place. Achilles was telling her how he had learnt of the plot from one of his soldiers. (That they should know and not he!) Calchas had divined that the fleet would never sail—that Artemis would keep them there, wind-bound at Aulis—till Agamemnon had given his beloved first-born child, not as priestess or bride but as sacrifice. ‘Then let Artemis keep us at Aulis!’ And let him become husband to Iphigeneia and defend her from anyone who would harm her. Why should Menelaus’ hurt pride count for more than the life of this princess? ‘I will talk to my men. With the Myrmidons to defend you you’ll be safe.’ Taking Iphigeneia’s silence for consent, he bowed to her, and left. Daughter and mother sat for some moments in silence, each absorbed in imaginings that amounted almost to plans. Each resting in the spreading silence. Then Clytemnestra spoke. ‘If he kills you, I will kill him.’ The silence returned and the words spread out into it. There was nothing extravagant in them. They named only the truth. The two inner eyes—the heaven eye and the earth eye—were both wide open. From their different perspectives they saw the same scene and between them held it firm. They saw the blood flow from Iphigeneia’s death and Agamemnon’s shocked, astonished face, his child unable to protect him. Now, as never before, Iphigeneia found something to admire in her mother; another kind of being than herself, but brilliantly so. She was glad she had reached this point where she could appreciate the woman who had made her. Now she looked steadily at her, able to bear the intensity of the returning gaze. But she knew that her mother would never understand the path that was forming inside her, the royal road along which Artemis had already begun to guide her. Easier to let her mother think she would accept Achilles’ offer. The saffron wedding garment which they had

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carried with them from Mycaenae, branches of hyssop and juniper between its folds to scent it, had been laid out in readiness earlier that day. It was time to prepare for the altar. Like any other daughter, she would ask her mother to help her.

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Doh er ty, L., ‘Tyro in Odyssey 11: Closed and Open Readings’, Helios, 20 (1993), 3–15. —— Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey (Ann Arbor, 1995). —— Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth (London, 2001). Do n i g e r, W., The Bedtrick (Chicago, 2000). Do n o ug h o, M., ‘The Woman in White: On the Reception of Hegel’s ‘‘Antigone’’ ’, Owl of Minerva, 21.1 (1989), 65–89. Du Bo i s, P., Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago, 1988). Du p r e´ , J., ‘Metaphysical Disorder’, in Peter Galison and David J. Stump (eds.), The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford, Calif., and London, 1996), 101–17. Duroux, F., ‘Antigone une politique de l’e´thique’, in N-Autonomova et al. (eds.), Lacan avec les philosophes (1991), 37–41. Du s s a n e , B., Notes de theáˆtre, 1940–1950 (Paris, 1951). Ebert , T., Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism (Ann Arbor, 1996). Eg e r, E., ‘Representing Culture: ‘The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain’ (1779)’, in Eger et al. Women, Writing (2001), 104–32. —— Grant , C., O Ga l l c h o i r, C., and War burton, P., Women, Writing and the Public Sphere: 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2001). Elkins , J., Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford, Calif., 1999). El s h t a i n , J., ‘Antigone’s Daughters’, Democracy, 2 (1982) 46–59. Ende , S., Keats and the Sublime (New Haven and London, 1976). En g e lm a n , E. (ed.), Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna 1938 (New York, 1972). En g e ls , F., Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. E. Leacock (London, 1972). Enloe , C., Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London, 1983). —— Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley, 2000). Et ti n g e r, B., Matrix Hala(a)—Lapsus: Notes on Painting (Oxford, 1992). —— ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, Differences, 4.3 (1992), 176–208. —— ‘The Becoming Thresholds of Matrixial Borderlines’, in G. Robertson (ed.), Travellers’ Tales (London, 1994), 38–62.

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Fowler, R., ‘Genealogical Thinking, Hesiod’s Catalogue, and the Creation of the Hellenes’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 44 (1998), 1–19. —— ‘Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf’s Greece’, Comparative Literature, SI (1993), 217–42. Fr a e n k e l, E., Aeschylus, Agamemnon (Oxford, 1950). Fr e d e r i c k s, S. C., ‘Greek Mythology in Modern Science Fiction’, in W. Aycock and T. Klein (eds.), Classical Mythology in Twentieth Century Thought and Literature (Lubbock, Tex., 1980). Fr e e l a n d, C. (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (University Park, Pa., 1998). Fr e u d, S., et al. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., trans. and ed. James Strachey (London, 1953–74). Fr e y, H.-J., Interruptions, trans G. Albert (Albany, NY, 1996). Fu l t o n, A., ‘A Sequence Reimagining Daphne and Apollo’, in M. Hofmann and J. Lasdun (eds.), After Ovid (London, 1994); repr. in Sensual Math (New York and London, 1995). Fu r l e y, W. D., ‘Praise and Persuasion in Greek Hymns’, JHS 115 (1995), 29–46. Gailla rd, P., ‘Pie`ces Noires. L’Antigone du de´sespoir’, La Penseé, Oct.– Dec. 1944. Ga l e , M., Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge, 1994). Galison , P., and Stump , D. (eds.), The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford, Calif., and London, 1996). Ga l l o p , J., Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction (Hong Kong, 1982). —— Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1985). —— Thinking through the Body (New York, 1988). Ga m w e l l , Ly n n , and Wel l s, Ri c h a r d, Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities (New York, 1989). Garber, M., and Vi c k e r s, N. (eds.), The Medusa Reader (New York, 2003). Gi b s o n, W., Neuromancer, (New York, 1984). Gi g n o u x, H., ‘Revue de theáˆtre’, Cassandre, May 1946. Gi lb er t, S., and Gubar, S., The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979). Gi ll m o r e, I., Angels and Amazons: A Hundred Years of American Women (Garden City, NY, 1933). Gl a s e r, K., ‘Blutsbande und Staatsgewalt in der ‘‘Antigone’’ des Sophokles’, Die Alten Sprachen, 3 (1938), 105–12.

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Gl u¨ ck, L., Firstborn (New York, 1968). Gold, B., ‘ ‘‘But Ariadne Was Never There in the First Place’’: Finding the Female in Roman Poetry’, in Rabinowitz and Richlin (eds.), (1993) Feminist Theory and the Classics, 75–101. Goldh ill , S., ‘Exegeisis: Oedipus (R)ex’, Arethusa, 17 (1984), 177–220. —— Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1986; 2nd edn. 1988). —— ‘Reading Differences: The Odyssey and Juxtaposition’, Ramus, 17 (1988), 1–31. —— Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (Cambridge, 1995). —— ‘Greek Drama and Political Theory’, in C. Rowe and M. Schofield (eds.) The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge, 2000), 60–88. —— Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2002). Go l d s t e i n , J., War and Gender (Cambridge, 2001). Go m e z , L., An Introduction to Object Relations (London, 1997). Go o d w i n, W., A Greek Grammar (London, 1974). Gord on , P., ‘Some Unseen Monster: Rereading Lucretius on Sex’, in D. Fredrick (ed.), The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body (Baltimore, 2002), 86–109. Go s s m a n, L., Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago, 2000). Grah am, J., Erosion (Princeton, 1983). —— The End of Beauty (New York, 1997). —— Swarm (New York, 2000). —— Never (New York, 2002). Grant , C., ‘The Choice of Hercules: The Polite Arts and ‘Female Excellence’ in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Eger et al., Women, Writing (2001), 75–103. Graves , R., The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London, 1952). Gr e e r, G., Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (London, 1995). Gr i f fi n , S., Women and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New York, 1978). Gr o s s , P., and Levitt , N., Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore and London, 1994). Gr o s s v o g e l , D., The Self-Conscious State in Modern French Drama (New York, 1958).

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He i l m a n n , A., ‘Re-visionist Uses of Classical Myth in Mona Caird, Vernon Lee and Amy Levy’, forthcoming in Historicising Sexual Politics: Victorian Engagements with the Past, special issue of Victorian Review guest-edited by Ann Heilmann. He r z f e l d, M., Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece (Austin, Tex., 1982). Hi g g i n s , L., and Si lv er , B. (eds.), Rape and Representation (New York, 1991). Hi g h e t , G., The Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1949). Hi l l , M., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist 1860—1896 (Philadelphia, 1980). Hi l l i s Mi l le r, J., On Literature (London and New York, 2002). Ho bbs, R., Lee Krasner (New York, 1999). Ho d g e s, A., Alan Turing: The Enigma (London, 1992). Ho fm a n n, M. and Lasd un , J. (eds.), After Ovid, (London, 1994). Ho lt o n, G., Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1973). Ho man s , M., Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte¨, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, 1980). —— ‘Feminist Criticism and Theory: The Ghost of Creusa’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 1 (1987), 153–82. hooks , b., Ain’t I a Women: Black Women and Feminism (London, 1982). Hu n t e r, R. (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge, forthcoming). Hu s t o n , N., ‘The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes’ in S. Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 119–36. Hu t c h i n g s , K., Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Oxford, 2003). Hu x l e y, G., Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). Ir i g a r a y , L., Speculum of the Other Woman, trans G. Gill (Ithaca, NY, 1985). —— This Sex which is Not One, trans. C. Porter (Ithaca, NY, 1985). —— ‘Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, ‘‘Diotima’s Speech’’ ’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY), 20–33. —— ‘The Universal as Meditation’, in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G. C. Gill (New York, 1993).

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INDEX Note: page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Ettinger on 92–3, 95–6, 101, Achilles 47–9, 65–6, 223 102–3, 110–12, 115 Cixous’ identification with 49, as fascist heroine 165, 181–2 58, 59–60 Hegel on 124–5, 127–8, 143, Achilles (Cook) 1–2, 47–9, 61–4 158 Adams, J. 224 Irigaray on 133–8 Aeschylus 338 and kinship 95–7, 99–100, 104, Agamemnon 189, 197–8 107–8, 110–11, 127–9 Oresteia 149–50 Lacan on 97–9, 122–33, 137–8 Prometheus Bound 275 Antigone (Anouilh): Aggelaki-Rook, K. 372, 375 fatalism of 170–2, 173–4 Alcman 350 and Nazism 178–82 Amazons 210 n. 4, 218, 228–30, opening lines 170–1 292–3 Second World War America 209–30 reception 166–9, 178–83 as analogy for Woman 210–11, Sophocles, comparison 212–13 with 169–78 myths and 226–30 Antigone (Sophocles) 151–3, Whig Society 224–5 156–8 Ames, F. 223 Anouilh, comparison Aeneas 223 with 169–78 Anouilh, J. 166–78 opening lines 145–6, 169–70 bonheur 179–80 Apollo 149–50, 336 and Daphne 385–7, 390–1, and political resistance 166–8 and Vichy regime 178–82 393–4 anthropology 297–301 Apollodorus 308, 320–1 anthropomorphism: Apollonius Rhodius 280 of Nature 260–2, 264–7, 270, archaeology 83, 239 272–3 Arete 303, 313–15 in science 242–3, 247, 250, 252 Aristophanes 342–3, 349 Antigone 11, 91–112, 116, 117, Aristotle 26, 144 141–6, 156–61 artificial intelligence 276, 277, 279 Butler on 144–5, 159–6 Asclepiades 340

438

in d e x

Aske, M. 64–5 Atalanta 315–16 Athena 278, 313–14 atomism 241–3 Epicurean 241, 243–7, 249 Lucretius 269–73 Austin, N. 205–6 automata 277–81 Barkan, L. 390–1 Barlow, J. 223 Barry, J. 334–5 Beauvoir, S. de 45–6 Bernie`res, L. de 189–90 Bertgang, Zoe¨ 83, 84–5 biology 233–4, 238–9, 242 n. 22, 251 Blade Runner 282 Bluestocking Circle 331 Boland, E. 353–4, 381–2, 388, 392, 395–8 Bradstreet, A. 346 Brasillach, R. 181 Brodsky, J. 341 n. 21 brotherhood 146–7, 148, 154–5 Buci-Glucksman, C. 115 Bude´, G. 215–16, 217 Bulfinch, T. 226–7 Butler, J. 7, 93, 111, 121, 165 on kinship 144–5, 159–60 Buxton, R. 158, 280 Bynum, C. W. 389 Carson, A. 388–9 castration 22–34, 38, 39–42 Catalogue of Women: authorship 304, 306 courtship narratives 315–17, 318–24 focalization, feminine 318–25 focalization, masculine 315–18

genealogical content 305–6, 307–10, 313–15, 320, 322 gods, encounters with 320–5 Odyssey, comparison with 303–4, 312–15, 320 texts of 304–5 Centaurs 292–3 Chanter, T. 134, 136–7 Chioles, J. 370 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 224 Cifuentes, D. 282 Cixous, H. 5, 8, 12–14, 49–50, 228 antiland 219–26 Dark Continent 209–10, 211 ećriture feminine 3–4, 60, 270, 273–4 on reader identification 49–50, 51–2, 58–61 self-discovery 213–15, 217, 218–19 utopianism 4 Clampitt, A. 392 Clayton, J. 282 Cle´ment, C. 217 Clouds (Aristophanes) 342, 343 Clynes, M. 277 Columbus, C. 212, 216 n. 19, 229 Conkey, M. 239 Conrad, J. 190 consciousness/ unconsciousness 133–8 psychoanalysis and 61–2 Cook, E. 1–2, 47–9, 61–4, 399–410 Cooper, J. F. 226 n. 45 courtship 315–17, 318–24 Cratinus 343–4 Cronus 31, 32, 34–5, 38–41 cyborgs 281–94 feminism 287–92

in d e x Frankenstein’s monster 276, 277–8, 282 Hephaestus’ automata 277–81 Oncomouse2 276–7, 290 Talos 275–6, 279–81 Daly, M. 291 Daphne 382–8, 389–95, 396–8 in Boland 388, 395–8 in Graham 392–5 daughters 148–9 Dawkins, R. 247–9 day-dreams 45, 54–5 De Officiis (Cicero) 224 De Rerum Natura (Lucretius) 254–74 atomic theory 269–73 death, philosophy of 264–8 individuality 264–9 Nature, anthropomorphism of 260–2, 264–7, 270, 272–3 penetration 269–70 death 100–3, 110, 115–17, 258 Lucretius’ philosophy of 264–8 Demodice 321 Derrida, J. 148, 158–9 DeShazer, M. 346 Dick, P. K. 282 dike 127, 129, 177–8 Dimock, G. 76, 79 Dimoula, K. 371–2, 376, 377–8 Dio Chrysostom 309–10 Diodorus 228 Dioscurides 353 Doherty, L. 10, 46, 47, 216 Doniger, W. 307 n. 31 dreams 54–5 Dupre´, J. 241–2 Ebert, T. 288 ecofeminism 291

439

ećriture feminine 3–4, 60, 270, 273–4 Eger, E. 334, 335 Electra 148–9, 150–1, 153–6 Electra (Euripides) 149 Electra (Sophocles) 153–6 Elkins, J. 388 Ende, S. 66 n. 44 Engelman, E. 74–6, 75, 77 Epicurus 263 atomism 241, 243–7, 249 essentialism 94 Ettinger, B. 102 After the Reapers 112–14 on Antigone 92–3, 95–6, 101, 102–3, 110–12 Autistworks 114 Eurydice 114–15 Eurydice no. 17 113 on matrixial 86–7, 94, 95–6, 105–12, 115–17 metramorphosis 110, 115 Euripides 26, 149, 321, 348–9, 358 Trojan Women 195–201, 207 Eurydice 114, 117 Everett, E. 227 Faraone, C. 278, 279 fascism 163–86 Antigone as fascist heroine 165, 181–2 feminine: specificity of 90, 94, 103–5 theories of 88–90, 94 Fowler, D. 245 Fowler, R. 308, 310 Fox Keller, E. 235–7, 248, 250 Fraenkel, E. 197–8 Frankenstein (Shelley) 276, 277–8

440

in d e x

Freud, S. 70 n. 6, 121–2, 210 n. 3 antiquities’ collections 76–8, 78 consulting room, Vienna 74–8, 75, 77, 78 on Cronus 31, 32, 34, 35, 38–41 culture, role of 73 day-dreams 45, 54–5 delusions 84 dreams 54–5 on femininity 85–6 on Jensen 83–5 masculinity complex 43–4 phantasy 53–5 recapitulation theory 37 sexual difference 22–6 sexuality, female 22–4, 42 sexuality, infantile 34–8 on Zeus 32–4 Frey, H.-J. 306 Frogs (Aristophanes) 342–3 Fulton, A. 386 Furley, W. D. 336 Gaillard, P. 182 Garber, M. 13 genealogical traditions: ancient Greek 305–6, 307–10 women and 310–15 Gillmore, I. H. 228–9 Gilman, C. P. 229–30 Glu¨ck, L. 385 Goethe, J. W. von 158 Gold, B. 5 Goldhill, S. 205, 206 Gomez, L. 66 Gradiva (bas relief) 81–3, 82 Gradiva (Jensen) 83–5 Graham, J. 381–2, 392–5 Grassie, W. 282 Graves, R. 328–9, 352 n. 40 Greer, G. 12, 330–1, 352

Gumpert, M. 357, 369 Guyomard, P. 130–1, 132 Hall, E. 343 Hall, J. 308–9 Halperin, D. 344 Haraway, D. 235 n. 4, 249, 250, 252 on cyborgs 275, 281–94 Harrison, J. 68–9, 69, 71–4, 80 n. 18, 81 Hassan, I. 282 Hawthorne, N. 227 Hayles, K. 284 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 190 Hegel, G. W. F. 184 Antigone, reading of 124–5, 127–8, 143, 158 on sexual biology 135 sexual difference 143–4 on women, subversive activity of 136 Helen 316–17, 356–9 as bitch 203–5 in Dimoula 371–2, 376, 377–8 in modern Greek poetry 359–66, 367–72, 374–9 in Panagiotopoulos 359, 367–8 in Ritsos 362–5, 367–8, 369–70, 374 in Sikelianos 359–60, 367–8, 369 in Sinopoulos 360–2 and war 316, 317, 195–207 and weaving 201–3, 205 Helen (Euripides) 358 Hephaestus 275, 278–9 Hercules 221–2, 224–5 Herodotus 211, 226 Herzfeld, M. 355 n. 1

in d e x Hesiod 147, 148–9, 210, 211–12, 222–3 and Catalogue 304, 323, 338 Hesperia 211, 216 Hillis Miller, J. 50–2 Ho¨lderlin, F. 146 Holton, G. 237 n. 9 Homans, M. 384 Homer: automata 278–9 Iliad 148, 201–5, 278, 316, 338, 358 Odyssey 146–7, 205–7, 278, 303–4, 312–15, 320, 358 hooliganism 142 identification 46–9 Cixous 49–50, 51–2, 58–61 Hillis Miller 50–2 Keats 48–9, 52, 63–5 Iliad (Homer) 148, 201–5, 278, 316, 338, 358 incest 30, 105, 130–2, 146 Lacan on 130–1 Ingres, J. D. 77–81, 78 Ion (Euripides) 26, 321 introjection 52, 53, 56–7 Iphigeneia 148–9, 268–9, 372 ‘Iphigeneia’s Wedding’ (Cook) 399–410 Iphimedia 320–1 Irigaray, L. 4, 5–6, 89, 91 on Antigone 122, 133–8, 159, 160 on Ismene 141–3 on kinship 144 on (un)consciousness 133–8 Isaacs, S. 53 n. 17 Isabella of Spain 218 Isaia, N. 376–7 Ismene 100, 146, 151–3, 156–60

441

in Anouilh 172–3 Irigaray on 141–3 Janko, R. 304 n. 21 Jarman, M. 393 Jebb, R. 185 Jefferson, T. 213 Jensen, W 83–5 Joseph, J. 389–90 Julien, P. 133 Jupiter 262 Kapos, M. 391 Kauffmann, A. 331, 332–3 Keats, J. 61–4 and reader identification 48–9, 52, 63–5 Keegan, J. 191–2 Keith, A. 269 n. 28 Kentrou-Agathopoulou, M. 376 Kierkegaard, S. 157 kinship 70–1, 141–61 Antigone 95–7, 99–100, 104, 107–8, 110–11, 127–9 brotherhood 146–7, 148, 154–5 Butler on 144–5, 159–60 daughters 148–9 and gender roles 150–1 Irigaray on 144 motherhood (as parenthood) 149–50 sisterhood 145–6, 147–8, 151–60 sisters and brothers 149–53 and social order, breakdown of 33 n. 22 Kirk, G. 338 Klarer, M. 212 Klein, M. 52, 55–7 Kline, N. 277 Knights (Aristophanes) 343

442

in d e x

Lacan, J. 70 n. 6, 87, 102, 139 on Antigone 97–9, 122–33, 137–8 on incest 130–1 psychoanalysis, ethics of 122–33, 137 pur de´sir 125–33 Lattimore, R. 204–5 Laubreaux, A. 180–1 Lazarus, E. 220–1 Lefkowitz, M. R. 310 n. 38 Leonard, M. 4, 58 Levinson, M. 64 Lewontin, R. 239 n. 14 Library (Apollodorus) 308, 320–1 Likierman, M. 57 Loraux, N. 124, 125–6, 337–8 loss 264–8, 339 Lucian 309 Lucretius 238 n. 10 atomism 269–73 De Rerum Natura 254–74 on Epicurean atomism 241, 243–7, 249 Lyons, D. 309 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 349

Maximus of Tyre 319, 351 Medea 275–6, 280, 348, 349 Medea (Euripides) 348–9 Medea (Seneca) 216 n. 19 medicine, gender bias in 236–9 Melanippe the Wise (Euripides) 349 Merkelbach, R. 305, 308 Mestra 322–5 metamorphosis 382–98 metramorphosis 110, 115 Midgley, M. 234–5, 250–1 Miller, M. 390 Miller, P. A. 127 More, T. 214, 215, 217 motherhood 149–50 Mott, L. 228–9 Muses 222–3, 327–54 contests with 345–6 Graves on 328–9 Greer on 330–1 modern paradigm 327–9 paintings of 331, 332–5, 333 Perry on 332 re-visioning by women 346–8 and religion 336–7 Myrsiades, K. 364 mythographers: classical 278–81 cyborg 277, 281–3

McAlpine, K. 346 McLachlan, J. 224 McLeish, K. 342, 343 McWilliams, J. 223, 225 n. 45 Malvern, S. 347 Martin, E. 236–7 Martindale, C. 165–6, 387 matrixial paradigm 86–7, 94, 95–6, 105–12, 115–17

Nagel, T. 252 Nazism 178–82 New World 216 as analogy for Woman 210–11, 212–13 discovery of 212–13 and Hesperia 216 location of 221–2 Newton, I. 241 n. 19

Kofman, S. 83–4, 85 Kolodny, A. 213 Krasner, L. 72 Kristeva, J. 89, 91

in d e x Odyssey (Homer) 146–7, 205–7, 278, 358 Catalogue, comparison with 303–4, 312–15, 320 Odysseus 146–7, 223, 303, 317 Oedipus 9, 26, 38, 131, 132, 152 Oedipus and the Sphinx (Ingres) 77–81, 78 Oedipus complex 27–9, 30–1, 88 Oncomouse2 276–7, 290 oral traditions 306–7, 308 men’s 301, 302–3 women’s 297–303, 311 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 149–50 Orestes 149–51 Orestes (Euripides) 358 Ostriker, A. 385 Otherness 210 n. 4, 218 Padel, R. 386 pain 101–2 Paine, T. 225 & n. 45 Palatine Anthology 352, 353 Panagiotopoulos, I. M. 359 Partheneion (Alcman) 350 Pastan, L. 384–5 pathosformel 79 Peacock, J. 73–4 penis envy 25–6, 41–2 Perry, G. 332 Peter Martyr 227, 229 phantasy 53–6 physics 239–43 Plath, S. 382–4 Plato 344–5 Plutarch 350–1 Pollock, G. 138 Pollux (Julius Pollux) 338–9 Polybius 190–1, 194 Poseidon 313, 320, 323–4 post-structuralism 4 n. 5, 7, 8–9

443

Pound, E. 382 Powers, R. 282 primatology 238–9, 257 projection 52, 53, 56 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus) 275 Prose, F. 341 psychoanalysis 94–5, 122 introjection 52, 53, 56–7 Lacan’s ethics of 122–33, 137 literature and early childhood 52 and mythology 34–6 projection 52, 56 recapitulation theory 37 see also Freud, S. Pythais festival, Athens 336 Pytine (Cratinus) 343–4 Rabate´, J.-M. 131–2 Ramayana 301–2 Ranshoff, R. 76 reader identification 46–9 Cixous 49–50, 51–2, 58–61 Hillis Miller 50–2 Keats 48–9, 52, 63–5 reading 57, 66, 274 n. 33 recapitulation theory 37 reception 10–12, 13–14, 47, 165–6 Anouilh’s Antigone 182–6 Second World War 166–9, 178–83 Reinhold, M. 225 Resistance movement 166–8, 182 and Anouilh’s Antigone 167–8, 178 Reynolds, J. 331, 332 Rhea 41 Rhesus (pseudoEuripidean) 339–40 Rich, A. 226

444

in d e x

Richard, C. 224 Ritsos, Y. 362–5, 366–70, 371, 374, 379 Robinson, C. 373 n. 28 Romm, J. 214–15 Rose, S. 233–4, 242 n. 22, 249 Rush, B. 225 Rutherford, I. 310 n. 38, 312, 315 Sade, Marquis de 101 Samuel, R. 333–5, 333, 347 n. 31 Sappho 332–3, 350–4 Sarton, M. 342, 347 Sartre, J.-P. 168 n. 19 Schatten, G. & H. 236, 237 Schiebinger, L. 237, 238–9, 243, 251 science 233–52 anthropomorphism in 242–3, 247, 250, 252 Sedley, D. 268 n. 26, 269 Seferis, G. 365–6 Segal, C. 258, 268 n. 26, 389 Seneca 216 n. 19 Serres, M. 282 Servius 309, 319 Sexton, A. 388 sexual difference 10–11, 93–4, 138 Freud on 22–6 sexuality: female 22–4, 42 infantile 34–8 Shapcott, J. 386 Sharrock, A. 329 Shelley, M. 276, 277–8 Shiach, M. 60 Shoah 112–14 Sikelianos, A. 359–60 Sinopoulos, T. 360–2, 367–8

sisterhood 145–6, 147–8, 151, 152–60 Socrates 143–4 Sophocles: Antigone 124–5, 127–8, 145–6, 151–3, 156–8, 169–78 Electra 153–6 Thamyras 338–9 Stallings, A. E. 386–7 Stanton, E. C. 228–9 & n. 58 Steiner, G. 145–6, 163 Stone, L. 228–9 structuralism 4 n. 5 subjectivity 101–2 Sulter, M. 347 Symposium (Plato) 344–5 Talos 275–6, 279–81 Terminator film 276 Thamyris (Sophocles) 338–9 Thamyris 338–40, 345–6 Tocqueville, A. de 222 Todorov, T. 218 n. 24 Trojan Women (Euripides) 195–201, 207 Turing, A. 277 Turing test 276 Tyrell, W. B. 215 Tyro 312–13, 320 Tziovas, D. 366–7 Uranus 31, 32, 34, 41 utopia 214–17 Van Dyck, K. 373 Van Haute, P. 127 Vespucci, A. 212 Vichy regime 167–8, 178–82 Vickers, N. 13 Vidal-Naquet, P. 183–4

in d e x Waldman, A. 385 Warburg, A. 73, 79 warfare 189–207 language of, and atomism 245 women, as cause of 191, 194–204, 207 women’s exclusion from 190–2 Weinberg, S. 241 West, M. L. 304, 305, 306, 307–8, 315 Whig Society, America 224–5 White, G. 346 Whitman, W. 228 Wiener, N. 277

445

Wilkes, W. 334 Wilson, L. H. 351–2 Witt, M.-A. 182 Wittig, M. 1, 2 women’s traditions 297–302 oral genres 297, 300–3 Woolf, V. 67–71, 163–4, 340–1, 382 Harrison and 68–9, 71–2 Works and Days (Hesiod) 147 Zajko, V. 4 Zeus 31–4, 39–40 Zimmerman, M. 227–8

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