Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late Victorian Hellenism

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Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism

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Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism T. D. Olverson

© T. D. Olverson 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–21559–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: Contested Ground: Gender and Victorian Hellenism(s) The demos and the classics The shining light of Greek culture The ‘trick of Greek’: women’s access to the classics Daughters of Dionysus

1 6 8 10 18

1 Taking on the Tradition: Augusta Webster’s Feminist Revisionism Of maidens, magic and murder: Webster’s ‘Circe’ and ‘Medea in Athens’ ‘Am I no happy wife?’: Webster’s ‘Medea in Athens’ Her own mistress: Webster’s ‘Circe’ 2 Amy Levy’s Greek (Anti-) Heroines ‘Her tender language wholly misconceived’: Amy Levy’s Xantippe Hellenism and anarchy: Levy’s Medea 3 Worlds without Women: Emily Pfeiffer’s Political Hellenism Emily Pfeiffer’s ‘Studies from the Antique’ Making silence speak: Kassandra’s burning words ‘Power to wreak high ruin’: female militancy and Pfeiffer’s ‘Klytemnestra’ 4 Old Greek Wine in New Bottles: Michael Field’s Dionysiac Poetics Michael Field’s erotic poetics The miss-education of Michael Field Libidinous laureates and lyrical Maenads: Michael Field, Swinburne and the sexual politics of erotic Hellenism ‘I am a maenad, I must have love’s wine’: Michael Field’s Callirrhoë v

27 32 33 45 54 57 69

83 85 91 100

111 116 118 123 127

vi

Contents

5 Medea’s Haunting of the Fin-de-Siècle The spirit of rebellion: Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus Medea’s afterlife in Vernon Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’

145 148 157

Afterword: Looking Back With an Eye to the Future

171

Notes

175

Bibliography

206

Index

231

Acknowledgements This book developed over several years with the support of many friends and colleagues. I owe my gratitude to Linda R. Anderson, whose support has helped to see this project through to its conclusion. I would also like to thank Hilary Fraser for her generous encouragement and intellectual example, and John Batchelor, Naomi Hetherington, Linda Beckman and Kathleen Hickok for their helpful advice. I am also grateful to the anonymous reader from Palgrave, whose useful comments have helped to shape this study and refine my ideas. My sincere thanks to all the staff at the Robinson Library, Newcastle. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Mrs Basil Herbertson for permission to reference her husband’s article, to the staff of Cambridge University Library, the British Library, John Rylands Library, Special Collections staff at Leeds University Library, Colin Harris of the Bodleian Library, Anne Thomson of Newnham College Library, administrators and staff at the Camellia Collection, Kent, and Special Collections staff at the National Library of Scotland. I’d like to thank Paula Kennedy and Steven Hall at Palgrave for their enthusiastic support for this project. My warmest thanks are due to my family and friends for all their encouragement over this long period of time, particularly my father Phillip and my mother Elaine. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book both to the memory of my grandmother, Audrey Terry, and to Louise A. Armstrong. Without your unconditional love and support the writing of this book would not have been possible – thank you, for everything.

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Introduction: Contested Ground: Gender and Victorian Hellenism(s)

The ancient classics resemble the universe. They are always there, and they are very much the same as ever. But as the philosophy of every new age puts a fresh construction on the universe, so in the classics scholarship finds a perennial object for ever fresh and original interpretation.1 Myths by reason of their symbolic pregnancy and spontaneity of origin, are everlastingly elastic.2 Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.3 ‘I thank god I was born a human and not an animal, a man and not a woman, a Greek and not a barbarian’ – Socrates

What we now think of as the Hellenic inheritance within British culture was a Victorian invention. After the first wave of artists and explorers returned from Greece in the eighteenth century, Greek culture became, as Richard Jenkyns suggests, ‘à la mode; art, archaeology, history and philology would have a nucleus around which they could gather, each stimulating interest in the others’.4 If the Romantics rediscovered the historical significance and the artistic potential of the ancient Greeks, it was the Victorians who adopted Hellenism as an integral part of British culture.5 Dwight Culler notes that, ‘it was clearly a habit of mind among the Victorians to perceive analogies between their own day and various historical epochs in the past and then to use these analogies in conducting their controversies’.6 By the late nineteenth century, the period on which this study is focused, ‘ancient Greece’ constituted a variety of competing discourses.7 Indeed, according to Bernard Knox, ‘the Victorians appropriated the ancient Greeks, imagined them as contemporaries, and used their writings as weapons in their own ideological 1

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wars’.8 Like the troubled ‘nation’ of Greece, nineteenth-century Hellenism was ideologically important but fraught with tension and conflict. Hilary Fraser suggests that, ‘Victorian commentators were acutely aware of the varieties of classicism and medievalism displayed among contemporary poets.’9 One of the aims of this study is, therefore, to amplify the various networks of interests at play within Victorian Hellenism(s). Of the numerous discourses which Hellenism intersects in the nineteenth century, one of the most significant is that of sexual politics. In the following pages I intend to reveal the extent to which Hellenism influenced Victorian conceptions of gender and sexuality in the work of women writers. That is not to say that gender-related issues are the only subjects of concern. Wider issues of education, racism, spirituality, personal freedom and democracy all traverse the appropriation of Hellenic subjects by women writers. Moreover, women did not write or generate their work from within a vacuum; they were influenced by the work and opinions of their male contemporaries. Mapping the influence of Hellenism over British women writers is, therefore, a convoluted and multifarious task. It may seem that the Greeks have always shone a light, or cast a long shadow over British culture, but it was not always so. In the early eighteenth century it was Latin and the glories of the Roman Empire that were revered as markers of English high culture. In looking back, the Victorians (inappropriately) labelled the eighteenth century England’s ‘Augustan Age’.10 As Culler observes, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in England, the words Greek and Grecian carried unfavourable connotations. Many aristocratic (anti-democratic) leaders in fact preferred the ancient regime of Sparta to that of ancient Athens. Athens was considered to be ‘wanton, too “merry,” and given to pederasty’.11 But, following the excavations at Pompeii in 1748 and the publication of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s extraordinary drawings of the Greek mainland and its architectural treasures, interest in the civilization of ancient Greece was revived.12 On the continent, Johann Winckelmann, Jean Jacques Barthélèmy and August Wilhelm Schlegel, amongst others, also aroused new interest and generated great debate about the lives of the ancient Greeks through their own literary and artistic interpretations. But what is most interesting about this sudden avalanche of critical interest is that at this time, as Jennifer Wallace reminds us, ‘the official account of Greece did not yet exist, with the result that these writers were still able to dispute and reshape their ideas’. Furthermore, ‘these new ideas of Greece were seen as pioneering and radical, emanating from outside the standard cultural expectations and institutional values’.13 Hellenism was, at this point, a relatively fluid set of images and ideas, under debate and under construction. By the middle of the nineteenth century, many Victorians felt a close affinity with the glorious achievements of ancient Greece and Rome. For the agents and supporters of England’s burgeoning Empire, the political, military

Introduction: Contested Ground 3

and cultural achievements of the ancient Greeks provided a particularly rich point of comparison. In Lectures on the Geography of Greece, for instance, Henry Fanshawe Tozer asserted that ‘Greece occupied in ancient times a position in many respects similar to that of England at the present day.’14 ‘The battle of Marathon’, John Stuart Mill declared, ‘even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.’15 The appropriation of Hellenism by both conservative and liberal academics and thinkers throughout the course of the nineteenth century clearly indicates the importance of Hellenism to Victorian cultural practices and socio-political discourses. Indeed, for the liberal reformers of mid-century, the model of ancient Athens contained all the necessary ingredients for the socio-political transformation of an indolent Imperial Britain, as Linda Dowling notes: Victorian liberals pointed to fifth-century Athens and nineteenth-century England – revealing them in their exact and vital similitude. This living historical identity between a specific past and a specific present in turn gave to certain ancient writers – usually Thucydides and Plato were named – their extraordinary power to speak as truly living contemporaries to the English, offering them, as Thomas Arnold said of Thucydides, ‘a wisdom more applicable to us politically than the wisdom even of our own countrymen who lived in the middle ages’.16 Harry Payne suggests that Britain’s emerging middle class found the Athenian qualities of self-control, patriotism, education and democracy, virtues to which they themselves could aspire.17 The study of the classics thereby formed an integral part of the British educational and class systems and much of the confidence of the ruling classes can be seen to have derived from their knowledge of the classical world.18 Formal access to such knowledge was, for much of the nineteenth century, more exclusive than inclusive. As Jenkyns succinctly puts it, ‘the man who knew Latin and Greek was a gentleman’.19 The notion of ‘gentlemanly’ conduct was a crucial element in the appeal of Hellenism. As we will see in more detail later, many tutors and scholars felt that the ancient Greeks, as depicted in the literature of Herodotus, Thucydides and Plato, exemplified the ideals of masculinity and citizenship. The warrior-citizens embodied in the figures of Socrates and Plato had a particularly powerful grip on the imaginations of the ambitious citizens of Victoria’s Empire. Equally as important, and as influential, was the ancient notion of ‘republican motherhood’. Pomeroy tells us that in ancient Athens ‘the principal duty of citizen women toward the polis was the production of legitimate heirs to the oikoi, or families, whose aggregate comprised the citizenry’.20 A similar system of social organization is espoused in the writings of Margaret Oliphant, Eliza Lynn Linton and Arabella Kenealy, amongst others. For example, in ‘The Modern Revolt’, Linton declared that ‘the care of the

4


young ranks as one of the most important of all things to the State and the race, and one on which no pains bestowed could be too much’.21 The ancient concepts of citizenship and civic responsibility were apparently as applicable to the disenfranchised subjects of the Empire, as to the ruling elite. Linton’s strident anti-feminism is echoed by the hypocritical Arabella Kenealy in her emotionally manipulative article, ‘Talent for Motherhood’. In her semi-fictional account, Kenealy tells us that she was visited by two mothers-to-be in her medical practice. The first woman was a beautiful, intelligent, young professional, whilst the second woman was a weak, nervous, artist. She records that, months later, ‘the strong, beautiful, assertive amazon had mothered a pigmy’, whilst ‘the sensitive, fine-souled’ artist had ‘idealized the image of man, and her child was born a hero’. Kenealy unjustifiably concludes that, ‘Motherhood is the true test of womanhood . . . Upon the best motherhood must the progress of nations depend; upon the proper performance of this duty the evolution of humanity turn.’22 To Kenealy, the modern Amazon would not just emasculate men, she would also be responsible for the corruption of the nation’s future citizens. Only dutiful wives and mothers could give birth to the nation’s next generation of ‘heroes’. The education of the young was a major preoccupation of the Victorians, but in terms of the population, comparatively few men received a thorough education in the classics. One thinks of Jude Fawley’s painfully laborious attempts to overcome his disadvantageous background, to scale the walls of the fortress-like colleges in Christminster (Oxford).23 Class was not, however, the only inhibition to a classical education. Not all middle-class Victorian gentlemen were fortunate enough to have the funds and connections to continue their studies at the Oxbridge colleges. Yet, those fortunate few men who attended schools like Eton, Rugby, Charterhouse and Harrow and who went on to study the classics at university had a disproportionately influential effect on public and foreign policy. Hellenism may have been merely one strand which can be seen to have contributed to the formulation of Victorian domestic and political ideologies, but it was a significant one. It is, therefore, worth noting just some of the continuities between the work of the ancient authors and Victorian configurations of domestic and political arrangements. The pervasive influence of the classics on the British education system has been discussed in detail elsewhere.24 But it is important to note, as Christopher Stray has so ably demonstrated, that the transmission and acquisition of classical knowledge was shaped by the specific institutional contexts of Oxford and Cambridge. Academic politics, ideological traditions, organizational structures and established models of teaching and learning all had an impact on the transmission of the classics. Importantly, in the early nineteenth century, ‘after the unsettling of the scholastic curriculum by the impact of the scientific revolution, Cambridge took up the study of mathematics and Lockean epistemology, while Oxford clung to the logic


and ethics of Aristotle’.25 It should of course be noted that in Book I of the Politics, Aristotle makes a number of bold assertions about the authority of men over women, the household and the family, such as ‘the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled’.26 Students of Aristotle received some rigidly hierarchical lessons about the ‘ideal’ structure of social and domestic relationships. Aristotle and Thucydides were the particular favourites of the influential educationalist Thomas Arnold. Hundreds of young men, first at Rugby, then at Oxford, experienced Arnold’s passionate enthusiasm for ancient history and literature of the Greeks. However, Jenkyns reminds us that the effects of Hellenism on political thinking were not as unequivocally beneficial as Arnold might have believed them to be: Lytton opposed the unification of Italy on the ground that Greece had lost its greatness when it ceased to be made up of city states. One of Thucydides’ central themes is the bitter conflict between the few and the many (‘the nobles and the Commons’, Mitford misleadingly called them), and those who saw England in a Thucydidean light were liable to develop a bleak pessimism. In 1819 . . . during the agitations for a reform bill, [Arnold] argued that Greek and Roman history showed the dangers of premature concessions to democracy . . . Gladstone was perhaps right to suspect that study of the ancient historians sometimes encouraged ‘the cruder forms of oligarchic or democratic prejudice’.27 Other ‘live’ political issues were just as likely to be (re)ignited by ancient texts. Victorian men, and women, would have learned from ancient sources that women were excluded from the agora and the Pnyx, the meeting places of the ancient ‘democratic’ Athenian assembly. Further, they would have learned that in ancient Athens women were prohibited by law from transacting business in significant amounts, and they were also barred from appearing as witnesses or litigants in the many law courts located in and around the agora. In other words, what the ancient sources provided was the model of a politics of exclusion, based on sex, class and ethnicity. It was not just the political and legal examples of the Greeks that promoted a profoundly sexist view; one must also consider the influence of literature, mythology, history and philosophy. For instance, contemporary feminist critics consider Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony to be two of the primary texts of the Western tradition of misogyny. According to Hesiod, in the beginning men lived alone on the earth, in peace and free from disease or toil. But as punishment for Prometheus’ transgression against heaven, Zeus inflicted Pandora on the world of men. Pandora brought evil and misfortune into the world. Thus, as Okin points out, ‘the fateful degeneration of the human race began with the appearance of woman’.28 The denigration of women was not just confined to mythology, of course. The Pythagorean

6


philosophers, to whom Plato is indebted for his theory of principles, taught that there are ten essential principles, in contrasting pairs, which could explain the organization of the universe. The pairings included: Limit and Unlimited/Odd and Even/Male and Female/Light and Darkness/Good and Evil. Thus, the Pythagorean Table of Opposites illustrates the apparent opposition between male (good) and female (evil). Such hierarchical, binary thinking is reflected in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, despite the differing tone and aims of the two philosophers. A woman, says Aristotle, is a natural deformity.29 For Plato, on the one hand, the female sex was created from the souls of the most wicked and irrational men, and should be considered as little more than the chattels of Athenian (male) citizens. On the other hand, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 2, Plato’s Republic espouses a potentially radical view of women as having the requisite abilities to rule alongside philosopher-kings. Despite the radical promise of Plato’s thinking, the often anxious Victorians chose to promote the more conservative aspects of Greek philosophy. In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, a new age of Platonic doctrine was ushered in by Benjamin Jowett at Oxford University. Jowett elected to teach Plato’s Republic alongside the firmly established teachings of Aristotle. However, the Republic, as Nathalie Bluestone points out, posed particular difficulties to the paternalistic Jowett.30 Jowett felt that Plato had failed to appreciate the differences ‘in mind and feeling’ between the sexes. In thinking that Plato had made an error with regard to the ‘nature’ of women, Jowett failed to promote the truly ground-breaking innovations in Plato’s texts. As I demonstrate in Chapters 1 and 2, Victorian women had to contend with the misogyny of ancient authors, as well as the prejudiced scholarship of eminent professors and translators. Following the government commissions of the 1850s and 1870s, there were significant changes to both the content and structure of the ‘Oxford Greats’ course and the Cambridge Classical Tripos. These changes, Stray suggests, not only had a major impact on the curriculum but on style of teaching and the manner of learning at the two institutions. A former student at Cambridge, Charles Merivale, summarized the different institutional approaches thus: ‘Oxford professed to cultivate the study of the ancient literature’, whilst the aim of Cambridge ‘was to acquire the most accurate appreciation of the ancient languages.’31 For much of the century Oxford seemed to eclipse Cambridge in terms of its reputation for first-rate classical scholars and scholarship. But, as we will see, this disparity was not to last.

The demos and the classics Recent scholarship has revealed that knowledge of classical culture was not just the province of the social and political elite, but was extensively appropriated and consumed, particularly in terms of the art, architecture,


drama, music and literature of the Victorian period. For example, classical myth and literature became available to a much wider audience through the increasing prevalence of translations like Blackwood’s series, Ancient Classics for English Readers, and the seemingly ubiquitous Greek Anthology. Classical dictionaries, such as the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1849) by William Smith, John Lemprière’s popular Bibliotheca Classica (1788) and William Hazlitt’s Classical Gazetteer (1851), all made Greek myth and literature more readily accessible. Hellenic subjects were increasingly accessible to working-class audiences through plays and the astoundingly popular musical burlesques. As Edith Hall notes, ‘large numbers of mid-nineteenth century people without a word of Latin or Greek’ attended John Heraud’s theatrical adaptation of Medea in 1859. ‘Tens of thousands of lower-class spectators, seated in east London’s enormous Strand Theatre’ were enabled to feel the ‘theatrical impact of the death of Medea’s children’.32 Others gained access to classical myth and history through the informal entertainments offered by travelling carnivals and showmen. Hall cites the example of Billy Purvis who was famed for taking his ‘booth theatre’ around the circuits of northern race tracks. Here Purvis would display ‘phantasmagorias illustrating scenes such as Neptune in his car’, and his troupe of actors would perform ‘paraphrases of plays on classical themes, including The Death of Alexander the Great’.33 It is very difficult to assess the cultural and intellectual impact of such performances, but the very nature of these classical entertainments suggests just how far ancient Greek history and myth had migrated from the Victorian schoolroom and university lecture theatre. Mid-century also saw a proliferation of texts concerned with the study of ancient mythology, including Max Müller’s influential Comparative Mythology (1856), George Grote’s voluminous A History of Greece (1846) and J. J. Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (1861). Perhaps more influential were the carefully calibrated texts written for children, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Boys and Girls: Comprising Stories of Classical Fables (1853), Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes (1856) and Eliza Robbins’ Classical Tales (1850), and later in the century, Charlotte M. Yonge’s Aunt Charlotte’s Stories of Greek History for the Little Ones (1880). From mid-century onwards the ethical, philosophical and cultural values of the ancient Greeks were therefore employed as complex educational frameworks for generations of young children. It should also be noted that the illustrations which accompanied such texts may well have played a significant role, educative or otherwise, for illiterate or semi-literate children and adults. Much work still needs to be done in this area. As the nineteenth century wore on, references to Greek texts and classical myths increasingly appeared in newspapers and periodicals, in novels, poetry, paintings and sculptures.34 One immediately thinks of the arresting paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones and John

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William Waterhouse, amongst others, and the beautiful Hellenic sculptures and bronzes of William Goscombe John, Harry Bates and Sir Alfred Gilbert. Furthermore, the influence of ancient Greek architecture and design could be seen in almost every major city in the country. In one way or another, the Greeks had well and truly arrived on Britain’s shores. For the critic and writer, John Addington Symonds, all civilized nations were colonies of Hellas.35 Algernon Swinburne also employed the metaphor of colonization, calling Greece the ‘mother-country of thought and action’.36 Later in the century, Oscar Wilde observed that, ‘it is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth . . . its calm possession of beauty, with the passionate colour of the romantic spirit, that springs the art of the nineteenth century in England’.37 The inspirational ‘beauty’ of Greek art was, however, a particularly contentious area.

The shining light of Greek culture When Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy appeared in 1872, the prevalent conception of the Greeks was, as Walter Kaufmann suggests, still ‘that pioneered by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) and adopted by Goethe (1749–1832): edle Einfalt, stille Grösse, “noble simplicity, calm grandeur”’.38 This view was furthered by Matthew Arnold’s famous formulation of Greek civilization in Culture and Anarchy as that of ‘sweetness and light’. Indeed, it is remarkable just how often Hellenism is described as an intense white light, illuminating the present from the recesses of history. For instance, in The Renaissance, Walter Pater contrasts the clarity of Hellenism with the richer but glaring colour of the modern world: ‘Hellenism, which is the principle . . . of intellectual light (our modern world may have more colour . . . but Hellenism is pre-eminent for light), has always been most effectively conceived by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements predominate.’39 The shining light of the Greeks was seen to be reflected in the luminous sculptures which graced the corridors of the British Museum. But the sculptures did not just have aesthetic value. Carefully santitized, arranged and displayed, the political and cultural values of Greek sculpture were quickly identified and modified towards political and nationalistic ends. The acquisition of ancient artefacts, like the Three Graces and the Parthenon marbles, served a variety of political purposes, not least the edification of the British middle-class(es). On another, more symbolic level, the ancient statues and fragments artificially insinuated a link between Imperial Britain and the ancient Greeks. As Inderpal Grewal suggests, the white marble statues on display in the British Museum were utilized in a particular conversion, suggesting a radicalized conjunction of purity and whiteness: ‘the virtues represented by classical sculpture were believed replicated in the people of England; the likeness of the statues were the men and


women of England’.40 The guidebooks of the British Museum thereby represented and reflected the increasing hegemony of an upper-class definition of national culture. Moreover, the creation of a Greek ‘heritage’, which was purely Caucasian and unmixed with Egyptian or Semitic influences, can be seen to culminate in the racist imperialist agenda of the late nineteenth century.41 Women writers were, as we will see, sensitive to the issues of (Hellenic) racial purity and national identity. Others were enamoured and inspired by the luminosity of Greek sculpture, such as Walter Pater, who particularly admired the ‘white light’ of Greek sculpture, which he felt to be ‘purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion’. To Pater these pallid statues reveal ‘not what is accidental in man, but the god in him, as opposed to man’s restless movement’.42 Like Arnold, Pater appears to associate whiteness with a moral as well as an aesthetic purity. And yet, the metaphor is deliberately diffuse, as Jenkyns notes: ‘Pater associates whiteness with the ideals of Greek art and life . . . as interpreted by Matthew Arnold . . . and yet all the while Pater is using it to evoke those naked statues and youths exercising by the banks of the Ilissus, where Socrates expounded to Phaedrus the mysteries of a passionate yet passionless [homosexual] love.’43 Arnold’s fusion of aesthetic and moral criteria meant that the idiom ‘sweetness and light’ was, to use Jenkyns’ phrase, ‘fatally equivocal’.44 As a result, Hellenism could be employed as a culturally prestigious discourse through which one could discuss and validate otherwise controversial subjects. Towards the end of the century, as Linda Dowling suggests, the aesthetes and decadents had appropriated Hellenism for more socially seditious purposes: For the historical study of Greece which Jowett so massively influenced embraced both an ethically centered providentialism and an ethically relativizing historicism. With the first insisting on the extraordinary value and relevance of the Greek achievement for the English, while the second was minimizing the relevance of English moral categories for the Greeks, such students of Oxford Hellenism as Symonds and Pater and Wilde would find that Greek paiderastia was, through the agency of the Greats curriculum, brought vividly and compellingly to life even as English religious prohibitions on sodomy were simultaneously being made to recede.45 In Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, Dowling demonstrates that late Victorian Hellenism provided a powerful, progressive language of social identity and erotic liberation; a discourse which would come to be called the ‘Greek movement’.46 For writers and critics like John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, Hellenism provided a linguistic and

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ideological framework which not only represented same-sex unions in a positive light, but which also expressed a particular kind of male homoeroticism. Their Hellenic writings have been envisaged as a ‘coded’ discourse, which could only be read and understood by those sufficiently skilled in reading the signs. In recent years, however, critics such as Ruth Vanita and Richard Dellamora have argued that the Hellenism of Pater, Wilde and artists like Simeon Solomon should be seen as a sophisticated counter-discourse, which is both inclusive and positively subversive. Despite the claims of critics like Vanita and Dellamora, it is not always clear how the male-identified aestheticism of Pater and his contemporaries can be ‘liberatory’ or positive for women. As I discuss in Chapter 2, the reconfiguration of Platonic homoeroticism by male writers can be problematic for women as these writers often idealize love between men in spiritual or transcendental terms.47 In the homosocial exchange of Platonic ideas women are removed from the equation. In short, as Ruth Hoberman notes, ‘while this association between ancient Greece and homosexuality opened up discussion as to what “Greece” was, it did not make Greek culture any more accessible to women’.48

The ‘trick of Greek’: women’s access to the classics The issue of access to the classics is a crucial one, particularly in relation to Victorian sexual politics. The critical consensus suggests that late Victorian Hellenism was an elusive and exclusive discourse, limited to the fortunate few (males) who could afford a classical education. For instance, Dorothy Mermin suggests that, ‘women’s access to the classics were restricted in order to keep women out of the club, which was partly defined precisely by that exclusion; and women ambitious for literary accomplishment, just as naturally, yearned to get in’.49 The gender bias both within the Victorian education system and in nineteenth-century scholarship can be seen to be reflected in subsequent critical responses to women’s relationship to the classics. But as Isobel Hurst has demonstrated, the relationship of Victorian women writers to classical studies is more complex than has previously been suggested.50 Many students of nineteenth-century literature will be familiar with the struggles of George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke or Maggie Tulliver to acquire a classical education. Equally, many might recognize the scholarly accomplishments of writers like Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, both of whom were noted for the ‘strength’ of their intellects and their particular skills in reading and translating classical literature. Like her famous heroine, Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning knew the ‘trick of Greek/And Latin’, having been educated at home alongside her brothers. After her brothers left for Charterhouse, the young Elizabeth Barrett continued to read


widely in Greek and Latin literature, producing the Homeric poem, The Battle of Marathon, at the age of fourteen. Barrett’s fascination for classical literature was further bolstered by the Greek scholars Hugh Stuart Boyd and Uvedale Price, with whom she kept up a scholarly correspondence. At Boyd’s behest, Barrett translated Aeschylus’ Prometheus in 1833, aged only twenty-seven. In later life, as Jennifer Wallace points out, Barrett Browning translated Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus (again), Theocritus, Bion and Apuleius, among others.51 Despite these major achievements, it was her long epic poem, Aurora Leigh, which secured Barrett Browning’s literary reputation and which cemented the image of the scholarly woman artist in the public imagination. Another female artist who was as well renowned for her classical credentials as her literary works was George Eliot. The child of reasonably affluent parents, the young Mary Anne Evans was fortunate enough to have attended local schools, where she is said to have excelled in her classes and developed a particular interest in reading and languages. At the age of sixteen her mother died and Mary Ann was compelled to take on the role of caring for her father and managing the family household. After her father died in 1849, Evans moved to London where she was finally able to pursue her intellectual and literary interests to the full. Eliot’s consummate familiarity with classical literature and culture pervades most of her novels, essays, reviews and letters. Jeanette King notes that Eliot ‘frequently uses traditional tragic concepts such as peripeteia in her depiction of the clash between the individual and the inexorable law of consequences’. But, ‘their significance lies in the way these concepts interact with George Eliot’s vision of modern tragedy, to which they present a contrasting aesthetic and moral ideal’.52 The ancient dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides may have been perennial favourites of Eliot’s, but she had her own ideas about the role and significance of tragedy in the modern world. Eliot’s classical erudition has already been the focus of extensive critical analysis and commentary, and I will not repeat nor seek to emulate much of this excellent work here.53 It is, however, important to note that Eliot and her work had a significant impact on later women writers. As Henry James acknowledged after Eliot’s death, ‘to her own sex her memory, her example, will remain of the highest value’.54 To the next generation, George Eliot was the kind of literary precursor and intellectual example that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had so longed for.55 Despite her conviction that ‘women have long studied Greek without shame’, Eliot was unflatteringly labelled, ‘Pallas with prejudices and a corset’ by W. E. Henley in 1895.56 Such comments reinforced the view that women like Barrett Browning and George Eliot were intellectual exceptions, rather than the rule. Indeed, Eliot and Barrett Browning are often depicted as isolated individuals (albeit married to men of letters), working alone within a

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‘masculine’ tradition. For instance, Hartley Coleridge considered that, ‘Miss Elizabeth Barrett may justly claim to stand alone . . . as well for her extraordinary acquaintance with ancient classic literature, as for the boldness of her poetic attempts.’57 Likewise, Leslie Stephen applauded George Eliot’s ‘great intellectual powers’ which were ‘unsurpassed in her own sphere’.58 But, as Hurst explains, ‘by emphasizing the outstanding quality of Barrett Browning’s and Eliot’s classical achievements, critics endorse the gendered stereotypes associated with the classics: a woman may study Latin and Greek to a high standard but only if her intellect is so powerful that it may be described as “masculine”’.59 The gendering of Hellenism and classical scholarship as unequivocally ‘masculine’ discourses certainly had its effects on female intellectuals. In ‘An Essay on Mind’, Barrett Browning catalogues who she perceives to be the great poets of literary history. Significantly, all of the poets are male. As Gilbert and Gubar point out, in the same work Browning describes the joys of intellectual discovery she herself must have felt as a girl, ‘yet she writes about a schoolboy and his exultant response to the classics’.60 More tellingly, in a letter to her friend, Anne Thomson, Barrett Browning revealed, ‘I do not partake quite your “divine fury” for converting our sex into Greek scholarship – and I do not, I confess, think it as desirable as you do. Where there is a love for poetry and a thirst for beauty strong enough to justify the labour, let these impulses, which are noble, be obeyed; but in the case of the multitude, it is different.’ Barrett concludes, ‘the mere fashion of scholarship among women wd [sic] be a disagreeable vain thing, and worse than vain’.61 Such comments may be seen as a form of internalized sexism, which, in a literary context, Judith Fetterley describes as a process of ‘immasculation’.62 On a more practical level, Hurst suggests that women who chose to study the classics often ‘measured their progress against the achievements of fathers, brothers, or mentors’.63 Such comparisons were not only unfair but unreasonable. For much of the nineteenth century it was clearly very difficult for young middle-class girls with academic ambitions to acquire a sufficiently rigorous classical education. But it was not impossible. In the absence of good formal tuition, as Philippa Levine suggests, ‘women often organized their own education, either in small interest groups or alone’.64 Most girls and young women received their education at home, often under the amateur tutelage of governesses or relatives. But, as Claire Breay observes, ‘the type of teaching given by governesses was haphazard and those who taught Latin and Greek were unusual’.65 With the increase in publication of dictionaries, lexicons and translations, it was possible, if extremely difficult, to teach oneself the basics of a classical education at home. Augusta Webster professed to having followed such a course herself, ‘mysteriously in my own room and with no admirers & what might nearly be called no books & certainly no serviceable books besides wretched Charterhouse Grammar’.66 Alternatively, girls could,


with the consent of male relatives, join in with the tutorial lessons intended for their brothers. Some girls, like Mary Coleridge, were fortunate enough to directly receive private tuition in Greek. Coleridge’s classes were run by the accomplished Etonian scholar William Cory. Interestingly, Mary, who wrote under the pseudonym Aνoδoς, was just one of the pupils to attend Cory’s private class. Cory’s ‘select academy’ consisted of fourteen female pupils whom he called ‘my lady Greeks’.67 The classes began in 1886, when Mary was twenty-five, and continued through the next six years, until Cory’s death. Other women also sought out mentors to cast an adjudicating eye over their Greek studies. Eliza Lynn Linton read Greek with Walter Savage Landor, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper were eager to learn from the erudite Robert Browning, whilst Emily Pfeiffer kept a close correspondence with the highly respected Professor of Greek, John Blackie. Mentors were important, but as Hurst points out, ‘the attitude of male relatives was crucial to girls’ access to learning’.68 A supportive or encouraging male relative could make or break a woman’s desire for a classical education, especially if fees needed to be paid. In response to the increasing demand for formal education for girls, schools such as Queen’s and Bedford College for Ladies, established in the 1840s, were fee-paying institutions catering for a middle-class clientele. But, as Levine points out, ‘the accent was rather less on academic acquirement than on appropriately feminine accomplishment’.69 Indeed, Claire Breay observes that, ‘education for middle-class girls was much less developed than that for boys and rarely focused on classics. Girls who did go to school were taught far less Latin than boys and many were taught no Greek at all.’70 This disparity in educational practice severely restricted women’s educational and employment opportunities, as it was often the case that knowledge of Greek was a prerequisite entrance requirement for public institutions like universities and the civil service.71 The findings of the Taunton Commission, the establishment of the National Union for the Improvement of the Education of Women of All Classes (1871) and the Education Acts of 1870 and 1876 went some way towards providing a national system of elementary education. As a result, by the late 1870s, a wave of new schools sought to reform the nature of secondary education for girls. Again, however, class distinctions largely determined the material taught and the methods for teaching. Breay observes that ‘Greek was held to be dispensable for girls but important for boys since it was necessary for those who intended to go to university. In girls’ schools, Greek was often sacrificed to the cause of a broad curriculum.’72 Working-class girls attending state schools were principally educated in order to fulfil a domestic role. But in the private sector, as Levine notes, ‘a crop of feminist-inspired and feminist-managed schools offered middle-class girls a curriculum almost identical to their brothers’.73 Despite this move towards

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equality in tertiary education, girls remained at a disadvantage, as Breay explains: Boys at preparatory schools started learning Latin grammar and syntax when they were eight. By the age of twelve, when girls were just beginning Latin, many boys had started Greek and were learning Greek and Latin verse and prose composition. Whilst there were variations in practice between boys’ schools, boys usually spent longer on Greek and Latin at school than girls . . . boys in the highest classical form devoted almost all of their time to classics, often in preparation for university examinations.74 Surprisingly, perhaps, the inadequacies and inequalities in terms of preparation did not dissuade young women from choosing to read classics at university, despite the availability of new Triposes in History and Modern Languages. Breay suggests that the proportion of women choosing to read classics was actually greater than the proportion of men in the period up to 1914.75 Clearly, the desire to learn a language, which was represented as an explicitly masculine prerogative, was an irresistible challenge to ambitious young women. From the late 1870s onwards a number of higher educational institutions opened their doors to women eager to study the classics. For instance, Manchester New College accepted female students from 1876, whilst the co-educational Victoria University opened in the same city in 1884. The University of London amended its charter in order to accept women in 1878, and the Association for the Higher Education of Women in Oxford was founded in the same year.76 Changes had been initiated at Cambridge some years earlier. Oxford and Cambridge universities already differed in their methods for teaching classics, but the new women’s colleges at Cambridge were as equally divided in their ideological approaches to the subjects.77 Hitchin, later Girton College, was established by Emily Davies in 1869 and was soon followed by the foundation of Newnham College in 1871. As part of the Classical Tripos, the Poll degree, frequently referred to as the General, the Pass, or the Ordinary, and the Previous Examination, also known as the Little-Go, involved a compulsory examination of both Latin and Greek. The standard required in the classical languages was considered to be relatively low, but nonetheless some knowledge of the ancient languages was an essential prerequisite for a Cambridge degree. Of course, the study of classics and mathematics was, as Rita Tullberg suggests, what was most lacking in female education.78 Nevertheless, Emily Davies’ desire to achieve equity with men on all levels of the educational process meant that she encouraged the students at Girton to adhere to Cambridge University’s regulations regarding courses and examinations.79 As such, the students of Girton were expected


to undertake the same examinations as their male counterparts, despite the inequities in preparation. Newnham College, on the other hand, adopted a totally different approach to the issue. Under the influence of Professor Henry Sidgwick, Newnham did not force its students to take the Previous Examination, nor did it expect students to keep to the university’s rigid residence requirements. Breay points out that, ‘whilst Sidgwick aimed at broad, integrated reform within the University and beyond, Davies was more pragmatic. Her action was based on the more immediate need for women to be given access to, and recognition in, higher education.’80 But as Sidgwick well knew, the education of women and young girls coincided with wider debates about the educational needs of Britain’s expanding population. Classical education was frequently attacked by liberal reformers as being irrelevant and anachronistic for the demands of a ‘modern’ industrial society. So, ‘whilst the theory of a liberal education was widely supported, reformers argued that its benefits could be more profitably derived from scientific subjects and modern languages than from classics’.81 The harbingers of doom also proclaimed that the sudden influx of educated women into the labour market would lower wages and consequently plunge the economy into recession. It was also widely suggested by commentators, using a combination of sexism, evolutionary theory and eugenics, that women educated in subjects like the classics would be inclined to refuse marriage and motherhood. Such women, prone to selfishness and other ‘masculine’ pursuits would thereby jeopardize the future of the British Empire. For instance, the self-proclaimed ‘feminist’ Grant Allen, rehearsing the same argument that Henry Maudsley had put forward fifteen years previously, declared:82 In the first place, the movement for the Higher Education of women, in itself an excellent and most praiseworthy movement, has at first, almost of necessity, taken a wrong direction . . . instead of women being educated to suckle strong and intelligent children, and to order a wholesome, beautiful, reasonable household – the mistake was made of educating them like men – giving them a like training for totally unlike functions. The result was that many women became unsexed in the process, and many others acquired a distaste, an unnatural distaste, for the functions which nature intended them to perform.83 Presented with the devastating consequences of the higher education of women, it is hardly surprising that women’s colleges occupied such ‘a prominent place in the public imagination’.84 Hurst suggests that women’s colleges tended to be represented as ‘places where talents were fostered instead of being obliterated by domestic duties, or, to more conservative onlookers, subversive institutions which dangerously empowered rebellious women by

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taking them away from home and giving them a sense of collective power’.85 For the most part, the conservative argument won out. As a result, the study of Latin and Greek had, for women, particularly negative connotations. Even when female students proved themselves to be the equals, if not the betters, of their male colleagues, the media reaction was frequently hostile. Punch famously published a series of derogatory cartoons depicting ‘masculine’, or isolated female intellectuals. Other commentators, like Allen, could not resist taking a swipe at the ‘new breed’ of intellectual, independent women, who threatened to change the make-up of the established social system. In a wonderful article, written seven years after she had left Newnham College, Amy Levy sarcastically attacked the ‘prophetic chorus’ of critics who predicted the catastrophic social consequences caused by the higher education of women: ‘Do we hear the unladylike excesses among the students of Girton or of Somerville Hall? Of the undue extravagance and evil habits of those hard-working and self-respecting bodies?’ The answer was, of course, a resounding no. Levy’s article, ‘Women and Club Life’ (1888), not only challenges the prejudicial commentators, but celebrates the new opportunities afforded to young women, as a result of the changes in the education system: ‘in class-room and lecture-theatre, office and art-school, college and club-house alike, woman is waking up to a sense of the hundred and one possibilities of social intercourse; possibilities which, save in exceptional instances, have hitherto for her been restricted to the narrowest of grooves’.86 As Levy suggests, networks of educated women existed outside, as well as inside, the privileged spaces of the Oxbridge colleges. Women like Levy would collect in the Reading Rooms of the British Museum, or in one of the newly formed women’s clubs. On another level, campaigners like Augusta Webster were elected to educational boards, where they had the opportunity to develop public educational policy. Many young female writers and intellectuals would also meet in less formal surroundings, at parties or salons hosted by London’s great and good. One did not need a degree from Oxford or Cambridge to gain access to a community of other like-minded women. Of course, women also socialized and corresponded with like-minded men. In 1885, Karl Pearson established the Men and Women’s Club for such purposes. It was at the Men and Women’s Club that Amy Levy debated the merits of feminist campaigns with Grant Allen. But as Judith Walkowitz points out, in reality the male members of the club often intimidated and dominated the female members.87 Other women managed to establish much more positive relationships with male artists and writers. ‘Michael Field’ shared friendships with the artists Ricketts and Shannon, whilst Emily Pfeiffer continued a long and fruitful correspondence with Professor John Blackie. The work of late Victorian women writers was, in other words, not generated in isolation, nor within a ‘separate sphere’. We may therefore


consider the Hellenic writings of late Victorian women as contributing to a wider cultural dialogue. Despite the wealth of evidence, a good deal of recent feminist scholarship suggests that the process of women’s feminist re-vision of classical subjects has only really taken place in the last thirty years.88 Alicia Ostriker’s otherwise highly suggestive Stealing the Language only focuses on the work of American women poets from the 1960s onwards.89 In her study of contemporary female novelists, Ruth Hoberman suggests that women in the late nineteenth century ‘were still largely excluded from universities and the study of classical languages’, and, as a result, ‘classical culture represented a world of male power and collegiality denied them’.90 Despite the obstacles, women in the late nineteenth century did study classical literature and culture in significant numbers. In fact the proliferation of Greek subjects in women’s literature from the middle of the century onwards suggests a collective movement into the classical tradition by women writers and scholars, rather than comprehensive exclusion from it. As the number of female scholars who were able to read ancient Greek increased, they were no longer reliant upon male interpretations of the Greek works in question. Women’s active engagements with classical texts gave them crucial access to the interpretive processes of translation, transliteration, expurgation, adaptation and editing. But perhaps the most significant movement was in literary interpretation, which, over the course of the nineteenth century, was increasingly considered as a discipline worthy of rigorous academic study.91 Together these developments transformed women’s writing of the late nineteenth century. It is, therefore, in these areas that I will focus my attention. Other cultural developments also influenced women’s relationship to ancient literature and culture, such as increased opportunities for travel. Large numbers of women travelled to Greece and the Near East from the eighteenth century onwards, for reasons as disparate as pleasure/leisure, exploration, escapism, scientific and/or historic investigation, as dutiful wives, for missionary work, for the sake of art, diplomacy, or simple curiosity. Women such as Isabel Armstrong, Fanny Blunt, Mary Dawson-Damer, Lady Francis Egerton, Elizabeth Grosvenor, Catherine Janeway, Mabel Moore, Florence Nightingale, Felicia Skene, Agnes Lewis Smith, Lady Hester Stanhope and Jane Ellen Harrison all travelled to and wrote about their experiences in Greece.92 Of the writers in this study, only Emily Pfeiffer travelled beyond the borders of Italy to experience first-hand the fragmented, liminal land that was Greece. In 1880, before her journey East, Emily Pfeiffer wrote a poem entitled ‘Hellas’.93 Like Byron and Shelley before her, Pfeiffer envisaged a ‘new’ England in the poem, inspired by the glorious achievements of the ancient Greeks. In her travelogue Flying Leaves from East and West (1885), published only five years later, Pfeiffer reveals her deep ambivalence about the ancient

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culture which she had previously so revered. In many ways, Pfeiffer’s journey to Athens is represented as a return to the origins of sexual difference. For instance, in Athens, overlooking the massive, fragmented relic of the Parthenon, Pfeiffer consults (a translation of) Plato’s Republic, and concludes that, ‘the Athenian world, more than that of its neighbour States, still more than that of some other ancient peoples, was a world without woman in any true sense’ (59). Coming face to face with the literary and stone monuments of the androcentric ancient Greeks, Pfeiffer feels compelled to disinherit herself from the Hellenic tradition.94 Other women’s experiences of Greece were more positive. The Cambridge scholar Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) made repeated visits to Greece from the 1880s onwards. As I will discuss in more detail later, Harrison was a pioneering figure in terms of classical scholarship and in the anthropological and archaeological study of ancient Greece. In her visits to the ancient sites, Harrison not only gathered empirical data pertaining to her own interests, she met and interacted with a range of scholars, such as Wilhelm Dörpfeld and Arthur Evans, who were in the process of rewriting the history of ancient Greece. Harrison’s journeys through the (intellectual) landscapes of Greece thereby placed her at the site of knowledge production. Importantly, Harrison’s intellectual tourism not only helped to galvanize her own ideas about the culture and religions of ancient Greece, she also helped to shape the intellectual horizons of other British tourists. Mary Beard points out that Jane Harrison’s Introductory Studies to Greek Art, known as the ‘Blue Jane’, ‘became the standard handbook for an archaeological visit to Athens’.95 Another popular guide to the rich treasures of Athens was Mrs Vernon Delves-Broughton’s Hand Book to the Antiquities of Athens (1896). Such guides were supplemented by a growing trend towards more ethnographic works, like Lucy M. J. Garnett’s Greek Folk-Songs (1885). What these works indicate is that women were increasingly involved in the professional study of Greece, and in the process of disseminating their ideas to the British reading and travelling public. The heterogeneous quality of women’s Hellenic writing of the late Victorian period suggests a widespread engagement with a tradition that was being forced to change, to keep pace with the modern world. With the advent of increased social, educational and travel opportunities, in conjunction with the developments in archaeology, anthropology, philology, theatre, museums and the arts, I suggest that women found in Victorian Hellenism some profoundly interesting dark materials, and a space within which to express themselves.

Daughters of Dionysus The dark, Dionysiac side of Greek drama was rediscovered by the German classicist Nietzsche in his seminal study, The Birth of Tragedy (1872).


In this work Nietzsche sought to outline ‘the hitherto unintelligible Hellenic genius – the phenomenon of the re-awakening of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of tragedy’.96 In richly purple prose Nietzsche declared that ‘the age of the Socratic man is over’. Nietzsche attacked the ‘shining fantasy’ of Apollonian rationality, the ‘beauty’ of Greek art and the ‘illusory’ nature of Socratic philosophy. In its stead, Nietzsche championed the tragic vision of Dionysiac art, which he felt forced the individual to confront the ‘true’ horror of existence. He encouraged his inspired fellow Germans to ‘put on wreaths of ivy, put the thyrsus into your hand, and do not be surprised when tigers and panthers lie down, fawning, at your feet’.97 Nietzsche’s groundbreaking study was greeted with derision by classical scholars, such as the young philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, on the basis of poor scholarship.98 Yet, Nietzsche’s thesis, particularly his construction of the Apollonian–Dionysian polarity in Greek thought, came to exert considerable influence.99 The resurgence of Dionysian Hellenism was not just felt within classical scholarship. As Margot K. Louis has demonstrated, for the late Victorian popular audience, it was not the Olympians but the chthonic deities and the Dionysian revels that most vividly represented Greek culture and religion.100 The celebration of gods like Dionysus, Demeter and Persephone animated not only fin-de-siècle mythography, but also poetry. For writers like Swinburne and Pater, as Louis points out, ‘Dionysus and Persephone are both rich with “dark possibilities”, chthonian deities with “an element of sadness” . . . bringing beauty out of pain.’101 The figure of Dionysus was attractive to so many writers precisely because he represented multiple paradoxes and possibilities. On a psychological and emotional level Dionysus signifies the free flow of the emotional life, untouched by the restrictions of family, society or conventional morality and religion. On a cultural level, Dionysus confuses distinctions between city and wild, mortal and immortal, man and beast, male and female, Greek and barbarian, heaven and earth. Dionysus is, therefore, a complex, protean and provocative god, who opens up a world of new experiences, for those brave enough to embrace him. Dionysus, the paradoxical Greek god of drama, of irrationality, gender confusion and fervent female rites, can, I suggest, be seen to personify the seditious Hellenism of the women writers in this study. Originating from the regions of ancient Thrace, Dionysus is a foreign god who insinuates himself into the Pantheon of Olympian deities. As an outsider, Dionysus can therefore be seen to exemplify the situation of the woman writer and her relationship to the classical tradition. A transvestite god, who slips easily between genders, Dionysus can also be seen to embody the various subjective possibilities available to the creative writer. Further, Dionysus is a transgressive god, who, like the classically educated woman writer, threatens to destabilize social and political institutions. Dionysus does not simply symbolize chaotic social rebellion; he also celebrates nature and femininity,

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as the deity of a female community. For the woman writer, there is much to inspire and admire in Dionysus. Blinded by his own sexism, Nietzsche did not foresee the darkly imaginative possibilities made available to women writers by his valorization of Dionysus.102 Yet, as Nietzsche recalled so vividly, one of Dionysus’ formative functions was as the god of drama, of tragic theatre. After the successes of the musical burlesques, a preference for more sombre, academic adaptations of ancient drama prevailed towards the end of the nineteenth century.103 A striking feature of the ancient tragedies is that so many of the dramas include powerful and emotive female figures. Knox reminds us that, ‘only one of the surviving tragedies has no female character, and the titles and fragments of the hundreds of lost plays tell the same story: women, on the tragic stage, play the active roles, as man’s partner or more often antagonist, that real life, according to other sources, denied them’.104 In contrast to the historical prose documents which are deafeningly silent in terms of women’s voices, the ancient dramas are saturated with strong female characters who deliver strong opinions. One particularly thinks of Euripides’ heroines: In the seventeen tragedies of Euripides that have survived intact, Phaedra, Electra, and Agave kill or help kill a man, Medea kills a man and her male children, Hecuba blinds a man, and Creusa tries to kill one, while on the other hand Alcestis gives her life to save her husband’s, and Iphigenia, Macaria, and Polyxena are sacrificed at the altar by men. Women’s voices are so insistent on the Euripidean stage that Aristophanes can have Euripides say, in the Frogs, that in his plays, ‘They all stepped up to speak their piece, the mistress spoke, the slave spoke too, the master spoke, the daughter spoke, the grandma spoke.’105 The fact that the ancient dramas were written by men, and not women, nonetheless indicates that the status of women in ancient Greek society was a live political issue, as Helene Foley explains: While women in daily life appear to have been confined to the internal spaces of the household, to public silence, and to non-participation in the political life of Athens, women play an exceptionally prominent role in drama. They speak for themselves, lay claim to a wide-ranging intelligence, criticize their lot, and influence men with their rhetoric. They leave the household and even take action in the political sphere denied to them in life.106 As Ruby Blondell et al point out, tragic heroines are often deliberately subversive and disturbingly belligerent: ‘women in tragedy often disrupt “normal” life by their words and actions: they speak out boldly, tell lies, cause public unrest, violate custom, defy orders, even kill’.107 Marilyn Katz


also suggests that, ‘in tragedy, comedy, and myth – in the realm of the imaginary – Athenian dramatists and their audiences explored freely both the dangers of female “otherness” and the potential remedies for women’s subordination’.108 However, Froma Zeitlin reminds us that women’s limited functions in ancient Greek society meant that they were more likely to play the role ‘of catalysts, agents, instruments, blockers, spoilers, destroyers, and sometimes helpers or saviors for the male characters’. They might also serve as ‘anti-models as well as hidden models for that masculine self’.109 At the heart of this configuration of female figures as ‘spoilers, destroyers’ and ‘anti-models’, are the deeply gendered issues of violence and the expression of anger. As Kathleen Komar points out, ‘violence is a founding feature of the Western tradition: heroes gain immortality through it; nations are founded upon it; families entrenched in it destroy themselves’. And yet, ‘violence seems especially disturbing when it concentrates around women in the classical tradition’.110 In other words, unconventional female figures often carry traditionally negative connotations associated with femininity and womanhood. Ostriker points out that vengeful figures and ‘wrathful deities provide the motivating energy for much of Greek legend, epic, and tragic drama, and without this passion we would have no quarrel between Achilles and Menelaus, no slaughter of the suitors at the end of The Odyssey, no Prometheus or Oedipus’.111 Yet, as Ostriker suggests, ‘the articulation of female anger, like female body language, is culturally taboo, and a woman who breaks this taboo does so at her own peril’.112 For women writers of the late nineteenth century, the attraction towards the spoilers and destroyers of ancient literature is obvious. Women quickly recognized that the tragic female figures of page and stage need not necessarily represent female irrationality, or pathological femininity. Revised and re-envisioned, these female characters could in fact symbolize women’s empowerment, their ability to fight back and to communicate their grievances against patriarchal oppression. I suggest that women writers grasped the opportunities offered by the fierce female figures of ancient drama to articulate the disparities in civil status between men and women in Victorian society and the home. By appropriating transgressive female characters from ancient Greek literature and myth, women writers were able to express their rage and desires with a vengeance. Moreover, the tragic women of antiquity allowed Victorian women to express themselves from within the boundaries of a prestigious, culturally legitimated, male-dominated discourse. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Hellenism was, however, a highly contested area of academic study. The traditional interest in tragic drama was matched by a growing academic interest in the anthropological origins of ancient ritual and myth. James Frazer’s comprehensive investigation into myth, The Golden Bough (1890), Jane Ellen Harrison’s Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature (1882) and Harrison and Verrall’s Mythology

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and Monuments of Ancient Athens (1890) concentrated on the socio-religious practices of the Greeks. As Louis notes, ‘as the century wore on, this insistence on a spiritual vision that acknowledged and incorporated pain, loss, and division grew and shifted the emphasis once more away from the gods of light, toward the chthonic deities and the gods of the Mysteries’.113 Louis explains that, ‘such scorn for the Olympians, such praise for the Mysteries, goes against the wide current on the surface of mid-Victorian culture – the current that most commentators have taken for the whole sea’.114 This shift in academic interest did not dampen enthusiasm for the Greek tragedies. Gilbert Murray’s translations of the ancient tragedies, particularly the work of Euripides, and the inauguration of the Cambridge Greek play in 1895, all contributed to keeping classics at the centre of a flourishing intellectual scene. At the centre of that scene was a group of academics who have become known as the ‘Cambridge Ritualists’. The supposed ‘members’ of this loosely defined group included Gilbert Murray, Francis Cornford, A. B. Cook and Jane Ellen Harrison. Others have also listed James Frazer as another peripheral member, despite Frazer’s repudiation of ritualism later in his career.115 Nevertheless, the work of these Cambridge academics certainly reinforces the sense that in the late nineteenth century, the emphasis shifts from the homosocial Hellenism of Oxford to the feminist-inclined Hellenism of Cambridge.116 One of the most influential figures of this cluster of classical scholars was the Newnham-educated Jane Ellen Harrison. As Beard points out, the basic message of Harrison’s work, ‘that somewhere underneath the calm, shining, rational exterior of the classical world is a mass of weird, seething irrationality – is a tenet that almost everyone working in the history of Greek culture would now take for granted’.117 After early excursions in the ideality of Greek art, Harrison moved away from the grandeur of the Olympians to study the matriarchal origins of Greek myth and religion. In her now famous works, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Themis (1912) and Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1921), Harrison devised a daring reading of the Greeks as an often irrational and mystical people. The cult of Dionysus features heavily in Harrison’s early work. In Alpha and Oemga (1915) for instance, Harrison declared her ‘deep inward dissatisfaction with the Olympian religion’, and her preference for the ‘savage disorders’ of the Mystery gods, ‘Demeter, Dionysus, the cosmic Eros’.118 Moreover, in Prolegomena, Harrison represented Dionysus as a thoroughly feminized god: The interesting thing about Dionysos is that, develop as he may, he bears to the end, as no other god does, the stamp of his matriarchal origin. He can never rid himself of the throng of worshipping women, he is always the nursling of his Maenads. Moreover the instruments of his cult are always not his but his mother’s. It is not enough to say that


all orgiastic cults have analogies, nor, as is usually maintained, that the worship of Kybele came in classical times from Asia Minor, and was contaminated with that of Dionysos. All this is true, but the roots of the analogy lie deeper down. The Mother and the Son were together from the beginning.119 As Sandra Peacock notes, ‘Harrison posited the historical existence of matriarchy by connecting matrilineal descent and the presence of the pre-Olympian earth goddesses.’ Unlike Freud and Bachofen, who asserted the overthrow of matriarchy by patriarchy as a positive development towards ‘civilization’, Harrison ‘straddled the fence by being neither overtly lyrical about these goddesses and the matriarchy they represented nor overly hostile toward the patriarchal structure that Olympianism reflected’.120 If Harrison was tentative about her conclusions in Prolegomena, her body of work on Greek ritualism firmly established the importance of the cult of Dionysus in the study of ancient Greek culture. In her fascinating biography of Harrison, Mary Beard suggests that Harrison not only changed the way we think about the ancient Greeks, she also ‘put women academics and women’s colleges (dangerously) on the map’.121 In the history of classical scholarship and Victorian Hellenism, Harrison cuts a particularly impressive figure. Indeed, Beard suggests that Harrison’s ‘new vision of the Greek past . . . found a ready audience among modernist writers and critics in the first half of the twentieth century’:122 T. S. Eliot had read Themis as soon as it appeared and discussed it in a Harvard graduate paper – and his later construction of the ‘primitive’ was explicitly influenced by Harrison and her ‘fascinating’ books. Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) figured a version of the ancient world that drew directly on Harrison (not surprisingly: her lectures notes taken on a Greek cruise in 1932 show that the lecturer was feeding his audience pure Prolegomena). Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, pointed to Harrison’s work on Greek archaeology . . . as a prime example of distinguished non-fiction writing by a woman. And she gave her ghost a famous walk-on part, haunting the gardens of Fernham College (a thinly disguised Newnham).123 In Hypatia: Or Woman and Knowledge (1925) Dora Russell celebrated the ‘votaries’ of the previous generation, who, like Harrison, gave ‘the classics, science, medicine, the history of the world . . . They, these pioneers, childless, unwed, created and bore thousands of women.’124 However, Russell’s tribute to the previous generation of ‘feminist’ revisionists is unusual. Hurst suggests that Harrison’s enthusiasm for the Dionysian had little impact on the next

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generation of women writers who, instead, ‘wanted to go on from university to a literary career combined with a fulfilling domestic life’.125 Hurst points out that, “‘Michael Field” and Jane Ellen Harrison may have adopted the “Greek Maenad” as “an imaginary alternative to the Victorian spinster,” but for writers like Dorothy Sayers and Vera Brittan, “it was a derogatory image” ’.126 The socio-medical discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had already pathologized many aspects of female sexuality and behaviour. Communities of unmarried, intellectual women were thereby perceived as unnatural, and many writers found themselves reassuring their readers of their uncorrupted ‘femininity’. Hurst cites N. M. Haldane’s (later Naomi Mitchison) ‘Awakening of the Bacchae’, in which Haldane ‘rewrites a negative image of uncontrolled, violent female force to reassure her readers that the women liberated by the First World War will not abuse their unwonted freedom’. As Hurst notes, ‘the Bacchae of this poem are not savage or destructive . . . their awakening does not endanger anyone, the “god” who endows them with “wisdom” does not inspire violence or loss of control’.127 After the violence of the First World War, the transgressive power of Dionysus had been neutralized and his Maenads desexualized and pacified. In the earlier work of Webster, Levy, Pfeiffer, Field, Mona Caird and Vernon Lee, tragic heroines such as Medea, Clytemnestra, Cassandra and the Bacchantes of Dionysus retain their power to disturb and transgress. In fact Medea emerges as a dominant figure in this study, suggesting that her ferocious violence against the patriarchal family and her successful escape from punishment had a particular resonance with Victorian women. I begin my analysis with the work of Augusta Webster, who was repeatedly drawn to Medea, as both a translator and a poet. A tenacious campaigner for women’s rights and educational opportunities, Webster’s Hellenic poetics can be seen as particularly bold interventions in the discourse of Hellenism, as her poems reflect her political concerns. In Chapter 2 I examine the poetry of the Cambridge-educated, AngloJewish writer Amy Levy. In many ways Levy can be seen to share Webster’s poetical techniques and political aims. In the dramatic monologue ‘Xantippe’ and the closet-drama ‘Medea’, for instance, Levy skilfully exploits the potential in these literary forms for psychological and sociological analysis. In these ancient female figures, Levy (re)discovered resources of resistance and narratives of displacement through which she could examine the gender and racial politics of the late Victorian period and her own status as a culturally marginalized Other. Thus, Levy’s Hellenism is marked by self-conscious minority politics and a subversive note of non-conformity. Emily Pfeiffer exhibits a similar level of technical skill and political awareness in her depictions of tragic heroines. Pfeiffer was a renowned sonneteer who produced a number of highly regarded volumes of poetry throughout the 1880s. In her twin-sonnets ‘Kassandra’ and ‘Klytemnestra’, Pfeiffer


ambitiously takes on the shocking biographies of Aeschylus’ ancient protagonists, and opens up a dramatic dialogue between the two characters. Pfeiffer effectively transforms the brief, condensed mode of the sonnet into a dynamic form, suitable for provocative social and political commentary. Indeed, Pfeiffer’s heroines have particularly potent, transgressive qualities, which can be seen to speak to contemporary British women struggling for social and political emancipation. Kassandra and Klytemnestra ultimately succumb to male violence and the vagaries of fate. Nevertheless, Pfeiffer successfully demonstrates that the willingness of her characters to defy and to protest against male power retains significance in the modern world. Mona Caird offers a similar message in her ‘New Woman’ novel, Daughters of Danaus. However, Caird’s realist approach to her subject limits the drama, if not the tragedy, of her heroine’s fate. Caird’s protagonist, Hadria Fullerton, is a highly intelligent, articulate young woman, frustrated by the demands and restrictions placed on her sex. At various points throughout the text Hadria’s frustration threatens to boil over into Medea-like rage. But whereas tragic heroines take decisive action against their situation, even at the cost of their own lives, Hadria is overwhelmed by the claims of family and mundane practical difficulties. Caird thereby ensures that Hadria’s needless suffering disturbs and her fate provokes sympathy for the contemporaneous struggles of the fin-de-siècle ‘New Woman’. The chapters of the book follow a loosely chronological order so as to emphasize the concepts of inheritance and transmission, and to highlight inter-textual and literary networks. This structure will hopefully illuminate both the continuities and shifts within Victorian Hellenism and the wider cultural context. For instance, the heavily politicized Hellenism of Augusta Webster, Amy Levy and Emily Pfeiffer can be seen to differ from the later, more aesthetic approaches of Michael Field and Vernon Lee. In many respects this shift can be seen to echo the waning fortunes of the feminist movement, which struggled to maintain its momentum and to force through political change during the 1880s and 1890s. That is not to say that the female characters of Field and Lee are any less subversive, or that their work has no political content. In Bellerophôn and Callirrhoë, for example, Bradley and Cooper engage in the very public debates about sexual morality, as part of their wider agenda to expound a philosophy of experience and pleasure for contemporary life. Bradley and Cooper’s bacchants revel in celebration of Dionysus, but they do so with political revolution in mind. Vernon Lee also locates her Renaissance/Victorian heroine within a cultural and literary context concerned with transgressive femininity. Whereas the Apollonian strains of Greek culture may have inspired generations of male writers and artists, as J. B. Bullen and others have shown, I suggest that it was the ‘dark side’ of Hellenism which most appealed to Victorian women writers. I argue that the provocative female figures of ancient tragedy, myth and history provided Victorian women with

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subversive anti-heroines, female figures who exemplify matriarchal power, political protest and/or dissident behaviour. Reading each text in relation to the social, political and literary contexts of its production, I hope to show that a range of women writers, with differing aims and ambitions, conscientiously reinterpreted ancient paradigms in order to challenge contemporary values. These writers both engage with intellectual culture on a scholarly level, and they demonstrate the wide appeal of Hellenism. Moreover, Victorian women writers can be seen to reaffirm the relevance of Hellenism in the modern world, and restate the significance of Hellenism as a vehicle for dramatic social and political commentary.

1 Taking on the Tradition: Augusta Webster’s Feminist Revisionism

Recognized for the strength and ‘virility’ of her verse, as well as her good judgement and intellectual integrity, Augusta Webster is one of the nineteenth century’s most unique voices. As a poet, reviewer, campaigner and reformer, Webster can be seen as one of the most politically active and informed writers of her generation. Yet despite her versatility, technical ability and productivity, Webster did not enjoy contemporary fame as a writer nor did she secure a strong posthumous reputation. For some of her admirers this state of affairs was simply inexplicable. Theodore Watts-Dunton felt that, ‘it is a monstrous thing that such poetry as Augusta Webster’s should be unknown. Her name is not even mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’1 For many years Watts-Dunton, a colleague of Webster’s from the Athenaeum, ventured to correct this gross error on behalf of the Victorian reading public by supporting and promoting the work of his friend. However, it was not until the late twentieth century that Webster received the critical re-evaluation that her work so richly deserves. In stark contrast to the voluptuous lyricism of writers like Michael Field, the work of Augusta Webster is more restrained and can be characterized by a sense of intellectual veracity and endeavour. That is not to say that Webster’s work is narrow in scope, or mundane in content. Rather, Webster can be seen as one of the most bold and innovative women writers of the Victorian period. Continually experimenting with form, Webster produced a novel, eight books of poetry (one posthumously), four dramas, children’s fiction, extensive criticism and translations of classical Greek. In addition to this impressive output, Webster also campaigned for women’s rights and was an elected member of the London School Board. In fact Webster’s political activism traverses her creative and critical writing to such an extent that she must be seen as one of the most politically driven and socially committed writers of the nineteenth century. As Angela Leighton notes, Webster ‘belongs in the liberal, humanitarian tradition of the high Victorians, with its social responsibility and philanthropical concern’.2 Webster repeatedly dealt with many of the morally 27

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contentious issues of the day, such as prostitution, sexuality, religious doubt and political oppression. If one takes the poem ‘A Castaway’ as an example, a young female prostitute vehemently condemns all the ‘virtuous worthy men/Who feed on the world’s follies, vices, wants,/And do their business of lies and shams’.3 Unfortunately, such strong moral and political beliefs neither guaranteed an audience, nor secured influential admirers. Christina Rossetti, a long-term enthusiast of Webster’s work, thought that Webster’s status as a feminist campaigner and educational reformer may have adversely affected her reputation as a poet.4 Webster’s relative obscurity would seem to suggest that Rossetti was right. Fortunately, however, Webster’s work has been rediscovered by a new generation of scholars. Her work features in a number of recent anthologies and she has been the focus of a number of individual studies.5 Since the feminist re-evaluation of the canon, Webster, along with so many other women writers, has finally been allocated a place within the English literary tradition. Ironically, Webster was intensely familiar with the difficulties of ‘reception’ and working within the canon. As a translator and critic, Webster’s writing can be seen to directly reflect the complexities of bequeathing and inheriting, of receiving and transmitting, of learning and teaching. In fact one of the most impressive aspects of Webster’s work is her meticulous scholarship, particularly with regard to classical subjects. In 1866, for example, Webster published a translation of Aeschylus’ tragedy, Prometheus Bound. The tragedy was an interesting choice for Webster, as the play was widely known and highly regarded by educated audiences. Made famous by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge early in the nineteenth century, Prometheus was repeatedly translated and adapted throughout the Victorian period. In addition to the translations of scholars like George Burges (1833), F. A. Paley (1855) and John Stuart Blackie (1850), Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously published a much maligned version of the play in 1833. As an informally educated young woman, Webster was, therefore, taking a considerable creative risk. Her decision to translate not only suggests that she felt sufficiently skilled and confident in her knowledge of ancient Greek to publish alongside male scholars, but also that she was sceptical of the veracity and accuracy of previous scholarly versions. Indeed, in one of her essays on the subject of translation Webster lamented, ‘if only the master poets of the classical world could be rendered for us as have been the magnificent Hebrews! If translation of them could be done by a company – a company seeking no personal glory and impressed with such a reverence as would prevent their altering or elaborating one jot or one title.’6 Entrusting herself to the difficult task, Augusta Webster produced ‘literal’ translations of two of the most tantalizing of classical texts, Prometheus and Medea. Lorna Hardwick suggests that Webster chose Prometheus because it is a play ‘which dramatises issues of obligation, community, freedom, tyranny and oppression of woman’.7 Certainly, all of these themes would have appealed

Augusta Webster’s Feminist Revisionism

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to the politically minded Webster. At one point in the drama, for instance, it is foretold that Zeus will be toppled from his throne through the medium of marriage: ‘He is set to wed/With such a wedding as shall shake him down/From throne and kingship, a forgotten thing’ (940–2). Webster clearly found the gender politics of Prometheus attractive and subversive. Significantly, however, Prometheus is also a play which dramatizes the acquisition and transmission of received wisdom. Prometheus’ illicit distribution of the fire of the gods to humans undermines the sovereignty and authority of the Greek deities and ushers in a new era. Prometheus’ insolent challenge to authority is not only highly subversive. His defiant independence is inspirational and potentially revolutionary. On a parallel, if less dramatic level, Webster, a largely self-educated scholar, also managed something of a Promethean feat; in acquiring and translating classical Greek, Webster had stolen the language of the dons. By successfully translating a highly regarded Greek text for an unschooled readership, Webster effectively challenged the authority and exclusivity of the university-educated male elite. Throughout the Victorian period translation remained a male-dominated area of scholarship, despite the major contributions of women like Webster, Barrett Browning, Anna Swanwick, Mary F. Robinson and Constance Garnett.8 In part, this was due to the inequalities in classical education for girls. However, such disparity also reflected, as Hardwick notes, ‘competition to appropriate and control the classical canon’. ‘Classical texts’, and the related issues of authenticity, interpretation and transmission, were ‘part of the battlefield of social change’.9 In choosing to announce herself to the literary community through the medium of translation, Webster knew that she would have a platform from which to fight the culture wars, particularly with regard to women’s education. As Lori Chamberlain notes, translation can provide a wealth of information about ‘practices of domination and subversion’.10 The process of translation may highlight the often antagonistic relationship of women to language. Indeed, Webster directly acknowledges the exclusion of women from academic scholarship and classical literature in the preface to her translation of Prometheus. The revealing preface was not in fact written by Webster, but by her husband and editor, Thomas Webster. He writes, ‘the reason why the title-page of this book bears the name of an Editor as well as that of a Translator is, that my wife wished for some better guarantee of accuracy than a lady’s name could give, and so, rightly or wrongly, looked to me for what she wanted’.11 Thomas Webster was a lawyer by profession and, having graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, was well-versed in classical Greek. He was not, however, formally trained as a translator nor was he a poet. Nevertheless, Augusta Webster sought to forestall the expected critical backlash against her, by having her work verified and authorized by a scholar from an intellectual community from which she had been excluded.

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Surprisingly, critics reacted far more favourably to Webster’s version of Prometheus than the interpretation produced by Barrett Browning over thirty years earlier. What appealed to the critics about this version was the very literal nature of Webster’s verse-translation. The reviewer for the Westminster Review praised Webster’s ‘fidelity to the original’, whilst the Contemporary Review felt that Webster’s work was ‘done faithfully and conscientiously’.12 Webster’s rendition of Medea was similarly praised for its honesty and accuracy. J. Millard in the Athenaeum commented that, ‘it is surprising how closely and correctly she has reproduced the original, expressing its full force and delicate shades of meaning, line for line, and almost word for word’.13 Of course, what the reviewers meant was that Webster’s scholarly translations were sufficiently rigorous and accurate for a woman. The Contemporary Review condescendingly acceded that, ‘in faithfulness and accurate interpretation [Webster] is second to none, and this in itself is saying a great deal for a lady-translator’.14 Female translators like Webster demonstrated that translation could be a potentially dynamic and interventionist form of creation and communication. As Sherry Simon suggests, translation can be envisaged as a ‘mode of engagement with literature, as a kind of literary activism’.15 In receiving, translating and transmitting ancient Greek texts to a Victorian audience, Augusta Webster directly interceded in the creation and interpretation of Victorian culture. In Webster’s case, translation may be seen not only as an expression of her political convictions, but also as a reflection of her interventionist and reformist inclinations. As a poet and translator, Webster was intensely invested in contributing to contemporary debates and, I suggest, in creating new intellectual communities. Indeed, Webster’s translations, alongside those of Anna Swanwick and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, may be seen as significant contributions in the creative renewal of the classical literary tradition in the Victorian period. What makes Webster’s achievements in classical scholarship all the more remarkable is that unlike the university-educated Swanwick, Webster was almost entirely self-taught. Born in Poole, Dorset in 1837, to Julia Hume Davies and Vice-Admiral George Davies, Webster was part of a large middleclass family. Despite repeated upheavals, the Davies children attended schools in both Scotland and Cornwall, before the family finally settled in Cambridgeshire in 1851. It is unlikely that Webster received a thorough grounding in the classics at these provincial elementary schools. What is more likely is that Webster may have learned basic Greek whilst assisting her younger brother Gerald in his rudimentary lessons. As Hurst reminds us, girls ‘often learnt Latin and Greek for more practical reasons than their brothers . . . they could save money for the family by passing on their learning to younger siblings (and later to their own children), or stimulate lazy brothers by providing competition for them’.16


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These stolen hours of study certainly seem to have paid off, for as a teenager Webster was known as ‘one of the brilliant daughters of Admiral Davies’.17 Yet, in a letter to the classical scholar Professor John Blackie, Webster revealed that much of her learning actually took place in later life, with the occasional guidance of her husband, Thomas Webster: You are very right in considering my excursions into Greek authors flirtations. That is just what they are as yet, for I mean to set to work at some schoolboy drudgery in a little while and so put something more like a foundation under my guesswork scholarship. I bought myself . . . what little I know mysteriously in my own room and with no admirers & what might nearly be called no books & certainly no serviceable books besides wretched Charterhouse Grammar . . . my being able to make out the meaning of a poet – if I like him so as to be able to enter into the spirit of him – comes from a rather remarkable gift of good guessing, and my being able to retain confidence in my interpretation so made comes from my having a husband who has learned Greek in good university earnest and is therefore an accurate person quite capable of insisting on my counselling my most brilliant guesses if he thinks the grammar of the original stands in their way. I have been telling him ever since we were married that it is high time for him to take me in hand and give me a sound classical education; but he is very lazy, and I generally have a good many irons in the fire and so we don’t begin our schooling.18 Somewhat disingenuously, Webster describes her learning as a ‘mysterious’ process, whereby she communes with the ancient poets on a spiritual level. As attractive as this notion is, it is misleading, as Webster also reveals that she spends hours alone with ‘the wretched Charterhouse Grammar’. Webster’s ‘guesswork scholarship’ is, therefore, about as well informed as any young male scholar’s. Feeling the need to legitimize her ‘flirtations’ with the classical canon, Webster reassures Blackie that her ‘good guessing’ is supplemented by the occasional advice of her university-educated husband. In other words, Webster responds to Blackie’s criticism by citing the influence of a worthy male relative. But Webster is no apologist for women’s achievements. Rather, she reminds Blackie about the mundane obstacles that are routinely placed in a woman’s way, impeding sustained study and intellectual reflection. Aside from a fundamental lack in formal education, there are ‘housekeeper’s duties and a little daughter to attend to and all the many social taxes on a married ladies [sic] time’. Considering the circumstances, it is remarkable that Webster managed to translate any Greek at all. Yet, she professes ‘the flimsiness of my scholarship because, though I certainly do my own translating, and though I mean to translate & publish one more Greek drama, (some one of

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Sophocles), I do not want to carry false colours and wear the honours of a learned person when I am but a dabbler’. Cleverly, Webster not only emphasizes the fact that her work is her own (thereby reducing the editorial role of her husband), she also highlights the fact that she is effectively barred from higher education. She is unable to wear the colours of a university scholar, not because of a lack of ability on her part, but because of her sex.19 Nevertheless, Webster defiantly announces her intention to ‘dabble’ with the classics, at will. Ultimately, what this fascinating letter reveals is that Webster not only felt that the core texts of the Hellenic tradition were available to her, but also that she was as well-placed as any male scholar to receive, translate and transmit them to a contemporary audience. Over the course of her career, Webster would repeatedly ‘take on’ the Hellenic tradition in Victorian England, as both an admirer and a detractor.

Of maidens, magic and murder: Webster’s ‘Circe’ and ‘Medea in Athens’ Webster’s long lyrical studies on the classical figures of Medea and Circe appear in her fifth book of poetry, Portraits. The 1870 edition of the volume begins with the powerful ‘monologues’ of four female characters. The first two are classical studies, ‘Medea in Athens’ and ‘Circe’, which are followed by the contemporary portraits, ‘The Happiest Girl in the World’ and ‘A Castaway’. This carefully assembled quartet – a wife, a fiancé, a mistress and a prostitute – deliver their observations on the frustrations, disappointments and dangers of relationships with men. Thematic continuities bind all four of the opening monologues and the emotions and experiences of each female character are, to a certain extent, mirrored and reflected by the other characters. For instance, Medea and the newly engaged Happiest Girl in the World expose the double standards inherent in the institution of marriage from two differing points of experience. There is also a distinct correlation, in terms of character and content, between the classical studies. Webster’s informal pairing of Circe and Medea recalls both their familial tie (Medea is said by legend to be Circe’s niece) and their matching reputations, as dangerously sensual, potentially murderous witches of the ancient world. Indeed, in William Morris’ Life and Death of Jason (1867), the seductive figures of Circe and Medea collude in sorcery and the art of prophecy. But, as Webster surely knew, there are other significant points of conversion between the characters of Circe and Medea: both women enjoy magical powers beyond male knowledge and mastery; both women conduct sexual relationships with unfaithful men; and both women are abandoned by their lovers in favour of more domestically inclined ‘wifely’ women. Webster’s portraits can therefore be seen to reflect women who voluntarily enter into self-destructive relationships with selfish, manipulative men. But Circe and Medea are not passive victims to male desire. They are powerful,


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challenging women who refuse to acquiesce submissively to male demands. And, if necessary, they will use violence against male sexual aggression. As we shall see, Webster’s psycho-social portraits are not merely studies of ancient archetypes. Her magical maidens sit alongside their ‘modern’ contemporaries, suggesting that their stories have a particular relevance to Webster’s own age. The familiar characters of Medea and Circe offered an exciting, if challenging, opportunity to Webster. By employing notorious female characters from ancient myth, Webster could, with all the weight and cultural authority of the classical tradition behind her, explore the causes and circumstances behind their exceptional reputations. In so doing, Webster could manipulate the malleable myths of the ancient Greeks for her own determinedly feminist purposes. In an intriguing essay collected in the volume Housewife’s Opinions, Webster outlined her approach to the appropriation of ancient myths and legends. For Webster, ‘the highest powers of creative imagination have usually found their fittest exercise in intensified pourtrayal [sic] of the men and women and events of history or of legends and tales’.20 In other words, ‘the poet creates as the sculptor does; he need not make the stone as well as the statue’.21 Clearly, Webster considered the myths and legends of ancient Greece to be freely available base material. She felt neither intimidated by, nor obligated to follow, previous versions or characterizations of Medea or Circe. This particular artist had her own creations in mind.

‘Am I no happy wife?’: Webster’s ‘Medea in Athens’ The first classical study to appear in the first edition of Portraits is that of Medea. Having translated Euripides’ version of Medea, it is likely that Webster was familiar with the details and indeterminate history of Medea’s ancestry, and of her many roles as a pivotal character in numerous ancient narratives.22 Webster’s reworking of this most famous of classical tales deliberately and significantly departs from Euripidean convention. Webster combines many traditional elements of the myth of Medea, only to forge her own distinctive character and voice. For instance, Webster’s Medea is not the unwavering, sadistic agent of Euripides, but a disturbingly reflective, brooding character, caught between her memories and her desires. Removed to Athens, Webster’s Medea is also temporarily and geographically dislocated from the notorious events of her past. Yet, Webster has no intention of glossing over Medea’s heinous crimes. Webster compels her audience to reassess the story of Medea, by providing intimate insights into Medea’s psychology and her infamous backstory. In representing Medea’s case before a Victorian literary jury, Webster encourages her audience to acknowledge the sexual double standard which often applies to any judgement of Medea’s character. Webster’s portrait thereby highlights the contemporaneous issues of sexual morality, marital infidelity and gender roles.

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The myth of Medea has endured for over two thousand years. As a figure of lyric poetry, drama, epic and art, Medea has survived many manifestations and transformations. As a dark-skinned woman originating from the distant land of Colchis, Medea has, at various points in her long history, been both an icon for the sexually, politically and racially oppressed and a figure of fear. In the ancient world she was widely known as a sorceress of divine origins. But, after Euripides rewrote her story in 431 BC, the name of Medea became synonymous with the act of infanticide. As Marianne McDonald succinctly notes, Medea ‘is not simple, and neither are her interpretations. She overflows constricting categories.’23 As a sorceress, guilty of fratricide and infanticide, Medea is, perhaps, the most famous antagonist created by the Greek poets. According to various traditions, Medea’s saga begins in Colchis, the kingdom of her father Aeëtes. A beautiful young princess, Medea falls in love with the Greek Argonaut Jason, whom she helps, with the aid of magic, to steal the Golden Fleece. After she betrays her father and kills her brother, Apsyrtus, Medea and Jason flee to Corinth where, living as husband and wife, Medea bears Jason two sons. However, Jason, who has ambitions towards the throne, soon resolves to wed the King of Corinth’s daughter and to exile Medea and his sons from Corinth. Medea, outraged at Jason’s betrayal, determines to take her revenge on her perfidious spouse by murdering the Corinthian princess and her own children. This she does before she manages to escape Corinth on a golden-dragon chariot, sent by her grandfather, the sun-god Helios. Multiple versions of Medea’s story existed in antiquity, but it is Euripides who has been credited with the ‘invention’ of the mother who killed her children.24 Following her terrible crimes, Medea is said by tradition to flee to Athens, to the household of King Aegeus. Euripides stops short of confirming this course of action, but the Roman poet Ovid takes a more sustained view of Medea’s story, tracing her origins in Colchis to her eventual arrival and forced withdrawal from Athens. In the Metamorphoses Ovid tells us how after living happily for many years with Aegeus, Medea attempts to kill the king’s estranged son, Theseus, to prevent him from inheriting the throne. In an extraordinary recognition scene, the king recognizes the young hero as his own son, dashing the poisoned cup, which Medea had prepared, from his lips. Medea is then forced to flee Athens as the declared enemy of the future king. ‘Medea in Athens’ steers a delicate course between the dramatic denouement of Euripides’ play and the lyrical representations of Ovid. By focusing on Medea’s situation after the notorious events of Corinth, Webster can be seen to distance herself from her classical predecessors and the majority of contemporary representations of Medea. Medea was a conspicuous figure in Victorian theatre, music and literature from mid-century, despite, or perhaps because of her reputation for murder and sorcery. A number of women writers sought to rehabilitate Euripides’ antagonist throughout the


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period, including George Eliot, who repeatedly returned to the Medea myth in Adam Bede (1859), Felix Holt (1866) and Daniel Deronda (1876). In Adam Bede the hapless Hetty Sorel murders her infant, after being abandoned by the squire’s grandson, Arthur Donnithorne. As Josephine McDonagh points out, ‘Hetty’s child murder is an attribute of her dissident sexuality, the most extreme manifestation of a wild, transgressive desire that threatens the stability of the emerging bourgeois society.’25 The sensuous, pleasure-seeking Hetty is found guilty of murder and banished from the community which perceives her to be a threat. Eliot persisted with her allusions to Medea as can be seen from her portrayals of Mrs Transome in Felix Holt and Lydia Glasher in Daniel Deronda. The best-selling novels of Ellen Wood and Elizabeth Braddon also feature unconventional and assertive heroines, who bear an uncanny resemblance to Euripides’ ancient antagonist. As Edith Hall notes, such shocking representations of Medea-like figures reflect the widespread trend towards sensation fiction in the 1860s and 1870s.26 Medea’s appeal did not stop there, however. As we will see, towards the close of the century, Amy Levy, Vernon Lee, Mona Caird and Edith Wheelwright also exploited the feminist potential of the Medea myth, in their own fictional portrayals of rebellious women.27 Medea was also a popular figure in the art of the Victorian period. Frederick Sandys, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, depicted one of the most famous representations of Medea for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1869. Sandys’ striking oil-painting caused a sensation when it was first exhibited. But despite obvious artistic merit, the picture was rejected by the Academy for its supposedly deplorable depiction of a murderous mother. Others were far more generous in their appraisal of Sandys’ achievement. Alfred Bate Richards was so impressed by the image that he produced a long poem in response to Sandys’ portrayal of Medea. Medea: a Poem (1869) is, however, more of a testament to Sandys’ richly creative imagination than that of Richards. More images of Medea appeared in England and in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, including paintings by Valentine Prinsep (1888), Evelyn Pickering de Morgan (1889) and Edward Burne-Jones (1890).28 The French painter Eugene Delacroix produced a powerful picture of Medea, together with her children, in 1838, whilst the German neoclassical painter Anselm Feuerbach created an emotive image of ‘Medea’, also with children, in 1870.29 Medea also made repeated appearances on stage during the nineteenth century. As Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh observe, the sudden proliferation of new versions of Medea – both tragic and burlesque – in mid-century coincided with public debates regarding the divorce laws and the enfranchisement of women in England.30 The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act was passed in the August of 1857. Around this time, as Hall suggests, Medea ‘became one of the most ubiquitous heroines on the London stage’.31 James Robinson Planché’s The Golden Fleece; or Jason in Colchis and Medea

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in Corinth (1845) was a particularly important intervention in Medea’s Victorian stage reception. As Hall and Macintosh point out, Planché’s drama ‘explores, in a comic vein, the plight of wives should divorce become accessible to husbands who had tired of them’.32 Planché’s approach inspired a series of imitators, such as Robert Brough’s burlesque of 1856. Humorously entitled, The Best of Mothers, with a Brute of a Husband, the joke not only refers to the infanticidal Medea, but, as Hall points out, to ‘yet another legislative controversy concerned with marriage, the long-running attempt to remove the ban on a man marrying his deceased wife’s sister’.33 In the following decades, however, the tone of the stage productions changed. In 1876, for example, an adaptation of Das Goldene Fliess (The Golden Fleece), by the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer, was staged at the Haymarket in London. On this occasion the tempestuous Czech-born actress Francesca Janauschek was contracted to play the role of the barbarian Medea. Unlike the productions of twenty years earlier, this Medea was not played for laughs. As the nineteenth century wore on, Medea was increasingly appropriated for overtly political purposes. By the turn of the century, Euripides’ version of the myth was considered a particularly potent force in representing women’s desires for social and political emancipation. An anonymous reviewer spoke of the great tragedian in the following terms: Does he not, with Prof. Gilbert Murray for interpreter, find his natural place on our stage by the side of our newest and brainiest dramatists? Is he not familiar to all Fleet Street as the ‘Greek Ibsen’, the ‘Attic Shaw’? Are not his plays an inexhaustible mine of tags for the Feminist and other workers for Great Causes?34 The notable translator of Euripides, Gilbert Murray, a fellow of New College, Oxford, and later Regius Professor of Greek, also recognized the potential for the feminist revisionism of Euripides’ great tragedy. Hall suggests that: Although Murray was later to distance himself from the militant wing of the women’s suffrage movement, he had supported its aims since 1889. He believed that the ancient Greeks were ‘the first nation that realised and protested against the subjection of women’ and the actress Sibyl Thorndike recalled him saying that Medea ‘might have been written’ for the women’s movement.35 As early as the 1860s, Augusta Webster had recognized the political potential of Medea’s tale of oppression and violent resistance for advancing the cause of women’s rights. Webster’s translation of Euripides’ Medea (1868) should be seen as a timely and well-judged contribution to the ‘feminist’ debates of the midnineteenth century. Webster’s decision to promote Medea’s powerful story to


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an English-speaking audience may in fact be interpreted as a pointedly political gesture. Likewise, ‘Medea in Athens’ can also be viewed as a commentary on the developing campaign for women’s rights, and particularly on the debates about the rights of middle-class wives. First and foremost, Webster’s Medea is a wife. In Athens she is both the consort to King Aegeus and the former wife of Jason, and it is from this position that she speaks. Furthermore, the issue of Medea’s infanticide is downplayed until the final section of the poem. As a consequence, Webster’s audience is compelled to confront Medea as a woman, rather than as a murderous mother. This strategy allows Webster to introduce a range of issues pertinent to Medea’s social and psychological status. Webster’s Medea is, therefore, no crude caricature of an ancient archetype. In ‘Medea in Athens’, Webster creates a sophisticated portrait of a betrayed wife, driven to extraordinary deeds. Webster designs an appropriately complex narrative structure in order to deliver Medea’s story. ‘Medea in Athens’ has been variously described as a dramatic monologue and a ‘monodrama’.36 The lyric constitutes a deliberately convoluted narrative, which defies rigid classification. The poem can be divided into three main sections, with each element of the portrait revealing a different aspect of Medea’s psychology and personality. Medea’s narrative voice may hold the lyric together, but the various shifts in time, tone and perspective undermine the notion of a cohesive monologue. For instance, the first part of the narrative focuses on the reception of the news of Jason’s death and Medea’s subsequent ‘vision’ of that death. A sudden hiatus interrupts the narrative before the second section of the poem, which reveals a more conventionally introspective Medea. After another narrative break, Medea is seen to address Jason’s ghost in the third and final section. In this last segment, Medea not only discloses the motivations behind her act of infanticide, she also seeks to establish Jason’s culpability. Her argument is powerful and persuasive, if a little one-sided. What we are left with is a suitably fragmented portrait of an ultimately elusive character. Yet it is the inconsistencies and discontinuities in Webster’s lyric that best reflect the complexity of Medea’s psychology and precarious social position. Webster’s portrait begins with a question, ‘Dead is he?’ The question refers to the news that Jason, the Greek hero of the Argonautica, has perished.37 Medea’s question is soon answered when the details of Jason’s death are supposedly revealed to her in a vision: Has a god come to me? Is it thou, my Hecate? How know I all? For I know all as if from long ago: and I know all beholding instantly. Is that not he, arisen through the mists? – a lean and haggard man, rough round the eyes, dull and with no scorn left upon his lip,

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decayed out of his goodliness and strength; a wanned and broken image of a god; dim counterfeit of Jason, heavily wearing the name of him and his memories.

(37–47)

Such visionary abilities suggest that Medea is either semi-divine, or prone to fits of delusion and flights of imaginative fancy. Webster chooses not to provide any definitive answers. In so doing, Webster encourages her audience to suspend their judgement of Medea’s notorious character. Keeping her audience off-balance, Webster inserts a speech by Jason into Medea’s entrancing ‘vision’. This clever narrative device allows Webster to explore Jason’s perspective, without ever compromising Medea’s subjectivity and the power of her voice. However, the questionable nature of Medea’s ‘vision’ invites us to speculate as to the potentially ‘counterfeit’ nature of her narrative. If we accept Medea’s semi-divinity, her vision must be considered genuine. But if we consider Webster’s Medea to be a humanistic representation of a betrayed wife, then her vision of Jason’s humiliating and pitiful death may be considered more in terms of wish-fulfilment than foresight. Webster provides her audience with the opportunity to listen to both sides of this estranged and damaged couple, before they come to a conclusion. Jason’s narrative begins on a far-off beach, in the final few hours before his death. Stranded and alone, Jason begins to reminisce about the past. He paints a picture of a bold, youthful Medea whose ‘daring beauty’ inspired the ‘fire and the flush’ of their passionate romance. For Christine Sutphin, Webster’s Medea is compelling because she is an actively desiring character, whose sexuality is provocatively ‘troublesome’.38 I suggest that unlike previous versions of the myth which appear to emphasize Medea’s sensuousness and overt sexuality, Webster’s account accentuates Jason’s sexual amorality. As a dispirited and lonely old man, Jason is able to recognize that his lust for the Corinthian princess Glaucé was short-sighted and vain: ‘ “Medea would have made what I would;/Glaucé but what she could. I schemed amiss/And earned the curses the gods send on fools” ’ (84–6). This sober assessment of their marriage places the blame for the events in Corinth squarely on Jason’s shoulders. The Greek ‘hero’ is aware that he effectively prostituted himself for a royal title. He declares himself to be ‘ “ruined, ruined! A laughing-stock to foes!” ’ (87). Webster’s Jason may admit his responsibility for the destruction of his family, yet, as opposed to the female prostitute in ‘A Castaway’, Jason is not condemned by his society for his irresponsible sexual behaviour and monetary greed. It is Medea’s high ethical standards (unethically upheld) which shame and dishonour Jason. In ancient Greece, it was permitted for a husband to enjoy casual adultery, especially with slave girls or prostitutes. But polygamy or a quasi-legitimate domestic arrangement with another woman was prohibited in most Greek communities. At times of crisis, or in times of war, some Greek states,


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including Athens and Sparta, temporarily allowed bigamy as an expedient response to high wartime mortality rates and the need to replenish the population. But a monogamous marriage, on the bride’s side at least, was seen as the ideal arrangement for the production of citizens. Sarah Pomeroy points out that ‘divorce was easily attainable’, in ancient Athens, ‘either by mutual consent or through action on behalf of either one of the spouses, and there was no stigma attached’.39 In Euripides’ Medea, however, marriage and child-rearing are represented somewhat differently. In her famous speech to the Women of Corinth, Medea declares: For he in whom was all to me, my husband, Ye know it well, has proved of men most base. Aye, of all living and reasoning things Are women the most miserable race: Who first needs buy a husband at great price, To take him then as owner of our lives: For this ill is more keen than common ills. And of essays most perilous is this, Whether one good or evil do we take. For evil-famed to women is divorce, Nor can one spurn a husband. [ . . . ] But, say they, we, while they fight with the spear, Lead in our homes a life undangerous: Judging amiss; for I would liefer thrice Bear brunt of arms than once bring forth a child. (223–48) For Euripides’ Medea, divorce is simply unthinkable. Whatever ‘good or evil’ her husband commits, Medea will never simply ‘spurn’ her husband. That is not to say that she is not willing to punish Jason for his misdeeds. In Victoria’s England, over two thousand years later, sexual morality was also a highly contentious issue in middle-class marriage. The establishment of the civil Divorce Court in 1857 inspired passionate debate about the role of men and women within marriage, and it highlighted previously underestimated instances of marital misconduct and abuse. The central purpose of the Court was to provide relief from intolerable marriages for a wider crosssection of the community than had previously been available. But, as James Hammerton suggests, the court ‘had a further, less explicit, purpose, to regulate the worst kinds of marital misconduct, and to make husbands and wives more moral’.40 Ironically, an inadvertent consequence of the civil court was that it provided an unprecedented opportunity to revel in the sordid details of real sexual scandals. As Hammerton notes, ‘revelations of sexual infidelity lent themselves to the laments of moralists and the imagination of novelists’

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and ‘inspired feminist attacks on marriage and a full-blown campaign of reform within two decades’.41 However, even after the 1857 Act, dissolving a marriage remained a difficult proposition, especially for women. A woman suing for divorce needed to prove an additional offence beyond adultery, such as cruelty, bigamy or incest. A man, on the other hand, could divorce his wife for adultery alone. Hammerton suggests that, ‘because aggrieved wives were thus less able to obtain a divorce, many turned to the narrower claim for a judicial separation, which did not permit remarriage’.42 In the event of divorce, it was typical that the father was awarded custody of any children resulting from the marriage. As Trev Broughton and Helen Rogers observe, ‘the rights and duties of the father were considered synonymous and co-extensive with those of the husband, while the legal powerlessness of the mother was the corollary of her lack of separate legal identity as a spouse: both she and her children were the property of her husband’.43 The situation improved only slightly after the Infant Custody Act of 1839. Broughton and Rogers note that, even ‘though further amendments enabled the courts to award mothers greater rights of custody and maintenance in cases of cruelty, the principle of equal rights was rejected repeatedly by parliaments until 1923, on the grounds that it would weaken the authority of the father within his family’.44 The law of the father was seemingly unassailable. I suggest that Webster’s ‘Medea in Athens’ can be seen to directly contend with the contemporaneous issues of sexual hypocrisy, marital discord, paternal authority and the lack of legal redress for the wronged wife, as Webster situates Medea’s narrative firmly within the discourse of marriage and marital conflict. For example, Medea describes herself as bound by ‘dreadful marriage oaths’, which ‘led my treacherous flight/From home and father’ (208–10). Later, Medea challenges Jason’s ghost with the provocative question, ‘Am I no happy wife?’ (240), and further describes herself as ‘an envied wife’ in light of her ‘new marriage hope’ with King Aegeus of Athens. Moreover, a bitter, estranged Jason accuses Medea of breaking ‘ “oaths more than I broke” ’ and of sitting ‘ “fondling in a husband’s arms/While I am desolate” ’ (112–14). The marital discord between Webster’s Medea and Jason is, I suggest, a very familiar tale of failed romance. Of course, what makes this couple uncommon and atypical is the vengeful violence perpetrated by the legally powerless wife against her (even more vulnerable) progeny. Webster’s aim is, I think, not to exonerate Medea for her act of infanticide, but to emphasize the injustices of a social and marital system that fails to adequately represent wives and mothers. Significantly, in the poem Jason’s adultery and casual abandonment of his family does not invite public censure. Only Medea reacts with outrage to Jason’s callous desertion of her and his sons. Medea certainly overreacts to her husband’s infidelity. But her extreme response can perhaps be explained by the fact that in Victoria’s England there were no effective penalties for


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errant or irresponsible husbands. For adulterous wives the consequences for infidelity could include the complete loss of parental rights over children, the loss of property or private fortune, or, as in the notorious Mordaunt divorce case of 1869, incarceration in an asylum. At the very least, adulterous wives would suffer social condemnation and isolation, as a result of the wide reporting of divorce cases. Despite intending to provide relief for those suffering intolerable marriages, the 1857 Act effectively enshrined the sexual double standard in law. It took another twenty years before the Matrimonial Causes Act (1878) provided financial provision for abused wives and dependants. Despite the lack of formal sanctions for negligent fathers, Jason’s decision to exile his sons, followed by his inability to protect his children, would have been recognized as a terrible form of neglect by Victorian audiences. John Tosh explains that throughout the nineteenth century it was seen that ‘to form a household, to exercise authority over dependants and to shoulder the responsibility of maintaining and protecting them – these things set the seal on a man’s gender identity’.45 In his politically and sociologically important role as paterfamilias, Jason fundamentally fails to uphold the integrity of his household and to protect his sons from harm. Moreover, in exiling his sons together with their mother Jason refuses to accept responsibility for the maintenance and protection of his family. Jason’s appeal for his dead sons is therefore decidedly inappropriate, as it calls attention to his flaws as a father and as a citizen: ‘Ah me! She might have spared the children, left me them: – No sons, no sons to stand about me now And prosper me, and tend me by and by In faltering age, and keep my name on earth When I shall be departed out of sight.’ (96–101) The young boys are described as merely adjuncts of the narcissistic, arrogant father, the patriarchal pawns to the would-be king. Jason has no love for his sons as individuals. Rather, the children are seen in terms of pensioninvestments, mere profit from his marriage to Medea. Their deaths do not appear to concern Jason on an emotional or spiritual level. What disturbs the patriarch is that there is no one left to carry forth his hard-earned name: ‘ “My house is perished with me – Ruined, ruined!” ’ (116). Webster presents Jason’s claims of fatherly love as hollow and self-serving. If the patriarchal family unit is the basis of Jason’s status and power, then, for Webster, it is a model that requires radical redefinition. At the moment of Jason’s death Medea’s visionary narrative comes to an end. It seems that the vision has fractured Medea’s psyche, as she now admonishes herself in the third-person: ‘What, is it thou? What, thou, this

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whimpering fool,/This kind, meek, coward! Sick for pity, art thou?/Or did the vision scare thee? Out on me!’ (131–3). Medea’s self-reprimands underline her emotional confusion. She finds it difficult to accept Jason’s death, as it was his suffering which sustained her revenge and fuelled her hatred. Feeling isolated and ‘forgotten’, Medea reflects on the events of the past, and ponders the failure of her legendary passion for the Greek hero: ‘Would love have kept us near if he had died/In the good days? Tush, I should have died too:/We should have gone together, hand in hand,/And made dark Hades glorious each to each’ (164–7). Medea’s highly romanticized description of her relationship with Jason, as a committed partnership, based on mutual respect, love and admiration is hopelessly wide of the mark. According to Medea, her passion for Jason costs her her brother’s life, her father’s love, her kingdom and, ultimately, the lives of her children. Content to sacrifice all for the love of a vain and self-aggrandizing politician, Medea appears to lack judgement, perspective and a sense of self. This Medea is no heroine of the ‘feminist’ cause. What she is, is a gullible victim of the myth of companionate marriage. The notion of companionate marriage was of great interest to the Victorians, particularly after the public scandals of the Divorce Court in the mid-nineteenth century. But the issue was a highly politicized one, as demonstrated by John Stuart Mill who raised the spectre of companionate marriage in a debate on the Second Reform Bill in 1867. For Mill, a dedicated and lifelong campaigner for social and political equality between the sexes, women and men were, ‘for the first time in history, really each other’s companions . . . the women of a man’s family are his habitual society; the wife his chief associate, his most confidential friend, and often his most trusted adviser’.46 Mill’s proposal to make the franchise available to both genders was ultimately defeated in the House. But his speech had highlighted the changing nature of marital relationships in Victorian England. Mill again raised the issue in his famous treatise, On the Subjugation of Women (1869). But whilst Mill’s writing may have illustrated the everyday reality in some middle-class marriages, in legal terms women who expected a marriage based on the principles of companionship were bound to be frustrated by a marital system that enforced the absolute authority of husbands and fathers. Despite the avalanche of advice booklets directing women to accede to their husband’s authority, for many wives ‘submission to their husbands, while in principle an explicit article of faith, in actual practice was hedged about with limitations based on what they regarded as reasonable or unreasonable behaviour’.47 Under such contradictory circumstances, conflict was inevitable. Demanding that Jason treat her with the respect that she feels she deserves as his wife, Medea absolutely refuses to be ‘put aside like some slight purchased slave/Who pleased thee and then tired thee’ (224–5). Medea knows her case law. According to the principles of the Divorce Act, Jason cannot


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simply reject his wife and familial responsibilities. Moreover, according to Victorian standards, Medea knows that she cannot easily divorce Jason, without facing a tough legal battle and the probable loss of her sons. Unwilling to allow Jason to abandon his legal duties as a husband and father, Medea intends to destroy the very basis of Jason’s authority as paterfamilias. By taking radical political action in the domestic sphere, Medea will kill their children and destroy the patriarchal family unit. In the third and final section, Webster provides Medea with the opportunity to salvage her character. Appearing to address the ghost of Jason, Medea is allowed to fully elucidate her case against her treacherous spouse, to explain her actions and to appeal her guilt. More of a prosecutor than a defendant, Medea hurls accusations towards the insubstantial shade: Go, go, thou canst not curse me, none will hear: The gods remember justice. Wrongs, thy wrongs! Thy vengeance, ghost! What hast thou to avenge As I have? Lo, thy meek-eyed Glaucé died, And thy kinsman Creon died: but I, I live with what thou hast made me. (183–8) Medea attempts to justify her actions both in terms of divine justice and by the tenets of revenge. But it is Medea’s backstory which proves to be most useful in her exculpatory narrative. Medea describes herself as a ‘grave and simple girl’, before the arrival of the Argonauts on the Colchian shore. Her infamous skills as a witch are represented as ‘spells for pleasant services’ and remedies ‘to make sick beds easier’. This young Medea is a veritable picture of girlish innocence: With me went The sweet sound of friends’ voices praising me: All faces smiled on me, even lifeless things Seemed glad because of me; and I could smile To every face, to everything, to trees, To skies and waters, to the passing herds, To the small thievish sparrows, to the grass With sunshine through it, to the weed’s bold flowers: For all things glad and harmless seemed my kin, And all seemed glad and harmless in the world. (193–202) This pastoral picture is blighted by the arrival of the ‘smooth adder’ Jason, whose aggressive sexual advances change Medea’s ‘natural blood’ to ‘venom’. Medea’s reversal of the trope of the Lamia figure is clever and expedient.48 Medea insists that Jason’s toxic influence perverted the natural

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goodness of her character and undermined her sense of self. She may be a ‘wretch’, she says, but ‘by whose work?’, ‘mine or thine, Jason?’ In describing herself as polluted and corrupted by Jason, Medea effectively absolves herself of any conscious wrongdoing. In a further attempt to sway the sympathy of her audience, Medea goes on to suggest that the ‘winged swift car’, the deus ex machina which is described at the end of Euripides’ play, came too late to save her and her sons. ‘’Twas best’, she says, that the boys did not survive, for: If they had lived, sometimes thou hast hope: For thou would’st still have said ‘I have two sons’ And dreamed perchance they’d bring thee use at last And build thy greatness higher: but, now, now, Thou hast died shamed and childless, none to keep Thy name and memory fresh upon the earth, None to make boast of thee, ‘My father did it.’ (248–54) Importantly, Webster’s Medea does not frame the murder of her sons in terms of sexual jealousy. Medea demonstrates that her crime is less a crime of passion than a calculated attempt to wrest power from the unworthy when she says, ‘my sons, we are avenged’ (256). But in aligning Medea with her sons, Webster boldly depicts Medea as a guardian of the family, rather than as the attacker. Unlike Euripides’ protagonist, Webster’s Medea never declares her disdain for motherhood. In fact, Webster’s Medea goes on to describe her ‘ill dreams’ in which she sees her sons ‘loathe me, fly from me in dread’ (258). In Webster’s eyes, Medea is a mother who grieves the loss of her sons and regrets her role in their deaths. She is, therefore, more of a tragic heroine than a danger to society, as she attempts to justify her extraordinarily masochistic act of vengeance. It should also be noted that Webster’s Medea is more of a supporter than a detractor for the institution of marriage, as she freely marries the King of Athens following her escape from Corinth. Margaret Williamson points out that, according to Euripidean tradition, this marriage is a prearranged transaction for Medea in which ‘she and Aegeus meet as equals, and form a contract based on exchange . . . she offers Aegeus fertility – the power to beget children; he gives her in return, not the safety of an oikos, but that of the Athenian polis’.49 Webster’s Medea is clearly very pleased with her new arrangement, as she describes herself as ‘folded round with love’ and ‘proud’ of her relationship with Aegeus, whom she regards as the ‘noblest of the world’. Here, then, Webster reverses the conventional characterization of Medea as a wild, uncontrollable threat to domestic order. In Webster’s lyric, it is Jason’s greedy infidelity that poses the threat to domestic harmony.


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By exploring Medea’s motivations for her crimes, largely in the first person, Webster highlights the inequalities in middle-class marriage and the social-sexual double standard. Importantly, Webster does not seek to sanitize Medea. Webster’s fractured and distressed Colchian princess remains a compelling figure, precisely because of her relentless desire for violent retribution. Webster’s ‘Medea in Athens’ clearly coincides with the feminist campaign for a change in marriage from an institution based on domination and hierarchy to a relationship based on shared ideals and reciprocal admiration. Unfortunately, like Medea and her counterpart Circe, the feminist campaigners of the nineteenth century would be frustrated in their expectations.

Her own mistress: Webster’s ‘Circe’ The second classical study of Webster’s Portraits is ‘Circe’. Circe is another multifaceted character from ancient myth with a diverse history to rival that of Medea. Circe originally appears in Homer’s Odyssey as the captivating helper-goddess of the isle of Aiaia. Later, Ovid picks up her story in the Metamorphoses, Virgil includes her in his epic Aeneid, Petronius incorporates her legend in his Satyricon and she also briefly appears in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius.50 Aside from many literary incarnations, Circe has also been well represented in art from ancient Greece onwards. Judith Yarnall suggests that the core of Circe’s power and appeal is that she ‘possesses the ability to transform, to give shape to others or to take it away. She offers both debasement and deliverance, a new life in the flesh.’51 It is the ‘fleshly’ aspect to Circe’s story that has most interested artists and writers over millennia. Circe’s power to manipulate flesh is frequently represented as a dangerously potent sensuality which threatens the integrity of the male onlooker. Over the centuries the magical goddess Circe has thereby been reduced to a sinister, emasculating anima figure, as evidenced by the work of Virgil and Ovid. In other less chauvinistic representations Circe is, as Yarnall suggests, ‘an archetypal woman of power’.52 Augusta Webster’s portrait of the ancient goddess is more psychological and philosophical than sensual. And, significantly, Webster’s Circe maintains her independence from men. That is not to say that Webster’s goddess is desexualized and pacified. Rather, her power resides in her autonomy, as Circe lives outside conventional codes of gender and sexuality. In Homer’s poem, the Circean episode begins when Odysseus and his Companions arrive on the shores of the island of Aeaea. Sent to scout for food and supplies, the Companions come across the glorious palace of Circe. On hearing the bewitching song of the ‘formidable goddess’, the Companions enter the palace, uninvited, to find Circe at her loom.53 Disarmed by this deceptively domesticated picture, the rapacious sailors are soon struck by Circe’s magic wand and are transformed into swine. Eurylochus, the only

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Companion to escape, returns to the ships where he informs Odysseus of the sailors’ transformations. On his way to rescue his crew, Odysseus encounters the god Hermes, who provides the Ithacan king with a magical plant, moly, to help him resist the magical powers of Circe. Taking Hermes’ potion and advice, Odysseus is able to defy the transformative magic of the ‘dread goddess’. As Circe goes to strike the hero with her wand, he rushes towards her with an unsheathed sword. At the point of his phallic sword, Odysseus forces the now suppliant Circe to promise that she will no longer use her magic against him. She agrees, with the proviso that the hero will take her to bed. According to Charles Segal, ‘the hero’s encounter with the goddess is played out on the level of an archetypal conflict between the sexes . . . Odysseus, who leaps to a primordial sexual combat replete with primitive symbols, not only retains his human shape, but has his heroic identity reaffirmed.’54 Odysseus’ post-coital bliss is, however, marred by the bestial state of his Companions. Moved to relieve her lover’s distress, Circe turns the Companions back into men, better looking and younger than before. The Greek company remain on Circe’s isle for a year, lost in pleasurable pursuits, before finally becoming restless and homesick. Odysseus agrees to guide the men home, with the assent and invaluable advice of Circe. The epics of Homer held a distinct and firm grip over the Victorian imagination. The ancient poet was, to men like Matthew Arnold, the grandest poet of all, an inexhaustible source of spiritual, moral and creative inspiration.55 Homer was so much a feature of Victorian scholarship that translating Homer became what James Porter describes as ‘a national pastime’.56 This frenzy in Homeric scholarship was exemplified by the mid-century controversy between Matthew Arnold and Francis W. Newman. Newman, as Porter points out, ‘took the position that the task of the translator is to render the strangeness of Greek relative to English’, whilst Arnold felt that the objective of the translator should be to recreate the monumental impression of Homeric epic.57 Over twenty-five translations of Homer’s epics appeared between 1800 and 1860, followed by another sixty-four translations in the years up to 1900. Yet, for the majority, Homer remained untranslatable if not incomprehensible. Perhaps Homer’s most famous Victorian devotee was William Gladstone, who found an ‘intense political spirit’ permeating the lines of the epic poems.58 In 1858 Gladstone published his mammoth study, Homer and the Homeric Age. But this volume constituted merely the tip of his interest in Homer. As Jenkyns notes, ‘over a period of forty-five years, in the midst of immense political, theological and philanthropic activities, [Gladstone] found time to write a series of articles on Homer and five books, one of them consisting of three volumes and containing more than 1,700 pages’.59 If Homer was intellectually, emotionally and spiritually woven into the fabric of Gladstone’s life and thought, the Homeric epics were woven into Victorian culture at large.


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The Odyssey was repeatedly translated and adapted throughout the nineteenth century by writers and scholars such as Alfred Tennyson, F. W. Newman, William Morris, Richard Jebb and Andrew Lang. Homer’s epics were also the subject of numerous scholarly studies, paintings, sculptures and stage adaptations. For instance, J. M. W. Turner turned to the Odyssey as inspiration for his painting, ‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus’ (1829); the classical painter William Etty employed the Siren episode for his painting, ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ (1837), as did Waterhouse in his picture of the same name (1891). On stage, F. C. Burnard produced two burlesques on the Odyssey in the 1860s. Patient Penelope, or, The Return of Ulysses was produced in 1863, followed by Ulysses, or, The Iron-Clad Warrior and the Little Tug of War two years later. The women of Homer’s epics were subjects for John Addington Symonds (1875) and Samuel Butler who, in 1897, published his provocative thesis, The Authoress of the Odyssey, Where and When She Wrote, Who She Was, the Use She Made of the Iliad, and How the Poem Grew Under Her Hands. Butler’s fascinatingly idiosyncratic argument may have been compelling and entertaining, but it was not well received by the scholars and critics of the day. The Odyssey also featured heavily in children’s literature of the period, such as Mrs C. M. Bell’s The Cruise of Ulysses and His Men; Tales and Adventures from the Odyssey for Boys and Girls (1880) and Stories from Homer by Alfred J. Church (1878). To scholars and schoolchildren, artists and theatregoers, Homer’s epics were both culturally valuable and readily enjoyable. Furthermore, the Odyssey also played a distinctly political role in the intellectual life of the nation. As Hall suggests, one reason for the unremitting popularity of Homer’s epic tale in the nineteenth century was that, ‘the Odyssey became central to the Victorian male’s attempt to understand his ethics, religion, treatment of women, sexuality, manners and public self-presentation. The public school’s ideal of competitive athletics, and the celebration of versatility and cunning intelligence required by the imperial service, found ideological grounding in the Odyssean hero.’60 Odysseus was not the only figure from Homer’s epic to have a lasting impact on the Victorians. The legend of Circe, with its sensational elements of sexual love, witchcraft and divinity, was a rich source for authors and artists alike during the nineteenth century. Circe appeared in paintings by the French painter Louis Chalon (1888), Edward Burne-Jones (1869), Arthur Hacker (1893), Wright Barker (1889) and in two Circean offerings from John William Waterhouse (1891 and 1892). Images of Circe complimented the seemingly endless assembly of dangerously sensual femme-fatales that proliferated throughout the period, such as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Delilah, Medusa, Lamia and Salomé. As the personification of sexual allure, passion and vice, Circe was in good company. Dante Gabriel Rossetti responded in verse to Edward Burne Jones’ pictorial rendering of Circe with ‘The Wine of Circe’ in 1870. His intention was

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to capture ‘the scope of [Burne Jones’] work – taking the transformed beasts as images of ruined passion – the torn seaweed of the sea of pleasure’.61 For Rossetti, Circe is a dangerously degrading and emasculating enchantress, who threatens the physical and moral integrity of the male subject. William Morris also presents Circe as a petrifying seductress in his Life and Death of Jason (1867). Revealing her ‘undreamed-of loveliness’ to the visiting sailors, Circe is said to entrap the men before leading them ‘Into the dark cool cloister, whence again/They came not forth, but four-foot, rough of mane,/Uncouth with spots, baneful of tooth and claw’ (xiii, 171–3). Far from relieving the animalistic sexual appetites of the sailors, Morris’ Circe facilitates their enactment. Typically, Ruskin approached the figure of Circe from a different perspective. In an essay on political economy, which first appeared in Fraser’s Magazine (1862–3), Ruskin defined Circe in opposition to the tantalizing Sirens, the singing ‘phantoms of vain desire’. Ruskin describes Circe as a nourishing goddess, a daughter of the ‘strong elements, Sun and Sea; her power is that of a frank, and full vital pleasure, which if governed and watched, nourishes men; but, unwatched . . . turns men into beasts, but does not slay them, leaves them, on the contrary, power of revival’. For Ruskin, Circe is ‘an Enchantress; – pure Animal life; transforming – or degrading – but always wonderful’.62 Ruskin’s goddess is enchanting, but her power is such that she needs to be ‘watched’, presumably by moralistic mortal men such as himself. Female writers were also drawn to the mysterious figure of Circe. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, that most ‘sensational’ of Victorian novelists, produced Circe, Or Three Acts in the Life of an Artist in 1867, whilst ‘the Duchess’, otherwise known as Margaret Hungerford, released A Modern Circe, in 1887. Braddon’s Circe is characterized as a wealthy Italian woman, who entraps an aspiring young artist using her seductive charms. In many ways she retains the traditional traits of the goddess of Aiaia, such as her desire to demonstrate her power over men: ‘having captured a tame young lion, Madame d’Aspramonte’s dearest delight was to exhibit the noble creature in all his paces, and to show her admirers how abjectly the king of beasts could grovel beneath her feet. She had the instincts of a feminine Van Amburgh, and was pleased to demonstrate her power over the grand creatures that make common mortals fear.’63 She is, in other words, a traditionally emasculating version of Circe. Webster both gestures towards and departs from traditional representations of Circe, particularly in terms of Circe’s characterization. In using the dramatic monologue, Webster is able to shift the emphasis from the desires and opinions of male (writers and) sailors, to the mind of a self-possessed female figure. However, this shift in emphasis requires what E. Warwick Slinn calls ‘the reader’s discernment as a participating element’.64 As an interlocutor, ‘the reader is required to stand back while being imaginatively


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engaged, to assess the speaker’s qualities and arguments while simultaneously empathizing with the speaker’s predicament’. As a dynamic, hybrid form, the monologue not only demands active engagement on behalf of the reader, it also ‘exposes the way subjectivity is constituted through discourse’. For, if monologists ‘speak in order to affirm their authority’, the act of speech commits the self ‘to a social or dialogical intrusion, to an inevitable division, that ironically undermines their single sovereignty’.65 Webster displays an acute awareness of the issues concerning the integrity and subjectivity of Circe’s voice, as Circe repeatedly questions her subjectivity and submits herself to rigorous self-scrutiny throughout the poem. Circe broods on the provocative question, ‘Why am I who I am?’ Webster’s clever adaptation of the monologue form creates a space in which Circe, together with the reader, attempts to answer this question. This is, however, a two-way process. Circe’s self-contemplation invites self-consciousness and self-awareness in the (female) reader. Another important facet of the monologue that Slinn has identified is that the form ‘generically displays a radically political as well as psychological event – that moment when the forces of social discourse and the claims of personal utterance meet in the construction and dissolution of individual identity and power’.66 Operating on both a figurative and literal level, there is indeed a social and political relevance to Circe’s narrative, and her isolated position, as the only speaking subject on her heavily populated island. Circe’s relationship with her environment is a complex one, in that the landscape appears to reflect her power and the force of her emotions, whilst simultaneously signifying her physical and emotional estrangement from the world at large. Webster’s psycho-scaping effectively translates the sense of Circe’s inner turmoil. Her goddess longs for a ‘glorious storm’ that will ‘rend my bowers,/Scattering my blossomed roses like the dust,/Splitting the shrieking branches, tossing down/My riotous vines’ (11–14). The destructive nature of Circe’s call for change has the ring of violent sexual conquest about it. Indeed, Circe’s call to ‘let the storm/Break up the sluggish beauty’ (52–3) suggests an elemental power struggle. The rhythmical, sexualized nature of Circe’s language and imagery may reflect the intensity of her sexual frustration, but it does not adequately represent her attitude to sex and relationships. Webster attempts to humanize her goddess by describing her isolation in terms which could be readily understood by a Victorian audience: What fate is mine, who, far apart from pains And fears and turmoils of the cross-grained world, Dwell like a lonely god in a charmed isle Where I am first and only, and, like one Who should love poisonous savours more than mead,

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Long for a tempest on me and grow sick Of rest and divine free carelessness! Oh me, I am a woman, not a god. (58–65) Leighton argues that Webster’s Circe can be seen to echo the cry of many young Victorian women who pleaded ‘for that most elusive of rights: the right of experience’.67 Circe is, however, less concerned about engaging with the complexities of the ‘cross-grained world’ than she is with satiating the pangs and demands of her own mind and body. Physically trapped on her island home, imprisoned by the tumultuous thoughts of her mind, and held captive by the needs of her own body, Circe tells us that ‘I know nought of peace, and have not loved’ (71). Circe longs to externalize, to share her innermost thoughts and desires with a worthy companion. But there are only beasts on Circe’s glorious island of pleasure. And so she waits. Circe’s emotional and physical solitude can be seen to reflect the day-today reality of a large number of young women who lived independently, either through choice or force of circumstance in Victorian England. The 1851 Census had revealed that out of a national population of twenty million, there were approximately 500,000 more women than men, and there were two and a half million unmarried women across the country. This burgeoning female population was seen to pose particular difficulties for the well-being and productivity of the nation, as unmarried middle-class women were correctly perceived to be economically and socially unproductive and financially burdensome to their families. More hypocritically, young single women were seen to carry a potent sexual threat to the moral probity of the community.68 Along with many other female reformers such as Harriet Martineau, Francis Power Cobbe and Josephine Butler, Webster knew that the solution to the supposed problem of ‘surplus’ unmarried women was to educate and train young women to live and work independently.69 Essentially, Webster felt that women should embrace the concept of autonomy as part of a movement towards greater economic and civic independence. Webster believed that physical and economic independence would enable choice. The ability to choose one’s circumstances would thereby increase the possibilities for happiness. The self-determined Circe may therefore be seen to be as liberated as she is isolated. It is, I think, significant that despite articulating her emotional need for companionship, Circe never expresses any wish to be a wife or a mother. Her desires for sexual fulfilment and fellowship are free from the rhetoric of matrimony and Christian notions of duty, virtue and fidelity. In this sense Circe may be considered to be, as Christine Sutphin suggests, a remarkably positive representation of the actively desiring female subject.70 However, according to nineteenth-century standards, female desire outside of wedlock was considered dangerously immoral. As we have seen, even goddesses like


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Circe were considered as the incarnation of vice and sexual depravity. Webster tackles this crude stereotyping and sexual hypocrisy head-on. Far from being a treacherous seductress, Webster’s Circe is morally righteous and has little appetite for any form of intemperance. Throughout the poem there is a clear disjunction between Circe’s sense of self and cultural constructions of femininity and female behaviour. Webster’s monologue also exposes the complex interrelationship between earlier (predominantly male) representations of the goddess and Webster’s ‘realist’ depiction of Circe as a thinking, feeling woman: Why am I so fair, And marvellously minded, and with sight Which flashes suddenly on hidden things, As the gods see, who do not need to look? Why wear I in my eyes that stronger power Than basilisks, whose gaze can only kill, To draw men’s souls to me to live or die As I would have them? Why am I given pride Which yet longs to be broken, and this scorn, Cruel and vengeful, for the lesser men Who meet the smiles I waste for lack of him, And grow too glad? Why am I who I am? But for the sake of him whom fate will send One day to be my master utterly, That he should take me, the desire of all, Whom only he in the world could bow to him.

(98–113)

According to tradition, Circe’s powers are such that she is able to prophesize like a god and manipulate men’s souls and bodies at will. Yet, as Homer has it, the prideful goddess will apparently ‘be broken’ in by a mere mortal who will assume the role of her ‘master’. It seems that Circe is whomever men want her to be. Webster is eager to expose the absurdity of this fantasy by emphasizing the inconsistencies in Circe’s characterization. Webster’s Circe has no intention of playing an indulgent seductress to a selfish male adventurer. Asserting the power of her female voice, Circe’s description of her encounters with men reveals an altogether different dynamic: And the silly beasts, Crowding round me when I pass their way, Glower on me and, although they love me still, (With their poor sorts of love such as they could) Call wrath and vengeance to their humid eyes

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To scare me into mercy, or creep near With piteous fawnings, supplicating bleats.

(177–83)

Circe’s authoritative speech contrasts markedly with the ‘supplicating bleats’ of the male characters. What Circe describes here is her contempt for, and total domination over, brutish masculinity. Her strongly ethical nature, which has seemingly emerged organically and independently from Christian principles, condemns the ‘false and ravenous and sensual brutes/That shame the earth that bore them’. In effect Circe holds these men accountable to the same impossibly high standards to which women are conventionally held, and finds the men sadly wanting. In this poem, as in ‘Medea in Athens’, predatory male behaviour will not be allowed to prosper unchecked. Importantly, Circe has not achieved this moral, intellectual and physical supremacy through foul or magical means. She is, she says, ‘more of a woman than a god’, and therefore incapable of transforming the men into beasts. According to Circe, it is the men themselves who are responsible for their brutal metamorphoses: Change? there was no change; Only disguise gone from them unawares: And had there been one true right man of them He would have drunk the draught as I had drunk, And stood unharmed and looked me in the eyes, Abashing me before him. (188–93) The wine in Circe’s Cup of Truth is not transformative, merely revealing. We must therefore conclude that the men have been corrupted, not by feminine wiles, but by their own bestial desires and values. Among her assembly of beasts, there is not ‘one true right man’, whom Circe would consider as a lover. And so she waits for a man with the necessary moral and intellectual strength who can withstand her simple personality test. Designed as a companion piece to ‘Medea in Athens’, I suggest that ‘Circe’ challenges the hypocrisy and double standards inherent in Victorian conceptions of sexual morality. Discarding the trope of the temptress, Webster represents male sexual desire as self-serving and potentially destructive. Indeed, ‘Medea in Athens’ and ‘Circe’ represent the heroes of ancient myth and literature as weak, duplicitous and profligate. Webster not only contests the notion of masculine moral authority and superiority; she actively punishes male infidelity and incivility. By juxtaposing the four portraits of Circe, Medea, Eulalie and the Happiest Girl in the World, Webster reveals the level to which women’s sexuality is socially controlled through the myth of romantic heterosexuality and the institution of marriage. If Medea’s cautionary tale can be seen to form a warning to women of the dangers of inequitable matrimony, then Circe’s


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monologue, like that of Eulalie, is a direct challenge to male fantasies of uncomplicated extra-marital sex. Together, Webster’s transgressive female figures remind us that there is a dark side to illicit (male) desire. Webster returned to the themes of marriage, inequality and the abuse of power in her later Hellenic drama, In a Day (1884). But Webster had already established her key themes in her poetry and translations. Even if Webster’s work was not widely known, it seems to have been read and respected by the next generation of female writers. One can see the themes of sexual hypocrisy and infidelity pursued and explored in the work of other poets, such as Amy Levy and Emily Pfeiffer. In her translations, poetry and reviews Webster continually sought to intellectually engage men and women in some of the most crucial debates of the time. But in the poetry of Amy Levy, in particular, Webster’s sophisticated sense of injustice can be seen to turn to rage and disaffection.

2 Amy Levy’s Greek (Anti-) Heroines

In 1883 Amy Levy published an essay on one of her favourite poets, the recently deceased James Thomson. The essay is not only an attempt to secure Thomson’s posthumous reputation as a meritorious ‘Minor Poet’, it is also a strong endorsement of Thomson’s philosophical pessimism. Levy clearly identified with Thomson, admiring the passion in his work; the ‘hungry cry for life, for the things of this human, flesh and blood life; for love and praise, for mere sunlight and sun’s warmth’.1 Levy also makes clear that Thomson’s ‘nudity of expression’ and moments of ‘absolute vulgarity’ threaten his reputation as a truly talented poet.2 Attempting to redress the balance, Levy suggests that one major failing of Thomson was that he lacked ‘one graceful finish of our latter-day bards; the pretty modern-classical trick’. He had ‘neither the wit nor the taste’ to drape his work ‘in the garb of ancient Greece or mediæval France’.3 For a writer who supposedly lacked the ‘classical trick’, Thomson was actually well acquainted with classical material. In 1866 Thomson wrote an essay entitled ‘A Word for Xantippe’, in which he examines the reputation of the wife of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. Thomson invites respectable Victorian matrons to follow Socrates home, in order to ‘judge whether Xantippe had or had not the right to scold and rage, and even to pour out vessels of wrath’.4 He concludes that there is only one living writer ‘with genius and learning and wisdom and fairness enough to picture truly the conjugal life of Saint Socrates and shrew Xantippe’ (p. 227). For Thomson, the only suitable candidate was George Eliot. Eliot, a fine classicist, never took up Thomson’s invitation, but the young Amy Levy did. Levy had the wit, the wisdom and the erudition to garb her own philosophy in the guise of ancient Greece. After all, like Eliot, Levy’s liberal education included ancient Greek philosophy and drama, which provided her with another language, literally and figuratively, with which to explore her own philosophical and political concerns. In this chapter I will examine Levy’s classical education and appropriation of Hellenic discourse with particular reference to her two long ‘Greek’ poems, ‘Xantippe’ and ‘Medea’, from A Minor Poet and Other Verse (1884). 54

Amy Levy’s Greek Anti-Heroines

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By highlighting the explicit references to Platonic philosophy in ‘Xantippe’, I suggest that the philosophical context of Levy’s most famous monologue has been largely underestimated. In ‘Xantippe’, Levy cleverly exposes the gendered nature of Hellenic discourse and in so doing directly challenges the ‘separate spheres’ ideology of the late nineteenth century. The themes of mental anguish and frustrated womanhood continue in ‘Medea’, where the foreign antagonist inverts the socio-political structure of the state as punishment for her degradation. Ultimately, Levy’s heroines suffer because of their resistance to and their inability to change the misogynistic customs of the ancient Greeks. Levy reinvigorates the passionate protests of these infamous Greek women, and they stand as forceful reminders of the injustices of a supposedly ‘democratic’ society dominated by men. In ‘Xantippe’ and ‘Medea’, Levy literally rewrites the script of female subjugation, conventional gender roles and the role of the Other in Western culture. In doing so, Levy is herself transformed, in the words of Alicia Ostriker, into a revisionist mythmaker. It is important to note that until Linda Beckman’s recent biography on Amy Levy, Levy was herself subject to much mythologizing. Amy Levy was born in south London in 1861. Her mother’s ancestors had arrived in England in the early eighteenth century, where they established themselves in the port of Falmouth. The Levy family enjoyed a high degree of prosperity after striking lucky in the Australian gold-rush. If the family’s affluence was made possible by British colonialism, Lewis Levy, Amy’s father, was quick to make the most of the opportunities on offer. Levy invested his good fortune in the stock market, becoming a stock and share broker in the 1880s. As Beckman suggests, the Levys had deep roots in English soil and in many ways the family ‘exemplifies what historians report about Anglo-Jewry at the time’, that the ‘upper middle-class lived much like non-Jews, having “become overwhelmingly English in manners, speech, deportment and habits of thought and taste”’.5 Despite their Anglicization, the Levys maintained a strong identification with Anglo-Jewry. If the Levys were a conventional middle-class Anglo-Jewish family in most respects, they were, according to Beckman, atypical in two ways. Firstly, ‘they were literary and intellectual’, and secondly, ‘they believed in giving girls an excellent education’.6 Fortunately for Amy Levy, the pioneering work of the previous generation of ambitious women, such as Augusta Webster, provided her generation with new opportunities in work and education.7 With the support of her literary and intellectually inclined family, Amy Levy received a first-rate education, first at Brighton High School for Girls and later at Newnham College, Cambridge. At home the Levy children read widely, encouraged by knowledgeable parents and a governess. As a young girl Levy recorded in her ‘Confessions Book’ the names of her favourite poets.8 Interestingly, the list includes a number of accomplished Hellenists,

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such as Swinburne, Robert Browning, Goethe and Shelley. Levy’s admiration was not just confined to male writers however. As a precocious thirteen-year-old Levy reviewed Barrett Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’ for the children’s journal Kind Words, in which she addressed the issue of inequality in the education of women.9 Levy audaciously asserts that ‘as a poet we see Woman in her most favourable light’ and applauds Browning’s ‘peculiar genius’. Even more boldly, Levy accuses Browning of ‘a very common fault’, ‘that of introducing too many learned allusions’ in her work. Levy reasons that, ‘it is perhaps more excusable in a woman than a man’, for, ‘it is only natural that she should wish to display what public opinion denies her sex – a classical education’.10 Clearly, even at thirteen, Levy considered Barrett Browning’s classical erudition as a sophisticated form of feminist protest. In Aurora Leigh Browning demonstrated that whilst public opinion may have derided ‘lady’s Greek/Without the accents’, women could employ classical allusions to powerful effect.11 At this early stage Levy was preoccupied with the idea of education for women, as demonstrated in numerous sketches for Harum Scarum, the Levy family’s own periodical. One particular sketch by ‘New Boots’ (Amy Levy) entitled ‘Ye Woman’s Contest’ is particularly revealing in terms of the personal sacrifices that Levy felt were required of an intellectual woman. On the left side of the picture Levy has drawn a somewhat unflattering portrait of an intellectual woman, clothed in ‘rational’ attire. Her face is sombre and serious, no doubt because she has just finished reading Pascal, Mill and Huxley. Behind this studious woman there is a bust of Minerva, who was the Roman patron of artisans, poets and teachers. On the other side of the sketch is a more fashionable and attractive young woman, who is characterized by a bust of Venus. The ‘contest’ of the sketch is quite simple; in a male-dominated world, women are forced to choose between love and wisdom. In Levy’s case, she seems to have chosen wisdom. In the Levy archive, there are a few undated sketches which depict female figures in stout late Victorian dress, walking and talking in Greek. Notably, these female characters are not accompanied by any male figures, nor are they presented in any social situation. Authoritative and demonstrably intellectual, these women are not concerned with the demands of wider society. They are, instead, impressively self-contained. At fifteen, Levy left London to attend Brighton High School for Girls. The school, founded by the feminist reformers Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff, was progressive and espoused a philosophy of women’s rights. It was here that Levy was formally taught Latin by Mr Lomus who complimented the young Amy on ‘my Latin generally, and on my translation of Ovid, particularly – said worms often go up for exams with less knowledge than I have’.12 Levy dutifully completed her Local Highers exams and continued her education at Newnham. Newnham College, Cambridge, was one of the newly opened colleges for women and had a reputation for innovation in women’s


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education.13 As part of her curriculum, Levy attended lectures in Latin and received formal tuition in Greek from ‘the worthy Mr. Jenkinson’.14 In 1879, just before she entered Newnham, Levy completed ‘Xantippe’ which became the title poem of her first volume of poetry, Xantippe and Other Verse (1881).15 Considering the date of its completion, ‘Xantippe’ seems to anticipate Levy’s time at Cambridge. ‘Xantippe’ is essentially a cautionary tale about the dangers and disappointments of marriage and womanhood for an intellectual woman. We may therefore ask, as a pioneering female student did Levy expect to be included, or like Xantippe, excluded from the highest levels of intellectual debate? ‘Xantippe’ is directly concerned with the inequality between the sexes in late Victorian society and the poem does suggest that women have been impeded in terms of academic achievement. In a letter from Dresden, Levy revealed that ‘a new poetry club at Newnham was inaugurated the other day with a reading of “Xantippe”’.16 Published whilst Levy was still a student at Newnham, Xantippe caused quite a stir. The Literary World responded to the volume by suggesting that Xantippe was proof of Miss Levy’s ‘training and opportunities, that there is hardly a line which will not pass muster in the most rigorously critical examination’. The reviewer also speculates ‘how thoughts like these will echo in neighbouring academic halls, and how they may mould and modify the feeling of the next generation’. Indeed, The Literary World perceived Levy’s poetry as representative of a ‘new movement’ which, whilst it may strengthen ‘the antagonism of discordant natures, will deepen the insight and intensify the sympathies of others’.17 ‘Xantippe’ can be seen as representative of a ‘new movement’ inasmuch as Levy directly contends with the politics of knowledge and power.

‘Her tender language wholly misconceived’: Amy Levy’s Xantippe The inconsistencies in Socratic and Platonic philosophy with regard to the education of women have been well documented in recent years. Plato’s texts and the dialogues of Socrates suggest contradictory attitudes towards women that can be described as feminist and misogynist in turn. Nathalie Bluestone suggests that a number of eminent Victorian scholars, such as Benjamin Jowett, Walter Pater, Richard Nettleship and Francis Cornford, flagrantly attempted to square the Platonic proposals for equality between the sexes with contemporary English morality and social convention. Ultimately, Bluestone suggests, ‘by downplaying or disregarding Plato’s provocative proposals for women rulers, philosophers, whose task it is to question the dominant assumptions, instead reinforced the tendency of the “educated gentlemen” to ignore the matter of sexual equality as an important element of justice’.18 In ‘Xantippe’, Levy, like James Thomson before her, refashions Platonic philosophy, incorporating it into her protagonist’s tale of oppression and resistance. An initial reading of Xantippe’s monologue may not

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immediately invite comparison with any of Plato’s dialogues; after all, Xantippe does not exchange conversation with any of her fellow characters. Yet the central philosophical influences of the poem are, as in Thomson’s ‘A Word for Xantippe’ (1866), Plato’s dialogues Phædo, Symposium and Republic. In a striking departure from orthodox scholarship, Thomson references lines and episodes from Plato’s Phædo, Symposium and Republic in order to judge, by Victorian standards, Socrates’ record as a husband and father. Using the Platonic texts as evidence of spousal abuse, Thomson highlights Socrates’ intemperance and selfishness: ‘he was an incorrigible idler always lounging about Athens, arguing, questioning, exhorting; chaffing and ruffling the bigwigs in the midst of groups of young swells’ (p. 224). In contrast, Thomson reminds us of the daily grind of Xantippe, who ‘in our age and country . . . would be obliged to go to the workhouse, and the parish authorities would prosecute her husband for not supporting her and his family’ (p. 226). Even if Thomson is forced to admit ‘the charm of the symposium’, he draws attention to the remarkable disparity between philosophic dialogue and material reality: ‘delivering orations in honour of Love, with his lawful wife at home in her lonely bed, hungry and wretched, and horribly anxious!’ (p. 225). Similarly, Levy responds to the sexism in Platonic discourse by contrasting the failed relationship between Sokrates [sic] and his wife Xantippe, set against the love that Sokrates holds for his male peers.19 Thomson’s article humorously highlights the paucity of literary criticism in mid-nineteenth-century classical scholarship, whilst remaining acutely sensitive to the methodological problems of how to separate women’s subjective experience from the male literary and historical record. The central issue, as Thomson suggests, is that when trying to assess the position of women in antiquity there is little ‘hard’ data and not much written evidence by women. Therefore, we can only claim to know what Greek men or (sexist) male scholars think about women and how they define them.20 In order to demonstrate the unreliability and inequity of Xantippe’s historical reputation as a harridan, Thomson employs the chauvinist bookworm-figure Dryasdust. Dryasdust is a scholar who seeks revenge on historical female figures for his own unhappy position: Bookworm, feeling himself too weak for open and honourable warfare, betakes himself to a characteristic revenge, safe, cowardly, professional, honey-sweet; in the most scurrilous Latin he can command (and Latin is said to be rather rich in scurrility) he libels women and marriage, and retails from the inexhaustible stores of his anecdotage how Xantippe emptied the vessels of her wrath upon the sacred head of Socrates. Xantippe is the lay-figure which he kicks and punches in lieu of Mrs. Dryasdust, of whom he is very properly afraid; he conceits himself, Dryasdust, to be a fair counterpart of Socrates, the sublime imperturbable


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philosopher; and all the Dryasdust mummies throughout Europe, whose wives do not understand Latin, can mumble and chuckle over the tidbit of recondite ribaldry (pp. 220–1).21 Thomson’s acerbic humour cleverly exposes the gender politics involved in scholarship and the making of knowledge and history. Female writers were, of course, all too painfully aware of the male bias in the construction of history. For instance, in the New Minnesinger, Arran Leigh (Katharine Bradley) waxed lyrical about the male domination of history and scholarship: How men have woven into creeds The unrecorded life she leads! What she hath been to them, oh, well The whole sweet legend they can tell; But what she to herself may be They see not, or but dream they see.22 The problem particularly with regard to ancient sources is, as Bradley points out, the profound lack of women’s voices describing women’s experiences. However, many (male) Victorian scholars uncritically accepted the ancient perspective on women’s inferiority as outlined in Greek texts, partly because the ancient Greek attitude towards women so closely resembled their own. Most nineteenth-century classicists, as Roger Just observes, unquestionably affirmed that ‘in classical Athens women lived lives of cloistered confinement verging on “oriental seclusion,” that they were legally, politically and economically, and socially subjugated and suppressed, and that they were treated with an indifference approaching contempt’.23 Hence Thomson’s pained observation of Socrates’ wife: ‘would that she had left her own statement of the case!’ In accordance with Thomson’s wishes, Levy’s protagonist is the teller of her own tale, the voice of authority and linguistic control. Like Webster, Levy adopts the dramatic monologue as the most appropriate form for her subject, confirming the potential of the genre to highlight the psychological and philosophical concerns of a single female speaker. Cynthia Scheinberg notes that, ‘Levy’s dramatic monologues explore the relation between an auditor/reader’s capacity for sympathy and that auditor/reader’s access to cultural power, and thus reading Levy’s poetry within the larger tradition of Victorian dramatic monologue is like inserting a lens into the critical history of the genre itself’.24 Ironically, it is the profound lack of evidence regarding women’s lives in antiquity which allows for imaginative (re)constructions of characters like Xantippe. Through Xantippe’s monologue and Medea’s passionate objections, Levy directly challenges the notion, famously expressed by the Athenian oligarch Pericles, that women’s art is the art of silence.25

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The opening scene of Levy’s monologue echoes Plato’s account of Socrates’ blunt dismissal of Xantippe from his deathbed in the Phædo. The Phædo describes the scene of Socrates’ final exercise in philosophy before his death by hemlock. In ‘Xantippe’ Levy’s tragic heroine delivers one last lecture to her maidens in the final few hours before her own death. According to the teachings of her husband, Xantippe, denied lessons in philosophy and metaphysics because of her sex, faces death as an ignorant and, therefore, immoral soul. But Xantippe is wise; a life of bitter regret and subjugation has taught her some valuable lessons that she is more than willing to share with her maidens: What, have I waked again? I never thought To see the rosy dawn, or ev’n this grey, Dull, solemn stillness, ere the dawn has come. The lamp burns low; low burns the lamp of life: The still morn stays expectant, and my soul, All weighted with a passive wonderment, Waiteth and watcheth, waiteth for the dawn. Come hither, maids; too soundly have ye slept That should have watched me; nay, I would not chide – Oft have I chidden, yet I would not chide In this last hour; – now all should be at peace. I have been dreaming in a troubled sleep Of weary days I thought not to recall; Of stormy days, whose storms are hushed long since (1–14) We can conceive Xantippe’s darkened room as comparable with the cave in Plato’s Republic.26 It is in this space that Levy spins her tale of neglect, rejection, humiliation, loneliness, socially sanctioned misogyny and the wasted potential of an ambitious and intelligent woman. The interior of her bedchamber is a peculiarly ‘feminine’ space, strongly suggestive of women’s domestication, the interior spaces of women’s bodies and psychological introspection. As Gilbert and Gubar observe, ‘although Plato does not seem to have thought much about this point, a cave is – as Freud pointed out – a female place, a womb-shaped enclosure, a house of earth, secret and often sacred’.27 The doleful darkness within the chamber also reflects Xantippe’s deficiency in terms of (male) knowledge. This Greek woman lacks the intellectual illumination of Greek culture. Levy frequently depicts her characters’ moods or states of mind in terms of lighting or light effects, and in this case Xantippe wakes to the ‘dull, solemn stillness’ of pre-dawn. The low burning lamp anticipates Xantippe’s imminent death and suggests that she has lived her life in the shadows. Initially, however, Xantippe’s reminiscences focus on the ‘sunny days’ of her youth. The ambitious and intelligent Xantippe longs for direct, unmediated


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experience of the world that is unfolding before her. But it seems that she is unaware of her peripheral place in the rigid hierarchy of the Athenian polis: ‘What cared I for the merry mockeries/Of other maidens sitting at the loom?/Or for sharp voices, bidding me return/To maiden labour?’ (336–6). Xantippe hears, yet resists, those ‘sharp voices’ that seek to control her and her sense of self is, at this point, strong enough to resist the social pressure to conform to contemporary ideals of ‘femininity’. She clearly feels that her intellectual ambitions alienate her from her more obedient and more ‘feminine’ peers, suggesting that she is already conscious of her preference for more ‘masculine’ forms of employment. That there are specifically gendered forms of labour suggests that gender is not simply a biological category, but an organizing principle in a male-dominated society like ancient Athens. Xantippe’s intellectual aspirations mark her out as unconventional in relation to the other Athenian maids, perhaps also suggesting Levy’s deep anxiety about her new role as a female intellectual. Xantippe tells us that as a young woman she had a ‘soul which yearned for knowledge, for a tongue/That should proclaim the stately mysteries/Of this fair world, and of the holy gods’ (38–40). Xantippe’s appetite for knowledge and access to the ‘mysterious’ language of advanced learning echoes the aspirations of a growing number of Victorian women who longed to learn Greek, the language of scholarship and the ubiquitous signifier of ‘knowledge’. One thinks of the young Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘ardent desire to understand the learned languages’ in order for her to be considered, or to consider herself, as a ‘serious’ woman writer.28 Or, one might recall the pangs of George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke who longs for a life of intellectual inquiry. Eliot describes ‘this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance’.29 Unlike her Victorian counterparts, Xantippe will not be trained in the disciplines of science or metaphysics because as a young woman in the Athenian polis, she is not required to know such information to fulfil her functions as a wife and mother. Her youthful aspirations are short-lived, as she becomes increasingly aware that her mind, as well as her physical body, is to be socially regulated: Then followed days of sadness, as I grew To learn my woman-mind had gone astray, And I was sinning in those very thoughts – For maidens, mark, such are not woman’s thoughts – (And yet, ’tis strange, the gods who fashion us Have given us such promptings) . . . (41–6) This is a masterful passage by Levy, even more so if we consider that it was written when she was only a teenager herself. The sarcastic tone belies

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Levy’s serious intellectual argument, that if women are physically incapable of sophisticated philosophical thought because of their inferior ‘feminine’ brains, then why are women socially forbidden to exercise such thoughts? Why do men attempt to regulate that which ‘women’ supposedly do not have? Why should men, especially enlightened philosophers, attempt to deny the divine in women? And, what, we might ask, would happen if women’s thoughts were not controlled? Levy uses Xantippe’s sly aside to reveal a deep level of anxiety at the heart of this male-dominated hierarchical society, as she suggests that ‘women’ are not ‘natural’ beings, but are culturally constructed. Nineteenth-century debates about the role of women in society rehearsed similar arguments to Aristotle’s assumption of women’s ‘natural’ inferiority. Ardent anti-feminists like Eliza Lynn Linton were so sure that women were unable to successfully transcend their naturally designated roles as mothers and housekeepers that she effectively promoted equal opportunities in work and education. In The Modern Revolt, for instance, Linton adopts the language of social Darwinism in an attempt to disprove women’s fitness for intellectual work: They want to be lecturers, professors, entitled to wear gowns and hoods, and to put letters after their names; and perhaps the desire is natural; but let us call it by its right name – personal ambition – and not to be ashamed to confess the truth: and if they can do the work well, let them, in heaven’s name! The Best is not a question of sex, though we may have our own ideas as to who is most likely to be the best. Still, if women like to try their powers, why deny them the opportunity? Public opinion and the proof of experience would be sufficient to prevent an influx of weak incapacity in avenues already crowded by the capable and strong; and the law of fitness would soon find them out and place them according to their deserving.30 The transcendental law of the ‘Survival of the Fittest’ will supposedly find women out and ‘place them according to their deserving’. One presumes that that lowly place is back in the domestic home. Whilst Linton condescendingly suggests that women ‘try their powers’, Levy asks how one can arrive at a conclusion about women’s ‘powers’ without ‘the proof of experience’. For the scientifically minded Xantippe, only empirical evidence will do. From her deathbed Xantippe recalls the day when, as a young maiden participating in a public ceremony celebrating the goddess Aphrodite, she first caught sight of Sokrates. At first, and much like Dorothea Brooke’s attraction to the unappealing Casaubon, Xantippe’s stubbornly optimistic nature persuades her to see ‘the soul athwart the grosser flesh’ (87) in her husband-to-be. Xantippe also feels, again like Dorothea, that she can see the


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potential for a mutually rewarding relationship of intellectual inquiry and sophisticated debate with her prospective philosopher-husband. In fact Xantippe’s philosophical meditation on finding the beauty within, as opposed to physical attraction and desire, recalls the lesson that Diotima teaches Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. Xantippe wants desperately to believe that a soul, ‘found after weary searching in the flesh/Which half repelled our senses, is more dear’ (67–8) than ‘a brow of beauty’. The irony, of course, is that in the Symposium when Diotima instructs Socrates to ‘consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form’, she is speaking with regard to Socrates’ relationships with other men.31 As Sarah Pomeroy reminds us, in ancient Greece ‘vulgar love could be either heterosexual or homosexual, but intellectual love could be found only in a relationship between two males’.32 The Symposium had a major impact on discussions about the future of liberal England throughout the Victorian period, despite the fact that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the expurgators had been hard at work on translations of Plato’s dialogue on love. In 1761, for instance, Floyer Sydenham subjected the Symposium to radical modification as he transformed the ‘homoerotic’ relations into heterosexual relations, consistently employing female pronouns when referring to the object of love. This explicitly heterosexual version of Plato’s text became so widely accepted that it even prompted Shelley to adapt the Symposium in his attempt to defend the ‘free love’ he shared with his mistress. It was not until 1850 when George Burges translated Plato that the general reader in Britain was enabled by translators to appreciate the importance of the samesex relationships, which are fundamental to the argument of Plato’s text. In 1875, Benjamin Jowett translated a number of Plato’s works, which superseded Burges’ rendering of the Symposium. Interestingly, Jowett kept the male pronouns and male relationships that Plato had originally intended, despite trying to obscure Plato’s many references to pederasty.33 Major mid-century figures like Jowett, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, felt that Plato’s teachings would help to inspire a new generation of liberal thinkers and that this governing elite would help to galvanize Imperial Britain. This reverential attitude towards Plato was then enhanced by what Richard Jenkyns calls ‘the cult of Socrates’. Mill compared Socrates’ ‘martyrdom to the passion of Jesus’ and Matthew Arnold declared that though Socrates is dead, ‘every man carries a possible Socrates in his breast’.34 It would seem that Arnold failed to consider that not every woman would be so enthralled with the ancient lover-mentor-hero, Socrates. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a period described by Elaine Showalter as one of ‘sexual anarchy’, Plato’s Symposium was appropriated as an apologetic discourse for love between men. For men like Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds the Platonic or Socratic doctrine of eros had, according to Linda Dowling, ‘already assumed a living reality, as they saw,

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in the pedagogic institutions of a reformed Oxford’.35 The homosocial (and in some cases homosexual) bonds that are reified in the Symposium were a matter of fact in the Oxbridge colleges of mid-Victorian England. Desperate to enter the all-male sphere of intellectual debate, Xantippe deludes herself into believing that the institution of marriage will provide her with the means to satiate her thirst for knowledge. She trusts that a man at the very pinnacle of Athenian society, the same society that refuses her citizenship, education and personal agency, will in fact be her champion. If Xantippe’s hope of a union of intellectual equals echoes Plato’s radical suggestions on philosopher-rulers in the Republic, then her desire for equitable marriage is strikingly similar to John Stuart Mill’s proposals in The Subjection of Women (1869). In Book V of the Republic, Plato suggests that the traditional family unit should be abolished and consequently, equal opportunities given to women. Plato’s ideal state would live communally and the philosopherrulers would include both sexes.36 Over two thousand years later, in his groundbreaking work of liberal philosophy, Mill, a self-professed pupil of Plato, suggests that marriage should be ‘a school of sympathy in equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or obedience on the other’.37 However, Mill’s approval of the traditional family unit and his tacit conformity with the attendant roles of women, greatly limited the political potential of his liberal feminism. In his important work of liberal philosophy, The Subjection of Women, for example, Mill went so far as to declare that ‘woman seldom runs wild after abstraction’ but displays a ‘lively interest in the present feelings of persons’. Furthermore, Mill states that ‘the great occupation of women should be to beautify life . . . and to diffuse beauty, elegance and grace everywhere’; since women are naturally endowed with greater elegance and taste, one presumes.38 It would seem that even this fine philosopher had trouble with the ‘nature’ of women’s souls. Xantippe’s marriage to Sokrates is hopelessly conventional. She describes it as ‘that strange day’ of ‘sacrifice and flowers’, when her dreams and freedoms are sacrificed on the altar of male social dominance. Just when we might expect Xantippe to launch into a bitter tirade against her famously unattractive and indifferent spouse, she tells us: Yet, maidens, mark; I would not ye thought I blame my lord departed, for he meant No evil, so I take it, to his wife. ’Twas only that the high philosopher, Pregnant with noble theories and great thoughts, Deigned not to stoop to touch so slight a thing As the fine fabric of a woman’s brain – So subtle as a passionate woman’s soul. (116–23)


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The texture of a woman’s brain, it would seem, directly reflects her culturally assigned occupation; women are inextricably wedded to the ‘feminine’ loom. Levy reiterates the (fabricated) charge of women’s intellectual fragility, but now her sardonic tone is unmistakable. Sokrates may well have intended ‘no evil’ to his wife, but his lack of insight and rigid adherence to (homo)social codes has had a detrimental effect on Xantippe. In fact Sokrates’ unenlightened attitude to his wife’s desire to acquire knowledge directly contradicts his own fundamental edict, a belief repeated in Plato’s Republic and Symposium, that the dedicated search for knowledge is both virtuous and good. Levy’s application of the adjective ‘pregnant’ with regard to Sokrates’ intellectual labours is an unmistakable allusion to Plato’s famous image of the pregnant philosopher as envisaged in the Symposium. In one of the most celebrated passages of Platonic philosophy, Diotima, the enigmatic female sage of Socrates’ dialogue, emphasizes the need for reciprocity in any loving relationship, that each partner should cherish and nurture the other in order to beget and perpetuate their love. Diotima goes on to suggest that one of the highest forms of love is that of ‘spiritual procreancy’. This intense ‘spiritual’ form of love can only be achieved between men, within an exclusively male intellectual coterie. Theoretically the male citizens who share this intense erotic bond become metaphorically pregnant with meaning: Men whose bodies only are creative, betake themselves to women and beget children – this is the character of their love . . . But creative souls – for there are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies – conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or retain. And what are these conceptions? – wisdom and virtue in general . . . But the greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families.39 Levy’s monologue suggests that under these circumstances there is simply no place for an intellectual woman. As Luce Irigaray observes, Diotima ‘does not take part in these exchanges or in this meal among men. She is not there. She herself does not speak. Socrates reports or recounts her words. He praises her for her wisdom and her power and declares that she is his initiator or teacher when it comes to love, but she is not invited to teach or eat.’40 In fact, Diotima is merely a linguistic construction for Plato’s own dialectic on love. Levy, therefore, is not only questioning and challenging the ‘masculine’ values of antiquity, but the contemporary male writers and philosophers who threatened to reinstate and thereby culturally legitimize the same elitist and prejudicial attitudes in Victorian England. The homosocial coterie that is depicted in the Symposium is (re)created by Levy in ‘Xantippe’. Xantippe recalls a summer evening and a symposium at

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the marital home. On the threshold of the oikos, ‘half concealed/By tender foliage’, Xantippe observes ‘the gay group before mine eyes’. Funnily enough, the ‘gay’ group consists of some of the most famous pederasts of ancient Athens. From her partially concealed vantage point Xantippe spies the serene figure of Plato, calmly sitting in the shade of the leafy arbour. Next, she observes the solemn figure of Sokrates at whose feet lies ‘Alkibiades the beautiful’, the famous Athenian general. Crucially, Xantippe does not enter or divide this male circle; her peripheral position to this group is indicative of women’s estranged relationship to male philosophic discourse and her lack of influence over political events in the polis. Xantippe listens closely to the group’s conversation and overhears her husband speaking about Aspasia, historically and literally the mistress of the great Greek patriarch, Pericles: ‘This fair Aspasia, which our Perikles Hath brought from realms afar, and set on high In our Athenian city, hath a mind, I doubt not, of a strength beyond her race; And makes employ of it, beyond the way Of women nobly gifted: woman’s frail – Her body rarely stands the test of soul; She grows intoxicate with knowledge; throws The laws of custom, order, ’neath her feet, Feasting at life’s great banquet with wide throat.’ (168–77) Levy’s provocative reference to the historical relationship between Aspasia and Pericles suggests yet another layer to this complex monologue. I suggest that this statement by Sokrates sharply contrasts with Plato’s representation of Aspasia as Socrates’ political tutor in the playful dialogue, Menexenus.41 In the Menexenus, Aspasia outlines the place of women in the civic myth of autochthony. Furthermore, in the Menexenus Socrates declares his admiration for Aspasia’s intelligence and wisdom. We should remember, however, that Aspasia, like Diotima, is a double construct; first of Plato and then of Socrates. Once again, Levy is playing with reputations. Instead of the openminded philosopher-hero that Plato seeks to represent in his dialogues, Levy presents Socrates as a racially intolerant misogynist, who is fearful of cultural diversity and female political power and influence. Moreover, the reference to Aspasia, and the more oblique reference to Diotima, constitutes powerful reminders to Levy’s readers that intellectual women can be found in the texts of the ancient Greek philosophers. Sokrates’ distasteful image of Aspasia gorging herself on knowledge and wisdom can be directly compared to Xantippe’s intellectual malnourishment. For Sokrates, Aspasia’s position of power and influence is entirely


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‘unnatural’ and goes against his stratified vision, based on ideas of class, race and gender, of a healthy body politic. He suggests that a woman’s ‘frail’ body is simply not designed to withstand the demands of an intellectual life. If women are not rigidly controlled by social ‘custom’, they will simply trample all over the laws of the polis, causing anarchy. Xantippe, offended and angered by the unjust and blatantly sexist words of her husband, steps forward into the arbour. Her transgression of the threshold anticipates her next violation of a social taboo; she will dare to speak in public and question the wisdom of the Athenian great and good: ‘By all the great powers around us! Can it be That we poor women are empirical? That gods who fashion us did strive to make Beings too fine, too subtly delicate With sense that thrilled response to ev’ry touch Of nature’s, and their task is not complete? That they have sent their half-completed work To bleed and quiver here upon the earth? To bleed and quiver, and to weep and weep, To beat its soul against the marble walls Of men’s cold hearts, and then at last to sin!’ (182–92) Levy’s reinstatement of a female presence at this particular symposium underlines the lack of a genuine female voice in Plato’s dialogue. Moreover, Xantippe’s interjection disrupts the male-dominated discourse that marginalizes both her sex and her voice; she has decided to confront the biological essentialism of the male philosophers by using their own language to disprove their reasoning. The (typically anti-feminist) suggestion that women are ‘half-completed work’ of the gods, that they are ‘too fine, too subtly delicate’ to live alongside men on an equal basis, is presented here in terms of blasphemy. Xantippe eloquently unravels Sokrates’ dubious supposition that women are sent to earth as failed experiments of the gods, with some ease. As Xantippe’s speech suggests, it would seem that with regard to evaluating women’s capabilities, the philosophers are again guilty of ignoring their own lessons. Dismayed by the ensuing silence, Xantippe looks about and finds the face of Plato, who ‘half did smile and half did criticise’. Plato’s ambivalent reaction directly reflects his contradictory attitude towards women, as outlined in his texts. Xantippe then finds the scornful face of Alkibiades, who ‘with laughing lips’ shrugs his snowy shoulders, ‘till he brought the gold/Of flowing ringlets round about his breasts’ (208–9). In this instance, Alkibiades’ effeminacy only seems to reinforce Xantippe’s exclusion from this male arena and from male structures of power. Her alien status is further

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underlined when Sokrates asks: ‘prythee tell/From what high source, from what philosophies/Didst cull the sapient notion of thy words?’ (213–15). Xantippe is literally struck dumb by her husband’s belittling response. He is fully aware that as an Athenian wife, Xantippe has been denied access to the philosophical education of her male peers. Sokrates’ cutting remarks also suggest that rather than being a transcendental discourse, philosophy is indicative of gender difference. Xantippe is momentarily ‘crushed with all that weight of cold contempt’, before angrily throwing the wineskins that she holds upon the floor. The wine that is spilt over Xantippe’s robes indicates that the silenced woman has been sacrificed to ensure the continuity of male social dominance. However, we may also interpret the spilt wine as a Dionysian symbol. The stained marble highlights the flaws inherent in Athenian ‘democracy’, and Xantippe’s violent opposition to traditional socio-political structures of power. The spilt wine, an obvious sign of her frustration, also demonstrates Xantippe’s autonomy and self-assertion. Yet, as the (menstrual) wine stain on her robes signifies, her gender excludes her from adequately responding to her husband’s taunts. Xantippe’s social position is too weak to completely disrupt the masculine order. Nevertheless, Xantippe’s ‘fierce acceptance’ cannot be construed as acquiescence with power structures of ancient Athens. She remains strong enough to keep disputing her husband’s authority and her obvious discontent and powerful protestations disprove the claim for the superiority of Athenian social harmony and order. Xantippe’s reputation as a bitter and dissatisfied wife indicates that Sokrates has failed in his roles as pedagogue and paterfamilias. By his own standards, he is an unsuccessful citizen of the Athenian polis. ‘Xantippe’, therefore, invalidates male claims to masculine superiority by exposing the hypocrisy and gender-bias of much Western philosophical discourse. Despite the sense of remorse in the closing lines, Levy ends her monologue on a positive note when, like the released prisoner from Plato’s metaphorical cave, Xantippe stretches toward the dawn, an enlightened being. Enough, enough. In vain, in vain, in vain! The gods forgive me! Sorely have I sinned In all my life. A fairer fate befall You all that stand there . . . Ha! the dawn has come; I see a rosy glimmer – nay! it grows dark; Why stand ye so in silence? throw it wide, The casement, quick; why tarry? – give me air – O fling it wide, I say, and give me light! (280–8) If there is a moral to Xantippe’s cautionary tale, it is for young women to avoid marriage and to become educated critics. As Levy knew herself,


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women have to learn the terms of male discursive practice, before they can change it. ‘Xantippe’ also appeals for female solidarity and the need to create new communities, based on education and knowledge. However, Xantippe’s verbal assaults against Socrates mark her out as a figure of angry protest, rather than a figure of reform. Xantippe is a truly tragic figure in that she articulates the frustrations and disappointments of a wasted life. Yet, Xantippe can also be seen as a successfully subversive figure. Refusing to silently acquiesce to her fate, Levy’s Xantippe stands as a reminder of women’s mental strength, tenacity and ability to represent themselves. Tragic and transgressive, Xantippe is a worthy precursor to Levy’s next Hellenic (anti-)heroine, Medea.

Hellenism and anarchy: Levy’s Medea And now without the barbarians what will become of us? Those people were a kind of solution. – C. P. Cavafy42 If, as the reviewer of The Literary World suggested, ‘Xantippe’ was designed to ‘intensify the sympathies of others’, then Levy’s retelling of the story of ‘Medea’ demands empathy and understanding. In 1882 Amy Levy completed ‘Medea’ which she describes as a ‘Fragment in Dramatic Form’. The dramatic fragment forms an integral part of Levy’s second volume of poetry, A Minor Poet and Other Verse, published in 1884. As a whole, Levy’s collection is strongly influenced by German literature, including the work of the notable Hellenists, Heinrich Heine and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. ‘Medea’, however, may well owe a debt to other contemporaneous versions of Medea’s story, and specifically to the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer. Grillparzer’s Medea, which forms part of his dramatic trilogy Das Goldene Vlieβ (1821) (The Golden Fleece) is a sympathetic portrayal of the Colchian princess, who is derided by the Greeks for her ethnic difference. I suggest that Levy’s Medea can be seen as a combination of the powerful personality and psychology of Euripides’ Medea and Grillparzer’s racially orientated representation. Through the figure of Medea, Levy is able to articulate her anxieties concerning her Anglo-Jewish identity and her feminist beliefs. Amy Levy’s ‘Medea’ should be read, I think, not only as a cautionary tale concerning the disavowed and disenfranchised but also as another highly significant contribution in feminist-revisionist mythmaking. The subtitle to Levy’s ‘Medea’ states that the dramatic fragment is ‘After Euripides’ and as such there are a number of similarities, as well as crucial differences, between the dramas. The first and most obvious difference is that of form. There are few stage directions in Levy’s drama and the text consists of only two main scenes and has only four main characters. However, Levy does include a couple of conspicuous details in the formal arrangement of

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the ‘dramatic fragment’. Against tradition, Medea is identified as a citizen of Corinth and the first scene takes place before ‘Medea’s House’, suggesting Medea’s agency and subjectivity. Levy also dispenses with many of the visually arresting stage devices, such as the spectacular deus ex machina, the golden dragon-chariot, which ‘rescues’ Medea at the end of Euripides’ play. Indeed, in keeping with her humanistic approach, Levy resists Euripides’ representation of Medea as semi-divine. She also omits the Chorus of Corinthian Women and the crucial figure of the Nurse from her drama. Levy was technically accomplished, so her decision to depart from classical forms should be seen as deliberate and in keeping with her intentions for the volume. Consequently, I suggest that Levy’s verse-drama was not intended to be performed on stage. Levy’s ‘Medea’ can, however, be seen in accordance with the tradition of closet dramas written by women during the nineteenth century, such as Augusta Webster’s ‘Medea in Athens’ and ‘A Woman Sold’, and George Eliot’s Armgart. As Susan Brown points out, closet drama was a particularly useful form for Victorian women writers as, like the monologue, the ‘dramatic form presents women as speakers, as actors, as agents, in a way that lyric or thirdperson narrative poetry cannot’. Closet drama also ‘portrays the constraints imposed by social context and the way that women’s actions are shaped by such forces; women are also thus clearly reactors, social creatures rather than unfettered subjects’.43 Closet drama not only allows subjectivity and an unmediated voice in the text, it also reveals the intricacies and subtleties of character, which may be lost in other forms. Brown also makes the important point that the closet drama form anticipates the representational strategies of the Actresses’ Franchise League and of the Women’s Social and Political Union in the early twentieth century, which devised plays about women’s position, to bring the issues alive. However, as a genre, closet drama can also be problematic for women writers. As Brown points out, it is often very difficult to know if an author intended a work to be read as an entirely textual production, or whether issues arising from reception or audience determined the work’s status as a ‘closet drama’.44 For instance, female playwrights found it extremely difficult to have their work staged and promoted in the nineteenth century. The problems in relation to ‘closet drama’ are not insubstantial for women writers. Yet, unlike Michael Field and Emily Pfeiffer, there is no direct evidence to suggest that Levy wished to have her work performed on stage. Levy’s use of closet drama should therefore be seen not only an attempt to find a suitable literary form to represent the complex social issues facing contemporary women, but also an attempt to meet the aesthetic challenge of representing women as ‘determined heroines’.45 There is, of course, no more determined heroine than Medea. ‘Medea’ is positioned alongside two long monologues in Levy’s second collection of verse. ‘A Minor Poet’, ‘Xantippe’ and ‘Medea’ are all character studies, focused on the psychological sufferings of outcast figures.


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Importantly, the three poems are separated from the ‘other verse’ that follows, forming a sort of triptych of philosophical pessimism. I suggest that Levy retains only the bare essentials of Euripides’ drama in order to highlight the origins of Medea’s psychological pain. Indeed, the first act of Levy’s dramatic fragment focuses on Medea’s ethnicity and Jason’s betrayal and the second act relays, through an intermediary, Medea’s act of infanticide. What emerges from this dramatic fragment is a sympathetic portrait of a woman compelled by her own nature and by circumstance to act against her intolerable maltreatment at the hands of a hostile society. It is important to note that before her re-presentation of ‘Medea’, Levy was interested in the social and political persecution of ethnic minorities. Linda Beckman suggests that Levy avoided Jewish topics in her published fiction until 1888, when she produced the controversial novel on contemporary Anglo-Jewry, Reuben Sachs.46 However, at the age of fifteen, Levy wrote the poem ‘Run to Death’, which was published in the feminist journal, Victoria Magazine. The poem is about a gypsy woman who is hunted, together with her baby, by a group of French noblemen. Set in pre-revolutionary France, the poem details the persecution of a woman who is dehumanized and persecuted because of her class, her sex and her ethnicity. Consequently, we may see ‘Run to Death’ as a forerunner of ‘Medea’, in which prejudice against vulnerable members of ethnic groups is a driving concern. As an Anglo-Jewish woman writer, Levy was particularly well positioned to examine the difficulties involved in immigration and assimilation. From a young age Amy Levy seems to have struggled with her Anglo-Jewish identity. At times, she firmly and happily locates herself within the Jewish community. At other moments Levy can be seen to be at best ambivalent, if not unsympathetic, towards other Jews. Some commentators have suggested that Levy suffered from Jewish self-hatred which contributed to her suicide at the age of twenty-seven.47 Levy may have struggled with her identity as a young woman, but Levy’s Jewishness cannot be seen as a major factor in her depression. Levy’s re-vision of ‘Medea’ can, however, be seen as an important development in Levy’s career. Through the figure of Medea Levy is able to articulate the difficulties of being both a young intellectual woman and a culturally marginalized Other in the late nineteenth century. Levy (re)appropriates Euripides’ notorious antagonist but her drama is also a radical departure from Euripides’ version of the Medea myth. As well as a complex character study, Levy’s play combines Hellenism, feminism and references to anti-Semitism as part of her examination of contemporary social and political institutions. If Xantippe is the intellectual woman who philosophically laments her degraded state, then Medea is the intelligent foreign woman who takes decisive action against her humiliation. As we have seen, Medea became an increasingly politicized character towards the end of the nineteenth century. As Hall and Macintosh point out, Medea’s famous speech to the ‘Women of Corinth’ formed part of the repertoire of

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the Actresses’ Franchise League at suffragette meetings.48 Levy actually omits this speech from her drama, but includes an extract from the speech as an epigraph, indicating that Levy’s ‘Medea’ should be read in terms of contemporary debates about the status of women in society. The epigraph to Levy’s dramatic fragment can be translated as, ‘Of all those beings capable of life and thought, we women are most miserable of living things’.49 Yet, as Bernard Knox observes, ‘Medea is not about women’s rights; it is about women’s wrongs.’50 Levy also presents Medea’s tragedy in terms of moral and social justice, rather than political reform. Nevertheless, Levy’s versedrama, like Webster’s ‘Medea in Athens’, should be seen as a response to the social and political circumstances of her time. Clearly fascinated by another disreputable and demonized female character, Levy completed ‘Medea’ in Lucerne in the summer of 1882. The previous year Levy had decided, after two years of hard study at Newnham, to continue her education abroad.51 Whilst in Germany, Levy kept an eye on the reviews of Xantippe and continued to study Greek, under the tutelage of a ‘Cambridge man’. At this time, Levy’s continued interest in Greek subjects collided with her hyper-awareness of and disturbing ambivalence towards other Jews. A letter from Dresden recounts her visit to a ‘beastly’ synagogue: ‘the place was crammed with evil-looking Hebrews . . . the German Hebrew makes me feel, as a rule, that the Anti-Semitic movement is a most just and virtuous one’.52 Beckman sees Levy’s letter as a ‘classic instance’ of Jewish self-hatred. Levy’s reaction does seem to comply with Gilman’s analysis of the perceived impact of the ‘Eastern Jew’ on assimilated Western Jews.53 The letter not only demonstrates Levy’s difficulties with Jewish identity but also her consciousness of the German anti-Semitic movement. In another letter from Lucerne, Levy describes herself as ‘sad but infinitely amused’ at the sight of other Jews in the resort. Interestingly, Levy chooses to associate the Jewish tourists with her sister Katie, ‘yr. [your] co-religionists’, not with herself.54 Levy implies that the visitors are readily identifiable as Jewish, which makes her feel both ‘sad’ and detached. It is under these circumstances that, in Dresden and Lucerne, the twenty-one-year-old Levy writes ‘Medea’. Levy was familiar with the work of the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer, as she translated his verse-drama ‘Sappho’ in the same year that she wrote ‘Medea’.55 The similarities between Grillparzer’s representation and Levy’s are not structural or technical. Rather, Levy shares Grillparzer’s interest in and his emphasis of Medea’s ethnic difference. As Macintosh observes, Grillparzer’s trilogy set a new trend in presenting Medea’s cause in a thoroughly sympathetic and humanistic light.56 Douglas Yates also observes that Grillparzer ‘radically altered the traditional character of Medea, making her appear morally superior to the other Colchians . . . far from being simply a barbarian sorceress, Grillparzer’s Medea is wise’, and ‘strong in character’.57 Bruce Thomson suggests that Grillparzer intended to endow his Medea ‘with


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a moral superiority over the unfortunate Jason’.58 Consequently, Grillparzer can be seen to transform Medea’s infanticide into an act of maternal protection and he consistently highlights Medea’s ethnicity and her futile attempts at assimilation. At the time Grillparzer wrote Medea, Austria was ruled by the fierce figure of the Chancellor, Prince Klemens von Metternich. As a liberal, Grillparzer objected to, yet continued to live under, Metternich’s oppressive and censorious regime. Consequently, as Thomson points out, ‘Franz Grillparzer’s works are deeply rooted both in his personal life and in the life and atmosphere of the imperial city into which he was born.’59 Grillparzer’s Medea is therefore an interesting precursor for Levy, not least because, as Macintosh suggests, his ‘Hasidic’ Medea was written against the background of the pogroms in Austria in 1817–18.60 In comparison, Levy’s drama was written against the backdrop of the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. In Levy’s drama, Medea’s ethnic difference is highlighted from the outset. Having been granted asylum in Corinth, Medea, the stranger from distant lands, is surrounded by, ‘this strong, fair people, marble-cold and smooth/As modelled marble’ (pp. 22–3). One immediately thinks of the impressive exhibits of ancient sculpture lining the halls of the British Museum. As I indicated earlier, the aesthetic ‘purity’ of the statues was linked by nineteenth-century commentators with whiteness and the racial ‘purity’ of the English. The English often saw themselves as the natural inheritors of Greek (white) culture, despite the inconvenient fact that, originally, the sculptures were decorated with bright colours. As Martin Bernal suggests in Black Athena, the construction of a Greek ‘heritage’ that was purely Caucasian and unmixed with Egyptian or Semitic influences can be seen to reflect the racist Imperialist agenda of the nineteenth century.61 Levy certainly gestures towards such a racist construction in her ideologically loaded description of the Corinthians. Conversely, as a native of Colchis, a country that the Greeks believed nestled on the eastern edge of the Black Sea, Medea is frequently described in terms of ‘blackness’. Medea is also ‘wild’ in her gestures and speech; she has ‘fierce’ black eyes and profuse amounts of untamed inky-black hair. Nikias’ gross objectification and dehumanization of Medea corresponds with the many late Victorian representations in art and literature of the ‘Oriental female’: I like not your swart skins and purple hair; Your black, fierce eyes where the brows meet across. By all the gods! When yonder Colchian Fixes me with her strange and sudden gaze, Each hair upon my body stands erect! Zeus, ’tis a very tiger, and as mute! (p. 38)

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As Nadia Valman notes, in nineteenth-century culture the Jewess was ‘ubiquitously conflated with the Oriental woman, and recognized by her stylized sensual beauty: her large dark eyes, abundant hair and languid expression’.62 Levy taps into this visual economy by endowing Medea with the stereotypical motifs of the Jewess. Todd Endelman suggests that before the 1870s, Jews did not loom large in the political or cultural imagination of the English, despite representations of Jews in popular literature such as Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1865).63 The change occurred during the 1870s and 1880s when there was a significant increase in the numbers of Jewish immigrants entering England from Eastern Europe. It was, Endelman suggests, mass immigration from Eastern Europe that focused attention on Jews.64 And, as many critics have illustrated, despite relatively positive Anglo-Jewish relations, it was widely felt that the unassimilated Jew posed a threat to the ‘purity’ of the English national character.65 The arrival of the Eastern European Jews also had an impact on established Anglo-Jewish communities. Endelman suggests that the ‘new immigrant “ghettos” were both an embarrassment and a threat, with the potential, it was believed, to undo the social and political gains made by anglicized Jews’.66 Native leaders were critical of the immigrants for their ‘foreign’ customs and a number of community leaders suggested that the new immigrants go elsewhere. However, anglicized Jews also understood that ‘the fates of the two communities were linked, that hostility to poor, unacculturated, foreign-born Jews could, and frequently did, become an attack on all Jews’.67 It should be noted that the writing of ‘Medea’ coincides with the first major peak in immigration of Eastern Jews into England.68 Levy seems to have been acutely sensitive to the cultural impact of the growing number of ‘foreign’ Jews as her sketches of this period (1876–81) indicate. Beckman observes that ‘these drawings reveal a new, much more troubled preoccupation with “racial” difference’ and that they bear a striking resemblance to the caricatured Jewish faces in Robert Knox’s The Races of Men (1850).69 Knox’s work has become the most notorious text of the Victorian pseudo-science of ethnology. It was not, however, the only text, as Sander Gilman suggests: ‘the general consensus of the ethnological literature of the late century was that the Jews were “black” or, at least, “swarthy”’.70 Medea’s ‘blackness’ is also significant in that it can be interpreted as a ‘pathological sign’.71 In The Jew’s Body Gilman suggests that ‘for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientist the “blackness” of the Jew was not only a mark of racial inferiority, but also an indicator of the diseased nature of the Jew’.72 The pathologized Jewish body not only threatened to corrupt the racial ‘purity’ of the English nation, it was also perceived to be the carrier of sexually transmitted diseases, contagious infections and mental illness. In Levy’s drama the ‘black’ character threatens the health of the


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Corinthian body politic; not only in terms of racial purity but also in terms of infection. The Corinthians try to contain Medea’s physical body and, for much of the play, Medea is restricted to Jason’s oikos [house]: ‘walled about as with a mighty wall,/Far from men’s reach and sight, alone, alone’ (p. 43). But Medea refuses to be contained. At the conclusion of the play, following the bloody deaths of his mixed-race sons, Jason declares that no Corinthian should seek out Medea lest ‘we pollute our hands/With her accursèd body’ (p. 55).73 Medea is also conceived as ‘a festering plague/In our fair city’s midst’ (p. 55). The city is indeed diseased, but from Medea’s perspective, the Corinthian polis has been contaminated by fear, hatred and injustice. Importantly, Grillparzer also uses pathological terms to describe Medea’s ethnicity. For instance, Jason tells Medea that it is unlikely that she will be allowed entrance to the city as ‘one shuns communion where infection flares’ (p. 14).74 Furthermore, when Medea looks to embrace Creusa, the princess recoils, to which Medea responds: ‘Oh draw not back! My hand will not infect!’ (p. 27). King Creon subsequently banishes Medea from his kingdom, telling her: ‘get you from my father’s hallowed town/And make the air you poisoned pure again’ (p. 55). And, in the final act, Grillparzer has the King exile Jason on the basis that he has been infected by his (sexual) contact with Medea: ‘Pollution all too near, I see, is dangerous’ (p. 14). I suggest that Levy appropriates Grillparzer’s racial terminology in her own version of the play, in order to reflect continuing debates concerning Jewish immigration and national identity. Grillparzer’s Jason tells Medea: ‘We are no more in Colchis but in Greece. No longer now with monsters, but with men!’ (p. 15). But to the Corinthians of Levy’s drama, Medea’s black (Jewish) features are evidence of her immutable ethnic difference that cannot be changed, cured or transformed by the white, male-dominated culture.75 Ironically, Levy’s Medea later comments that as a result of the hostility of the Corinthians and her husband’s neglect, she has been transformed by the dominant culture; she is no longer a woman, ‘but a monster’ (p. 43). To the terrified Corinthians she is exactly that, a monstrous manifestation of deviant, oriental femininity that threatens to undermine the homogeneity of the Greek social and political systems. Medea’s subsequent isolation suggests the difficulty of maintaining a diasporic identity in the face of a (seemingly) hegemonic culture. The territory beyond the Black Sea could be considered as the ancient Greek equivalent of the geographical ‘Dark Continent’ of European imaginary. By locating Medea’s origins at the far and shadowy boundary of the Greek world, Medea is perceived as a representative of a mystical and terrifying wilderness, outside of patriarchal Greek culture and ‘civilization’. The conventional cultural paradigm of white/good, black/bad is thoroughly inverted in Medea’s description of her new home and local community. To begin with, Corinth is depicted as an idealised polis, inhabited by

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‘strong, fair people, marble-cold and smooth/As modelled marble’. One is, of course, immediately reminded of Matthew Arnold’s famous formulation of the ‘sweetness and light’ of Hellenic culture.76 But this description is not intended to be complimentary as the gleaming white and ‘marble-cold’ citizens, like the statues they represent, are bereft of any real feelings of compassion and sympathy for the alienated Medea: ‘When all around the air is charged and chill,/And all the place is drear and dark with hate?/Alas, alas, this people loves me not!’ (p. 36). Grillparzer similarly speaks of Greece as a land of light, in contrast to the darkness of Colchis (p. 16). Grillparzer’s Medea is, like Levy’s princess, deliberately represented as a barbarian within the gates. Despite her isolation Medea manages to overcome one of the key difficulties of assimilation, the ability to speak the language of the dominant culture. One of the defining characteristics of the ancient Greeks was their sophisticated use of language (as opposed to the non-Greek speaking barbarians) and Medea is acutely aware of the need to express herself in this culture, ‘I, an alien here/That well can speak the language of their lips/The language of their souls may never learn’ (p. 36). This is a crucial statement by the immigrant Medea and can be seen to influence much of the later action. Her inability or unwillingness to adopt ‘the language of their souls’ indicates Medea’s different system of ethics and may also signify her religious difference. Medea’s admission that she has managed to master the language of the Corinthian polis does not alter her ‘alien’ status whatsoever. From her monologue we know that this particular subaltern woman is well versed in the language of the white ruling class, but the question is, is she heard by the society that dominates her? Medea cries out: ‘Hear me, friends!/Friends, I am very hungry, give me love!/’Tis all I ask! Is it so hard to give?’ (p. 37). Apparently it is, since Medea’s passionate pleas to the surrounding community go unanswered. Here, Levy indicates the impossibility of the voice of the female Other ever being truly recognized in a European, androcentric culture. This point is vital to Medea’s subsequent action. Medea is, therefore, disillusioned and disowned long before she hears the announcement of Jason’s impending marriage to Glaukê, the King of Corinth’s daughter. Jason is not only unfaithful, he also commands Medea to leave the city by nightfall, taking their two sons with her. Arrogant, selfish and ambitious to the last, Jason suggests that rejection and exile, ‘is but a blessing, wrapped and cloaked about/In harsh disguisements’. Medea is simply incensed by the revelation of Jason’s betrayal. Not only does he present his infidelity in the most ‘reasonable’ of rhetorical terms, Jason intends to become leader of the state that has denied Medea personal agency, liberty and respect. His is a double betrayal. Medea reminds Jason that she has sacrificed much to be his wife, that she ‘was not born to serfdom’. Indeed, Medea’s magical talents, royal blood and divine ancestry mark her out as an exceptional wife. And, as Stephen Gill observes, ‘it is precisely the special


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circumstances of Medea’s marriage (with the exceptional commitment and status on her side) that give her a special claim to underline the validity of marriage’.77 Medea reminds Jason that she has been, perhaps against her nature, a paragon of wifely virtue in Corinth. Long before the couple landed in Greece, Medea was selflessly loyal and loving towards Jason: Love, you have not forgot the long years passed in this Corinthian home? The great love I have borne you through the years? Nor that fair time when, in your mighty craft, You came, a stranger, to the Colchian shore? O strong you were; but not of such a strength To have escaped the doom of horrid death, Had not I, counting neither loss nor gain, Shown you the way to triumph and renown. (p. 41) We can empathize with the rebuked Medea, as it is clear from this statement that Jason’s legendary mission to win the Golden Fleece would not have been successful without her magical intervention. This realization clearly disturbs Jason who denounces Medea as ‘a dark-thoughted sorceress’ (p. 41). Instantly, her status as helper-maiden and loyal mistress has been reduced to that of a manipulative witch who apparently entangled Jason in her ‘magic web’. However, Jason’s angry response does not have the desired effect of offending the Colchian princess, as it only highlights Medea’s power and Jason’s lack. Her (expressly female) knowledge of and expertise in the supernatural demonstrates intelligence beyond male mastery. Jason’s office as a warrior and a citizen of a Greek city-state should have alerted him to the dangers of using foreign assistance that had not been fully appropriated and subordinated before its use. But it is now astoundingly clear to Jason that the wicked woman always lurked within the housewife and helpermaiden and that this foreigner can never be fully assimilated into Greek culture. However, Jason’s personal anxieties also run much deeper and concern his emasculation at the hands of this wild woman. It was supposed that in their behaviour the Greeks were rational, brave, honest, masculine, sexually restrained and in control of their women. Barbarians on the other hand were seen as emotional, cowardly, deceptive, effeminate and ruled by women. So, Jason’s action in asking for Medea’s help to retrieve the Golden Fleece has inverted the power dynamic between them. As it turns out, his greatest act of valour and daring, of manly intent and Greek virtus, cannot be credited to him at all. And it is Jason’s realization of his own weaknesses, in particular his reliance upon women, and his inability to control femininity (including his own ‘feminine’ nature), that so alarms him. Interestingly then, as Jason

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and Medea continue to argue, the spying Nikias directs his attention towards Jason who seems to metamorphose under his gaze: how firm his lithe, straight limbs; How high his gold-curled head, crisped like a girl’s. And yet for all his curled locks and smooth tones Jason is very strong. I never knew A man of such a strange and subtle strength. (pp. 45–6) Nikias, who is repelled by Medea’s exoticism, is bewitched by Jason’s pale, girlish looks and ‘subtle strength’. As Medea’s ‘masculine’ authority grows, Jason seems to exchange places with her, so that the Occidental hero is now the object of desire under the male gaze. The boundaries that define sexual and gender roles are rapidly diminishing and the Greek world that relies on order and strictly observed division is collapsing into Arnoldian anarchy. The famously androcentric and homosocial culture of ancient Greece is no place for the increasingly powerful Medea and soon she will be forced to leave. She is furious that her acts of feminine capitulation in the oikos have passed unnoticed and unrewarded by her spouse. Her rage is partly fuelled by the knowledge that she, along with the other women in Corinth, has been kept far away from the exclusively male coterie of the polis. She has lived: ‘sick and sore with pain;/Hungry for love and music of men’s praise’ (p. 43). As Medea’s rage grows, a quick-fire series of verbs indicates that Medea is becoming the most active agent in this scene. She tells Jason how she has ‘wrestled in the darkness’ and ‘fought with sweet desires and hopes’ in order to be with her inconstant lover. Medea realizes that her powers and desires, her uncontrollable instinctual, sexual self cannot be ruled or contained. If, in the past, Medea has ‘poured the sap’ of her sexual energies before ‘a thankless godhead’, she will do it no more. In this fictional setting Levy can allow her heroine to take definitive action, she will destroy the status quo. Medea tells the self-deluding patriarch: You never knew Medea. You forget, Because so long she bends the knee to you, She was not born to serfdom. I have knelt Too long before you. I have stood too long Suppliant before this people. (p. 48) Medea instructs Jason to ‘behold me now, your work, a thing of fear’ and she resolves to ‘move the generations yet unborn’ in revenge for


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Jason’s betrayal. As she moves back within the boundaries of the family home, Medea proclaims that there ‘shall be a horror and a horror in the land’. Unlike Euripides’ text, there has been no mention of revenge before this point, so we do not feel that Medea is ‘naturally’ vengeful. Conversely, we feel that she has been provoked and that Jason must suffer the consequences of his appalling actions. According to tradition, Medea will exact a terrible revenge by killing her children and Jason’s bride-tobe. But how does Levy deal with the ethical difficulties of identifying with a tragic protagonist who is at once heroic, sympathetic and morally repugnant? Reading Euripides, Gill suggests that Medea’s act of infanticide should be interpreted as ‘an exemplary gesture’. For Gill, ‘this gesture despite its horrific character, expresses an ethical stance’.78 The ethical standard of ancient Greek social and political life was, in essence, to be good to your friends and do harm to your enemies.79 Levy’s Medea, shunned by the Corinthians for her ethnicity and her sex and betrayed by her husband for his political ambitions, sees herself as harmed by the people who should be her friends.80 Jason’s unilateral decision to sever their marriage, a union upon which Medea has been totally dependent, can be seen as a violation of the ethics which govern interpersonal relationships. Without her marriage to Jason, Medea and her children will be destitute. Her desperate predicament is one with which many Victorian women could have identified. Indeed, the response of Levy’s protagonist to Jason’s betrayal may be seen, very much like Webster’s ‘Medea’, as an overt critique on the Victorian institution of marriage. Levy’s Medea is in fact less conflicted about her revenge than Euripides’ protagonist. Following an angry exchange with Jason, Levy’s Medea determines to take decisive action and we do not see her hesitate. In this case, Medea’s revenge cannot be seen as acts of maternal protection. Medea tells us she feels ‘strong’ and ‘lifted up into an awful realm/Where is nor love, nor pity, nor remorse’ (p. 48). B. M. W. Knox suggests that Medea’s murderous rage should be considered alongside the actions of other famous Greek ‘heroes’, such as Ajax and Achilles.81 As Knox observes: Her [Medea’s] language and action, as well as the familiar frame in which they operate, mark her as a heroic character, one of those great individuals whose intractable firmness of purpose, whose defiance of threats and advice, whose refusal to betray their ideal vision of their own nature, were the central preoccupation of Sophoclean tragedy.82 From this point in Levy’s drama Medea can be seen to comply with the Greek masculine heroic ethic. In the second act, the dubious interlocutor Nikias (unreliably) records Medea’s crimes.83 This clever narrative technique underlines the enforced

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silence of the foreign woman and Medea’s loss of subjectivity. Whilst the first scene emphasizes Medea’s intelligence and rhetorical skill, the second scene is dialogic, indicating her new status as a cultural construction. The racist and sexist figure of Nikias tells us that Glaukê was poisoned by garments which Medea’s sons carried to the Royal Palace. As messengers of death, no one, not even Medea’s own sons, are innocent bystanders in this awful tragedy. Nikias then reports that the boys were stabbed to death by Medea on their return from the Palace. By using and abusing her position as mother, Medea, the diametric opposite of the Victorian trope of nurturing motherhood, has struck at the heart of the patriarchal family. Clearly, Medea cannot be an avenging female hero in a man’s world and a conventional mother. By murdering Jason’s children and his future wife, Medea not only exposes the potential for violence within the family, but also inflicts maximum damage on the state. The royal family and the leader-in-waiting have been hit hard. As she said she would, Medea has moved ‘the generations yet unborn’. As in Webster’s drama, Levy’s Medea removes those people who define Jason as a patriarch by murdering Glaukê and the children. Consequently, the authority of the patriarchal state is immediately diminished. Moreover, Medea does not just kill her own children and wipe out Jason’s family line; she also kills the king, and the princess who would have borne him heirs. Medea has inflicted collateral damage on the ‘fair’ state that denied her personal agency, liberty and respect. Jason’s political adultery and Medea’s subsequent action also raises the issue of the relationship between the family and the state. Intentionally or not, Levy certainly taps into widespread fears about the increasing prevalence of infanticide in Victorian society.84 Victorian England, just like ancient Greece, depended on mothers as the bearers of future citizens and Empire builders. But in the late 1850s through to the 1870s reports of infanticide and child murder reached disturbingly high levels. The statistics are unclear and unreliable, but Lionel Rose estimates that the number of inquest verdicts of murder on infants was around 200 per year in the 1860s.85 The figures for stillbirths, illness and accidental death of infants were much higher and it wasn’t always possible to determine the cause of death. In 1872 the government passed the Infant Life Protection Act in response to the worrying statistics concerning the infant mortality rate and child murder. But as Josephine McDonagh observes, nineteenth-century child-murder cases are sites of extraordinary cultural contests in terms of race, class and gender. McDonagh suggests that ‘the very geography and temporality of the modern British nation were at stake; its networks of communication, its hygiene, its moral stature, all were threatened by persistence and primordial stagnancy of child murder’.86 The frequency of child murder cases seemed to threaten the very basis of civilized society.


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The citizens of Levy’s Corinth are unwilling to accept that Medea’s actions could be carried out by any civilized Greek woman. Nikias is quick to denounce Medea as an ‘alien’. In some ways, Levy’s Medea can therefore be seen to be complicit with the very categories of foreign women that she seeks to resist, as it is the contaminated foreigner who commits murder. However, for Levy, Medea’s actions testify to the alienating and destructive effects of institutionalized sexism and racism. In Levy’s drama Medea does not confess to having committed any crime. She does not speak of her guilt, Nikias does. If she is guilty, as we presume she is, Medea does not enjoy her retribution; ‘vanquished utterly’, she is not a female criminal who revels in the art of murderous revenge. Like Euripides and Grillparzer, Levy refuses to punish Medea directly. But there is no magic chariot to rescue Medea in Levy’s humanistic tragedy. In Grillparzer’s drama, Medea tells a devastated Jason that the dark night of their suffering is not over: ‘What is our happiness on earth? – A shadow!/What is the fame of earth? – A dream!/Poor man! Of nought but shadows you have dreamed!/The dream is ended, but the night not yet’ (pp. 119–20). Grillparzer’s bleak moralizing offers no sense of hope for the future. Following Grillparzer’s lead, Levy also achieves a truly pessimistic ending. The outcast figure who always felt ‘out of place’ is condemned to fulfil her role in exile, as the Wandering Jew of the ancient world: ‘Thus I go forth/Into the deep, dense heart of the night – alone’ (p. 57). In contrast to Euripides, who refuses to provide a clear explanation for Medea’s behaviour, Levy implicates the sexist, racist and morally bankrupt Corinthians in her crimes. In this case, Medea’s assimilation or conversion fails because the dominant society cannot and will not accept the ‘oriental’ female as a fullyfledged member of the state. Levy ensures that as a result of denying this woman her civil and human rights, anarchy reigns over Hellenic society. Levy’s interest in the persecution of the female Other began when she was only fifteen, when she wrote ‘Run to Death’. But it was Medea who was the ideal vehicle through which Levy could explore her identification with the outcast and persecuted. What Amy Levy (re)discovered in Medea was a resource of resistance and a narrative of displacement through which she could examine the gender and racial politics of the late Victorian period and her own status as a culturally marginalized Other. As Emily McDermott observes, ‘Euripides’ plays invert, subvert and pervert traditional assertions of order; they challenge their audience’s most basic tenets and assumptions about the moral, social, and civic fabric of mankind.’87 Levy’s late Victorian drama also compels Levy’s audience to re-examine their own values in light of the social and moral circumstances of Medea’s exemplary actions. The warning is clear: ignore, deny and abuse women and immigrants at your peril. The reviews of A Minor Poet praised and derided the volume in turn. But perhaps the most revealing review of the collection appeared in the Oxford

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Magazine, which condescendingly suggests that ‘the author probably has read little Greek’ and ‘at all events she thoroughly missed the Greek spirit and tone’. According to the Oxford reviewer: To make of Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, a modern woman with yearnings, who talks metaphysics, is a mere trick, none the less so that Mr. Browning has sometimes had recourse to a similar method. The dramatic fragment entitled Medea is said to be ‘after Euripides’. In reality it is perfectly remote from the Greek spirit of the Greek drama; people ought to realise that Euripides was a Greek first; and a modern if at all, only afterwards.88 If James Thomson lacked the classical trick, Levy seems to have had classical trickery in abundance. Levy’s unfaithful rendering of Euripides’ drama demonstrates the inherent problems for women writers who employ the ancient past as a vehicle for contemporary observation and commentary. As Ruth Hoberman suggests, women writers often ‘walk a narrow line between the pressures of plausibility – which require that they reinforce their readers’ assumptions about the past – and subversion’.89 The trick is to combine classical erudition with subversive intent, as often the only way to demythologize is to remythologize. In representing repressed, yet rebellious women from antiquity, Levy provided other women with powerful models with whom they could identify. Challenging and provocative, tragic and triumphant, Levy’s Greek women are heroines for her own time. Indeed, Emily Pfeiffer can be seen to adopt a very similar strategy to that of Webster and Levy, in her ‘Studies from the Antique’. The sense of anger and frustration which Webster and Levy so clearly delineate in their Hellenic poems had struck a very public chord.

3 Worlds without Women: Emily Pfeiffer’s Political Hellenism

Almost ten years ago Kathleen Hickok asked why Emily Pfeiffer ‘was still missing?’1 What Hickok meant was that Emily Pfeiffer had been overlooked in the feminist drive to reclaim ‘lost’ women writers from the dark recesses of literary history. Whereas Amy Levy, Michael Field and Vernon Lee have received much critical attention in recent years, Pfeiffer remains critically neglected.2 The critical silence is hard to fathom, not least because Pfeiffer is a writer of great range and quality, who received good reviews during her lifetime. Included in her long list of publications are volumes of poetry, a fascinating travelogue, a drama and political essays. Throughout the 1880s, Pfeiffer wrote a number of articles for the Contemporary Review and Cornhill Magazine on the status of women in Britain with regard to work, education, legal rights and suffrage. Collected under the title of Women and Work, Pfeiffer’s essays are an impassioned argument in favour of women’s collective entry into higher education and work. Yet, with the twin misfortunes of having no children on whom to bestow her literary estate, and having a large portion of her work destroyed in a fire, Pfeiffer’s reputation has suffered unduly. Skilled in terms of metrical and formal arrangements, Pfeiffer was a renowned sonneteer. Contemporary commentators, such as The Academy, observed that in terms of the sonnet, Pfeiffer ‘possessed the qualifications of a refined imagination and considerable metrical faculty. Her sensitive and cultured mind was also open to receive the impulses of thought and feeling which are most characteristic of our self-conscious age.’ ‘Suffice it to say’, the reviewer continues, ‘that Mrs. Pfeiffer’s poetry, whether we consider its quantity or its quality, will contrast favorably with the poetry of any living men, except the first half-dozen.’3 The condescending tone of the review would not have surprised Pfeiffer whose poetry is unapologetically female-orientated, and includes a number of sympathetic portrayals of downtrodden women. In poems such as ‘From Out of the Night’, ‘A Protest’ and ‘Outlawed’, Pfeiffer, very much in the mould of Augusta Webster, boldly deals with the subjects of female sexuality, betrayal, the rights of mothers in relation to their children, prostitution and suicide. ‘In general’, Hickok 83

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observes, ‘Pfeiffer wrote about the pressures on women, their victimization, and the strategies they employed for escaping.’4 The clever blend of poetic form and political content is the hallmark of Pfeiffer’s literature. Very little is known about Pfeiffer’s early life and education. The eldest daughter of Thomas Richard Davis and his wife Emily Tilsley, Emily Jane Davis was born in 1827, in Montgomeryshire, Wales. It seems that Thomas and Emily Davis struggled to provide little more than the bare necessities for their children, due to financial hardship brought about by the collapse of the family bank. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Emily and her sisters did not receive a formal education. As we know, most girls and women in nineteenth-century Britain did not enjoy the same educational opportunities as their male peers, even if money was not a consideration. However, Emily’s father, who himself delighted in drawing and painting, encouraged the study and practice of painting and reading at home. Whilst Pfeiffer’s early education was sparse and amateurish, it was representative of many literary women’s educations in the nineteenth century. Moreover, this early paternal tutoring bore much fruit, as Emily not only went on to become a published author, she also exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy.5 Basil Herbertson suggests that a turning point occurred in Emily’s life when, as a young woman, she was taken on a trip to Europe by a friend.6 The trip up the Rhine valley greatly expanded Emily’s experience of the world and soon afterwards she spent a season in London where she met her husband and travel companion-to-be, Jürgen Edward Pfeiffer. In Edward Pfeiffer, Emily seems to have chosen a partner who shared both her interests and beliefs. A prosperous merchant, Pfeiffer not only encouraged his wife’s literary and political activities, he was also a passionate supporter and sponsor of the higher education of women. Following the deaths of the couple large sums of the Pfeiffers’ estate were bequeathed towards projects supporting opportunities for women in work and education. To this day, one may still find the Pfeiffer gates guarding the entrance to the grounds of Newnham College, and the Pfeiffer Wing at Hughes Hall, Cambridge.7 It was Emily Pfeiffer’s great misfortune not to receive a formal university education. Nevertheless, with the emotional and financial support of her husband and the intellectual encouragement of Professor John Stuart Blackie and Rector Mark Pattison, Pfeiffer immersed herself in classical literature and culture.8 As is evident from her work, Pfeiffer was a keen student of Greek philosophy, sculpture, architecture and drama. One letter, now held at the British Library, reveals that Pfeiffer and her husband also chose to engross themselves in other, more fashionable, aspects of Greek culture. Addressed to the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, the letter reveals that the Pfeiffers held parties at their London home attended by some of the most influential scholars, commentators and political figures of the day.9 The letter tells us that on one particular occasion the hosts requested that their female guests would come to a party ‘in ancient Greek dress’.10 Upwards

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of fifty ladies apparently responded to the call, including the feminist writer Frances Power Cobbe and the Greek scholar Anna Swanwick, who dutifully appeared ‘in the beautiful & refreshingly simple costume of our desire’. Emily Pfeiffer had painstakingly illustrated her invitations with a series of hand-drawn sketches, accompanied by detailed instructions of how to reproduce the desired effect.11 ‘The object of the gathering’, Edward explained, ‘was to test the effect of this costume on women of various ages & types.’ ‘It is our hope’ Edward announced, ‘that some seeds of a purer taste in female costume may have been scattered . . . among an elite of cultivated women, who have long rebelled in heart against the tyranny of milliners & the weariness of the ceaselessly changing fashions.’ For Mrs Cobb [sic] it was apparently a ‘revelation’ to see the ‘ennobling power of this costume’, whilst Swanwick felt ‘transported to our beloved Hellas, and all the glorious Heroines of that classic region, Cassandra, Antigone, Electra & a host of others rose up before my mental eye’. One suspects that the theatrical efforts of the Pfeiffers were actually intended to bring about a wider discussion on the role of women in contemporary society. As Stella Newton points out, the desire for reform in the design of women’s dress was often inextricably entangled with organized struggles for the rights of women.12 Pfeiffer’s ‘Grecian fillets’ were clearly designed to evoke the ‘democratic’ culture of the ancient Greeks, and to symbolize women’s desire for freedom of movement and action. It is not known how Gladstone responded to the letter. The aesthetic values of the ancient Greeks may have appealed to Emily Pfeiffer, but in the figures of Cassandra and Clytemnestra Pfeiffer found the literary counterparts to her own frustrated desires for social and political equality. These tragic heroines have come to be associated with the Dionysian qualities of irrationality, violence and social transgression. For Pfeiffer, the stories of Cassandra and Clytemnestra also represent women’s right to dissent and to fight against male oppression and exploitation. Refashioned for a contemporary audience, Pfeiffer’s Kassandra and Klytemnestra [sic] retain their power to fascinate and agitate.

Emily Pfeiffer’s ‘Studies from the Antique’ If, as Bernard Knox suggests, Western European history began with a war, then it also began with a battle between the sexes. Homer tells us in the Iliad and Odyssey that King Agamemnon triumphs in his ten-year war against the Trojans, only to be slain by his wife on his return to his kingdom. As Robert Fagles succinctly suggests, ‘the Fury of the Father collides in Argos with the Fury of the Mother, and the Mother wins a battle to the death’.13 The battle between the sexes does not of course end with the murder of the king, and the male patriarch is not the only victim of Clytemnestra’s rage. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, after murdering the king, the queen also

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kills the Trojan captive Cassandra. Cassandra is not only the victim of the murderous Clytemnestra, however, but also of the god Apollo, who endows Cassandra with the gift of prophecy only to make her speech unintelligible. Aeschylus’ Cassandra can be seen as the polar opposite of Clytemnestra; an incomprehensible hostage who falls victim to a (rhetorically) powerful and vengeful queen. In ‘Studies from the Antique’, Emily Pfeiffer can be seen to take a completely different approach to two of the most compelling and suggestive female figures in ancient Greek tragedy. Pfeiffer elects to pair her poems ‘Kassandra’ and ‘Klytemnestra’, in order to highlight the commonalities as well as the differences between the Trojan maiden and the Greek queen. In line with tradition, Kassandra and Klytemnestra both suffer violence and both violently protest against their subjugation. Furthermore, neither woman is trusted by men; Klytemnestra because of her duplicity and infidelity and Kassandra because of her duplicity against Apollo and her prophetic powers. The ancient stories of Clytemnestra and Cassandra come together at a pivotal moment in the creation of European legal, social and political culture. In many ways, therefore, we may see these female figures playing out roles which became templates or archetypes in the European imagination. Pfeiffer revises the relationship between Klytemnestra and Kassandra in order to question the integrity of those archetypes. Pfeiffer’s ‘Studies from the Antique’ is composed of four sonnets, two for each character. The first edition of the twin-poems, published as part of Quarterman’s Grace & Other Poems in 1879, included only a single sonnet on ‘Klytemnestra’. The second sonnet was added to the subsequent editions of ‘Studies from the Antique’, which appeared as part of Sonnets and Songs in 1880. The four sonnets not only provide balance to the two portrayals, but also allow Klytemnestra and Kassandra to be seen as relative equals; the Greek queen brought to her ruin by the king that murdered her child, and the captive barbarian seer, ruined by the god who stole her virginity and reputation. The collective title is also suggestive insofar as ‘study’ not only reflects Pfeiffer’s technique of literary portraiture, but also her developing erudition. Interestingly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti produced two sonnets on the story of Cassandra in the 1870 edition of Poems. Entitled ‘Cassandra (For a Drawing)’, Rossetti intended his sonnets to be read in conjunction with a large-scale painting of Cassandra. Unfortunately, this ekphrastic experiment was only ever realized in the form of a sketch.14 Rossetti’s crowded vision of the fall of Troy has little in common, in terms of content, with Pfeiffer’s interpretation of Cassandra’s story. Nevertheless, Rossetti’s two sonnets on Cassandra may have inspired Pfeiffer’s own re-presentation of Cassandra.15 In the nineteenth century, some of the greatest proponents of the sonnet were women writers, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and Michael Field. Traditionally, however, the Petrarchan sonnet has been seen as a male-dominated form in that the medium frequently features


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a male speaker who addresses an idealized, though absent or unobtainable, female beloved. Yet, the sonnet can be highly effective for the female poet; as Alison Chapman suggests, ‘many of Christina Rossetti’s sonnets ironically speak from the position of the dispossessed, marginalized, silenced and excluded’.16 One immediately thinks of Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death’, or the tantalizing ‘In an Artist’s Studio’. Similarly, Emily Pfeiffer can be seen to amend the sonnet form for her feminist-orientated poetics. Her subjects are not the unattainable female beloved, but the castigated and denigrated female figures from antiquity. Pfeiffer’s pairing of ‘Kassandra’ and ‘Klytemnestra’ not only indicates her intention to disrupt conventional wisdom (Clytemnestra is not a natural bed-fellow of Cassandra), but also her desire to unite the two women under a single banner, ‘Studies from the Antique’. Crucially for Pfeiffer, the stories of both women concern injustice and the violation of laws that are meant to keep women safe from harm. Furthermore, both of these female figures are powerful and threatening as they exhibit powers beyond male mastery and both women threaten the structure of the patriarchal family. Despite the formal arrangement of the sonnets, Pfeiffer refuses to formally connect the women, as neither poem contains a reference to the other woman. This deliberate division/juxtaposition of the female characters not only illustrates the difficulties women have in uniting against their shared oppression, but also represents the mirror-like relationship between the female characters. We may consider Kassandra to be the more conventionally docile, ‘feminine’ figure, as opposed to her more deviant, ‘masculine’ counterpart, Klytemnestra. However, the two female figures are not intended to be viewed in isolation, nor as binary opposites. Both female figures can be seen to blur gender categories, albeit in different ways. Kassandra speaks with the force and wisdom typically associated with men, but she succumbs to Apollo like a woman. Klytemnestra is a mother and a wife, but she wreaks revenge like a hero and she governs like a king. The violence which traditionally binds these two female figures takes place within the house, not on the battlefield. Often in the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides the house is the battlefield, but in the case of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon the metaphor can be extended. As Fagles and Stanford suggest, ‘the house of Atreus is the embodiment of savagery. No other Greek family can rival it for accumulated atrocities.’17 And yet, Fagles interprets Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy as a tale of ‘light after darkness’, a ‘rite of passage from savagery to civilization’.18 Simon Goldhill points out that the conventional wisdom which suggests that there is a movement in Aeschylus’ trilogy, ‘from tragic problems to a resolution in the harmony of an achieved social order’, has in recent years been opposed mainly by Marxist and feminist critics, ‘who have seen the “justice” at the end of the work not as a triumph of reasoned civilization but as an evolution towards the apparatus of state authority on the one hand, and towards the enforcement of patriarchal authority

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on the other’.19 The legal order which comes into force at the end of the Eumenides is, in other words, a complex ideological construction rather than a simple evolutionary movement towards ‘harmony’ and ‘order’. Fiona Macintosh suggests that, ‘the nineteenth-century obsession with origins and the evolutionary process meant that both the idea of a transgenerational curse and the notion of political and social progress from a tribal to a civic system were of particular interest to Victorian audiences’.20 The nineteenth-century interest in origins was also bolstered by J. J. Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht, in which he proposed that in ancient times a matriarchal system of social order had been overthrown by patriarchy and that this dramatic change was effectively re-enacted in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. For many other male theorists, such as Sigmund Freud, however, Aeschylus’ Oresteia unproblematically delineated the transition from an irrational matriarchal society to rational patriarchal culture, as Freud outlined in Moses and Monotheism: Under the influence of external conditions – which we need not follow up here and which in part are also not sufficiently known – it happened that the matriarchal structure of society was replaced by a patriarchal one. This naturally brought with it a revolution in the existing state of the law. An echo of this revolution can still be heard I think, in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. The turning from the mother to the father, however, signifies above all a victory of spirituality over the senses – that is to say, a step forward in culture, since maternity is proved by the senses whereas paternity is a surmise based on a deduction and a premise. This declaration in favour of the thought-process, thereby raising it above sense perception, has proved to be a step with serious consequences.21 Hélène Cixous, following Melanie Klein, Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett, also suggests that the Oresteia marks the dawn of a new era: ‘Orestes, neuter, neither masculine nor feminine, half-active, half-passive, neither criminal nor not-guilty, signs the end of the great reign of mothers. Dawn of phallocentrism.’22 Cixous points out that what Aeschylus’ Oresteia reveals to us is indeed the triumph and subsequent institutionalization of patriarchal culture: ‘patriarchy – political-economy – sexual-economy – it has all sorted itself out since they checkmated those great screeching females’.23 Unlike Freud, not every philosopher can conceive of this process in terms of social progress. This moment of violent transition has also been interpreted as a moment of rupture on a wider cultural scale. According to Pantelis Michelakis, the Oresteia and the Agamemnon in particular, have come to represent ‘the transition from aristocracy to democracy, from monarchy to tyranny, from matriarchy to patriarchy, from the archaic to the classical, from lawlessness to order, and from the primitive to the modern’.24 Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy


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has not only come to represent (false) notions of progress, but as Cixous suggests, the Oresteia can also be seen in terms of nostalgia and loss. The central crisis of the trilogy nevertheless remains the threat posed to the polis by Clytemnestra’s murder of the king. Goldhill points out that Clytemnestra’s murderous actions open ‘a vista of violence, obligation, punishment and justice – the very widest dynamics of social order’.25 Central to the notion of Greek social order is the issue of gender. Clytemnestra’s crime is a political act; her assault on the king’s body is in effect an assault on the institutions of Greek civilization. However, Clytemnestra’s act of regicide is also largely unproductive, for as a Greek woman Clytemnestra is not allowed to wield the power that she seizes. The problematic relationship of women to power in European culture is thereby reflected in the conclusion to Aeschylus’ play. The denouement to the Eumenides is, however, much more equivocal than Freud or Cixous suggests. At the conclusion of Orestes’ trial, the votes of the jury are tied. Orestes is not exonerated of his crime. Rather, through a process of negotiation Athena and the Furies agree to restore order and end the cycle of revenge, if the Furies are given a central position in the Athenian polis. Female figures, virgin and divine, thereby save the polis from destruction, and instigate laws which secure its future. Yet, these same laws deprive women of exercising political power. In ‘Studies from the Antique’ Pfeiffer can be seen to examine women’s relationship to power and the exclusion of women from socio-political processes. Pfeiffer’s sympathetic portrayals of Kassandra and Klytemnestra suggest the pain of disempowerment and the hopelessness of not having a voice in society. Pfeiffer’s female figures also represent the strength and courage of the intellectual female who, much like Xantippe and Medea, is not only determined to speak her mind, but who is also willing to strike back against patriarchal oppression and exploitation. Pfeiffer’s poetic re-vision of Aeschylus’ characters corresponds with the passionate debates about the social and political roles of women in the late nineteenth century. Campaigners for women’s rights had achieved some success with the increasing provision of formal education for women, the repeal of the pernicious Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s and the enactment of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882. For some social commentators, like Grant Allen, such developments signified, not progress, but a ‘crisis in the position of women’.26 Others, like Eliza Lynn Linton, took the situation to be much more serious. ‘Hitherto’, Linton declared, ‘England has been a masculine nation . . . Duties, spheres, functions, activities, all have been divided for the better management of affairs. We have changed all that now . . . Now we have the two hostile camps in full activity of guerrilla warfare.’27 The battle lines were being drawn. It is particularly interesting that at this politically fraught moment in time, ancient drama, and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in particular, reappeared on the British stage.

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Throughout the period, Aeschylus was typically referred to as a Gothic or romantic artist, and was beloved by one of the most famous romantic couples of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband Robert Browning.28 The ancient poet was not, however, beyond parody. Following the successful burlesques of Medea in London in the 1850s, Robert Reece turned his attention to the work of Aeschylus in his humorous production, Agamemnon and Cassandra; or, The Prophet and Loss of Troy! (1868). The first solemn revivals of Aeschylus’ play were seen by audiences in Scotland, who attended productions by Lewis Campbell and Professor Fleeming Jenkin.29 Aeschylus also had other eminent admirers, including Anna Swanwick and George Eliot. Swanwick, a highly reputed scholar, educationalist and campaigner for women’s rights, produced a versetranslation of the Oresteia in 1865; a translation of Aeschylus’ complete works in 1873, and a much lauded version of the Agamemnon, which was performed as the Cambridge Greek Play in 1900. But it was a production in Oxford that, as Fiona Macintosh suggests, ‘marked a turning point in the performance history of Greek tragedy in Victorian Britain’.30 In June 1880, Aeschylus’ tragedy was staged in the Hall of Balliol College at the University of Oxford. Macintosh points out that this production is of enormous importance ‘not only because it was the first production of a Greek tragedy in modern times in the original language to receive serious critical attention, but also because the personalities involved continued to promote Greek drama in England long after they had left Oxford’.31 It is entirely possible that Emily Pfeiffer saw this production at Oxford or at one of the further performances staged at Eton, Harrow, Winchester and St George’s Hall, London. Another crowd favourite was Professor George Warr’s Tale of Troy, or Scenes and Tableaux from the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, which was staged over four evenings in both Greek and English in the Odeon of Cromwell House in London in May, 1883. Seated in the audience was none other than the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, who was fortunate enough to be present at what The Times described as ‘the first successful attempt to bring the living characters of Homer upon the stage’.32 The circumstances surrounding the production are more interesting still. Warr, a Professor of Classics at King’s College, London, was committed to the higher education of women, and the Tale of Troy was primarily staged to raise funds for the foundation of the Women’s Department at the College.33 The impressive cast and crew of Warr’s production were therefore working towards raising funds for the classical education of women at a time when the higher education of women was still a hotly contested issue. The women of Troy could clearly be relied upon to stir the emotions, and the coffers.34 Multiple factors both within and beyond the academy determined the new vogue for ancient drama in the 1880s, including ‘the widening of the classical curriculum, the inclusion of women, as well as the broader developments


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within the professional theatre which allowed both for the power of the burlesque and fostered an interest in music drama’.35 Furthermore, throughout the 1870s there was extensive media coverage of Schliemann’s excavations at Hissarlik and Mycenae, culminating in the discovery of Agamemnon’s ‘Death-Mask’ at Mycenae in February, 1877. Reporting of the archaeological discoveries was extensive, but often tended towards the biographical and sensational. For the Victorians, ancient history was as entertaining as it was edifying. As we know, Hellenic figures were well represented in the art of the period, and the women of Homer and Aeschylus were no exception. Alongside her vibrant portrayal of Medea, Evelyn Pickering de Morgan produced a compelling image of Cassandra in 1898. Frederick Leighton’s snappily titled Clytemnestra from the Battlements of Argos Watches for the Beacon Fires which are to Announce the Return of Agamemnon was completed in 1874. A more successful, if more sensational, rendering of Clytemnestra was that by John Collier (1887). Collier’s bold and brash queen stands on the threshold of the royal palace, bloody axe in hand. As Michelakis wryly observes, the size of the axe provides ‘a perfect yardstick for measuring the monstrosity of Clytemnestra’s crime’.36 It should be noted that the labrys of Collier’s Clytemnestra is really very long indeed. With her finger firmly on the pulse of British taste, Pfeiffer can certainly be seen to tap into the contemporary fashion for the more sensational aspects of ancient Greece. Pfeiffer may rely on the popularity of Aeschylus and Homer for her audience to recognize the subversive significance of Klytemnestra and Kassandra appearing as a poetical pair. But to a knowledgeable audience, Pfeiffer’s intertextuality and poetic revisionism is strikingly evident.

Making silence speak: Kassandra’s burning words The mythmaking surrounding Cassandra began over two and a half thousand years ago. In The Iliad Cassandra is described as King Priam’s ‘loveliest daughter’ (XIII, 424), and her hand in marriage is promised to Othryoneus, one of the brave Trojan fighters who falls in battle. She is a princess and a ‘free woman’ in the Iliad, not the pitiful suppliant that Aeschylus later portrays in the Oresteia. Homer also provides an outline for Cassandra’s murder in the Odyssey (II, 421–3), but it is Aeschylus who, in the Agamemnon, has largely determined her tragic story. In Aeschylus’ representation, Cassandra is a truly tragic figure who is violated, taken as a spoil of war, dehumanized, isolated and eventually murdered. On the face of it, Cassandra appears to be the female victim par excellence. One might consider, therefore, that Cassandra’s tragic story leaves little scope for feminist revisionism. Cassandra has, however, proven to be a powerful figure for female artists and writers in more recent times. The key element of Cassandra’s

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representation is that of her silenced prophetic voice. Her ‘gift’ is noted in a number of accounts including those of Apollodorus and Pausanias.37 According to tradition, Cassandra’s gift of prophecy was bestowed on her as a child by the god Apollo. As a young woman, Apollo demanded that Cassandra have sex with him, or else he would revoke his gift to her. Cassandra refused the god and as punishment Apollo is said to have spat in her mouth, thereby corrupting her voice and making her prophecies unintelligible. Cassandra’s fate has consequently been seen by subsequent generations as a metaphor for oppressed women, who struggle to make their voice heard, particularly in the cultural and political arenas. The issue of enforced silence is a crucial theme with regard to female writers and feminists of the late nineteenth century. Whilst demonstrating her right to represent Cassandra, Emily Pfeiffer does not endow her female sage with a voice in the text. That Kassandra does not speak directly to us not only suggests her status as a cultural construction, but also suggests the frustrations of the silenced intelligent woman and the impossibility of an unmediated female voice from the past. However, by employing a variety of narrative strategies, Pfeiffer re-places female experience at the centre of her text. As a result, Pfeiffer suggests how powerful female figures can be reclaimed by women for women. Through her clever use of the twin-sonnet, Pfeiffer is also able to generate sympathy and outrage for the continually abused and misrepresented Cassandra. In Pfeiffer’s paired sonnets we get a vision of Cassandra rarely seen, that of a happy and sexually fulfilled young woman, before the fall of Troy. Indeed, Pfeiffer challenges Cassandra’s mythological reputation as seen in the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, for example, Poseidon reveals that in the Shrine of Athena, ‘that Aias [Ajax] tore Cassandra thence’ (I, 70). The violated maid is then ‘forced to a dishonoured wedlock’ with Agamemnon, who has become enchanted by the frenzied Trojan. A wild Cassandra, driven insane by her suffering at the hands of Apollo, Ajax and Agamemnon, declares revenge on the Acheans for her rape and the rape of Ilium. Cassandra finally leaves the stage, enraged and vengeful but still proud, on her way to captivity. Conversely, in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the commander of the Achaean army takes Cassandra back to Greece as his ‘spear-prize’, for his glorious victory over the forces of Troy. As she is dragged to Agamemnon’s royal palace Cassandra foresees her own death and the death of the king at the hands of Clytemnestra. She tries, in vain, to warn the king of the impending danger, but Apollo has already corrupted her voice. Abducted from her home and country, Cassandra has no protection from kinship structures, or from (defeated) male relatives. She has, in other words, no rights or official means of representation. Cassandra is first caught in a war and then in a vicious battle between the sexes. Both Aeschylus and Euripides had first-hand experience of war and its consequences and both


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playwrights knew how to evoke the cruelty of war. Pfeiffer is less concerned with the epic campaign of the Greeks and far more concerned with the costs of conflict, specifically in relation to women. Pfeiffer chooses a female narrator to represent Kassandra and Klytemnestra, thereby universalizing their stories. Failed by men, human and divine, Kassandra may be unable to tell her own story. But her sister poet, Emily Pfeiffer, is more than capable of representing her suffering. The first section of the poem details Kassandra’s seduction by the god Apollo. Pfeiffer’s innovative portrayal suggests a young, carefree Kassandra, who is more of a sexual libertine than violated maid: VIRGIN of Troy, the days were well with thee When wandering singing by the singing streams Of Ilion, thou beheldest the golden gleams Of the bold sun that might not facèd be, Come murmuring to thy feet caressingly; But best that day when, steeped in noontide dreams, The young Apollo wrapped thee in his beams, And quenched his love in thine as in the sea! And later, in thy tower ’twas sweet to teach The loveless night the joys high day had known; To dream, to wake – and find thy love impeach Late sleep with kisses, and thy spirit flown To his, and at the ivory gates of speech Breaking in words as burning as his own.38 In referring to Kassandra as a virgin, Pfeiffer immediately underlines the Trojan’s status, in terms of her relations to men and the wider community. As a young, royal maid Kassandra is supposed to abide by the feminine virtues of abstinence and self-sacrifice. But as a devotee of Apollo, Kassandra has more to offer the god than her spiritual devotion. Traditionally, Apollo is not known for endorsing equal opportunities. In the Oresteia, for example, it is Apollo who encourages Orestes to kill Clytemnestra and it is Apollo who defends Orestes’ actions to the court of Athena. As part of his defence of Orestes, Apollo makes his feelings towards women known: The woman you call the mother of the child Is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, The new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her. The man is the source of life – the one who mounts. She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps The shoot alive unless god hurts the roots.39

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Apollo’s disrespect for women is also evident in his treatment of Cassandra. In the Oresteia, as Fagles observes, first Apollo exploits Cassandra as his medium, then he destroys her, ‘treads [her] down – his service is a rape’.40 David Kovacs also concludes that the Cassandra of the Agamemnon is, in the first instance, violated by the god, whom she then betrays.41 Cassandra’s confession to the Chorus seems to support such a reading: CASSANDRA: He came like a wrestler magnificent, took me down and breathed his fire through me and – CHORUS: You bore him a child? CASSANDRA: I yielded, then, at the climax, I recoiled – I deceived Apollo! (1211–14) Unlike Aeschylus, Pfeiffer does not depict a scene of violent violation. Rather, Pfeiffer elects to represent the moment when Kassandra chooses to become an actively sexual woman. As an erotic figure, Pfeiffer’s prophetess seems to follow another ancient model. From the brief glimpse of Cassandra in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and in Trojan Women, Cassandra is intensely devoted to her god, Apollo. In Iphigenia Cassandra is more of a sensual figure than a pitiful suppliant: ‘Cassandra/ Adorned with a garland of green laurel/Tosses her bright locks, when the god/Breathes on her the compulsions of prophecy’.42 Similarly, in Euripides’ Trojan Women Cassandra openly declares her physical fidelity to Apollo: O garlands of the god who is dearest to me, you joyful emblems of his worship, fare you well. I have left the festivals in which I once found joy. Away with you! I tear you from my body – so that while my flesh is still pure, I may give them to the winds to carry to you, O lord of prophecy.43 Pfeiffer’s Kassandra may, therefore, be seen as more Euripidean than Aeschylean in terms of her sexual expressiveness. Pfeiffer’s Kassandra dreams of the potent young god, before he mysteriously enters her chamber, unseen. The illicit tryst reaches its dramatic climax, when, seemingly at the point of orgasm, Kassandra is suddenly infused with the gift of prophecy. Kassandra’s sexual awakening coincides with an unusual spiritual and intellectual awakening. It would appear that Kassandra has been rewarded, or even compensated, for the loss of her virginity. The Trojan’s divine ‘gift’ may allow her to see into the future as well as into the past, but Kassandra’s ‘power’ is inextricably linked to her (socially regulated and controlled) sexuality. As the phrase suggests, Kassandra’s ‘burning words’ will prove to be a mixed blessing. In representing the ancient Trojan seer, Pfeiffer can be seen to co-opt elements of nineteenth-century ‘sage discourse’. As Carol Christ notes, the expansion of the periodical press gave rise to a new class of writers, whom


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the Victorians called ‘Men of Letters’. It was these men whom Thomas Carlyle described as priests and sages in his influential essay, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (1841). Carlyle advocated what Christ calls a ‘strenuously masculine ideal’ of the sage and sage writing: ‘Carlyle’s hero as man of letters was not specifically a writer of non-fiction prose. He was, however, emphatically a man.’44 Despite the uncertainty of what exactly constituted ‘sage writing’ the notion of the sage as a ‘masculine’ man of letters dominated the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth.45 Only George Eliot, possessor of a strong ‘masculine’ mind, could compete as a contemporaneous ‘sibyl’. But what was it, exactly, that distinguished the ‘sage’ from other writers? According to George Landow, ‘sage writing is a form of post-romantic nonfictional prose characterized by a congeries of techniques borrowed, usually quite self-consciously, from Old Testament prophecy, particularly as it was understood in the nineteenth century’.46 By self-consciously and aggressively setting themselves in opposition to contemporary society, ‘especially to its rulers or priests’, the sage spoke ‘from off-centre or in a deliberately eccentric manner’.47 More concerned with the present than any remote future, the nineteenth-century sage would choose a contemporary social issue or ‘sign of the times’ as the focus of his attack. He would then suggest that this phenomenon was ‘a symptom of a falling away from the paths of God and nature’. The sage would then predict a calamitous disaster if his peers refused to change their behaviour. Finally, the sage would call for a collective ‘spiritual awakening’ and would offer a vision of social bliss, if the audience would only return to the forgotten path.48 The Scottish writer Charles Mackay can certainly be seen to adopt the voice of the seer, if not the voice of Cassandra, in a poem entitled ‘Cassandra’ from his Studies from the Antique (1864). Mackay’s apocalyptic vision stresses the need for social and political revolution, as the leaders of these hapless nations, ‘scarcely conceal from the people/The fact that they prophesy falsely’ (p. 114). Mackay’s prophetic words are supposed to represent transcendental truths in the face of political falsehoods. In this instance, Mackay alludes to the classical authority of Cassandra, in order to cement his own position as a Victorian seer. It is interesting to note that a number of nineteenth-century male writers who also wrote poems on Cassandra did so from a first-person perspective. Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Courthope, for instance, both employed the dramatic ‘I’ in their representations of the Trojan prophetess. George Simcox, Winthrop Praed, William Bennett and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on the other hand, begin their poems in the third person, only to shift to first-person narration part way through. In effect, these male writers put words into the mouth of Cassandra; they speak as and for her. Cassandra’s ‘burning words’ were also subjects for other influential writers like Tennyson and George Meredith.49 But there was one man who was

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particularly confident in speaking as Cassandra, the actor J. F. Crace. In the Cambridge Greek Play of 1900, Crace delivered his ‘most impressive’ performance in the supposedly ‘dead’ language of ancient Greek.50 Later, W. Le B. Egerton was also lauded for his success in portraying the ancient seer. The Daily Telegraph reflected on Egerton’s ‘tour de force’ as follows: ‘It is really difficult to believe when Cassandra is on the stage that she is a man at all. Mr. Egerton manages his voice with extraordinary cleverness.’51 Egerton clearly beguiled his audience, not just as a seer, but as a woman. Female actors also faced the difficult proposition of performing Cassandra’s burning words. In Warr’s Tale of Troy Eugenie Sellers, student and companion of Jane Harrison, played Cassandra. She was described by Vanity Fair as one of the ‘lovely women rolling out hexameters’. In his next production, Story of Orestes, Warr chose Dorothy Dene to play the role of Cassandra. The Illustrated London News applauded Dene for playing ‘Cassandra with real fire’. Dene was seen to be ‘absorbed in the contemplation of a great subject’ and ‘lost in the passion of her personation’.52 One presumes Dene found her way back from her frenzied rôle. Perhaps the most famous invocation and impersonation of Cassandra in the nineteenth century was that by Florence Nightingale. Nightingale’s essay, entitled ‘Cassandra’, does not mention the sage from antiquity directly. But as George Landow points out, in thus entitling her work, Nightingale ‘aligns herself with a mythic figure who blends the Old Testament prophet and a Victorian woman’s version of the experience of privileged but suffering isolation’.53 Claire Kahane raises the interesting point that Cassandra was written just before Nightingale took to her bed with what might be characterized as a hysterical illness. Kahane argues that the text of Cassandra ‘bears the classic marks of a hysterical discourse, riven by contradictory passions, digressive, fragmentary, inconsistent in its voice and subject position, a text that Lytton Strachey aptly characterized as a cri de coeur even though it had undergone repeated revisions’.54 Nightingale’s fragmented essay is not only representative of her own intense feelings; it also represents the potential dangers facing intellectually and physically inert women. Indeed, one of the most forceful sections in Cassandra is Nightingale’s plea for women to grasp the transformative power of pain and suffering, over the debilitating effects of silence and inaction: ‘Give us back our suffering, we cry to heaven in our hearts – suffering rather than indifferentism, for out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure. Better have pain than paralysis!’55 Nightingale understood the pain of passivity. Moreover, Nightingale knew that illness, imagined or real, was not a means to equality, nor was it an effective form of protest. Kahane notes that ‘although Nightingale herself refused the label feminist, Cassandra turned rage into outrage and thus turned the hysterical complaint to political account’.56


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Like Nightingale, Pfeiffer was outraged at the social, political and educational restrictions placed on women. In ‘Kassandra’ Pfeiffer not only highlights the censorship of the public female voice, but also the price of political inaction. Pfeiffer’s aim in representing Kassandra is not to force words into Cassandra’s mouth. Rather, in order to demonstrate her point, Pfeiffer represents Kassandra’s frustrated speech and the disdainful treatment she suffers by those who dismiss her prophecies as ‘madness’. Kassandra has the ability to see the truth beyond the façade, but her wisdom is lost, as Apollo’s act of linguistic rape obscures her visions and cries for help: How far from Ilion, and how far from joy, Captive Kassandra, wert thou, when in sight Of conquering Greece thou satest on thy height Of shame – a waif from out the wreck of Troy! Thine still the burning word, but slave’s employ Had from thy trembling lip effacèd quite The kisses of the god, and heaven’s light Now shone upon thee only to destroy. For thee, sun-stricken one, th’ abysmal sties Of sin lay open as the secret grave – Things of which speech seemed madness – while thy Cries On wronged Apollo lost the way to save; Till at the last, the faith of upturned eyes Brought him to right, as death to free the slave.57 A feature that Pfeiffer’s sonnets share with those of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is that Rossetti always represented a clear stanzaic gap in his sonnets. The effect of the gap not only heightens the sense of restrictive poetic space, but also underlines the inherent doubleness of the form, as the gap denies unity. The split sonnet may reflect a moment of discursive crisis, as the capacity to coherently tell Kassandra’s story breaks down. The narrative sequence is suddenly disrupted, temporally and geographically, as Kassandra is transplanted from Ilion and a state of post-coital bliss, to Greece and a state of abject subjugation. The division between the first and second sonnet and the stanzaic gaps also effectively represent Kassandra’s sudden estrangement from Apollo. Furthermore, these shifts in time and place not only suggest Kassandra’s abrupt change in circumstance, but also her psychic distress and emotional fragmentation. Contrary to (male) convention, Pfeiffer does not depict Kassandra as a madwoman. Rather, her prophetic speech ‘seemed madness’. Nevertheless, the frustrated speech of Kassandra can be seen to reflect contemporary debates on hysteria. It is tempting to compare the character of Kassandra with the famous late nineteenth-century cases of Anna O. and Dora.58

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Among Anna’s ‘hysterical’ symptoms was a tendency for polylingualism. At times of extreme anxiety, Anna’s speech was simply unintelligible. Dora’s symptoms, on the other hand, included dyspnoea, migraine headaches, an occasional limp, and periodic attacks of coughing, which were often accompanied by a complete loss of voice. Freud interpreted the ‘hysterical’ symptoms of both women in terms of sexual repression. Thus, Freud’s own fragmented narrative on hysteria formed the basis of his early psychoanalytic theories. But, as Kahane observes, the cases of Anna O. and especially Dora, raise political and theoretical issues which extend far beyond diagnoses of hysteria: ‘Dora is thus no longer read as merely a case history or a fragment of an analysis of hysteria but as an urtext in the history of woman, a fragment of an increasingly heightened critical debate about the meaning of sexual difference and its effects on the representations of feminine desire.’59 Recent feminist critics, like Clare Kahane, highlight the importance of rage to hysterical symptomatology.60 Other contemporary theorists like Clément and Cixous re-present the figure of the hysteric as a subversively powerful (Western) cultural icon.61 Pfeiffer was alert to the sexual politics of hysteria and rage, as can be seen from this extract from Women and Work: Of hysterics among women I am persuaded that a great deal more is heard than seen, and that the disease is unknown among those who have found work fitted to their powers; but the language is sadly in want of some term which would imply the same phase of emotional outbreak in the other sex. In view of the derivation of the word ‘hysteria,’ the properties of speech forbid us to call the utter loss of mental balance which is seen in the half-childish, half-animal rage of men, often provoked by the merest trifles, by that name; but such exhibitions are very certainly the brutal analogue of the more purely nervous affection, and are of much more frequent occurrence.62 The majority of Pfeiffer’s Women and Work is dedicated to challenging the claims of anti-feminists, who cited women’s mental and physical ‘unfitness’ for work and higher education. In a similar vein, Pfeiffer’s complex sonnets effectively peal back the layers of myth involved in Kassandra’s mythological ‘madness’, to reveal their ideological function, and disruptive potential. Paradoxically, Apollo’s vicious attack on Kassandra’s ability to represent herself can be seen to establish the basis for a new female form of speech. Kassandra is not, necessarily, a slave to her broken speech; she may be seen as a master of a new communicative process, as she is no longer confined to male-dominated systems of knowledge and language. As a sage, Kassandra exerts mastery over male discourse. But, like a poet, Kassandra’s prophecies are full of word-play. Her words are open to interpretation, but they contain


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essential truths. That Pfeiffer believed in the veracity and authority of poetry can be seen from her travelogue Flying Leaves, in which she states that, ‘we will trust our causes, all causes to the poets, the Seers; for, of all human witness, theirs alone is true’.63 For Pfeiffer, Kassandra is the tragic poet of the Oresteia and she certainly condemns Apollo with her burning words. Crucially, Pfeiffer fails to explain the sudden rift between the Trojan princess and her lover Apollo.64 According to legend, Apollo punishes Cassandra for denying his sexual advances. In the Agamemnon, for example, the chorus asks, ‘Did you come to the act of getting children, as is the way?’ To which Cassandra replies: ‘I played Loxias false’, and ‘I could make none believe me, once I committed this offence’ (1207–13). In Pfeiffer’s poem, Apollo is said to have been ‘wronged’ by the manipulative, coquettish Kassandra: ‘while thy Cries/On wronged Apollo lost the way to save’. Pfeiffer’s tone in the final sestet must surely be sardonic. In light of the first stanza, it seems unlikely that this Kassandra would deny Apollo anything – least of all her body. Apollo’s sudden abandonment of Kassandra therefore seems inexplicable. However, Pfeiffer reveals in the final lines the spurious reasons for the god’s cruelty. In becoming a powerful female prophet, Kassandra has transgressed the Greek laws which separate women from men, gods from humans; laws which Apollo endorses and upholds. From Apollo’s perspective, Kassandra’s abilities, which he gave her on a sexual whim, may be seen as a blasphemous challenge to his divinity and a transgressive attempt to retain independent vision and ‘truth’. Apollo only sees fit to relieve Kassandra’s suffering when she, in desperation, looks to the heavens in the position of a suppliant. ‘At the last’, Kassandra is forced to admit Apollo’s masculine supremacy. And, once Apollo’s fragile ego has been ‘rightly’ restored, he grants only ‘death to free the slave’. Kassandra’s crime is to have been a woman with the powerful, transgressive knowledge of a (male) god. There may also be another insidious reason for Apollo’s malice against his former lover. The narrator tells us that: ‘but slave’s employ/Had from thy trembling lip effacèd quite/The kisses of the god, and heaven’s light/Now shone upon thee only to destroy’. Does Apollo act out of jealousy, that Agamemnon has made Kassandra his slave? If jealousy is the reason for Apollo’s betrayal, then Apollo is not just guilty of sexual double standards. His sexual jealousy – and not that of Klytemnestra – can be seen as the root cause of Kassandra’s death. If we recall, Kassandra’s murderer is never named. Pfeiffer simply refuses to hold Klytemnestra responsible for Kassandra’s death. For Pfeiffer, the murder of Kassandra is not a tale of female sexual jealousy, but a story of male exploitation and betrayal. By refusing to name Klytemnestra as Kassandra’s murderer, Pfeiffer asks us to rethink the relationship between these two infamous ancient characters. It is not Agamemnon that unites these women, but violence and language. In Kassandra’s case, her garbled voice not only predicts her own

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death, but also seals the fate of Klytemnestra; Kassandra’s prophecy effectively induces Klytemnestra’s terrifying powers. In her groundbreaking essay, Sorties, Hélène Cixous asks, ‘can one kill with a tongue?’65 Kassandra both does and does not kill with her tongue. After she has cried aloud her unintelligible prophecies, Kassandra sheathes her weapon. She dies in silence. Yet, in her own way, she is a verbally violent, transgressive woman.

‘Power to wreak high ruin’: female militancy and Pfeiffer’s ‘Klytemnestra’ The most (in)famous wife of European literature must surely be Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra not only commits the treacherous murder of her husband and his slave, she also commits adultery, with her husband’s brother. Consequently, as Foley points out, ‘she embodies the greatest threats to the cultural system of which a wife is capable; her crime, performed in revenge for a child, then divides her from her remaining children, and thus brings her maternal role into question as well’.66 Equalling Medea for her ferocity and capacity for vengeance, Clytemnestra is a truly disturbing character. Aeschylus’ drama may be named for Agamemnon but, as Fagles notes, Clytemnestra is ‘the far more potent force’: ‘not only does she have the right of retaliation on her side; she is one of the towering figures in European drama, diabolic yet strangely touching’.67 In her second ‘Study from the Antique’, Emily Pfeiffer provides an empathetic assessment of Clytemnestra’s murderous history. Pfeiffer not only re-examines the character of Clytemnestra, she also highlights the critical issue of how acts of cultural and political violence are evaluated in terms of gender. For instance, is it possible to view Clytemnestra as a militant hero, prepared to take action for her beliefs? Or should we see the queen as a malevolent deviant, who threatens the stability of patriarchal society? Considering the crimes of which she stands accused, it is perhaps difficult to see Clytemnestra as an exemplary female-hero. Yet, Pfeiffer effectively re-presents Klytemnestra’s [sic] actions in light of her status as an abused daughter, wife and mother. From this more sympathetic perspective, Klytemnestra signifies women’s ability to fight back against political oppression and male violence. Indeed, Pfeiffer resists the temptation to nullify or neutralize the queen’s frightening symbolic potency. In Pfeiffer’s poetic revision, Klytemnestra not only appropriates conventionally masculine prerogatives, she also retains her ancient capacity to ‘wreak high ruin’. In any depiction of Clytemnestra, the key issue concerns her motivation for killing Agamemnon and Cassandra. In the Odyssey, Agamemnon calls for a song that will curse the name of Clytemnestra for all time, for the role she played in his death. From Hades, Agamemnon accuses the queen of bathing ‘in shame not only herself but the whole breed of womankind,


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even the honest ones to come, forever down the years’ (2.490–2).68 Following Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides all treat the figure of Clytemnestra, and all three tragedians differ in their explanations of her motives.69 The most famous depiction of Clytemnestra is undoubtedly that by Aeschylus who endows his queen with great rhetorical skills, as a means of justifying her actions. Raging over the bodies of her husband and Cassandra, Clytemnestra tells the assembled chorus of the Agamemnon that it is hypocritical for them to punish her for her transgressions, when Agamemnon murdered their daughter, Iphigenia, to no apparent consequence.70 In so doing, Aeschylus emphasizes the sexual double standards inherent in Greek justice and heroic action. Citing the laws of kinship and the bloodthirstiness of the Furies, Clytemnestra insists that it was her duty to avenge the murder of her daughter. Her reason for killing Cassandra is, however, less convincing, as Clytemnestra appears to revel in the blood of her husband and his slave: He brutalized me. The darling of all the golden girls who spread the gates of Troy. And here his spear-prize . . . what wonders she beheld! – the seer of Apollo shared my husband’s bed, his faithful mate who knelt at the rowing-benches, worked by every hand. They have their rewards. He as you know. And she, the swan of the gods Who lived to sing her latest, dying song – His lover lies beside him. She brings a fresh voluptuous relish to my bed! (Agam. 1466–75) That Clytemnestra not only admits to but relishes the death of Cassandra obviously complicates her justification for the murders. Yet, Clytemnestra’s moral complexity is part of her great appeal, as Sally McEwan explains: Homer seems to assume that she acted by adulterous, free choice and thus he sees her as wholly villainous. After Homer, however, things get much more complicated. Since, as Aristotle observes, a proper hero needs mixed motives to be interesting, the issue for the authors we have from Aeschylus onward becomes some combination of problems of choice and compulsion; i.e., she is villain because she acts by informed choice, and/or she is a victim of injustice driven to react.71


Reading Clytemnestra as a victim or a villain can, however, be highly reductive and essentialist in terms of femininity. To view Clytemnestra as exceptional female villain (and therefore less of a woman), or to consider her as a betrayed wife (victimized and jealous), is potentially to deprive the character of any real sense of power and influence. Emily Pfeiffer resists the critical temptation to explain Clytemnestra’s character in such simplistic, dichotomized terms. Rather, Pfeiffer re-examines Klytemnestra’s actions in light of her socially assigned gender role. Edith Hall observes that the legacy of Clytemnestra has been negative in that subsequent representations have tended to react against Aeschylus’ matriarch, in favour of the more ‘effeminized’ Clytemnestras. As a result, the ‘motive of erotic interest in Aegisthus has assumed far greater significance than it possessed in the first play of Aeschylus’ trilogy’.72 Hall goes on to suggest that the character of Clytemnestra, as portrayed by Aeschylus, was so transgressive and challenging that ‘she was soon widely replaced by a less domineering character, of a type perhaps implied by the more sympathetic woman in Sophocles’ Electra or Euripides’ Electra and Iphigenia in Aulis’.73 Indeed, in his Electra, produced almost forty years after Aeschylus’ trilogy, Sophocles can be seen to undermine Clytemnestra’s claims to be a concerned mother, as Electra identifies entirely with her murdered father and exiled brother. Euripides, on the other hand, can be seen to humanize Clytemnestra, in that he presents the queen as a betrayed wife. However, Euripides’ emphasis of the mother–daughter relationship in Electra and Iphigenia also demonstrates the difficulties in identifying, or even associating Clytemnestra with other women. As far as more modern adaptations are concerned, Hall points out that the ‘authentic’ Aeschylean Clytemnestra ‘only began to speak in a voice once again immediate and relevant when she could address a late nineteenthcentury audience’.74 Clytemnestra, depicted as the ‘manslaying Amazon, who prioritized the mother–daughter relationship over that between husband and wife’, re-emerges at ‘exactly the chronological point at which women’s rights as both political agents and as parents finally began to be discussed with gravity’.75 Like Medea, therefore, Clytemnestra only becomes more like her ancient self when women’s participation in public, political and artistic life becomes increasingly prevalent. Pfeiffer’s depiction of Klytemnestra undeniably reflects the intense debates of the late nineteenth century and her own interests in women’s rights. But, Clytemnestra can be a highly divisive figure in terms of feminism. On the one hand, as Kathleen Komar observes: ‘Klytemnestra represents the feminist cause par excellence. Her story is really the story of the struggle of female, blood right against the founding of male, rational law and the establishment of patriarchy.’76 If Clytemnestra represents the feminist cause in her battle with Agamemnon, she is a more problematic figure in relation to Cassandra. As Komar rightly points out, Clytemnestra is not just a threat


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to husbands and sons: ‘the labrys-wielding Klytemnestra is also a menace to other women, since her one undisputed murder is of the Trojan princess Kassandra’.77 In other words, Clytemnestra not only represents women’s rage against patriarchal oppression, she also represents women’s anger against other women. In the Agamemnon a terrified Cassandra describes Clytemnestra as a ‘detestable hellhound’ (1237), ‘the monster of Greece’ (1242) and ‘the raging mother of death’ (1245), before her fatal encounter with the queen. But in keeping with her approach in her first ‘study from the antique’, Pfeiffer chooses to omit any reference to Kassandra in the second sonnet. As we have seen, Pfeiffer’s refusal to condemn Klytemnestra both forces her audience to reconsider women’s relationships to power and violence and removes one of the major motives for Klytemnestra’s murder of Kassandra – that of sexual jealousy. Instead, Pfeiffer rewrites the relationship between the two women in order to highlight their shared suffering, and to reject the frequently cited motive of competitive femininity. ‘Klytemnestra’ certainly calls into question gender expectations, including notions of female solidarity, maternity and benevolence. Pfeiffer is, however, keen to remind her audience that Klytemnestra was not simply a mother and a wife. Before the rude arrival of Agamemnon, Klytemnestra was a daughter and a sister: DAUGHTER of gods and men, great ruling will, Seething in oily rage within the sphere Which gods and men assign the woman here, Till, stricken where the wound approved thee still Mother and mortal, all the tide of ill Rushed through the gap, and nothing more seemed dear But power to wreak high ruin, nothing clear But the long dream you waited to fulfil. Mother and spouse – queen of the king of men – What fury brought Ægysthus to thy side? – That bearded semblant, man to outward ken, But else mere mawworm, made to fret man’s pride; Woman, thy foot was on thy tyrant then – Mother, thou wert avenged for love defied!78 This remarkably efficient sonnet not only establishes Klytemnestra’s history, it also outlines her motives for killing her husband. It is the octet which holds the key to Klytemnestra’s murderous rage. According to tradition, Clytemnestra and her sister Helen hold the somewhat dubious distinction of being cited as the cause of some of the most horrific acts of violence in European literary history. Yet, it should be


remembered that this kindred pair are in fact victims of appalling acts of male violence. Before Clytemnestra was born, her mother Leda, the Queen of Sparta, was raped by Zeus in the guise of a swan. The ‘eggs’ from this forced union not only produced Helen and Clytemnestra, but also their twin siblings, Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux). Klytemnestra, ‘DAUGHTER of gods and men’ is, as Pfeiffer reminds us, the product of a rape. What is more, whilst Clytemnestra was a young maid, her sister Helen was abducted and raped by the Athenian king, Theseus. Helen was recovered by her twin brothers, only after the Dioscuri had launched a war, in Helen’s name, against Athens and her people. Later, of course, Helen is abducted by the Trojan prince Paris. The resulting war, again launched in Helen’s name, lasts for over ten years. Euripides suggests that Clytemnestra was herself the victim of extreme sexual violence. In Iphigenia in Aulis, Clytemnestra accuses Agamemnon of murdering her husband Tantalus, of grabbing her baby from her breast and ‘breaking its head on the ground’.79 Agamemnon is also accused of taking Clytemnestra by force and of compelling her to marry him against her will. This pre-history may be a Euripidean invention. Nevertheless, Pfeiffer gestures towards the terrible sequence of violent events, which are integral to Klytemnestra’s back-story. Moreover, Klytemnestra’s history can be seen as a crucial factor in the crimes that she is seemingly destined to commit. Klytemnestra’s character may well have been moulded by her early experiences, but it is a more recent episode of brutality that preoccupies Pfeiffer’s queen. As we know, Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, at the behest of the seer Calchas. Her daughter’s death is the ‘wound’ from which Klytemnestra cannot heal. The gap left by Iphigenia’s absence is filled with Klytemnestra’s ‘oily rage’, no doubt fuelled by the knowledge that yet another member of her kin has been brutally assaulted by a Greek hero. This time, however, Klytemnestra is determined to have her revenge. And, as a mother, Klytemnestra appears to have the right of retaliation: ‘the wound approved thee still/Mother’. Pfeiffer’s queen is clearly justified in seeking revenge for the illegitimate death of her daughter. In sacrificing his own daughter, Agamemnon acts, not as a father, but as the commander of the Greek fleet. At issue, therefore, are the competing claims of familial and civic obligations. Yet, this conflict is, as Fagles notes, representative of much greater discord:

From a theological conflict between Will and Necessity, or Zeus and the Fates – the gods of the sky and the powers of the Earth; to a social, political conflict between the state with its patriarchal bias and the family with its matriarchal roots; to a psychological conflict between our intellect and our hunger for release, our darker, vengeful drives that can invigorate our dreams of ideality, equality and balance.80


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For Aeschylus, then, civilization is the ultimate product of this conflict between opposing forces. Aeschylus’ solution to such conflict, as represented in the conclusion to the Oresteia is, as Zeitlin suggests, to place ‘Olympian over chthonic on the divine level, Greek over barbarian on the cultural level, and male above female on the social level’.81 For Zeitlin, ‘the male–female conflict subsumes the other two, for while it maintains its own emotive function in the dramatization of human concerns, it provides too the central metaphor which “sexualizes” the other issues and attracts them into its magnetic field’.82 The clash between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra can be seen as the heart of the Agamemnon and the central focus of Emily Pfeiffer’s ‘Klytemnestra’. Pfeiffer, it seems, is far less concerned with the cosmological forces battling for supremacy than she is with the socio-political conflict between the ruling Mother and Father of Argos. The issue around which Pfeiffer focuses her argument is that of violence, enacted by the mother-figure. Klytemnestra’s violent revenge is, of course, a deeply gendered issue, and yet Pfeiffer’s poem questions the very basis of the distinction between male violence and female violence. If the octet establishes the social situation and the psychology of Klytemnestra, then the sestet can be seen to clarify the queen’s motive for revenge by rejecting the conventional assertion that Klytemnestra killed the king because of her passion for Agamemnon’s brother, Aegisthus. Zeitlin explains that, ‘in the Agamemnon the queen’s primary motive was maternal vengeance for her child, Iphigenia; her second one was the sexual alliance she contracted with Aegisthus in her husband’s absence’. Consequently, ‘adulterous wife is now fully equated with the hostile mother. The faithless wife who betrayed her husband and has taken his usurper into her bed has now betrayed her other children to gratify her own sexuality.’83 As a result, the queen’s motivation can be seen to shift from obligations to kin, to irresponsible self-interest. Perhaps responding to the growing trend for sensation fiction, Owen Meredith produced his own lustful Clytemnestra in 1855. Better known as Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Meredith’s drama formed part of a larger volume, entitled Clytemnestra, The Earl’s Return and Other Poems. Clytemnestra dominates Lytton’s drama of twenty scenes, replete with chorus. Despite her majesty, Lytton’s Clytemnestra cuts a somewhat pathetic figure as her murderous intent is fuelled by her love for her weak and cowardly brotherin-law: ‘But never did I feel this wretched heart/Until it leap’d beneath Ægisthus’ eyes’ (III, 270–1). Clytemnestra in fact attributes all her powers of vengeance to her hopeless love for her wretched swain: ‘My life did but begin when I found thee/O what a strength was hidden in this heart!’ (VII, 939–40). As a result, one feels that Lytton’s Clytemnestra does not act out of righteous indignation or moral obligation, but out of her selfish love for Aegisthus.


In contrast, Pfeiffer’s narrator is incredulous about suggestions of Klytemnestra’s passion for her husband’s brother: ‘what fury brought Ægysthus to thy side?’ Intensely sceptical that any such affair between the queen and her brother-in-law has taken place, the narrator suggests that Klytemnestra’s fervour for the ‘mere mawworm’ is not based on sexual attraction. Rather, the relationship with Aegysthus is strategic; designed to inflict pain on Agamemnon and to create havoc in his kingdom: ‘nothing more seemed dear/But power to wreak high ruin, nothing clear/But the long dream you waited to fulfil’. Pfeiffer’s Klytemnestra is not, despite the hesitancy of the narrator, psychologically weak or morally ambivalent. Nor does Klytemnestra struggle with her conscience or the validity of her feelings. There is nothing submissively feminine or pathetically corruptible about her. On the contrary, Klytemnestra’s ‘oily rage’ becomes combustible in the second stanza, as Klytemnestra’s actions explode the very sphere which is supposed to contain her: Woman and Greek – so doubly trained in art! – Spreading the purple for the conqueror’s tread, Bowing with feline grace thy royal head – How perfect whelp-robbed lioness thy part! One wrong the more to wring the ancient smart, Then three swift strokes, and the slow hope blooms red, Who shamed the hero lays him with the dead, Where nevermore his word may vex her heart. Bold queen, what were to thee the gods of Greece? What had been any god of any name, More than the lion-heart you made to cease, Or the live dog to all your humours tame? – The very furies left your soul in peace Until Orestes’ sword drave home their claim.84 The intriguing opening line invites multiple readings. Is the tone of the narrator one of condemnation, or one of admiration? Is the Greek queen to be feared, for her violence and her treachery? Or is the ‘bold queen’ to be lauded for her stand against a tyrannical husband and an unjust social system? Pfeiffer’s tone is deliberately ambivalent. The exclamation marks are matched in number by the question marks, indicating the moral complexity of Klytemnestra’s actions. Whether Klytemnestra acts justly, or not, is determined by one’s attitude to female violence and rage. By penetrating the body of Agamemnon, Klytemnestra can be seen to both emasculate the king and assume his masculine powers. This conflict is not simply sexual, however. In devouring the lion-heart of her mate, Klytemnestra’s actions represent the overthrow of all ‘civilized’ values and as such they


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are deeply threatening.85 Despite the animalistic imagery, Klytemnestra is not dehumanized or entirely masculinized by her brutal actions. Rather, as a Greek woman – ‘doubly trained in art!’ – Klytemnestra uses the seductive skills, particular to her gender. In the second line, Pfeiffer alludes to the famous tapestry scene in Aeschylus’ play, in which the queen deftly persuades the arrogant Agamemnon to incriminate himself. Caught in the tapestry of Klytemnestra’s beguiling words, Pfeiffer’s ‘king of men’ commits the same crime as his Aeschylean counterpart; he tramples the sacred cloth beneath his feet and seals his fate with the gods. Having out-smarted and out-manoeuvred her husband, the queen’s ‘great ruling’ will is evident. Klytemnestra easily defeats the tyrannical Agamemnon, but not before she is forced to suffer one final insult. Indirectly, Pfeiffer alludes to the brooding presence of Kassandra, ‘One wrong the more to wring the ancient smart’. If Klytemnestra needed any more reason to cut Agamemnon down to size, she has it in the figure of Kassandra. In a number of male-authored texts, including those of Ovid and Seneca, Clytemnestra’s motivation is not related to the death of Iphigenia and the attendant obligations of kinship. Rather, Clytemnestra is portrayed as a sexually jealous spouse, who remains faithful to Agamemnon until she beholds the captive Cassandra. However, Pfeiffer’s queen has planned her revenge for ten long years. She always intended to kill Agamemnon, irrespective of Kassandra. Nevertheless, the Trojan’s introduction into the royal palace is an offence to the king’s legitimate wife. Moreover, her presence is a threat. Klytemnestra’s standing, and her safety, is heavily dependent upon her status as Agamemnon’s wife and the mother of the royal children. The ‘queen of the king of men’ is, ironically, extremely vulnerable in the event of Agamemnon’s death. Pfeiffer’s concern with the vulnerable and exploited position of married women echoes the concerns of Augusta Webster. In an article for the Contemporary Review Pfeiffer refers to women’s struggle for suffrage as ‘the battle of her sex’.86 This military metaphor is again repeated in Women and Work, where Pfeiffer describes the ‘war of wills’ between married ‘partners’. Pfeiffer’s description is worth quoting at length:

Aspiring to be the friend of her husband; with love too pure for treachery where love survives; scorning to steal her way by the back-stairs of his vanity and weakness when it has departed . . . a cringing courtier, in the ante-chamber of his moods; without hysterics as set-off against the violence of masculine temper, she has no armour but her truth, no sword but of the spirit . . . with public opinion half-hearted and the law an adversary, her position is full of trial, and even of danger. If these words appear startling and the picture overdrawn, it will only be to those who live in forgetfulness that a mother who has not broken her marriage pledge


can still be deprived of her children (the most naturally inviolable of all human possessions) by other hand than that of death.87 The parallel of an ‘unfended’ Victorian wife with Klytemnestra’s situation is striking, except that Klytemnestra is no ‘cringing courtier’. A queen with a weapon, she takes revenge for the deprivation and degradation of her daughter. And, if we were in any doubt about the significance of symbolic figures like Klytemnestra to the women’s movement, Pfeiffer signals their import: The Ewige Weibliche [eternal feminine], though no new force in the world, will be lifted to its proper sphere. The woman, ceasing to be a mere queenconsort, as in the old ideal, will become a queen-regnant, bound to no taskwork, but acting in accordance with a rule from within – the true helper and complement of man, reigning no longer solely by his grace, but by the grace of God.88 Echoing Webster’s strategy in ‘Medea in Athens’, Pfeiffer’s ‘Klytemnestra’ can be seen to issue a challenge to current conceptions of conjugal and political arrangements. With the social and political odds stacked against her, Pfeiffer’s Greek queen has little option but to fight. The queen, whose mother and sister were raped and whose daughter was slaughtered like an animal, can be seen to have internalized the violent values of her oppressors. But in acting out, Klytemnestra operates in complete contradistinction to her socially assigned role. The mother, whose solemn duty it is to procreate and nurture, perverts all expectations by becoming the warrior whose only mission is vengeance and death. In the late nineteenth century, campaigners for women’s rights were frequently deemed as warriors or soldiers in the battle for equality. Pfeiffer peppers her own polemical prose with keywords such as ‘units’, ‘battalions’ and ‘army’, and her use of military discourse is very much in evidence throughout Women and Work. However, in considering the capacities of her own sex, Pfeiffer considers that, ‘the temper of the sex, as moulded by nature and circumstances, is not greatly militant’. Women are, according to Pfeiffer, ‘fundamentally opposed’ to ‘the profession of arms’. Women’s work is to be ‘creative, not destructive’, and their ‘office in the spiritual to save, not to slay’.89 Women may not be naturally inclined towards conflict, Pfeiffer insists, but necessity demands that women find it within themselves to join the battle: ‘the vast majority of women would still prefer to be sheltered from, not to say lifted above, the rude battle of life, and to have their part in it taken by some man to whom the fight might prove an agreeable stimulant. But it may not be.’90 At once appropriating and disavowing women’s ‘natural’ aptitude to bear arms, Pfeiffer elects to rally her troops:


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Women in large numbers are called to the fight; they have been engaged in it more or less for many generations, and have been worsted in helpless thousands. They feel at last the necessity of equipping themselves for the conflict, and are arming. What more is to be said?91 The question mark speaks volumes. Pfeiffer knows that in the battle for social and political justice, there will be casualties: ‘many are doomed to perish, giving up the fight in utter weariness. We call them fallen. They are not fallen; they are thrown down in the struggle, cast into the mire, and ruthlessly trampled upon!’ But the fallen heroes of the battle between the sexes are owed more than tears. Pfeiffer implores other women to unite behind their example and to applaud them, ‘for opening our eyes to the criminal side of a system in which we have thoughtlessly acquiesced. To those who stand in a conflict so fierce, our strongest support is due.’92 ‘Klytemnestra’ can be seen as Pfeiffer’s own example of a woman determined to fight against her oppression, and win. Pfeiffer’s belligerent rhetoric may also be seen to reflect the growing movement towards militancy within ‘first-wave’ feminism. Militant action had been stringently opposed by many female activists on the basis that it was antithetical to the democratic and libertarian values which underlay women’s claims to equal rights. But, in 1903, with the establishment of the Women’s Social and Political Union, female activists sought to follow a more militant agenda.93 Aside from the open-air rallies and high-profile publicity stunts, the new forms of activism involved more calculated threats to public order. The militant tactics of scuffling with police, courting arrest and imprisonment, were followed by more serious acts of violence including arson and damage to property. Some women were committed to taking their protests even further, by directing their rage inward, rather than outward. The tactic of the hunger-strike, for instance, helped to raise the profile of the militants, but placed the lives of the protesters in jeopardy. Despite the dangers, as Martha Vicinus points out, militancy gave women the freedom to express themselves differently, to engage in a form of self-sacrificing politics which had the potential to transform the political landscape.94 Whilst Pfeiffer was a dedicated and passionate campaigner for women’s political and economic rights, she retained the class and race prejudices of her time. The middle-class values of marriage, family and patriotism remained central to Pfeiffer’s fight for ‘women’s rights’. Consequently, Pfeiffer hoped that the ‘battle’ for women’s rights could be fought, primarily, on an intellectual and discursive level. The weapons she hoped women would employ were their intellects. A provocative poem like ‘Klytemnestra’ should therefore be read as a highly suggestive examination of the nature and limits of female power and not a wholesale endorsement of militant feminism. The emphasis of Pfeiffer’s poem is, however, directed towards Klytemnestra’s victory over Agamemnon. Twenty-seven of the twenty-eight lines of


the two sonnets concern Klytemnestra’s motivation and her act of murder. And, until Orestes returns to stake his claim to the throne, Klytemnestra is left in ‘peace’ by the Furies to rule the kingdom of Argos. Pfeiffer could have left Klytemnestra not only in peace but in power. To have ended the poem with a murderous Klytemnestra in control of both the royal house and the polis, would have been intensely challenging to a contemporary audience, but Pfeiffer stops just short of such a revolutionary conclusion. Edith Hall suggests that in ancient times it was ‘ideologically virtually impossible to perform Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (or any imitation with a similarly androgynous, autonomous, proactive, amoral, and politically triumphant queen) in isolation’. The Libation Bearers and Eumenides ‘are actually required if Clytemnestra is to be punished for her insurrection, and formally subordinated’.95 Pfeiffer gestures towards Klytemnestra’s punishment, by looking beyond the Agamemnon to both to the Libation Bearers and the Eumenides in the final line of the sonnet. One may consider that in drawing his phallic sword against his mother, Orestes seizes power not by right, but by might. Forced to suffer the violence of yet another male relative, Pfeiffer makes it very difficult for us to overlook Klytemnestra’s painful history. As a daughter, a wife and a mother, Klytemnestra has never enjoyed any protection from male violence. The codes, laws and gods of the ‘civilized’ Greeks fail her. Nevertheless, the self-sacrificing actions of Klytemnestra stand as a reminder that despite social and political injustice, women retain the transgressive power to ‘wreak high ruin’. In ‘Studies from the Antique’ Pfeiffer, using the highly adaptable sonnet form, creates a dramatic dialogue between two powerful female figures. The conflict which is supposed to take place between these two supposedly disparate characters never materializes. In its place, Pfeiffer suggests that these female figures have grounds to unite rather than to fight. The twinsonnet format allows Pfeiffer to create a sympathetic exchange of ideas, and provides an alternate point of convergence for Klytemnestra and Kassandra. Pfeiffer not only creates a dialogue between her characters, but also between ancient models and the everyday reality of women’s lives in the late nineteenth century. Ironically, perhaps, Pfeiffer’s ‘studies’ from antique literature could not have been more timely, nor more representative of Victorian women’s struggles for social and political freedom.

4 Old Greek Wine in New Bottles: Michael Field’s Dionysiac Poetics

The Hellenic poetics of Michael Field – the pseudonymous identity of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper – mark something of a departure from the highly politicized lyrics of Webster, Levy and Pfeiffer. More subversive allegories than overt political commentaries, the Hellenic poetics of Bradley and Cooper reflect Michael Field’s interest in drama, rather than activism. Like many of their male contemporaries, Katharine and Edith drew upon the rich resources of Hellenism in order to explore issues of contemporary significance. In 1892, Edith Cooper completed a prose play entitled Old Wine in New Bottles. The play, which was never published, serves as a useful metaphor for Michael Field’s extensive appropriation of ancient Greek literature and myth. Their plays, poems and journal entries are saturated with classical allusions, ancient myths and Hellenic figures. For much of their early career, Michael Field celebrated and venerated the Greek gods with Bacchic enthusiasm. Hellenic subjects also feature heavily in much of their later work, including the volumes Sight and Song, Underneath the Bough, Wild Honey and Noontide Branches. Their identification with ancient Greece was, in fact, not only professional, but personal. The couple’s association with Hellenism was so extensive that Robert Browning, a personal friend and mentor, hailed Bradley and Cooper as ‘my two dear Greek women’.1 Katharine and Edith revelled in the ancient past, to the extent that they had altars to Dionysus built in the garden and the study of their home in Surrey. Yet, their obsession with the ancient past was, of course, conspicuously ‘modern’. One is in fact struck by the very interdisciplinary and intertextual nature of Michael Field’s Hellenism. But which particular Greece, which nineteenth-century vision of Greece, was theirs? As ‘Michael Field’, Bradley and Cooper forged one of the most fascinating and productive literary collaborations of the nineteenth century. Together, they produced eight volumes of poetry, twenty-seven plays and thirty-six foolscap volumes of their joint journal. Their career lasted for over thirty years and they enjoyed the company and respect of some of the most famous artists and writers of the late nineteenth century. Their close association 111


with figures such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, John Gray and George Moore can be seen to highlight ‘Michael Field’s’ connections with late Victorian movements such as Aestheticism and Decadence.2 In a number of respects, Michael Field’s use of Hellenism reflects their close association with their male contemporaries. This chapter will, however, examine in some detail Michael Field’s distinctive, female-centred approach to the late Victorian discourse of Hellenism. Bradley and Cooper’s knowledge of Hellenism was informed and conscientious. As unmarried middle-class women with a private income, Bradley and Cooper’s independence allowed them the time and space to acquire education and cultural knowledge. This self-acculturation included the prolonged study of art, philosophy, ancient history, Greek and Latin. Bradley and Cooper were also intensely fanatical about drama and theatre. I suggest that the complex sign of ‘Michael Field’ should in fact be seen as a dramatic mask, which enabled Bradley and Cooper to challenge and explore issues of sex, gender, genre and authorial identity.3 Furthermore, Bradley and Cooper’s pseudonymous identity can be seen to have allowed them to explore the issue of violence, enacted by and against women, as is evident in Bellerophôn and Callirrhoë. Michael Field’s Greek communities are full of young women, willing and eager to explore the potential of pagan religion and the liberatory aspects of Greek eros. Rather than Arnoldian ‘sweetness and light’, Michael Field’s Hellenism, like the god Dionysus, is contradictory and disturbing. In her groundbreaking chapter on Michael Field, Angela Leighton suggests that ‘the ideal of “pleasure” for its own sake, sexual and pagan, is the impulse behind much of Michael Field’s best work’.4 For Leighton, Michael Field offers a ‘bleak yet bracing paganism’, which is ‘exhilaratingly sensual and pleasure-loving’:5 It is as if Michael Field begins where Barrett Browning ended, with the careless Pans of laughing creativity. To ‘laugh and dream on Lethe’s shore’ sums up a pagan jouissance, even in the place of death, which marks out much of Michael Field’s best poetry. Casual and pleasure-loving, their music grows out of the free sensuousness of the pagan gods, invoked, from the start, as an alternative to the moral reckoning of ‘heaven and hell’.6 Whilst I would agree that Michael Field’s paganism is highly sensual and pleasure-loving, it is also darker, more violent and more philosophically complex than Leighton suggests. Michael Field frequently demonstrates that the passions inspired by the pagan gods can be destructive as well as liberating. The myths and literature of the pagan Greeks did not just provide Bradley and Cooper with a liberal language of erotic liberation. Hellenism presented Michael Field with a philosophical and spiritual resource, through

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which they could explore such subjects as religion, power, identity, sexuality and gender. Michael Field’s pagan poetics certainly celebrate pleasure, but by repeatedly employing figures such as Eros and Dionysus in their work, Bradley and Cooper demonstrate that such pleasure, especially for women, often comes at a cost. After years of intellectual inquiry, Bradley and Cooper decided that their paganism would have a distinctly Dionysian flavour. The two women declared themselves bacchants, devotees of Dionysus, and adopted the loaded symbolism and mysticism of the Greek god in their lives and in their work. In the Hellenic volumes Bellerophôn, Callirrhoë and Long Ago, the Dionysiac rites of female passion and pleasure rule. Aside from the intoxicating allure of female rites of pleasure, the religion of Dionysus offered Bradley and Cooper a refreshing, if ancient, intellectual and philosophical framework. As I mentioned earlier, on a psychological and emotional level Dionysus signifies the free flow of the emotional life, untouched by the restrictions of family, society or conventional morality. On a cultural level, Dionysus confuses distinctions between city and wild, mortal and immortal, man and beast, male and female, Greek and barbarian, heaven and earth. Dionysus is, therefore, a complex, paradoxical and provocative god, who opens up a world of new experiences, for those brave enough to embrace him. His religion is not purely hedonistic, however; it is full of risks and tensions, as Charles Segal observes: The pleasure of Dionysiac song, like the pleasure of Dionysiac wine and ecstasy, is full of contradictions, surrounded by dangers. It offers no simple validation, through the microcosm of art, of the established harmony, moral as well as musical, of Olympian Zeus. Rather, it opens into the unknown, the boundless, the wild realms beyond the ordered framework of the city-state, the places where the individual, surrendering too much to that joy, may lose himself entirely.7 The cult of Dionysus celebrates the irrational side of human nature. He also embodies reversibility, ‘in a spirit that may veer abruptly from play and wonder to unrestrained savagery’.8 The contradictory truth of Dionysus, expressed most obviously in Euripides’ Bacchae, is that his capacity for destruction is the necessary and inevitable partner of his creative energies and life-fostering gifts. The dark side of Dionysiac pleasure is, therefore, that it can cause pain and suffering, as well as, or even as a part of ecstasy. This paradoxical principle is clearly expressed in Michael Field’s early works, Bellerophôn and Callirrhoë. The texts, which venerate pleasure and the power of passionate love, are suffused with instances of sexual violence. In this chapter I will analyse Michael Field’s Dionysiac poetics, in order to


demonstrate that their vision of ancient Greece is not utopian, but complex, dark and often violent. Bradley and Cooper embraced the paradoxes of Dionysus – in their writing and in their lives together. In fact one of the most interesting aspects of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship is that it is frequently discussed, by themselves and others, in terms of Maenadism. To celebrate the beginning of a new year, for instance, Edith wrote to Katharine in their journal: ‘My Love – O my delight – May joy dance by us, our Bacchanal, and we drive the tigers, with the divine Bacchus of the Olympian throne above us – Eleutherios!’9 Logan Pearsall Smith, in his somewhat condescending account of Bradley and Cooper, recalled that the two quietly attired ladies would seem to undergo the most extraordinary transformations, into princesses, tragic Muses, priestesses of Apollo and Bacchic Maenads.10 Years later, Edith described her intense relationship with Bernard Berenson in terms of Maenadic worship: ‘he would like me to be his Maenad; he has no intention of serving me – but he knows that we wake in each other finer powers of impression . . . if only he were less Dyonsiac [sic], I should love him less – forget him –’.11 In another note Berenson is transformed into the Dionysiac fantasy figure of Coresus from Callirrhoë: ‘I suppose he is the Dream – the Stranger from Phrygia, the Deliverer – whom I must always follow with my thyrsus. It is an awful thing for a poet’s dream to attach itself to a poor, small mortal.’12 But Berenson was not the only source of Dionysiac passion in Edith’s life. At a lunch hosted by Mary Costello, Edith describes looking across the table at Katharine: ‘My Love looked Dionysic [sic] in redwine-coloured velvet under her radiant face.’ Irrespective of gender, Edith’s passions were truly Dionysian. That is not to say that Michael Field’s Maenadism constitutes a wholesale rejection of Christian values. In a letter to Havelock Ellis, Katharine revealed the mutability of her belief system: ‘I am Christian, pagan, pantheist, and other things the name of which I do not know.’13 Until her suitably dramatic conversion to Catholicism, Edith also shared Katharine’s spiritual multiplicity. The following oft-quoted diary entry recalls Edith’s extraordinary spell in a fever hospital in Dresden: Delirium is glorious, like being inspired continuously . . . forms of art and poetry swim round and into me . . . Vast Bacchanals rush by, Rubenesque, violent – (Here Tannhäuser feeds the phantasy) I fall into an attitude of sleep like Antinous on the ground. I am Greek, Roman, Barbarian, Catholic, and this multiform life sweeps me toward unconsciousness – only the shine through the blinds tortures me so that I cannot lose myself.14 Hilary Fraser suggests that Edith’s ‘multiform life’ is ‘an apt metaphor for the trans sectarian capaciousness of Michael Field’s poetry’.15


As Fraser notes, the conjunction of pagan and Christian subjects and symbols in the early work of Michael Field, prepares the way ‘for the aestheticism and Bacchanalian eroticism of the later Christian poetry’.16 Bradley and Cooper go so far as to combine Christ and Bacchus in the fascinating poem ‘Dionysus Zagreus’. Published as part of the posthumous volume Dedicated, this poem represents the unification of Christian, pagan and pantheist values, in the protean figure of Dionysus. The poem depicts a Christ-like Dionysus, who is chased into the wilderness by savage hoard of unbelievers. The cast-out ‘son of a god, in the form of a man’ is forced to endure great pain and suffering, before he is redeemed: I rise, I bend the pale firs to my grasp, I break the whitened whorls, the honied cones; I of such sorrows, greater than a man’s, I, the rejected, hunted, mad, unwelcome, I weave these tragic bunches in a wreath, Fit crown for ever, of my misery (79–84) In Nature Dionysus is reborn and his wild environs become his kingdom. His crown of fir (and thorns?) is not just a Christian symbol of suffering and divinity. Dionysus’ garland also represents his symbiosis with Nature and his pagan roots. In this context, the suitably complex character of Dionysus encapsulates and reflects the heterogeneity of Edith and Katharine’s belief system.17 Edith commented that the myths of ancient Greece are ‘imperishable symbols. They have summed up Nature & Thought & Man as a splendid creature . . . in forms and in tales of imperishable perfection.’18 Another vital aspect of Michael Field’s ‘paganism’ is their totemic veneration for Mother Nature. In the garden of their Surrey home, the deliciously named ‘Paragon’, Edith and Katharine would utter all-embracing pagan prayers, such as, ‘I salute the Earth & the home of the gods above.’19 This pantheistic worship of Mother Earth alludes to ancient, pre-Olympian fertility rites. Michael Field wrote numerous poems celebrating the ancient goddesses Demeter, Persephone, Gaia and Cybele. Such allusions to the pre-Olympian female fertility cults, which dominated early Greek religious life, not only recall the theories of J. J. Bachofen, but also anticipate the work of Jane Ellen Harrison and the Cambridge scholars of the 1890s. However, Michael Field’s particular brand of pantheism can be as cruel as it is celebratory, as Leighton observes: The law of life, like ‘the law of pleasure’, is not separate from hunger, destruction or suffering, and indeed, in the best of Michael Field, the pantheism is neither rosy-coloured nor God-scaped. Instead, it is harsh and exact. Even if such poetry does not always speak overtly for the cause


of woman, it always speaks, ‘secretly’, in a woman’s voice which, like Syrinx’s, penetrates by its different ‘key’.20 Michael Field’s Hellenism is fundamentally grounded in female sexuality and fertility rites, both pre-Olympian and Dionysiac. If, as Leighton suggests, Michael Field ‘does not always speak overtly for the cause of woman’, Bradley and Cooper’s Dionysiac poetics can be seen to exploit the ancient sources in order to reveal dynamics of power in relation to sexuality and gender. Furthermore, Bradley and Cooper suggest that Dionysiac enthusiasm and ecstasy can be philosophically productive and socially progressive. Indeed, Bradley and Cooper can be seen to explore the transgressive potential of Hellenism; (re)presenting it as a dynamic and inclusive discourse which, unlike the Hellenism of their male contemporaries, directly incorporates female experience.

Michael Field’s erotic poetics In an obituary for her former tutor in Greek, Virginia Woolf described the full force of Janet Case’s teaching technique: ‘somehow the masterpieces of Greek drama were stormed, without grammar, without accents, but somehow, under her compulsion, so sane and yet so stimulating, out they shone, if inaccessible still supremely desirable’.21 As Yopie Prins suggests, ‘rather than lamenting the difficulty of educating women to write and pronounce Greek properly, Woolf here turns the Victorian denigration of “Lady’s Greek, without the accents” into a revelation of Greek as a language of and for desire’.22 Prins also cites Jane Ellen Harrison’s recollection of her first encounter with Greek. Harrison describes the moment when ‘my fate fell upon me, when the sudden sense came over me, the hot-cold shiver of delight, the sense of a language more sensitive than my own to shades of meaning’.23 Again, Prins suggests that the study of Greek was for Harrison not only an aesthetic encounter but also an erotically charged experience.24 In a similar vein, Jennifer Wallace refers to the case of Mary Shelley who, unlike her brothers who went to Charterhouse, was educated at home by a private tutor and consequently, was deprived of the same educational opportunities that her brothers enjoyed: As a result she held Greek, and men who could read it, in great awe, because it represented forbidden knowledge. Significantly, it was when she had met and declared her love for Shelley, over her mother’s grave, that she began to learn the language. Her promise to Shelley that she ‘will learn Greek’, written in a letter planning their elopement in 1814, suggests that she considered Greek a rite de passage to the illicit world of free love.25


Bradley and Cooper also found a language to articulate erotic experience in the ancient myths and literature of the Greeks. Like other disciplines, Victorian Studies has been dramatically influenced by Foucault’s multi-volumed The History of Sexuality.26 Foucault’s repressive hypothesis in relation to Victorian sexuality has proved to be incredibly stimulating for scholars and critics of the nineteenth century. For instance, one can detect Foucault’s influence in the work of Richard Dellamora, Jeff Nunokawa and Linda Dowling, amongst many others. But, as a number of critics have pointed out, the basis of Foucault’s analysis is always the active–passive polarity. Consequently, as Songe-Møller observes, ‘Foucault hardly spares a thought for the necessary but miserable existence of those who exemplified passivity in ancient Athens. He seems to get carried away by his enthusiasm for the enviable privileges of those who were active – both sexually and politically.’27 In an interesting article assessing the value of Foucauldian theory for Victorian Studies, Lee Behlman suggests that ‘the History of Sexuality, and the classicists’ recent engagements with it, provide a rich opportunity for reframing our understanding of male lyric subjectivities in Victorian poetry’.28 Foucault’s History of Sexuality is, however, far less rich in terms of female subjectivities. As Amy Richlin notes, there are methodological, intellectual and moral limitations to Foucault’s representation of female sexuality.29 Yet, Foucault’s wider emphasis on the discursive and institutional representations of sexuality can be highly suggestive. Foucauldian theory may therefore be employed as an interesting point of departure, rather than an exact framework, for an analysis of sexuality and gender in the work of Michael Field. In an important article concerning the history of lesbians and the lesbians of history, Chris White suggests that the literature and culture of ancient Greece offered male writers a ‘whole canon of male–male bondings and love’. Women writers, on the other hand, had only ‘one classical equivalent to draw upon for expressions and strategies of female–female love – the poetry of Sappho’.30 White persuasively argues that in their marvellously complex and provocative volume of pseudo-Sapphic lyrics, Long Ago, Bradley and Cooper’s appropriation of the poetry of Sappho is developed into a specific and strategic ‘language of love between women’.31 Prins also suggests that in Long Ago Bradley and Cooper ‘locate their own lyrics in a figurative gap, an open space out of which the possibility of lesbian writing emerges’.32 For Prins, the lacunae in the text of the Sapphic fragments open up a ‘textual field that Bradley and Cooper may enter together as “Michael Field”’.33 Of course, it isn’t just the gaps in the text, but the fragmentary nature of history and the lack of evidence concerning women’s lives which allow for such dramatic revisions. Michael Field’s female-centred Hellenism renders the late nineteenth-century Hellenic counter-discourse of (homo)erotic liberation open to the possibility of a ‘lesbian’ reading. Furthermore, in reclaiming the Maenad and Sappho as figures of desire, Michael Field suggests that there are


alternative female figures within the classical corpus capable of expressing female eroticism and female same-sex experiences. The interpretation of Michael Field’s Hellenism as a ‘lesbian’ counterdiscourse is made more complex by the issue of Bradley and Cooper’s personal relationship, as recalled in their letters and journals. As part of her discussion of Long Ago, White combines her reading of Field’s Sapphic lyrics with provocative extracts from Katharine and Edith’s diaries to support her interpretation of Michael Field’s poetry as explicitly sexual and homoerotic.34 In (re)presenting Bradley and Cooper’s relationship as a passionate, sexual partnership, White suggests that Michael Field’s metaphorical representations of female passion and same-sex desire are indeed deliberate and strategically subversive. Long Ago and the implications of reading the volume as a ‘lesbian’ text by ‘lesbian’ authors has, rightly, been the focus of much recent critical scholarship on Michael Field.35 In keeping with Foucault, Michael Field’s Hellenic poetics, like the Hellenism of Wilde, Pater and Symonds, has also been read as a ‘coded’ language of homoeroticism.36 For instance, Leighton suggests that Bradley and Cooper employed a ‘pagan subtext’ through which they explored female sensuality.37 Similarly, White notes that ‘rather than inventing a vocabulary with an unmistakable precision of meaning’, Bradley and Cooper strategically ‘deployed the language of classical scholarship’ in order to talk about female desire.38 It is difficult to see how a play like Callirrhoë which explores the orgiastic worship of Maenads and the erotic poems of Lesbian maidens can be coded. Indeed, there is much to suggest that Bradley and Cooper openly celebrated eroticism rather than codified it. I would like to draw attention to another aspect of Michael Field’s Hellenic poetics. That Bradley and Cooper were able to articulate same-sex desire using Greek models is interesting in itself, but perhaps what is more interesting is the nature of the desire represented. Often the desire depicted between Bradley and Cooper’s Greek maidens is violently passionate, sometimes painful and almost always physically consuming. As we will see, many of the central characters of Bellerophôn and Callirrhoë suffer their desires. In most cases, the characters suffer not because their desires are in any way aberrant, but because of the intensity of eros. Bradley and Cooper associate the Dionysiac impulse for enthusiasm, experience and pleasure, with the often excruciating pleasures and pains of eros. This seemingly paradoxical combination of pleasure and pain, heavily reminiscent of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry, can, I suggest, be seen to form the basis of Michael Field’s erotic aesthetic.

The miss-education of Michael Field Like many middle-class Victorian girls, Katharine and Edith were initially educated at home. But, as Katharine was Edith’s elder by sixteen years, their


educational experiences differed considerably. Katharine was the youngest daughter of Charles and Emma Bradley, a respectable tobacco-merchant family from Birmingham. Katharine’s father died of cancer when she was only two years old, leaving Emma Bradley, now a wealthy young widow, to bring up their two children. In the Bradley household, as Emma Donoghue observes, Katharine and her sister Lissie, ‘both benefited from their mother’s belief in a liberal education. Instead of school, they had a series of tutors who taught them French, Italian, German, Classics and painting.’39 Donoghue suggests that ‘the Bradley girls’ education was not meant to prepare them for any career but that of wife and mother’.40 And yet, Emma Bradley’s preference for private tuition over public schooling enabled her daughters to study subjects such as Latin and Greek, which were not widely available to state-educated young women. Not all private tuition was rigid and prescriptive and Katharine’s education was by no means limited to the domestic sphere. Following the death of her beloved mother in May 1868, Katharine took the opportunity to travel and to gain experience of the world. At twenty-two, Katharine enrolled, for a brief period, at the Collège de France. She spent many hours in art galleries and cafés, immersing herself in the art and culture of Paris.41 Seven years later, still hungry for knowledge and experience, Katharine attended Newnham College, in Cambridge, where she completed a summer course at the newly opened college for women. Her brief stay at the institution delighted her, despite her feelings of deficiency. Years later, having been invited to visit the college by the principal, Miss Clough, Katharine declared with pride: ‘I return to Newnham a poet and possessing a poet.’42 Katharine’s short summer at Newnham clearly galvanized her interest in education, for her next role was not as a student, but a tutor. In 1873, Katharine moved to Solihull with her sister, Lissie’s husband James and their two children Edith and Amy. Katharine took to ‘teaching the chicks’ and of an evening, writing lyrics. Her lone experiments in verse eventually culminated in the volume The New Minnesinger, published by Longmans in 1875. But her role as a tutor was as significant as her burgeoning writing career. As the spinster aunt, Katharine, in effect, became the governess of her nieces. But her experiences of higher education set her apart from most Victorian governesses. The curriculum set by Katharine was certainly untypical, as it is noted that by her early teens Edith was translating Virgil. Furthermore, at the age of twelve, Katharine’s protégée had completed her first drama The Iwl-Dû and was at work on the Greek drama Atys and Adrastos.43 Atys is clearly a concerted effort, on behalf of the young Edith, to produce a full-length Greek drama. Unfortunately, Atys remains a piece of juvenilia, as the play was never fully developed. Nevertheless, the play gestures towards the tragedies which Bradley and Cooper were to develop together as ‘Michael Field’.


When, in 1878, the family moved to Stoke Bishop, a suburb of Bristol, the higher education of women became something of a family concern. Whereas Katharine’s cousin Francis Brooks had gone to Balliol to study classics, Edith and Amy, now teenagers, took the opportunity to join their aunt as students of the local University College. With a private income inherited from Charles Bradley’s tobacco business, Katharine, Edith and Amy were free to dedicate their time and resources to prolonged personal study. Edith, growing increasingly attached to her intellectual aunt, accompanied Katharine in her studies as a day student. As Katharine noted sometime later, ‘Edith & I plunged into College life.’44 Bristol University College was established in 1876 and can be seen as one of the more progressive educational institutions of its day. Women could attend classes with their male contemporaries, both during the day and in the evening. Scholarships were also made equally available to men and women.45 Despite the institutional bias towards science and vocational courses, classics formed an integral part of the curriculum. Together, Katharine and Edith received tuition in Greek and Latin. In 1881, both women achieved Honours in Professor R. Fanshawe’s course in Ancient History. The main thrust of lectures for this course was ‘the place of Rome in universal history’ and Roman ‘law, language and politics in their permanent historic influences’.46 There can be little doubt that this particular area of study greatly influenced the Roman plays of Michael Field.47 Bradley and Cooper’s education in Bristol was not just limited to the study of ancient history and languages. Both women received Honours in Moral Philosophy, Katharine received Honours in Modern History and Edith is listed as having achieved Class I in the study of Logic. Within such an environment of equality and encouragement, Katharine and Edith flourished. It was about this time, as Donoghue observes, that Katharine aged thirtytwo and Edith, sixteen, started ‘behaving as a couple’.48 That their sexual relationship developed at the same time as their intellectual partnership is suggestive. Katharine and Edith may be seen as more like Oxford undergraduates, exploring the potential of their same-sex relationship, than aunt and niece. In ‘An Invitation’, published as part of the volume Underneath the Bough (1893), Katharine revealed the physical and intellectual intimacy between her and Edith, as they researched and wrote together in Katharine’s study: There’s a lavender settee, Cushioned for my sweet and me; Ah, what secrets there will be For love-telling, When her head leans on my knee!


Books I have of long ago And to-day; I shall not know Some, unless thou read them, so Their excelling Music needs thy voices flow . . . . . . All the Latins thou dost prize! Cynthia’s lover by thee lies; Note Catullus, type and size Least repelling To thy weariable eyes. And for Greek! Too sluggishly Thou dost toil; but Sappho, see! And the dear Anthology For thy spelling. Come, it shall be well with thee. As the elder, more experienced reader, it is Katharine who invites, or rather entices the younger woman to join her in her intellectual pursuits. But Edith is a resisting reader, prizing ‘all the Latins’ over Katharine’s beloved Greek. It is interesting to compare the scenario set out in ‘An Invitation’ – of an older woman inspiring and guiding an intellectual gifted younger woman – with Walter Pater’s Socratic tutorials at Brasenose College, Oxford. As Linda Dowling explains, Pater ‘seems to have been persuaded that an education conducted along the old lines of Greek paiderastia – of an older man “inspiring” a younger “hearer” with “his won strength and noble taste in things” – would genuinely fulfill the liberal ideal of education’.49 Katharine and Edith’s ‘educational’ relationship certainly seems to echo Pater’s tutorial technique. In a letter to an inquisitive Robert Browning, Edith described Katharine’s inspirational influence: ‘she has lived with me, taught me, encouraged me and joined me to her poetic life’.50 But it would be misleading to suggest that the partnership of Bradley and Cooper was dominated or driven by Katharine. As the career of Michael Field developed, Edith’s passion for Latin and Roman subjects gained precedence over Katharine’s preference for Greek. Ultimately, Michael Field produced a total of six Roman dramas, as opposed to just three Hellenic volumes.51 Katharine was not to relinquish her role as a tutor for a number of years, as in 1887 she was still teaching students, other than Edith and Amy, at the family home in Bristol. Katharine’s talent for teaching was equalled by her lifelong enthusiasm for learning. Together with Edith she attended the theatre, opera, galleries, exhibitions, museums and public lectures; such as Gilbert Murray’s lectures at the British Museum on Greek Art. Bradley and Cooper’s cultural education also included travel and experiences abroad. The two women visited France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, where they


absorbed all the local sights and sounds. Notably, the difficult journey to Greece was not on their itinerary. Katharine and Edith’s intellectual credentials and aesthetic proclivities granted ‘Michael Field’ access to the male-dominated intellectual and literary circles of the late nineteenth century. That is not to say that they did not enjoy friendships with other intellectual women. For instance, Bradley and Cooper were good friends with the Greek scholar and translator, Anna Swanwick. The two women also met Amy Levy, over whose suicide they gossiped with the poet Dollie Radford.52 Bradley and Cooper also enjoyed a long friendship with the American feminist Mary Costello, before Costello married the flirtatious Bernard Berenson. Bradley and Cooper were highly conscious of the transgressive potential of Hellenism. To have such illicit knowledge and be in such exclusive company was thrilling, as Katharine shrewdly noted in their journal: Every day we are expecting the first copy of Long Ago (a specimen copy). Tiny marsh violets have been sent to Edith – they are like Violets that have put aside their loving, & made sly little scholars of themselves, mystic & ‘beguiling’ – tricky & fanciful – rather than luring and recluse.53 Bradley and Cooper had transformed themselves into ‘sly little scholars’, with the erudition to beguile their readers. However, their new-found knowledge was not without cost. Despite the intellectual achievements of both women, Katharine later revealed her feelings of inadequacy and exclusion, when it came to matters of the mind: ‘one sentence of Mr. Pater’s which I could not say I would never forgive, because I recognised its justice; but from which I suffered, and which was hard to bear – that in which he speaks of the scholarly conscience as male’.54 Katharine’s revealing comment can be seen as the product of internalized sexism. But what is most interesting about Bradley’s observation is that, despite her own laudable efforts and the changes taking place in the education system, Katharine still considered scholarship as a ‘masculine’ activity. Indeed, despite their friendships with other female scholars and translators such as Swanwick, Bradley and Cooper frequently deferred to masculine authority where the classics were concerned. The popular consensus of the day was that the openly intellectual woman was still considered to be the ‘odd’ woman. Two intellectual women – aunt and niece as well as lovers and poets – would have been considered, at best, peculiar. Little surprise, then, that a number of their friends considered Bradley and Cooper thoroughly eccentric. To make their intellectual and literary sophistication palatable for a hypocritical Victorian audience, Bradley and Cooper invented the persona of ‘Michael Field’. Through their own


efforts, Katharine and Edith, two highly educated, intensely creative Victorian ladies, had acquired the ability to ‘mask’ their intentions and hoodwink their audience. Bradley and Cooper’s mythmaking really began with their pseudonym.55 Katharine began her publishing career under the male pseudonym of Arran Leigh in 1875. Six years later, Edith joined Katharine to produce the Greek drama Bellerophôn (1881). This time Bradley and Cooper chose the distinctly heterosexual coupling of Arran and Isla Leigh to front the volume. The drama received little critical notice and the literary careers of Arran and Isla Leigh were abruptly ended. Over the next few years Bradley and Cooper worked, but never published, under the sign of John Cooley. As Ivor Treby observes, ‘Cooley’ is a conjunction of Cooper and Bradley’s own surnames.56 Interestingly, when the draft version of Callirrhoë was sent to the publishers, the name of John Cooley graced the cover. However, when it came to publication, Katharine and Edith decided against the dual signature of ‘John Cooley’ preferring the singular, masculine, fabricated persona of ‘Michael Field’. I suggest that it is the entirely fictitious nature of Michael Field which Bradley and Cooper found so appealing. After all, it was, in a very literal sense, their fiction which created the ‘reality’ of ‘Michael Field’. Michael Field’s existence was dependent upon the successful publication and critical reception of Callirrhoë. And, with every publication, Bradley and Cooper added to the dramatic narrative of ‘Michael Field’.

Libidinous laureates and lyrical Maenads: Michael Field, Swinburne and the sexual politics of erotic Hellenism In 1889 ‘Michael Field’ published Long Ago, a volume of lyric poetry based on the extant Sapphic fragments. In deference to the poet whom they called the ‘guardian’ of the Lesbian lyrics, Bradley and Cooper sent a copy of Long Ago to Algernon Swinburne, together with a short letter: With flaming sword you have kept guard over the Lesbian lyrics; I have passed by you + touched the sacred things, + though I know my rifling to have been ‘sad + mad + bad,’ it has been to me ‘so sweet’ that, unrepentant as I recross the barrier, I lay my spoil in your hands. Fiery vengeance take if you will, Poet of Anactoria. I shall not strive but remain as before Yours in sincere admiration, Michael Field57 This brief note is illuminating in a number of respects, not least because Michael Field reveals that they were devotees of the work of Swinburne. In fact Bradley and Cooper considered Swinburne to be the best poet in England and a worthy successor to Poet Laureate. The women were also avid readers of Swinburne’s critical writing and they were interested in the


same kind of dramatic models.58 In a number of cases, Michael Field treated the same literary subjects as Swinburne, including Mary Stuart, Sappho and Tristan de Leonois. More than simple admirers, however, I suggest that the early Hellenic dramas and poetry of Michael Field can be seen to be directly influenced by the ‘fiery’ ‘poet of Anactoria’. As I noted earlier, Bradley and Cooper’s association of experience and pleasure, with the often excruciating pleasures and pains of eros evokes the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If Swinburne was, as John Morley memorably described him, the ‘libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs’, then I suggest that Bradley and Cooper should be seen as complementary lyrical Maenads.59 In the Greek drama Callirrhoë (1884), Bradley and Cooper incorporate such themes as the anguish of religious conversion, the pains and pleasures of forbidden love, the prevalence of sexual violence and the virtues of sensual passion. At once life-affirming and utterly tragic, Callirrhoë seeks to represent the paradoxes of passion. Almost twenty years earlier, Swinburne had similarly employed Hellenic subjects in his dramatic poem, Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and in his first, now notorious, volume of poetry, Poems and Ballads (1866). What was striking about Swinburne’s representations of Greek subjects was that his Greeks were far from the calm, philosophical, rational beings as depicted by writers and scholars like Matthew Arnold.60 Gone was the ‘sweetness and light’ of Hellenic culture. In its place, Swinburne visualized the ancient Greeks as wildly irrational, driven by libidinal impulses and fierce passions. Central to Swinburne’s Hellenism was, as Louis explains, ‘the celebration of the chthonic deities, the repudiation of the transcendent, the perception of sex and violence as central in the development of religion’.61 It was this eroticized vision of the Greeks, which, in part, helped to determine Swinburne’s reputation as a ‘demoniac youth’.62 Yet, the outraged critics overlooked a crucial element in Swinburne’s representations of the ancient Greeks. Anthony Harrison explains that Swinburne wrote erotic lyrics, ‘not merely for the sake of notoriety, but in order to express as powerfully as possible his sense of life’s inevitably tragic development for all spirited men and women: tragic because satisfying our passionate impulses is ultimately impossible’.63 Sensuality, spirituality and creativity are, in Swinburne’s poetic vision, inextricably wedded together. I suggest that Bradley and Cooper can be seen to replicate Swinburne’s literary and philosophical premise, that it is the poet’s (moral) duty to record one’s passion for life and its potentially tragic cost. In 1898, an anonymous contributor to the Academy stated that Swinburne was ‘the most sedulously imitated of poets’ for twenty years after the appearance of Atalanta in Calydon (1865).64 A mere sixteen years after Swinburne produced Atalanta, Bradley and Cooper published their first Greek drama, Bellerophôn (1881). Issued under the pseudonymous identities of Arran and Isla Leigh, Bellerophôn is an adventurous, if flawed dramatic experiment. Essentially, Bradley and Cooper combine Hippolytus’ famous reputation for


self-renunciation and self-righteousness with the hubristic personality of Bellerophôn, the young prince who defeats the famed Chimaera and subsequently compares himself to the gods.65 In Bellerophôn Bradley and Cooper can be seen to lay the foundations of Michael’s Field’s Hellenic principles; such as the virtues of Dionysiac enthusiasm, the pleasures of (homo)sexual desire, the reversal of traditional sex roles and the importance of powerful archaic female figures. The opening sequence, which describes Queen Anteia’s lust for the youth Bellerophôn, closely resembles Phaedra’s love for her stepson in Euripides’ ancient drama, Hippolytus.66 The resemblance is so strong that the famous Hellenist John Addington Symonds, in an informal review of Bellerophôn, wondered whether the ‘authoresses’ had ‘come across Miss Mary Robinson’s “Crowned Hippolytus,” a very admirable translation of Euripides’ play’.67 It is difficult to determine if Bradley and Cooper were aware of Mary F. Robinson’s translation before they wrote Bellerophôn, as both books were produced in the same year by the same publisher, Kegan Paul & Company.68 However, it is almost certain that Bradley and Cooper were aware of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and ‘Phaedra’ (1866).69 Richard Jenkyns suggests that, consciously or unconsciously, Swinburne modelled Atalanta upon Euripides’ Hippolytus.70 The comparison is interesting, not least because Swinburne claimed to loathe Euripides. However, Hippolytus’ sanctimonious sexual morality can be compared with that of Atalanta. Moreover, Atalanta’s rejection of the passionate pleadings of Meleager can be seen to closely reflect Hippolytus’ rejection of Phaedra in Euripides’ ancient drama. Swinburne nevertheless dismissed Euripides as ‘troubled with a dysentery of poetic imagination and a diarrhea of rhetorical sophistry’.71 Swinburne protested too much, as in 1866 he (re)turned to the Hippolytus myth in the dramatic fragment, ‘Phaedra’. Even if one discounts Euripides as a dramatic model for Swinburne, there are still numerous thematic similarities between Atalanta and Bellerophôn. Recurring themes in both dramas include incestuous sexual desire, the subversive reversal of sex roles and the prevalence of sexual violence. As both perpetrators and victims, a number of the characters in Bellerophôn and Atalanta experience a shocking array of violence. For instance, Bellerophôn’s Queen Anteia kills herself as a result of her sado-masochistic desire to punish the young prince for his sexual piety. Swinburne’s Queen Althaea kills her own son out of her sado-masochistic desire to punish him for falling in love with Atalanta and for causing the death of her brothers. Furthermore, Bellerophôn and Atalanta are perceived as disturbingly transgressive figures, who threaten the social order; Bellerophôn because he is a virginal (read ‘emasculated’) hero, and Atalanta because she is an unmarried maiden, performing the ‘masculine’ role of a warrior. Ultimately, however, Bradley and Cooper punish their protagonist for refusing a normatively heterosexual relationship, whereas Swinburne allows Atalanta to


return to the bosom of her goddess, Artemis. The difference is important, as Swinburne, the self-declared morally detached artist, refuses to ascribe a moral message to Atalanta’s triumphal exit. Bradley and Cooper, on the other hand, castigate Bellerophôn for his faith in an inhumane and sterile religion and he dies a pitiful death, unfulfilled and unheralded. Another character who suffers a distressing fate is the Maenad Phêmê. The unexpected and intrusive inclusion of this character not only demonstrates Bradley and Cooper’s early fascination with the figure of the Maenad, but also their deep appreciation of Euripides’ Bacchae. Declaring herself to be the legitimate daughter of Dionysus, Phêmê appears before the king and queen to announce Bellerophôn’s success in killing the Chimaera. The bold, saucy and assertive Phêmê also declares her usurpation of Iobates’ kingdom: ‘retired so far/From the great throng now wholly subjugate/To my wild will; thy kingdom is my own’ (p. 82). According to Phêmê, Lykia is in the throes of a Dionysiac revolution. What is more, Phêmê’s revolutionary strategy seems to involve the widespread seduction of the women of Lykia: ‘Woman are to me/Trumpets of flesh: I am their prophet, seer;/I love them as a king his courtiers loves./I fill their ears, I tip their tongues’ (p. 81). In Phêmê’s hands, the Dionysiac revolution will not be a violent insurrection, as she intends to transform the social and political landscape by promoting loving relationships between women. In response to her provocative speech, Iobates resolves to punish Phêmê for her verbal outburst. The impotent king announces to the court that he will sew her ‘revolting lips/As gaping wounds together’ (p. 82). This brutal act will silence Phêmê and prevent her from speaking her powerful political rhetoric. The stitching of her lips is also an act of extreme sexual violence. The lips with which she speaks with such passion, the lips with which Phêmê gives and receives pleasure, are to be controlled by a male tyrant. In the face of such torture Phêmê remains resolute: ‘I will outwit thee, vex thee, and forestall,/Harass thy slumber, fret thy waking hours,/Even undermine thy kingdom, while I lie/A bound corpse in thy dungeon’ (p. 84). Phêmê is quickly smuggled off towards the dungeon, silencing her dissenting voice. Bradley and Cooper’s violent punishment of the Maenad is problematic and suggests that Phêmê is not intended to be seen as a ‘heroic’, protofeminist figure. If, as Angela Leighton suggests, Michael Field’s celebration of pleasure is ‘more emancipating than decadent, more active than introspective’, then the torture and imprisonment of the only character that expresses her thoughts and desires freely seems rather damning.72 Forcibly silenced, Phêmê will have no choice but to consider the failure of her ‘liberatory’ religion and lifestyle, in the face of such tyranny. Alternatively, Phêmê can be seen as the true ‘hero’ of the drama, as she is willing to suffer for her beliefs. As a martyr, she may well be able to undermine Iobates’ kingdom from the womb-like depths of her dungeon.


Bellerophôn is an altogether less successful drama than Atalanta, notwithstanding Swinburne’s superior lyrical talents. The myth of Bellerophôn is an unnecessarily cumbersome vehicle through which to examine sexual morality. If Bradley and Cooper wished to celebrate sexual freedom, then very few characters in Bellerophôn are allowed the privilege. And, whilst Bradley and Cooper’s disjointed representation of the myth is indicative of their intertextual approach, the plurality of references in Bellerophôn suggests that Katharine and Edith were perhaps too keen to display their knowledge of classical texts and their affinity with contemporary literature. Nevertheless, the themes and structure of Bellerophôn suggest that Bradley and Cooper had found a kindred spirit in the ‘fiery’ Swinburne. And, despite its flaws, Bellerophôn can be seen to mark the beginning of a transgressive ‘Dionysiac’ creed that would be more successfully elucidated in Callirrhoë.

‘I am a maenad, I must have love’s wine’: Michael Field’s Callirrhoë Published in 1884, to considerable critical acclaim, Callirrhoë tells the story of the erotic conversion of a virtuous virgin. In this play Callirrhoë becomes the hero of a drama in which, on the surface, the primary concern is the arrival of the cult of Dionysus to the secluded region of Calydon in ancient Greece. The coming of Dionysus signifies a moment of cultural rupture, which severely disturbs the social order of Calydon, exposing the fragile and deeply gendered relationship between the citizens and the polity. The central conflict of the play focuses on the violent struggle between the forces of unrestrained sexual passion, exemplified in the text by Coresus, the male Priest of Dionysus, and the unyielding chastity of the fair maiden, Callirrhoë. Coresus attempts to seduce the chaste Callirrhoë into becoming a disciple of Dionysus by declaring his love for her. Ultimately, however, Coresus’ passion for Callirrhoë leads him to sacrifice himself, in her place, thereby leaving the young maiden, suddenly persuaded by the intensity of the Priest’s desire, to declare herself a Maenad. The dramatic outline bears more than a passing resemblance to the plot of Bellerophôn. However, by replacing the male hero with a female protagonist, Bradley and Cooper radically alter the significance of Callirrhoë’s sexual and spiritual transformation. Callirrhoë’s conversion, from maiden to Maenad, is not just an exemplary personal journey. As Maenads, the profane desires of Greek maidens are given precedence and sacred status. The veneration of pleasure can be seen to reach its apex in the orgiastic religion of Dionysus and, in becoming a Maenad, Callirrhoë is transformed, along with her community, by the power of sexual freedom and passion. In Callirrhoë, Bradley and Cooper can be seen to respond to the calls of early nineteenth-century hedonists like Shelley and Byron for a revolutionary ‘religion’ of pleasure. The epigraph to Field’s drama is a quotation from


Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, ‘to make the heart a spirit’ (Canto III, 103). And, like Byron’s pilgrim who comes to appreciate the revitalizing power of love, Callirrhoë finds love and spiritual fulfilment at the very moment when she is threatened with destruction. The play is also prefaced with a quotation from Shelley’s ‘Prince Athanase’, which begins, ‘Thou art the wine whose drunkenness is all/We can desire, O Love!’ Callirrhoë is likewise addressed to the ‘thousands’ who thirst for the liberatory ambrosia of Dionysus: ‘the myth of Dionysus is the glorification of enthusiasm, which the poet believes to be the sap of the Tree of Life, the spring and origin of all good fruit’. According to Michael Field, there is also ‘nothing lovelier among human things than Love with its halo of self-sacrifice’. Bradley and Cooper take the theme of self-sacrifice literally. Indeed, the self-immolation of Callirrhoë and Coresus not only emphasizes the dark side of Greek religion, but also the irrational side of sexual desire. The Preface to Callirrhoë tells us that ‘the story of Callirrhoë is drawn from a classic source, but has never been raised from obscurity by ancient bard or dramatist’. The chain of influence would, therefore, seem to be relatively direct as the classic literary source for Callirrhoë is recorded by the ancient Greek author Pausanias in his Description of Greece (7.21.1). However, Michael Field’s drama is heavily intertextual and is influenced by a variety of sources both ancient and Victorian. In her unusually frank record of the exact circumstances of the inception of Callirrhoë Katharine Bradley attributed her inspiration to a passage from Frederick William Henry Myers’ Hellenica: Greek Oracles (1880), and she reveals that the glowing words of Professor Alfred Marshall, principal of Bristol University College, also influenced the development of Callirrhoë.73 In another record, Bradley notes that, ‘in the spring of 1881’ she ‘read Sandys’ Bacchae with Mr Gridlestone & made large use of his exquisite translations of single passages or lines. The illustrations were of inestimable value to me.’ Katharine’s reference to the scholarly texts of John Edwin Sandys (1880), William Myers and the classical scholars Mr Gridlestone and Alfred Marshall, demonstrates the diversity of her influences and the seriousness of her scholarship. She was helped in this regard by Sandys’ critical edition of Euripides’ play. His approach marked something of a turning point in renditions of Euripides’ Bacchae. Like Medea, the Bacchae had been a subject for burlesque in the 1860s, such as Vincent Amcott’s production of Pentheus: a Burlesque in Three Acts in 1866. But from the 1870s onwards, following Nietzsche’s dramatic intervention, Euripides was increasingly considered as worthy of more intellectual, scholarly study. Bradley and Cooper remain largely faithful to the myth as recorded by Pausanias and retold by Myers and Sandys, yet the two renderings depart from each other over the impact of the religion of Dionysus on the citizens of Calydon.74 In the myth as told by Pausanias, Dionysus is firmly established as the local deity in Calydon. It is from this position of power that


Dionysus claims his retribution. In Callirrhoë, on the other hand, Dionysus and his priest enjoy only limited influence until the city suffers from a nameless plague. As a result, Bradley and Cooper are able to emphasize the Calydonians’ conversion to the religion of Dionysus and the subsequent collapse of the existing socio-political system. Michael Field’s emphasis on the spiritual transformation of the Calydonians and the collapse of traditional patriarchal structures is highly reflective of the seductive and destructive attributes of Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae.75 It was, of course, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) which brilliantly redefined the significance of Dionysus for a modern audience. To Nietzsche, the ‘charm of the Dionysian’ is that ‘not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man’.76 Albert Heinrichs suggests that Nietzsche changed the nature of Dionysus from ‘the pedestrian vegetation and fertility god constructed in the course of the nineteenth century’, to ‘the modern understanding of Dionysus as a cluster of psychological and social abstractions’.77 For Nietzsche, Dionysus was not merely a profoundly significant chthonic god, but the hero of the tragic stage: ‘the tradition is undisputed that Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its sole theme the sufferings of Dionysus and that for a long time the only stage hero was Dionysus himself’.78 For the socially fragmented, industrialized Victorians Nietzsche’s Dionysus held a particular appeal. However, Nietzsche felt that Greek tragedy was effectively destroyed by the philosophical musings of Euripides and Socrates.79 Furthermore, Nietzsche suggested that Euripides had effectively killed (Aeschylean) tragedy by applying the principles of Socratic rationalism to his art: ‘optimistic dialectic drives music out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms; that is, it destroys the essence of tragedy, which can be interpreted only as a manifestation and projection into images of Dionysian states’.80 For Nietzsche, one cannot think one’s way through tragedy, one must emotionally respond to it. Charles Segal points out that ‘what is missing from Nietzsche’s discussion, otherwise fruitful for the study of the Bacchae, is a consideration of the feminine in relation to both Dionysus and Apollo.’81 This is a significant point as in ancient Greece, as in Victorian England, irrationality was seen as a predominantly ‘feminine’ characteristic. Consequently, it can be seen that to adopt ‘irrationality’ as a philosophical standpoint is to address moral, aesthetic and philosophical questions from a predominantly marginalized – or female – perspective. Nietzsche’s vision of Dionysian irrationality was effectively limited by his deeply sexist attitudes and beliefs in aristocratic political principles. Yet his work was successfully appropriated by feminists and political activists in the 1890s.82 Unlike Nietzsche, Bradley and Cooper explore the personal, social and political potential of Dionysian emotionalism in Callirrhoë. In their celebration of Dionysus and their reverence of ‘enthusiasm’ in particular, Bradley


and Cooper have been seen to emulate the work of the eminent Victorian scholar Walter Pater. In his controversial volume Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Pater espoused a determinedly liberal, eroticized Hellenism, and later, in ‘A Study of Dionysus’ (1876), Pater celebrated the erotic and spiritual aspects of Dionysus. In recent years Pater has been lauded, by critics like Kathy Psomiades and Ruth Vanita, for his influential and ‘inclusive’ liberal aestheticism.83 According to both Yopie Prins and Richard Dellamora, Pater’s aesthetic essays ‘circulated beyond male circles and within the context of the Victorian “Woman Question” to create an aesthetic minoritizing discourse among women readers as well’.84 Prins suggests that one reason for Pater’s affinity with women writers is that he ‘performs the conversion of Classical learning into a queer philology that appealed to women interested in turning Greek eros to their own purposes’.85 But, as Linda Dowling suggests, Pater’s liberal observations are ‘unintelligible unless viewed within the context of a Socratic eros of men loving men in spiritual procreancy’.86 In other words, Pater’s liberal Hellenism has a specifically homosocial and homoerotic context. As we have seen, Bradley and Cooper were interested and engaged in exploring the social and political implications of eros, from a predominantly, but not exclusively, female perspective. Without doubt, Pater’s Hellenic aestheticism was highly influential in the late Victorian period and his writing certainly enjoyed a wide appeal. Whilst Bradley and Cooper admired Pater, Pater’s Hellenism and his depiction of Dionysus in particular often seems anaemic and androcentric in comparison with Bradley and Cooper’s Bacchic vision. For example, in ‘A Study of Dionysus’ (1876), Pater describes the Greek god as ‘the spirit of fire and dew’. But Pater’s Dionysus appears to be soaked with dew rather than galvanized by fire. Pater depicts a diluted Dionysus, drained from vitality and the crimson of his own Bacchanalian clusters: the religion of Dionysus connects itself, not with tree-worship only, but also with ancient water-worship, the worship of the spiritual forms of springs and streams . . . For not the heat only, but its solace – the freshness of the cup – this too was felt by those people of the vineyard, whom the prophet Melampus had taught to mix always their wine with water, and with whom the watering of the vines became a religious ceremony; the very dead, as they thought, drinking of and refreshed by the stream.87 In Pater’s re-vision Dionysus is demoted to a ‘refreshing’ god. Pater’s Dionysian wine is so weakened by water that Dionysus would be incapable of becoming wildly, irrationally drunk on the ecstasies offered by nature. According to tradition, the diluted wine of Dionysus was supposed to have a civilizing influence, as Jean-Pierre Vernant explains: ‘when diluted


and consumed in accordance with the rules, it brings to civilized life an extra, as it were supernatural dimension: joy in the feast with evil forgotten. It is a drug (pharmakon) that makes pain fade away; it is the ornament, the crown, the living, happy brilliance of the banquet, the joy of the celebration.’88 But, Vernant reminds us, wine is ambiguous. When Dionysian wine is consumed neat, ‘it conceals a force of extreme wildness, a burning fire’.89 There is nothing refined about genuine Dionysian intoxication. Pater’s Dionysus is unambiguously civilized. In his movement, from the hills of Boeotia to the city of Athens, Pater’s Dionysus becomes the celebratory god of the symposium: To this stage of his town-life, that Dionysus of ‘enthusiasm’ already belonged; it was to the Athenians of the town, to urbane young men, sitting together at the banquet, that those expressions of a sudden eloquence came, of those loosened utterance and finer speech, its colour and imagery.90 This urbane Bacchus barely has a pulse. Prins observes that the ‘Maenadic enthusiasm’ which Pater describes in his essay, ‘is transferred to the Hellenic enthusiast, who is explicitly addressed as male (“let him reflect”) and implicitly identified with the urbane Athenians who recognize Dionysus as one of their own’.91 In Pater’s re-vision Dionysus is the god of an exclusively male-dominated symposium and not the god of a frenetic femaleorientated religion. In other words, Dionysus and his Maenads are redefined by Pater in terms of an urbane androcentric aestheticism. The diluted wine of Pater’s Dionysus is not strong enough to overthrow the values of the maledominated polis. ‘Loosened utterance and finer speech’ does not equate with a re-evaluation of social, political and religious structures, nor does it suggest the inclusion of a female perspective. Pater praised the Greeks for their ‘passionate coldness’. As Jenkyns points out, ‘the noun and the epithet are equally important’.92 Bradley and Cooper similarly raised concerns about Pater’s style. Because Pater’s aestheticism was so ‘very peculiar to himself’, his analysis erased the aesthetic experience of other spectators.93 Furthermore, following a public lecture given by Pater in 1890, Edith mischievously recorded: ‘how one would love to surprise the bacchant in Walter Pater!’ One suspects that Edith would have surprised an urbane Athenian, rather than a bacchant. In his second essay on Dionysus, ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ (1889), Pater’s Bacchus again lacks the passionate excess of the wild god of the mountains.94 Pater describes ‘all the soothing influences’ that Dionysus brings with him: ‘above all, his gift of the medicine of sleep to weary mortals’.95 Even the Maenads, ‘those who experience most directly the influence of things’, are barely recognizable: ‘the presence of night, the


expectation of morning, the nearness of the wild, unsophisticated, natural things – the echoes, the coolness, the noise of frightened creatures as they climbed through the darkness, the sun-rise from the hill-tops, the disillusion, the bitterness of satiety’.96 Pater avoids describing the ‘grotesque scene’ in which Agave kills Pentheus, which is ‘full of wild, coarse, revolting details, of course not without pathetic touches, and with the loveliness of the serving Maenads – their trees and water – never quite forgotten’.97 The Maenads appear wistful rather than possessed by Bacchic ‘madness’. As Jenkyns suggests: ‘Pater took the Bacchae, a work of violent beauty and ferocious animation, and announced that the whole play was penetrated by a “sort of quiet wisdom.” Even when he described the ecstasy of the maenads, he made it sound like the emotion of a don taking a walk in the country: “that giddy, intoxicating sense of spring – that tingling in the veins, sympathetic with the yearning life of the earth”.’98 Pater’s subsumed and ‘sympathetic’ wine-god may be a transgressive figure combining masculine and feminine attributes, but he is not the same god or the driving force of Callirrhoë. Pater’s Dionysus has a tempered ‘enthusiasm’ but he lacks the fire of a true revolutionary. In an annotated copy of the play, in Bradley’s hand, Katharine reveals the real source of her inspiration: When the gods wd give us of their best & we crave it, they set the full cup of lyric frenzy to our lips & who dares drink of it goes mad. Madness is the initiatory right, the unlocking of the Doors of heaven. Would’st then know the secret of the hills? Animated by the winecup plunge into their glowing folds. Wine is the wild, mystic speech of Nature. . . What other life remains unsealed to us? There is the glorious life of the gods flooding the frenzied soul – the rich revelry of Nature is ours – what more is secret to us that we must take by violence? Love is the frenzy that unfolds ourselves.99 Bradley’s aesthetic impulse is driven not by the refined androcentric culture of Athens, but by the ‘rich revelry of Nature’, wild, violent and undiluted. Another poet who found (aesthetic and personal) value in revelry and the violent tribulations of the soul was ‘the fairest first-born son of fire’, Algernon Charles Swinburne.100 Callirrhoë can be seen to combine, I think, elements of Swinburnian Hellenism with the pleasure principles of Shelley. This aesthetic combination can be envisaged as a Dionysiac poetics of pleasure and pain.101 There is more to Michael Field’s debt than a close proximity of pleasure and pain, however. ‘Michael Field’s’ first Greek drama largely shares the same emotional drive as Swinburne’s own first Greek tragedy. The central thematic concern of Atalanta and Callirrhoë are the irresistible cravings of desire that create tension in the individual who attempts to resist the inner compulsion to love and be loved. There are also numerous thematic


continuities between Atalanta and Callirrhoë, such as the recurring motifs of hunting, sacrifice, wildness and order, duty and defiance, family conflict, gender inversion, sexual inhibition and spirituality. Yet, Callirrhoë can be seen as more of a riposte than a replication of Swinburne’s Hellenic tragedy. In Michael Field’s drama the worship of Dionysus allows the female characters to enthusiastically embrace pleasure, rather than to renounce it. The inner conflict of the chief protagonist is thereby resolved and Callirrhoë ends, in stark contrast to Atalanta, with a victory for the powers of female passion. If both Swinburne and Field compose their Hellenic dramas in the best traditions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies, with which they were so familiar, the plays diverge with regard to their Greek inheritances. Swinburne took Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy Oresteia as his central source, whilst it can be seen that Michael Field opts for a more female-friendly Euripidean approach to the same theme of unrequited passion.102 David G. Riede suggests that Swinburne’s ‘reliance on a classical tradition that had become an exclusively male inheritance was to cut his verse off from the expression of what might be called a female point of view’.103 Despite the apparent misogyny of the Oresteia, it should be noted that Swinburne’s most memorable and fully realized Greek characters, such as Sappho, Althaea and Praxithea, are in fact women. Rather than overlooking powerful women, Catherine Maxwell suggests that ‘Swinburne’s honouring of female power is undisguised. As femme fatale, goddess or muse, embodied in abstractions such as Liberty or Fate, or as nature or natural power such as the sea, the female principle is pre-dominant in his work.’104 And, if, as Dorothea Barrett notes, Swinburne’s ‘preoccupations with powerful images of women, with androgyny, generated startling new ideas of femininity and of the relations between the sexes’,105 then Swinburne and Michael Field have much in common. It is, however, important to note that Bradley and Cooper are willing to depart from Swinburne, particularly in relation to the issues of female power and freedom. Whereas Swinburne’s powerful Greek women, such as Althaea and Praxithea, are consuming maternal figures who seek to reinforce and secure the social order, Bradley and Cooper’s sensual Maenads challenge conventional gender paradigms and social organization. If female sexual power is a poetic preoccupation of Swinburne, it is an issue of considerable importance for Michael Field. By building on the liberal developments in Hellenism made by writers like Swinburne, Bradley and Cooper ensure that their transgressive, eroticized Hellenism includes a distinctly ‘female’ point of view. Callirrhoë begins at the temple of Bacchus in Calydon. As the temple is situated in the heart of Calydon, one would expect the religion of Dionysus to occupy a central position in the social and religious life of the polis. Yet, in Michael Field’s play the destabilization of Calydon’s social and sexual categories begins not with the worship of Dionysus, as one might expect, but


with the worship of the goddess Artemis. The heroines of both Atalanta and Callirrhoë are dutiful devotees of Artemis. And, significantly, the goddess serves the same function in Bradley and Cooper’s drama as she does in Atalanta. According to tradition, Artemis was said to have been an educator of young women, who oversaw their transition from the wildness of youth to their responsibilities as adults in the civic community. Bradley and Cooper employ this premise as Callirrhoë, like Atalanta before her, seeks spiritual guidance from the virgin goddess in order to keep her on the proverbial straight and narrow. But Callirrhoë is no saint and so she prays to the goddess to purge her of her rebelliousness, ‘to protect/My thoughts from lawless wandering beyond bound/Of thy own sacred precincts’ (I, ii). However, the thoughts of the young maiden will not be so easily contained. Artemis is, in fact, a difficult character to follow. According to Vernant, Artemis traditionally occupies ‘a liminal position that is uncertain and equivocal, where the boundaries separating boys from girls, the young from the adults, and beasts from men are not yet clearly fixed. They fluctuate and slide from one state to another.’106 As goddess of the margins, of borderlands, Artemis sees to it that the boundaries between the wild and the civilized are permeable. Furthermore, Artemis is, along with Dionysus, a ‘barbarian’ Olympian. She is welcomed by the Greeks and integrated into their religious pantheon, but her ‘otherness’, her wildness remains part of her appeal. Bradley and Cooper tap into this ambiguity in Artemis’ character in order to suggest that their heroine has chosen to follow a warrior-goddess, who is far from a clearly defined paragon of ‘feminine’ virtue. According to myth, Artemis’ incivility culminates in her demand for sacrificial blood. Artemis’ capacity for vengefulness and cruelty is exemplified by the legend of the Calydonian Boar Hunt. Classical sources suggest that Artemis took revenge on the city of Calydon because King Œneus had overlooked the goddess from his sacrificial offering to the Olympians.107 Offended by the King’s negligence, Artemis sends a wild boar to terrorize the citizens and ravage the land. The King’s son Meleager organizes a hunt for the boar, which is attended by the greatest heroes in Greece. As part of her cunning plan, Artemis dispatches her most skilled huntress, Atalanta, to attend the hunt. To the surprise of the other male hunters Atalanta is the first to wound the boar, which Meleager then kills. Regardless of Atalanta’s fiercely defended chastity, Meleager falls in love with the huntress and determines to give Atalanta the boar’s skin as a reward for her valour. Queen Althaea’s brothers, Plexippus and Toxeus, violently object to Meleager’s gesture of love and respect for a woman. A fight ensues and Meleager kills his uncles. Althaea, having already prophesized Meleager’s death, then takes vengeance on her son for killing her brothers. With the destruction of the Royal House, Artemis’ bloody revenge is complete.108


In Atalanta in Calydon Swinburne retold the myth of the Calydonian Boar Hunt. In Swinburne’s version, as Adam Roberts points out, ‘Artemis fashions a twofold attack on Calydon: she attacks the polis from the outside (with the boar), and undermines its unity from the inside (Meleager’s love for Atalanta destroys the unity of the royal family).’109 Artemis’ instrument of divine retribution is, of course, her dedicated disciple Atalanta. Atalanta is, in Swinburne’s words, ‘Chaste, dedicated to pure prayers, and filled/With higher thoughts than heaven’.110 But Atalanta is also a highly ambiguous figure; ‘a maiden clean/Pure iron, fashioned for a sword’ (198–9). To Althaea and Oeneus, the virginal Atalanta is ‘unwomanlike’, ‘not like the natural flower of things’ (634). The ‘unwomanly’ Atalanta wishes to remain in the female sphere of Artemis, and so she pursues the traditionally masculine and warlike activity of hunting as a refuge from sexual desire and the conjugal state. For Swinburne, Atalanta is an enticing, emasculating figure of fatal power, despite her claims to spiritual purity. In Michael Field’s drama the religion of Dionysus releases the emotional violence associated with women and gives it a formalized, controlled place in ritual. Maenadism was also associated with dangerously transgressive behaviour that operated in contradistinction to the laws of the polis. Part of the attraction of Maenadic worship was in the rite of oreibasia, the revel on the mountains where those repressed emotional energies could have free play. The oreibasia encouraged women to celebrate their god out in the open, beyond the walls of the polis and the laws of men. The act of becoming a Maenad did not just involve the production of celebratory songs and dances in honour of Dionysus, however. In becoming one with the god, one would experience Bacchic ‘madness’, allowing the votaries to experience another mode of reality.111 The religious rites also included the violent acts of sparagmos, the rending apart of a sacrificial animal and o¯mophagia, the joy of eating raw flesh. Of course, the eating of raw flesh suggests that the Maenadic body is anything but ‘contained’ by ritual, man-made laws. Clothed in animal skins, the mountain-dwelling Maenads also represent the fierce force of the wild. Correspondingly, the dominant motifs of Callirrhoë are those of hunting and sacrifice. Hunting may have a number of representational meanings, including that of the hunt as a metaphor for ‘the pursuit of an ordered human existence’, and as an act of violent sexual seduction.112 In Bradley and Cooper’s drama the ‘conversion’ of the Calydonian maidens is similarly conceived through the metaphors of hunting and violent seduction. Michael Field inverts the conventional model of the hunter as a violent male, by having a female devotee undertake the conversion of the Calydonian maidens. Wearing the leopard-skin of a Bacchant, the figure of Anaitis deliberately represents bestial female sexuality, sexual rapacity and sadomasochism. Maenad-in-chief to the band of female worshippers, Anaitis’


behaviour blurs the distinction between dutiful observance and frenzied indulgence. For Anaitis violence is a sensual experience, and she revels in the violent rituals demanded of her, rather like Swinburne’s famously sado-masochistic Lesbian lovers, Sappho and Anactoria. Anaitis is an experienced huntress, who skilfully seduces Callirrhoë’s companion, Nephele, into the ranks of the Maenads. Nephele in fact describes her induction into the cult in explicitly sexual terms: I lay as still As if a leopard couched there; but she came, The wondrous creature, threw her spells on me, And emptied my young heart as easily As from a pomegranate one plucks the seeds. And then she drew me, in caressing arms, By secret pathways, to the temple-gates, Where stood Coresus. (I, ii) In Callirrhoë, sexual seduction and the expression of fierce sexual desire is not the exclusive preserve of male characters. Nephele’s ‘shameful’ confession, that her ‘pure’ body has been tainted by her association with a Maenad, makes the erotic aspects of her liaison with Anaitis ever more visible. Like Swinburne, Michael Field makes use of the pomegranate as a symbol of sexual seduction and the expression of fierce sexual desire.113 In ancient Greece the pomegranate, the forbidden fruit with which Nephele compares her heart, was associated with Aphrodite and was used in rituals which consecrated a marital union.114 In the nineteenth century the pomegranate itself became an aesthetic symbol of sexual awakening and spiritual rebirth, appearing in numerous texts and paintings including Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1865), Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates (1891) and in Vernon Lee’s Hauntings (1890) and Vanitas (1892). Swinburne famously recounted the myth of the Roman goddess Proserpine in his atheistic poem, ‘Hymn to Prosperpine’. Likewise, Michael Field later produced the poem ‘Pomegranates’ which also features the sensual figure of Proserpine, who clutches the ‘ruddy’ fruit of her desire close to her chest.115 In Callirrhoë, however, it is Nephele’s pink flesh that will be devoured like that of the erotic fruit. But unlike Persephone, Nephele seems reluctant to return from her trip to the dark side. What Anaitis offers is not just sexual pleasure and liberation, but also membership of the thiasos, the sacred community of the Maenads. Communion with other young women is something that Nephele seeks. Thus far, Nephele has only been able to meet with other young women in the oleander bower. In this clandestine female space, it is Nephele who lies in


wait like an untamed ‘couched leopard’. She is not the passive prey that Coresus envisages, but a sexual huntress in her own right. Nephele is suitably entranced by the animation of Anaitis, the ‘wondrous creature’ before her, and appears to give more than her heart over to the beguiling Maenad. The wild woman then leads the enchanted Nephele down ‘secret pathways’, which we know will lead her way off the beaten track. Nephele then confesses to Callirrhoë that at the temple, surrounded by Maenads, she felt like ‘a bride, half-swooning in the flare/Of Hymen’s torches’ (I, ii). She reveals that she was so ‘caught up by the great choric throng’ that she found herself ‘whirling the thyrsus’ (I, ii). The entire female community of Bacchants has seduced Nephele, and her initiation, Prins suggests, ‘serves as an alternative to marriage and the revelation of another kind of love’.116 However, Nephele’s predatory behaviour and willingness to be led astray suggests that she might be familiar with ‘alternative’ forms of love already. Nephele continues her narrative and reveals to Callirrhoë that she was ‘doomed’ when she felt ‘the Maenads gather round me’. Nephele pauses at the climactic moment of her story, just when she is about to reveal the orgiastic conclusion of the night’s events. Suddenly racked with shame and ‘wonder at myself’, Nephele appeals to Callirrhoë for shelter. Bradley and Cooper’s clever pause at the moment of revelation invites us to evaluate Nephele’s actions. Just how much pleasure has Nephele enthusiastically enjoyed and what kind of punishment must she receive for her ‘transgressions’? Bradley and Cooper encourage their audience to speculate. In the ancient world, Maenads were not seen as extremists or terrorists battling against the patriarchal system that oppressed women. Rather, their presence and transgressive behaviour was, to a certain extent, sanctioned by that same system. The cult of Dionysus was often seen as a form of containment, governing the excesses of female behaviour. But in nineteenth-century art and literature the Maenad was frequently depicted as a radical revolutionary figure. Linda Shires observes that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in both England and France, ‘the image of woman as unnatural, whether depicted as maenad, bacchant, or fury, becomes increasingly prevalent’.117 In the early stages of the century the Maenad is explicitly associated with the iconography of the French Revolution. One particularly thinks of Eugene Delacroix’s famous painting, Liberty Leading the People at the Barricades of Paris (1831), in which a bare-breasted Maenadic woman leads the charge of the Revolutionary mob. By the 1840s, Shires suggests, the Maenad loses her connection with the historical and geographical events of the Revolution. Over the Channel, the ‘unnatural woman provides a locus for the intensified fears of revolution, in an England which wants, at all costs, to preserve the stability of government’.118 Fears of revolution were manifest in the literature of the period, as Shires points out:


Texts dealing overtly with political revolution, including Carlyle’s massive and influential History of the Revolution (1837), inevitably raise once again the issue of women’s participation in the public sphere . . . His blending of female power and mad excess in the figure of the maenad, a Bacchant who tears flesh from her victims, was later transformed by Charles Dickens, also ambivalent about female power, into the passionate murderess Hortense in Bleak House (1852–3) or the bloodthirsty Madame DeFarge in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Ironically, such texts assume female power as a given and therefore ‘begin to create a viable cultural space for female power and thus establish important ideological ground for the feminist movement which re-emerges forcefully in the 1850s and 1860s’.119 Later in the century, the figure of the ‘unnatural woman’, whether Maenad or Amazon, was embraced by the suffragist movement. And she did intend political revolution. One of the main reasons that the Maenad was perceived to be so unruly was because of her hyper-sexual female body. In the ancient world Maenads, like their god, would often robe themselves in the skins of wild animals, to signify their immediate relationship with the wild. The paintings of notable Victorian artists including Lawrence Alma Tadema, Arthur Wardle and John Collier depict Maenads with the deliberately disturbing quality of rampant, animalistic sexuality. The bestial associations of the Maenad, which were supposedly alien to English notions of propriety, actually made Maenads all the more alluring. As Bram Dijkstra points out, ‘the nymphs, sirens, and maenads of late nineteenth century art were the visual expression of a heady mixture of wish-fulfillment fantasies, fear, horror, hope, and revulsion crowding the nineteenth-century male mind’.120 In the figure of Anaitis, Bradley and Cooper not only parody this mixture of wish-fulfilment and horror, but also embrace the sexual associations of the Maenad. Prins suggests that in the figure of the Greek Maenad Bradley and Cooper ‘found an imaginary alternative to the Victorian spinster’.121 In the nineteenth century the disobedient daughter who refused to marry constituted a major problem in the Victorian imagination. Part of the threat, Vanita suggests, ‘may have been her living to grow old and become a figure of authority’ and her potential for lesbianism.122 Those women who were unmarried, and therefore outside of the socially and politically sanctioned model of female virtue, frequently found themselves metamorphosed into the sexually anarchic ‘wild women’ of popular consciousness. What these ‘wild’ single women actually represented was the overwhelming proliferation of modernity, of unstoppable change that would irrevocably alter the social structure of England. In Callirrhoë a similar generational conflict is played out in the anguished religious conversion of Callirrhoë. Callirrhoë is the one important exception


to the swelling ranks of Michael Field’s Maenads. The young maid has been ‘trained in the old pieties’ and she is most reluctant to relinquish her old allegiances. In a city conquered by the female-dominated religion of Dionysus, Callirrhoë knows that the male citizens of Calydon would undoubtedly suffer. Bradley and Cooper’s heroine is faced with a dilemma: should she embrace the forces of change or observe the male-dominated traditions and customs of the polis? She would be a beneficiary of social change, but her father and brother would be compelled to endure a loss of power and identity under a Dionysian system. Callirrhoë knows that the battle to come, between the forces of youthful enthusiasm and tradition, will pit child against parent. She determines that she will not wreck ‘my dear father’s peace’. So she rejects the ‘mocking messenger’ (I, iii), Coresus, and the new religion he represents. Following Callirrhoë’s rejection of him and his god, Coresus calls on Dionysus, the ‘great Revenger’, to infect the city with plague.123 As the religious and social structures of Calydon collapse, violence erupts throughout the city. Suddenly, the Maenads are perceived to be a direct threat to the failing stability of the polis. However, as the sceptical doctor, Machaon, points out, the Maenads are not wholly responsible for the fragmentation and degeneration of Calydonian society. For Machaon the virility and masculinity of the male citizens is fatally compromised: And I marvel not the women of Lemnos slew Fathers, husbands, brothers, and put an end to population Till they could furnish their brats with heroic fatherhood. Oh, we fail not in the stuff of motherhood; but the Heroes – the heroes!124 (II, ix) Machaon diagnoses the male citizens with ‘emasculation’. His cure, if his reference to the legend of Lemnos is anything to go by, is to ‘cleanse’ the city of effeminate males. A lack of ‘heroic’ male citizens means that Calydon is in danger of falling to non-citizens, to women.125 In Callirrhoë, as in Bellerophôn, Bradley and Cooper can be seen to parody the notion of heroic masculinity, as espoused by conservative critics like Robert Buchanan. Swinburne was of course one of the main targets of Buchanan’s ‘Fleshly School’ attack precisely because of his gender-bending poetics. In Atalanta in Calydon Swinburne certainly emphasizes the failure of heroic masculinity as the borderline figures of Artemis and Atalanta are able to undermine the social organization and hierarchy of the warrior-citizens simply by attacking their sense of masculinity.126 According to Buchanan, Swinburne was not only guilty of ‘the smile of harlotry and the shriek of atheism’ in his work, he is also the quintessential effeminate poet, ‘long-ringleted, flippant-lipped,


down-cheeked, amorous lidded’.127 In representing effeminate men and masculinized women Bradley and Cooper can again be seen to echo Swinburne’s transgressive Hellenism. In Callirrhoë Bradley and Cooper also emphasize that anxiety regarding gender roles generates violence and disorder, especially against women. The violence conventionally associated with heroic masculinity, which should be reserved for the battlefield, is instead acted out in the home. The insightful Machaon reprimands Nephele’s father, Megillus, for his part in the decline of the heroic warrior-ideal: Great zeal for justice! Now I think of it, That very day you beat poor Nephele, The pestilence – Before it was a summer sickness – grew Deadly in force. That I distinctly marked. The gods, discriminative, will adjust – (III, i) For the emasculated male citizens of Bradley and Cooper’s Calydon, the oikos is the new battleground. But as Machaon points out, as arbiters of justice, the gods (Bradley and Cooper) will not allow the endless persecution of one sex by another. In Callirrhoë Bradley and Cooper build on the notion of infection as depicted in Euripides’ Bacchae. Indeed, Machaon denounces the arrival of the Maenads in terms of pollution and infection: The air hath been unwholesome many weeks. Women, disordered and intoxicate Returning from their revel on the hills, Have filled their homes with fever, and increased A sickness that, without this irritant, Had not exceeded in fatality The plague of the great feast ten years ago. Men were not then half frenzied, and a few, Yielding to counsel, were restored to health. (II, vi) Machaon again suggests that the behaviour of the ‘disordered and intoxicate’ women is not the sole cause of the dis-ease in Calydon. The religion of Dionysus merely inflames the ‘fever’ that already lurks within the city. Callirrhoë’s father, Cephalus, claims that the male citizens of Calydon have become ‘uncivilized’ and have ‘grown wild’ as a result of the new religion:


Nay, child, we suffer for the foolishness That has bewitched this city; drunken heaps Of maddened women have infected it. The babe hath perished, while the mother’s breast Has suckled the young panther on the hills. Men, of their wives forsaken, have grown wild, Disordered, hungry, and uncivilized. Apollo sees his sister’s shrine desert, Her virgin followers flocking to the hills For all unseemly revel. (II, ii) To Cephalus, the social order depends on the behaviour of the women and maidens of Calydon. The oikos, the home, is the bedrock of the polis. If the women fail to meet their responsibilities as wives and mothers, the patriarchal family unit will collapse, and the polis will be plunged into chaos. The helpless cries of the Calydonian males echo the chorus of Victorian critics, who decried the advance of the ‘New Woman’.128 In ‘The Modern Revolt’ Eliza Lynn Linton attacked the ‘late remarkable outbreak of women against the restrictions under which they have hitherto lived’. Linton considered women who rejected the socially prescribed role of marriage and maternity as members of a ‘mad rebellion against the natural duties of their sex, and those characteristics known in the mass as womanliness’.129 A number of critics have pointed out that Linton’s anti-feminist tirades conveniently side-stepped the fact that she was a professional writer of considerable influence, living independently from her husband. Nevertheless, Linton vociferously attacked the Dionysian spirit of the modern woman, a spirit ‘which made weak girls into heroines and martyrs, honest women into the yelling tricoteuses of the blood-stained saturnalia of ’92’. For Linton, the spirited women of the late nineteenth century were not just political activists, they were the Maenads of the fin-de-siècle. As Linton knew, every social revolution needs a scapegoat. In Bradley and Cooper’s drama, the (Girardian) scapegoat is Callirrhoë. On the advice of the oracle at Dodona, Callirrhoë is to be sacrificed to save the city if no one else is willing to die in her place. Callirrhoë begs her feeble brother, Emathion, for an explanation as to why no man will die a heroic death on her behalf. Emathion replies, ‘men love their lives. You know not how it hurts’ (III, ii). Callirrhoë forgets that in tragedy it is often the role of the female to sacrifice herself for the ideals of the polis. Indeed, Callirrhoë’s name can be placed alongside the list of sacrificed virgins from ancient tragedy, including Iphigenia, Polyxena, Macaria and the daughters of Erechtheus, all of whom


died for the safety of their community. They may all be heroines, but they were all non-citizens. In Swinburne’s second Hellenic drama, Erechtheus, the (irrational) sacrifice of a young woman for the benefit of the (supposedly civilized) polis constitutes the emotional centre of the plot.130 And, like Swinburne’s Chthonia, Callirrhoë insists that she is given the opportunity to offer her blood sacrifice so that the city might be saved from destruction: ‘For my people, I/Come joyfully to die; each breath I draw/Delays deliv’rance; choose where thou wilt strike’ (III, v). But before Callirrhoë can become a tragic heroine, Coresus turns the knife upon himself. At the climactic moment, Coresus realizes that his sadistic threat to sacrifice his beloved to his god would be a betrayal of that love. Coresus would rather die impassioned and honest, than sacrifice the woman he loves for some abstract notion of religious fidelity. In Michael Field’s drama, an act of male self-sacrifice saves the city. As the blood pours from Coresus’ body, Callirrhoë is suddenly persuaded by the intensity of her lover’s desire: ‘I am a Mænad; I must have love’s wine,/Coresus, and you die before my face,/Leaving me here to thirst’ (III, v). Callirrhoë has been converted, not by rational argument or sophistic rhetoric, but by passionate suffering. The sight of the blood inflames her passion and she resolves to drink ‘love’s wine’. This appears to be a curiously Christianized conversion. Yet, the emotional impulse is thoroughly pagan; more Dionysus Zagreus than Jesus Christ. Removing herself from the bloodied, plague-ridden centre of the polis, Callirrhoë (re)turns to the wild space of the woods. Here, Callirrhoë meets Machaon, whom she implores to become the new priest of the Maenads. After urging Machaon to ‘gather the great scattered band’ of Maenads, Callirrhoë draws the sacrificial knife and stabs herself. Nicole Loraux makes the somewhat blunt observation that women in tragedy die violently. But the difference, according to Loraux, between life and drama is that tragic heroines could master their death, ‘for women there is liberty in tragedy – liberty in death’.131 Callirrhoë’s act of self-immolation is liberating in that it symbolizes her ideological and physical release from rationalism and repression. On a more political level, Bradley and Cooper turn the notion of female self-sacrifice entirely on its head. Unlike her Victorian counterparts, Callirrhoë is not willing to live out her life as a silent and subservient daughter and domestic servant. Rather, Callirrhoë’s extraordinarily passionate political martyrdom galvanizes the Dionysian revolution. The plague that has swept Calydon has devastated familial relationships, the foundational source of the male citizens’ power. New social and sexual dynamics will have to be instigated. Bradley and Cooper indicate that what is left is the opportunity to form a new society, based on the emotionally responsive model of Coresus and Callirrhoë. Invested with


Dionysian passion and the wild femininity of the Maenads, Calydon will begin life anew. The Maenads, after all, are waiting on the margins. Thomas Wymer suggests that Atalanta in Calydon establishes ‘Swinburne’s quest for a liberating Dionysian neopaganism’.132 To Wymer, Swinburne affirms ‘the joy of life and living’ and reveals a ‘hunger for more of life’ in the final words of Meleager. Wymer observes that ‘no Victorian poet comes as close as Swinburne in Atalanta to asserting a purely Dionysian affirmation of the joy of living’.133 Michael Field’s Hellenic aesthetic is heavily indebted to Swinburne’s intense passion for life and liberty, as outlined at the conclusion of Atalanta. Yet, I would argue that in Callirrhoë Michael Field achieves a more positive and optimistic expression of Dionysian passion than Swinburne. At the conclusion of Callirrhoë, the community of Calydon is offered the enticing opportunity of sexual fulfilment and freedom of expression through the religion of Dionysus. The all-embracing, paradoxical religion of the Maenads allows wildness and order, pain and pleasure to coexist. The protagonists of Swinburne’s poem, on the other hand, suffer and/or die against the backdrop of a fundamentally inhumane universe. Despite the very different conclusions to Atalanta and Callirrhoë, I suggest that Algernon Swinburne and Michael Field essentially share the same aesthetic impulse, that the pursuit of pleasure can be seen as virtuous and spiritually and philosophically enhancing. As Antony H. Harrison points out, at the core of Swinburne’s erotic poetry is the philosophical concept of ‘moral passion’, ‘of enrichment and redemption through desire and through suffering’.134 I suggest that Michael Field shares a similar interest in representing the spiritual and physical origins of human passion, which exists outside the mind–body dualism of conventional Christian morality. Writing almost twenty years after the appearance of Atalanta amidst a very different political landscape, Bradley and Cooper also demonstrate that the ethics of passion matter, especially in an unequal, unfree society. Bradley and Cooper’s erotic Hellenism can therefore be seen to be philosophically, physically and spiritually fulfilling and socially progressive, particularly in terms of gender and power. Perhaps detecting the echo of his own influence Swinburne was, according to Robert Browning, ‘generous’ in his appraisal of Callirrhoë.135 I suggest that Michael Field not only looked towards Swinburne’s poetics as an authoritative aesthetic model, they also followed the ‘libidinous laureate’ in challenging Victorian proprieties and values. We may see Bradley and Cooper accompanying Swinburne in trampling the tenets of Victorian poetry: British poetry had become a beautifully guarded park, in which [there] . . . was not a single object to be seen or heard which could offer the very smallest discomfort to the feelings of the most refined


mid-Victorian gentle-woman. Into this quiet park . . . a young Bacchus was now preparing to burst, in the company of a troop of Maenads, and to the accompaniment of cymbals and clattering kettle-drums.136 Swinburne may have beaten the exquisitely rhythmical drum, but it was left to Bradley and Cooper, the lyrical Maenads, to lead the Bacchic throng to new pastures.

5 Medea’s Haunting of the Fin-de-Siècle

‘Medea’, Marianne McDonald observes, ‘haunts the imagination.’ ‘She is the philanderer’s nightmare: the ex-wife who drives a dragon-drawn chariot. Medea is the wife who kills her husband’s lover, the mother who murders her own children.’1 One of the few ancient female protagonists not to be killed, willed or persecuted into submission or extinction, Medea, as Edith Hall adroitly puts it, ‘has murdered her way into a privileged place in the history of the imagination of the West’.2 Medea certainly enjoyed a privileged position in the literature, theatre and culture of the late nineteenth century. As we have seen, from the 1860s to the 1880s, the character of Medea is repeatedly recovered, revised and reinscribed by artists, writers and dramatists. Medea again appears in the 1890s, but in these late fin-de-siècle configurations, Medea’s character undergoes a significant, symbolic transformation. In Mona Caird’s novel, Daughters of Danaus (1894) and Vernon Lee’s ghost-story, ‘Amour-Dure’, the visceral figure of Medea is removed to the margins and disembodied. Rather than inhabiting the text as a fully realized character, the ‘spirit’ of Medea can be seen to occupy the dark spaces of these texts, ‘haunting’ the narratives of Mona Caird and Vernon Lee. As Julian Wolfreys points out, ‘to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something other returns, although never as a presence or to the present. Ghosts return via narratives, and come back, again and again, across centuries, every time a tale is unfolded.’3 This chapter attests to the endlessly fascinating qualities of Medea, and it calls attention to how certain narratives seem to haunt the popular imagination. The late Victorian Medea is not the semi-divine, dragon-chariot riding witch of Euripides. She is a more intangible and ephemeral presence, an influential spirit rather than a dynamic personality. In the Daughters of Danaus, for example, Medea is only occasionally invoked by the novel’s protagonists in conversation. Yet, the rebellious, Dionysian spirit of Medea forcefully emerges when Caird’s heroine, Hadria Fullerton, partakes in music and dance. Hadria briefly indulges her preference for wild, discordant compositions when she absconds to the Bohemian streets of Paris. But whereas 145


Medea trounces social convention and circumstance by the sheer force of her personality, Hadria’s over-developed sense of filial duty compels her to return to her parochial, middle-class life. In stark contrast, Vernon Lee reimagines Medea as a powerful, spectral presence in the first story of her celebrated volume, Hauntings (1890). In ‘Amour Dure’, Medea re-returns as the ghost of an Italian Renaissance aristocrat, Medea da Carpi. This Medea is not, as we might expect, a tormented spirit, doomed to roam the world of the living as punishment for her legendary crimes. Rather, in a clever reversal of supernatural convention, the memory of Medea is relentlessly pursued by an obsessive Polish historian, Spiridion Trepka. Medea is subsequently given new life (and form?) through the dogged scholarship of the lonely Trepka. However, Trepka is unable to limit Medea’s powerful presence to the pages of his diary. The potent, yet intangible Medea da Carpi ultimately takes possession of the academic’s mind, dooming him in the process. The different approaches of Caird and Lee can be seen to reflect both their differing attitudes towards the women’s movement and wider developments within Victorian literature and culture. For instance, Lee’s Medea is a highly sexualized and heavily mythologized figure, whose reputation for extraordinary violence is offset by her socio-political victimization. Caird, on the other hand, weaves Medea’s story of rebellion into Hadria’s deeply sympathetic struggles for self-realization and social respect. Whilst Caird’s realism may seem at odds with Lee’s inclination for the supernatural, both writers can be seen to share the impulse to reclaim that which, like the supernatural itself, has been discredited. Caird and Lee revel in the dark, Dionysian side of Victorian Hellenism, inviting the return of the repressed and demonstrating a willingness to readmit that which the dominant culture has officially marginalized and rejected. The re-emergence of that which has been repressed and discarded is also a theme of Edith Wheelwright’s sensationalist novel, The Vengeance of Medea (1894).4 Much in line with the ‘New Woman’ fiction of Mona Caird, George Gissing, Sarah Grand and others, Wheelwright’s novel features an unconventional heroine who eschews marriage in favour of a literary career. Michal Iliff, the adopted daughter of the kind and respectable Colonel Murray, is the Corinne-like counterpart to the Colonel’s artistic daughter, Sybil. Michal, dark in looks and brooding in character, is the polar opposite of the blonde and effervescent Sybil. The two young women nevertheless share an ‘undying’ friendship, which Michal compares to the ‘exceptional’ (homoerotic) love of Pylades and Orestes (161). Wheelwright’s story, however, is much less concerned with the careers of these ambitious New Women, than with the shadowy, marginalized figure of Lucia Safrana. Safrana enters the story as an artist’s model, paid to pose in the London studio of the conceited, well-connected artist Leslie Vernon. Both attracted and repulsed by the striking foreign woman before him, Vernon chooses

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to paint Safrana’s portrait. He tells his student Sybil that in Safrana he has found ‘a model unique in my experience – a fierce-eyed, desperate-looking Italian woman – not young, but altogether the most striking person that I have ever tried to depict.’ Shocked by the strange coincidence, Sybil replies that she met the same woman ‘some months ago. I shall never forget her face; it used to haunt me – I never could shake off the impression that I had seen it somewhere before’ (125). Safrana’s portrait, not unlike Frederick Sandys’ portrait of ‘Medea’, begins to haunt Leslie Vernon. As he gazes at his untitled work, Vernon feels the portrait come alive before him: The triumph of success was upon him, the sublime confidence and delight in his own genius which so rarely awoke in his soul, overwhelmed him for a moment, and became his inspiration. The portrait took utterance and spoke to him, and it was the language and voice of Medea. Why had he not heard it before? he wondered. ‘The vengeance of Medea; the vengeance of Medea,’ it was saying. And the eyes glowed like living coals. ‘Vengeance I will have, for though a woman have not courage nor dare to look upon the sword, yet, if she be wronged in her love, there is nothing fiercer than she.’ (127) Vernon may be awed and inspired by his own talent, but Safrana will not be objectified, or killed into art. Instead, she invites herself to the public unveiling of the portrait, where she hopes she will meet Vernon’s friend and patron, Lord Trevelyan. Trevelyan, appointed to the Jason-like role of an ambitious, deceitful aristocrat, is the voice of conservatism in the novel. He is also, it transpires, a character with a long and eventful past. As a young man, Trevelyan travelled to Italy where he indulged his sexual passions with a local peasant woman. The affair resulted in pregnancy. Trevelyan, unwilling to meet his fatherly responsibilities and keen to avoid a scandal, abandoned his lover and child and returned to England. The lover whom he cast aside with such contempt is, of course, Lucia Safrana. We learn that unable to care for her child alone, the impoverished, scandalized Safrana bequeathed her baby to a kind English couple. Deprived of her child, a promised marriage and a prosperous future, the young Safrana determines to take revenge against Trevelyan. She is forced to wait for over twenty years before she is able to engineer the opportunity for revenge. At the grand unveiling of her portrait in London, Lucia Safrana emerges from the shadows. On this occasion, Trevelyan’s past does not just return to haunt him. Rather, Safrana/Medea, an embodiment of the past and a supposedly inanimate art-work, springs into life and shoots Trevelyan dead. After fleeing the scene and returning to Italy, Safrana/Medea eventually dies in the arms of her estranged daughter, Michal Iliff.


Marriage, fidelity and the sexual double standard are repeatedly presented by Wheelwright as major issues of contention. Yet, Wheelwright frames her ‘New Woman’ novel as a(n) (anti-feminist) story of passion, sexual jealousy and revenge. Wheelwright’s representation of female sexuality is often negative, and the consequences of female independence and sexual freedom are severe. Safrana may embody the spectre of outraged womanhood, but she also represents the abuses and indignities suffered by the disenfranchised at the hands of the (travelling) English aristocracy. Essentially, Safrana is more of a pitiful victim than an example of righteous female aggression. Despite allowing her anti-heroine to complete her revenge against Trevelyan, Wheelwright ultimately betrays Safrana/Medea’s character. After the murder, Michal travels to Italy where she finds her mother, alone, dejected and penitent. Michal tells us that, ‘the anger and bitterness of years had left her, and I believe that she regretted that last fierce act of revenge’ (273). This explanation only serves to undermine Safrana’s passionate sense of (in)justice and it nullifies any notion of female rebellion in the novel. Indeed, even the New Woman Michal, as her biblical name suggests, is a curiously submissive, Christian figure, rather than a pagan figure of revolt. In fact Michal believes her mother to have ‘sinned against the higher laws, which we call God’s’ (247). Michal’s moralizing further undermines Lucia’s suffering and her motivations for revenge. Michal may be a New Woman of the 1890s, but unlike her mother, she displays no desire for radical action. Instead, Michal is content to pursue her literary career and to avoid the pitfalls of heterosexual relationships by declaring herself a spinster. Allowed to pursue her intellectual ambitions, Michal may appear to be a figure of progress in the novel, but she lacks the dynamism, courage and determination of her mother. In contrast, Mona Caird casts the daughter as the radical thinker and social transgressor, and the mother figure as the force of conservatism in her novel, Daughters of Danaus. Whereas Michal can be seen to reflect the hard-won but stalled progress of the women’s movement, the Dionysiac figure of Hadria Fullerton urges change and advancement. Hadria may not act like a modern Medea, but she is certainly able to articulate her suffering.

The spirit of rebellion: Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus Caird’s second novel, The Daughters of Danaus (1894), is a story of late Victorian manners and customs, focused on the issues of marriage and social power relations.5 Adopting ancient mythology as the frame for her ‘New Woman’ novel, Caird examines the burden of tradition on the fin-de-siècle generation. Named after the fifty mythical daughters of the ancient GreekEgyptian King Danaos, the novel takes Aeschylus’ Suppliant Maidens as its central mythological source. In the first and only extant drama of the Danaid trilogy, Aeschylus tells us how the virginal maidens flee their aggressive


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Egyptian suitors, only to be pursued to the Greek city of Argos, where they plead with the Argive king for shelter and protection. In a later regurgitation of the myth we learn that when forced to marry against their wishes, the Danaids slay their unwanted husbands on their wedding night.6 The mythological framework of the novel thereby provides an important context for the analysis of marriage and expectations of female behaviour in Victorian society. There are also other less obvious classical allusions in the text, which provide further scope for feminist analysis and commentary. For instance, the threat of violent female rebellion constantly bubbles under the surface of Caird’s intense narrative. Yet, despite repeated oblique references to the myth of Medea, female characters only do violence to themselves, rather than to male relatives. Lacking the fortitude and resolve of Medea, Hadria Fullerton, the novel’s protagonist, ultimately succumbs to her socially prescribed role as the dutiful daughter of a vampiric, republican mother. Occasionally, however, we see Hadria relax her social shackles and embrace the darker, Dionysian aspects of her personality. The dissenting strains of her wild musical compositions mark Hadria out as a pale, modern imitation of a bacchant. Unfortunately, Hadria is unable to dance to the beat of her own drum. Nevertheless, her brief rebellion and her unorthodox music suggest the possibility of alternative pathways for future wives and daughters. Perhaps the most publicly outspoken of all the authors in this study, Caird’s highly political novel raises serious questions about sociological models and the notion of inheritance. Much in line with the ‘feminist’ poetics of Augusta Webster, Amy Levy and Emily Pfeiffer, Caird addresses the social and political subordination of women from the perspective of a young, educated, middle-class Scottish woman. For Ann Heilmann, Caird configures Hadria ‘as both a tragic heroine and a feminist rebel, the one Danaid different from the rest’.7 But whereas the classical heroines of Webster, Levy and Pfeiffer take violent, militant action against their oppression and therefore instigate their own downfall, Caird’s Victorian heroine simply tires of the struggle. Despite her combative rhetoric, Hadria is certainly no Medea, Clytemnestra or murderous Danaid. The sense of battle fatigue permeates Caird’s novel and, ultimately, paralyses the actions of her protagonist. Hadria’s sense of failure, her frustration and her social paralysis suggest how the past may burden the present, to the extent that the forces of tradition inhibit any sense of social progress. And yet, Hadria manages to remain hopeful that her sacrifice will be worthwhile; a significant milestone on the road to female freedom. Mona Caird is undoubtedly one of the most significant woman writers of the late nineteenth century. Caird began her literary career in 1883 when she published her first novel, Whom Nature Leadeth, under the curious pseudonym of ‘G. Noel Hatton’. But it was not until she published an article entitled ‘Marriage’ (1888) in John Chapman’s radical quarterly, the Westminster Review, that Mrs Mona Caird came to public prominence. As


Margaret Gullette suggests, ‘in a voice that could not be dismissed – a plainspoken, pithy, scathing, learned, and authoritative voice’, Caird argued that ‘for women marriage was “a vexatious” failure’. The article created such a public storm that Caird became to many late Victorians, ‘probably the best-known and certainly the most decried feminist in England’.8 Caird enjoyed friendships with a range of writers and intellectuals, including Augusta Webster, whose feminist essays Caird admired. Like Webster, Caird was largely self-taught. But her lack of formal tuition did not limit her intellectual horizons. Neither did her marriage to James Henryson-Caird in 1877. Heilmann suggests that Caird ‘travelled widely, often without James, and generally led an independent, intellectually stimulating life’.9 The collection of some of her most important articles, The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays, demonstrates the depth of her reading and breadth of her interests. In ‘The Emancipation of the Family, Part I’, for instance, Caird makes reference to the social and marital customs of South American tribes, the ancient Etruscans, Feejeeans [sic] and the Chinese. Her grasp of historical and anthropological detail and her willingness to employ scientific methodology mark Caird out as a highly intelligent and strategically sophisticated campaigner for women’s rights. But it is her fiction which most forcefully reflects Caird’s passion and keen intellect. As many critics have observed, the last decade of the nineteenth century was a particularly fraught period in terms of the cultural contests regarding femininity and female behaviour. As Lynn Pykett notes, during the fin-de-siècle, ‘the tone of the debate on the Woman Question became more strident (on all sides), and its terms became more sharply polarized’.10 Caird was certainly a keen contributor to this increasingly bitter debate, both in terms of her journalism and her fiction. The Daughters of Danaus can be seen to belong to the burgeoning category of ‘New Women Fiction’ of the 1890s. As Pkyett suggests, ‘the New Woman novel was seen as the literary expression of destabilising democratic tendencies, or even of revolutionary excess’.11 Caird’s novel gestures towards revolutionary excess and urges democracy, both politically and within the domestic realm. A significant element of Caird’s feminist strategy is her use of classical myth and ancient literature. For Heilmann, ‘Caird’s mythopoeia reflects the turn-of-the-century feminist endeavour of revising and revolutionizing patriarchal script(ures)s’.12 Caird’s use of the Danaus myth as the frame to her novel would seem to imply a considered revision of ancient paradigms. However, Caird’s selection of the myth is by no means simple and the degree to which she revises any ancient narratives is open to question. The myth from which the plot of Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy is drawn, is the story of Io, which forms part of Hesoid’s (fragmentary) Catalogue of Women and which is dramatically retold in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.13 Aeschylus’ Suppliants is now considered by many classicists to have been one of a sequence of four plays, which also included Aegyptians, Danaides, and the satyr play


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Amymone, and which were all almost certainly concerned with the story of the daughters of Danaus.14 The fundamental problem arising from the loss of the two other plays from the trilogy is that it is unclear how the tragedy of the Danaids evolves and is resolved. There is the suggestion, as outlined in Prometheus, that having been forced to marry the fifty sons of Aegyptus, the fifty Danaids, with the exception of Hypenmestra, killed their husbands on their wedding night. But there are doubts as to the creative relationship between this play and the Danaid trilogy. Lynette Mitchell points out that, ‘whatever the difficulties in reconstructing the trilogy, it is generally agreed that the major theme of the trilogy, like that of the Suppliants, is marriage, whether it is marriage in general which is at stake, marriage to the sons of Aegyptus themselves, or an endogamous marriage to cousins’.15 Froma Zeitlin adopts a more radical view of the play, suggesting that ‘the primary motive at work is a fundamental and seemingly intractable conflict between the sexes’.16 Furthermore, when the Danaids ‘claim the ritual role of suppliants’, they enter ‘the world of politics’.17 For Zeitlin, the very act of supplication reveals the dynamics of power with regard to social, domestic and political relations. The Danaids, as Zeitlin suggests, ‘resist marriage as an unacceptable exercise of power by the strong over the weak in the violent seizure and control of women’s bodies’.18 The same issues, of marriage, power and women’s social, political and sexual freedom, broadly correspond with the themes of Caird’s novel. For instance, Caird’s protagonist, Hadria Fullerton, repeatedly declares her resistance to marriage and her contempt for social institutions which are fundamentally undemocratic and coercive. But that is where the similarities with Aeschylus’ play largely end. Unlike the suppliant maidens, Hadria freely enters into a marriage with a vain and arrogant man, and she repeatedly forgoes her own desires in favour of filial loyalty and duty. Hadria’s marriage may place her in the position of suppliant in legal terms. But it is a position from which she chooses to escape, and later, one to which she voluntarily returns. As A. F. Garvie notes, it far from clear how we are meant to regard the Danaids’ rejection of marriage, as it difficult to know if their objections are specific to the Aegytiads, or to matrimony in general.19 Furthermore, the inclination of the Danaids to plead for male sympathy and intervention, rather than to fight their oppressors in the first instance, has an important bearing on Caird’s novel.20 We must consider whether Caird admires the flight and resistance of the Danaids, or whether the meek acquiescence and subsequent violent reprisals of the Danaids are a negative paradigm, which Caird believes that contemporary women should avoid. As Zeitlin succinctly summarizes, ‘the Danaids tell us again and again what they do not want. They never express, however, what they do want.’21 Similarly, Hadria knows how she does not want to live. But she is much too reliant on the advice, support and validation of male and female friends and relatives to have


any idea of how to live a fully independent life. We may therefore conclude that Caird’s reference to the myth of the daughters of Danaus does not simply celebrate their resistance to marriage, but also emphasizes the dangers of supplication, of not taking responsibility for one’s life into one’s own hands. Indeed, Caird makes further oblique references to the Danaus myth, but only with regard to the supposed punishment of the maidens for the collective murder of their husbands. According to myth, the Danaids are condemned to Hades where they are compelled to collect water using a sieve. The endlessness and sheer futility of this mundane domestic task not only acts as a punishment for the maidens, but as a cautionary tale for women who consider rejecting marriage and the authority of the patriarchal family. Caird generates the same feelings of futility in a dream that Hadria has about her future married life. Inverting the cautionary tale, Caird suggests that the life of a domesticated, married middle-class girl is in itself a punishment: She dreamt an absurd dream: That she was herself one of those girls . . . playing tennis without ceasing and with apparent cheerfulness . . . and all the time, a vast circle of shadowy forms stood watching, beckoning and exhorting and warning, and turning away, at last, in sorrowful contempt, because she preferred to spend her youth eternally in futilities . . . she played on, mechanically . . . But she was so tired that existence became a torture to her, and her heart seemed about to break with the intolerable strain – when she woke up with a start. (47) Hadria’s tennis racket is, of course, a metaphorical sieve. The crowd of onlookers would seem to be the Danaids themselves, exhorting Hadria to cease ‘playing the game’. Hadria, however, is ‘an ardent tennis-player’. She fails to heed the warnings of her portentous dream. The next most explicit reference to the Danaus myth concerns Lady Eagleton, the novel’s representative of traditional, dutiful, obedient femininity. Towards the end of the novel Hadria realizes that Lady Eagleton, ‘for all her smiles and her cheerfulness, was busy and weary with futilities. She too, like the fifty daughters of Danaus, was condemned to the idiot’s labour of eternally drawing water in sieves from fathomless wells’ (467). This is a bitter, expensive lesson for Hadria. Her realization comes too late for any good to come of it for either herself or Lady Eagleton. Hadria would have been better advised to heed the words of Algitha, her sister, when at the beginning of the novel she proclaims, ‘I do not intend to be a cow, I do not mean to fight a losing battle’ (29). We may interpret Algitha’s declaration to mean that she will not sacrifice herself for her family; that she will not act in line with the herd; she will not thoughtlessly reproduce and, most importantly, that she will not act like a daughter of Io. She will not be a hapless, suppliant maiden. Rather, Algitha is determined


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‘to defend her dignity as a woman, and as a human being to the death’ (26). Caird later rewards Algitha’s fortitude and self-respect with a companionate marriage, to a sympathetic, generous, idealistic man. Hadria’s reaction to her sister’s declaration is equally revealing: she ‘felt as a magician might feel, who has conjured up spirits henceforth beyond his control’ (26). Indeed, Hadria’s belligerent rhetoric often disguises her lack of resolve and her lack of confidence in herself and her ideas. Nevertheless, throughout the novel, Hadria repeatedly declares her solidarity with women who would take extreme action against their degraded position in society. For instance, Hadria states that, ‘a woman is so desperately entangled, and restricted, and betrayed, by common consent, in our society, that I hold her justified in using desperate means, as one who fights for dear life. She may harden her heart – if she can’ (353). On a personal level, Hadria can’t quite harden her heart enough. Hadria may proclaim that she feels as if she ‘could kill every man who acquiesces in the present order of things’ (41). But her feelings never manifest into decisive action. It is difficult, therefore, to concur with Heilmann that Hadria Fullerton resembles Euripides’ Medea, as an ‘aberrant woman’ or as a ‘tragic artist’.22 Heilmann’s comparison of Hadria with Medea is nevertheless valid. Caird deliberately includes a number of provocative character traits and narrative details which invite comparison with Medea. For instance, like Medea, Hadria is a borderline figure, originating from the borderlands between England (Greece) and Scotland (Colchis). And, like Medea, Hadria is deceived by her husband, Hubert Temperley. But, unlike Jason, Hubert does not betray the principles of marriage, family and fidelity per se. Hubert’s faithlessness stems from his disregard of Hadria’s radical views on marriage and family. He is disingenuous when he states that he hates the ‘bourgeois element’ in the ‘popular version of the domestic story’ (140). But, ultimately, it is Hadria who betrays herself and her ideals. Hadria may temporarily lose control of her emotions when Hubert proposes to her at the dance. Yet, Hadria nevertheless chooses to proceed with her wedding to Hubert, against the advice of her family and her own conscience. Hadria also appears to share Medea’s contempt for popular views on motherhood and maternity. Hadria laments: ‘Motherhood, in our present social state, is the sign and seal as well as the means and method of a woman’s bondage. It forges chains of her own flesh and blood . . . A woman with a child in her arms is, to me, the symbol of an abasement, an indignity, more complete, more disfiguring and terrible, than any form of humiliation that the world has ever seen’ (341). Whereas Euripides’ Medea actively disdains the claims of her maternal instinct by murdering her own children, Hadria only temporarily abandons her sons, in favour of a non-biological maternal relationship with the orphaned Martha. Certainly, Hadria echoes Medea when she attempts to use Martha as a weapon against the treacherous Professor Theobold. But this strategy backfires badly. Hadria’s exploitative


strategy ultimately condemns Martha to a life with the cynical, misogynistic Theobold, her father. Most significantly, Caird never allows Hadria to act with Medea’s violence. Caird did not believe that violence was an appropriate means of expression, or a legitimate method to attain her ideals. As Heilmann suggests, Caird repeatedly cast herself ‘as a mere reformer and meliorist, bent not on “violent overturning”, but on the “gradual alteration” of the system’. And yet, ‘Caird called for nothing less than a revolution.’23 Hadria is therefore restricted in her revolutionary activities, only ever able to express her rage musically and verbally: ‘I often wonder why it is, that they don’t, one and all fling up their rôles and revenge themselves to the best of their ability – intentionally, I mean – upon the world that makes them live under a permanent insult. I think, at times, that I should thoroughly enjoy spending my life in sheer, unmitigated vengeance, and if I did’ – she clenched her hands, and her eyes blazed – ‘if I did, I would not do my work by halves!’ (91) ‘But,’ Hadria concludes, ‘I shall not do anything of the kind,’ because ‘women don’t. They always try to be good, always, always – the more fools they! And the more they are good, the worse things get’ (91). It is Hadria’s great misfortune that she is a fundamentally ‘good’ character, unable to act with the necessary rage and fearlessness to effect major change. Questions of character and free will in fact begin Caird’s novel. From the outset, Hadria never really believes that a strong, individual will can not only withstand but defeat the ‘hampering circumstances’ of a young woman’s life (28). Hadria observes that the common ‘fatality in a woman’s life’ is that women are forced to struggle for the mere opportunity to act (29). Much later in the novel Hadria is, however, forced to concede that human beings are ‘obviously susceptible to personality beyond all other things’ (382). In essence, Hadria lacks the uncompromising self-determination of Euripides’ Medea and that of her sister Algitha. One reason for her frailty is that she feels unable to act independently. Hadria frequently decries the fact that she had ‘never met the sister soul (for such there must be by the score, as silent as she), who shared her rage and her detestations’ (168). Despite Hadria’s conviction that ‘there must be other women somewhere at this very moment, whose whole being was burning up with this bitter, this sickening and futile hatred!’, she is forced to admit that she ‘knew so few women intimately; none intimately enough to be convinced that no such revolt lay smouldering beneath their smiles’ (168–9). What Hadria lacks, in other words, is a community of like-minded souls. Stifled by her parochial life, Hadria longs for joy and freedom, what she calls a ‘modified feast of Dionysus’. She tells her assorted friends that she would enjoy ‘some frolic of music and a stirring dance!’ But, she supposes,


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‘In this tamed England of ours, we should feel it artificial; we should fear to let ourselves go. But in Greece – if we could fancy ourselves there, shorn of our little local personalities – in some classic grove, on sunlit slopes, all bubbling with the rebirth of flowers and alive with the light, the broad all-flooding light of Greece that her children dreaded to leave more than any other earthly thing, when death threatened – could one not imagine the loveliness of some garlanded dance, and fancy naiads, and the dryads, and all the hosts of Pan gambolling at one’s heels?’ (289–90) Hadria not only describes the pleasures of a dryad, but the collective, Dionysiac celebrations of a Maenad. Indeed, Lady Eagleton describes Hadria as, ‘shockingly Bacchanalian’. In fact, Hadria has always been a ‘modern’ bacchant. From the opening chapters, Hadria is described as having a particular predilection for ‘wild’ music and dance. She describes the effects that music has on her in the following terms: ‘It fills me with bewildering memories,’ she said in a dreamy tone. ‘It seems to recall – it eludes description – some wild, primitive experiences – mountains, mists – I can’t express what northern mysteries. It seems almost as if I had lived before, among some ancient Celtic people, and now, when I hear their music – or sometimes when I hear the sound of wind among the pines – whiffs and gusts of something intensely familiar return to me, and I cannot grasp it. It is very bewildering.’ (137) Hadria’s ‘primitive’ experience is decidedly reminiscent of a thiasos, a sacred Bacchic revel. Charles Segal reminds us that the ancient Greeks worshipped Dionysus out on the mountainside, where in the forests his female band of followers would become wild as they drank the fruits of the vine and danced in celebration.24 The Maenads would dance to unusual strains of music, as ‘Dionysus is the “inventor” not only of wine but also of music, not the ordered and harmonious music of the polis, but the intoxicating Phrygian song.’25 As Segal suggests, there are two, conflicting sides to the enchanting music of Dionysus. One is ‘the life-fostering, joy-bringing god of musical festivity’, whilst the other is the darker, dangerous side of Dionysiac revelry, typified by the ‘wild shouting of the maenads’.26 Hadria’s acutely sensitized nature, her passion for music, her longing for the outdoors and for freedom of expression, may, I think, be usefully compared with that of a bacchant. Indeed, it is in Paris, the Dionysian capitol of the fin-de-siècle, that Hadria briefly manages to live out her bacchanalian dreams. Hadria’s willingness to abandon her family in pursuit of a musical career can be seen to confirm the subversive influence of Dionysus. As Vernant and Vidal-Naquet note, ‘Dionysus makes one flee from the town, deserting


one’s house, abandoning children, spouse, family, leaving one’s daily occupations and work.’27 Having secured her sister-in-law as a guardian for her inconsequential children, Hadria takes her adopted daughter, Martha, and a maid to live in Paris. Hadria’s small, non-biological female community, which has artistic expression as its heart, is a strikingly radical departure from the conventional patriarchal family unit. It is interesting to note, however, that Hadria’s independence is bought at the cost of another woman’s servitude. As a female composer Hadria’s connection with music is deeply significant and may be seen as a reflection of, amongst other things, Hadria’s discordant existence. At the same time, Hadria’s desire to rebel is best expressed by her ‘eccentric’ musical compositions. Indeed, Hadria’s symphonies are described as ‘rebel music, offensive to the orthodox’ (321). On one level, Hadria’s desire to compose reflects a Dionysian joy of being, an affirmation of and in creation. On another level, Hadria’s ‘offensive’ ‘rebel music’ never really finds an audience, and she is left to contemplate her own dissonant, inharmonious nature. Nevertheless, Jouffroy, Hadria’s musical mentor, reassures Hadria of her ‘unique power’. He promises ‘to help her by every means in his power, to watch over her career, to assist her in bringing her gift to maturity. Never before had he felt a faith so profound, or an interest so fervid in the genius of any woman’ (335–6). Despite Jouffroy’s support, Hadria fails in her resolve. Like a bacchant after the revel, Hadria eventually returns home. After receiving a distressing visit from her sister-in-law and letters from her family telling her of her mother’s (hysterical) illness, Hadria departs for England. Her brief foray into independence, experience and self-expression is halted not by a lack of ability, but by Hadria’s overwhelming sense of guilt and filial duty. Hadria has seemingly overcome the claims of maternity, only to fall prey to the obligations of a daughter. Problems of inheritance, transmission, generational conflict and the burdens of the past dominate the closing chapters of Caird’s novel. As Sally Ledger and Angelique Richardson have suggested, Darwinian theories of hereditary are inscribed in the novel’s discourse.28 But there is no progressive evolutionary dimension to Caird’s representation of events. For instance, Hadria’s mother makes a remarkable recovery from her ‘dangerous illness’, at the expense of her daughter’s decimated expectations and future ambitions. Hadria’s act of self-sacrifice may be described ‘as inevitable as that the doom of Orestes should follow the original crime of the house of Atreus’ (363). But whereas Orestes kills his mother, is freed from his madness and exonerated by the gods for his actions, Hadria is forced to live out her life harried by the knowledge of her complicity in her personal regression. Hadria is painfully aware that she has ‘prepared the altar and sharpened the knife’, in sacrificing her own future (363). But Hadria’s individual sacrifice is neither noble nor justifiable. For Caird, Hadria’s willingness to forfeit her future symbolizes not only the lack of progress made by her generation of feminist campaigners,


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but also the failure of British culture to evolve and develop beyond ancient paradigms. As Richardson observes, Caird ‘uses the language of biological transmission to address and highlight cultural transmission’.29 Certainly, Caird repeatedly refers to the cultural paradigms of the ancient past as having an undue significance and impact on the present. For instance, earlier in the novel, Hadria cites a passage from Aristotle’s Poetics, in order to demonstrate her point that ‘well-brought-up girls’ ‘do not appear to shrink from the ideas of the old Greeks’, that women are ‘simple reproductive agents of inferior human quality’ (171). Hadria again echoes this conviction when she lambasts the ‘virtuous Greek matrons’ ‘who insidiously prepared the doom for their country, as they wove and span and bore children, with stupid docility’ (291). Caird clearly invites comparison between the values of her own age and those of the ancient past. The implication is that the modern world must adapt to changing circumstances, or die clinging to outmoded values and beliefs. From his death-bed, the noble, if weak, figure of Professor Fortesque pleads with Hadria not to ‘take sides, above all, with the powers that have oppressed you. They are terrible powers, and yet people won’t admit their strength . . . Exhort people to face and conquer them. You can help more than you dream, even as things stand’ (489–90). In spite of his protestations, it is not clear that Hadria will find the strength to campaign on behalf of other benighted women. Caird only represents Hadria’s torment; she does not offer her protagonist either relief or easy solutions. Consequently, the cautionary message to Caird’s Daughters of Danaus appears to be for women to avoid the perils of marriage and maternity, in the first instance. A woman need not suffer, or be forced to violently rebel, like Medea, if one refuses the traditional role of domesticated femininity. And, a woman need not feel obligated to the demands of the patriarchal family if she is determined to construct her own family with its own identity. The tragedy of Caird’s novel is that Hadria betrays her own nature and her Parisian female community, in favour of a family which represents the ‘ideas of the old Greeks’. Hadria may have the spirit of a rebel, but she is divided within herself and over-burdened by the claims of the past.

Medea’s afterlife in Vernon Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ ‘My ghosts’, wrote Vernon Lee, ‘are what you call spurious ghosts (according to me the only genuine ones), of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains, and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends’.’30 In ‘Amour Dure’ the spectre of Medea not only haunts the fabric of Vernon Lee’s ghostly narrative, she seems to linger in the dark spaces of a collective cultural memory. Throughout ‘Amour Dure’ Vernon Lee traces the cultural evolution of an ancient myth, artfully leading her audience through


an impressive array of Renaissance and English texts, portraits and ‘histories’. Lee’s appropriation of the Medea myth is subtle, inconsistent and intricate. Furthermore, Lee’s many references to Medea’s past history really only speak to those able to appreciate their relevance. Yet, the compound effect of these allusions suggests that the ancient story of Medea is an integral element to the narrative of ‘Amour Dure’. Literally and metaphorically, ‘Amour Dure’ describes the afterlife of Medea. In contrast to the psychologically complex configurations of Webster and Levy, Lee’s Medea is, in many ways, a skilfully assembled archetype. Murderous, lascivious, duplicitous and coercive, Medea da Carpi is a femme fatale par excellence. However, Lee’s Medea, comprised as she is of classical, Renaissance and Victorian elements, is not a simple or wholly unsympathetic character. Lee intertwines history, literary references and folk-tales, forming a trans-historical, composite Medea of epic proportions. Medea da Carpi is not only embedded in the social, historical and cultural context of the Renaissance, she is also reimagined and reinterpreted in terms of the late nineteenth century. Lee’s Medea thereby reveals as much about the transmission of myth, as she does about cultural configurations of womanhood. Indeed, Lee not only suggests why the figure of Medea has emerged at various times and in disparate cultures, she also poses a number of important questions about the representation of history and the history of representation. Lee’s fantastical narrative, part-history, part-fiction, illustrates just how the lives of women are redacted to comply with dominant historical narratives and paradigms. Or, as Christa Zorn puts it, ‘Lee looks into history from the woman turned into myth.’31 In ‘Amour Dure’ Lee employs the figure of Medea in order to demonstrate just how ‘his-story’ and myth combine to establish cultural ideals, gendered values and social controls over female behaviour. The critical afterlife of Vernon Lee has been almost as interesting, if not as long-lived, as that of Medea. Author of novels, historical studies, short stories, travel writing, philosophical dialogues and essays on art, aesthetics and ethics, Lee was one of the foremost writers and commentators of her day. She was also one of the most well connected, enjoying relationships with such acclaimed authors as Walter Pater, Henry James, Ouida, Michael Field and Amy Levy. Lee was an itinerant intellectual, based in Italy, who regularly travelled through Europe and to England. It was in England where she established her reputation as a writer, with the publication of her first book, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), at the age of twenty-four. Lee’s study of a largely unknown and unexamined area of Italian history was an instant success, propelling her into the limelight of literary London and the glittering social circles of Florentine society. An acerbic cultural and literary critic, Lee often flirted with professional disaster, as can be seen from the controversies generated by her novel Miss Brown (1884) and ‘Lady Tal’. Nevertheless, in general Lee continued to be


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highly regarded until the early twentieth century when, despite regular publications in ethics and aesthetics, she began to fall out of favour. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham attribute Lee’s decline to a number of contributory factors including her movement towards more philosophical forms of writing, the unwise dissemination of her work, and her strident pacifism during the First World War.32 By the mid-twentieth century Vernon Lee had all but disappeared into the literary ether. It is somewhat ironic that a writer whose presence in the canon of English literature has been less than assured should be best known for her fantastical ghost stories. But, as Maxwell and Pulham observe, ‘like the revnants who people her stories, Vernon Lee has returned once more’.33 In recent years, critics have tended to discuss Lee mostly in terms of nineteenth-century aestheticism, and with regard to her sexuality and the potential for queer readings within her work. It is therefore tempting to attribute Lee’s Hellenic allusions solely to her association with male writers like Pater and Symonds, whose interest in the classics is often fused with their aesthetic writings and observations. Certainly Lee was intellectually and artistically influenced by male aestheticians like Pater, as is evidenced by her dedication to him at the beginning of Euphorion (1884). However, Lee’s intellectual and aesthetic development was eclectic and her approach to the past thoroughly informed by contemporary debate and theory. For instance, both Maxwell and Pulham suggest that Lee’s work exhibits a specifically Dionysian quality. Pulham suggests that, informed by the theories of Nietzsche, Lee’s work is ‘marked by the Dionysian. It haunts her writings on aesthetics, and manifests itself in force in her supernatural tales.’ This ‘Dionysian trait’ in Lee’s writing ‘allows the dissolution of boundaries: between the past and the present, between illusion and reality, between self and Other. It lures us into those borderlands which we keep at bay in our everyday existence.’34 I would argue that Lee’s Dionysian aesthetic is a reflection of the wider impulse towards the Dionysian in women’s writing of the late Victorian period. Indeed, Lee’s aesthetic approach to literature can be seen to share much with the Dionysian poetics of Michael Field.35 In terms of her intellectual community, ‘Amour Dure’ was written in 1887, when Lee was engaged in a romantic relationship with the poet and novelist Agnes Mary Robinson, another writer inclined to Hellenic subjects.36 Robinson read classics at University College, London, and was said to have been the only female student to attend the advanced Greek course at the university. For Emily Harrington, Lee’s intellectual and emotional exchanges with Robinson were significant in developing her ‘empathetic’ aesthetic outlook. Furthermore, Robinson’s literary connections, established in her family’s London salon, included both male aesthetes and ‘women poets recognized and admired in their day, such as Amy Levy, Mathilde Blind, and Augusta Webster’.37 Lee became friends with the classically educated Amy Levy, who had published her own poem on Medea in 1884. Having met


Lee in Florence in 1886, Levy began a correspondence with Lee and subsequently met her in both London and Italy. Levy knew Lee well enough to comment in a letter that, ‘I like the Phantom Lover better than Medea da Carpe’ [sic] . . . And I think Medea loses by being split up into two parts.’38 Never one to bow to criticism, ‘Amour Dure’ was reprinted in two parts in 1890. Yet, what this correspondence shows is that Lee was willing to discuss her work with other female writers who expressed a decidedly feminist Hellenic aesthetic. Personally and professionally Lee knew many other literary and artistic Hellenists such as William Morris, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, G. F. Watts, Alma-Tadema and Sir Frederick Leighton. But perhaps one of the most important influences over Lee was her brother, Eugene Lee-Hamilton who was particularly noted for his mastery of the sonnet form and his preference for classical material. In 1882 Lee-Hamilton published The New Medusa and Other Poems followed by Apollo and Marsyas and Other Poems (1884). Lee-Hamilton dedicated The New Medusa to his step-sister and, as Maxwell notes, ‘it is fascinating to see how similar they were in many ways both as writers and personalities, and to note how certain themes, ideas and images frequently recur in their work and in their lives’.39 Lee-Hamilton also had a major influence over Lee’s early education. Educated at Cambridge, Eugene, in conjunction with his mother Mathilde, directed much of Lee’s voracious reading. This domestic approach was bolstered by more formal tuition, in the guise of governesses and tutors, and which included studies in ancient Greek literature and philosophy. Lee thereby received a diverse early education and was encouraged to develop her own interests. Lee’s interest in Hellenism is almost always articulated through the lens of Italian and Renaissance culture, as befits a resident of Florence. The classical past is of course woven into the very fabric of Florence with its classically inspired architecture, art and sculpture, much of it built at the height of the Renaissance. Renaissance Italy was therefore an ideal period through which one could explore the strategic appropriations of the past. For, as Gordon Griffiths notes, what we now call ‘the Renaissance’ was to a large extent the rediscovery of classical Greek culture.40 Indeed, Simon Goldhill suggests that the study of Greek became so ‘intertwined with sixteenth century politics, theology and cultural change’ that Greek culture was integral to the ‘founding story of a new Europe, a new sense of the person’.41 For Vernon Lee the Renaissance could be allegorically characterized as ‘the offspring of this miraculous marriage’ between the Middle Ages and Antiquity.42 Yet, the Renaissance itself was, as Hilary Fraser and others have observed, an invention of the nineteenth century.43 As Fraser puts it, Renaissance Italy was ‘fabricated’ by the Victorians ‘in their own image’ and for their own contemporary cultural, political and intellectual purposes. Antique Italy also ‘offered Victorian humanists access to history, and the


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Renaissance gave them reassurance that the past could be resurrected, and indeed appropriated’.44 Lee weaves Medea’s fragmented history through the lens of Renaissance culture, gesturing towards Medea’s ancient past as she (re)constructs her ghostly narrative. Recognizing and emphasizing her own role in the (re)creation and mediation of the past, Lee appropriates the central Italian town of Urbania and fabricates its history and partially resurrects the people said to have populated it. For instance, Lee tells us that Medea was born in 1556 and, at the age of nineteen, was forced to flee to the Duke of Urbania, Guidalfonso II, for her protection. However, the town only became known as Urbania in 1636, after it became a part of the Papal States and was dedicated to Pope Urban VIII. The town had previously been known as Castel delle Ripe and later, after it was rebuilt in the thirteenth century, Castel Durante. Historically, Urbania’s Ducal Palace was the vacation home of the Dukes of Urbino. Yet, there is no historical record of a Medea da Carpi and a Guidalfonso II, as having resided in Urbania’s Ducal Palace. In other words, Lee creatively employs factual details including the names, places and dates of Renaissance Italy in order to create a highly suggestive fictional account. In ‘Amour Dure’ the instability and interrelation of fact and fiction is both a key theme and a structural, organizing approach. ‘Amour Dure: Passages from the Diary of Spiridion Trepka’, is delivered as an interrupted sequence of diary entries, which allows Lee to demonstrate the limits of a single, subjective approach to historical events, and to emphasize the fragility, instability, exclusions and prejudices of the historical record. The supposed author of the diary, Spiridion Trepka, is a twenty-fouryear-old Polish historian. Trepka’s cross-cultural position, as a Pole trained in Italian history and employed by a German university, can be seen to reflect the necessity of approaching historical material from an alternative social, cultural or intellectual standpoint. However, Trepka’s intimate personal concerns, observations and motivations dominate the narrative to the exclusion of all else. Only the abrupt notification of his death invades his scant memoir. Throughout his account, Trepka repeatedly demonstrates how our understanding of past cultures is always filtered through and informed by contemporary social, political and personal values. For instance, before he begins his research into fifteenth-century despots, he reveals that:

Even before coming here I felt attracted by the strange figure of a woman, which appeared from out of the dry pages of Gualterio’s and Padre de Sanctis’ histories of this place. This woman is Medea, daughter of Galeazzo IV. Malatesta, Lord of Carpi, wife first of Pierluigi Orsini, Duke of Stimigliano, and subsequently of Guidalfonso II., Duke of Urbania, predecessor of the great Duke Robert II. (45)


Trepka’s narrative, already (in)formed by the ‘histories’ of Gualterio and Padre de Sanctis, simply collapses the binary distinctions between fact and fiction, romance and history. Nevertheless, Trepka’s reference to Medea’s aristocratic titles is revealing. Her name(s) not only recall her legendary precursor, Princess Medea, the daughter of King Aeetes of Colchis, but they also connect her with the issue of marriage. Medea da Carpi, much like her ancient namesake, is defined solely in terms of her relationships with men. However, Trepka, eschewing her formal historical position, chooses to place Medea in more elevated company. Unfortunately, that company consists of Bianca Cappello and Lucrezia Borgia. Born in Venice in 1548, Bianca Capello was famed for her beauty. Her reputation for attractiveness was, however, marred by charges of lasciviousness and political ambition. Bianca’s reputation for seduction and scheming was so prevalent that Thomas Middleton exploited Capello’s biography for his famously bloody drama, Women Beware Women (1657). Likewise, the Borgias, one of the foremost families of Italian Renaissance society, were as famous for sexual and moral corruption as they were for political machinations and courtly intrigue. The name of Lucrezia Borgia, in particular, has long been synonymous with depravity and wickedness.45 Lucrezia’s debased reputation, and that of her family, was reinforced and embellished by contemporary writers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Johann Burchard and Giorgio Vasari.46 The illicit and unholy passions of the Borgia clan were also popular subjects for artists and writers in the nineteenth century, such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, J. C. L. Sismondi, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne. In citing Capello and Borgia, Lee locates her heroine and her narrative within a cultural and literary context directly concerned with transgressive femininity. Lee’s allusions to Capello and Borgia and her later references to Vittoria Accoramboni, Faustina and the Italian noblewoman Morozia, suggest how powerful women can be reduced to an expedient stereotype and posthumously vilified for political purposes.47 As the discredited ‘historical’ accounts of Lucrezia Borgia and Bianca Capello ably show, female figures are all too often used and abused by male writers and historians. Consequently, Lee’s entire narrative is organized so as to challenge conventional notions of ‘his-story’ and scholarship. She manages to do this, not by giving Medea an inauthentic voice in the text, but by contradicting, undermining and eventually discrediting Trepka’s hysterical account of Medea. At the conclusion of ‘Amour Dure’ Medea da Carpi is as intangible and as unknowable as she was at the beginning. Lee’s contextualization of Medea da Carpi in terms of infamous Renaissance women also demonstrates her sophisticated understanding of how historical information is often mediated and understood by reference to other sources, and of how facts may be subsumed into a wider fictional


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narrative. Indeed, one might suggest that Medea, the ancient archetypal bad woman, is the standard by which all transgressive and politically powerful women are judged. Medea was in fact a favourite of medieval European dramatists and writers from the Middle Ages onwards. In France and Italy, for example, authors such as Guido delle Colonne, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Giovanni Baccaccio, Raoul Léfèvre and the fascinating Christine de Pizan all rewrote the myth of Medea, either sympathetically or cynically. In England, Medea appeared in the narratives of Chaucer, John Lydgate, John Gower and the printer and translator William Caxton.48 Most of the medieval versions of Medea were influenced by the accounts of the Roman poet Ovid, whose work had by this time become widespread.49 Later English writers such as Thomas Heywood, Michael Drayton, Spenser and Shakespeare also creatively adapted the Medea myth. Interestingly, as Diane Purkiss notes, ‘the English Renaissance was not particularly interested in, even alienated by, the Medea of Euripides and Seneca’. Rather, ‘the standard Renaissance Medea was a treacherous and passionate young girl, a girl who helps a hero on his way in exchange for marrying him. This adolescent Medea, the Medea of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is a Medea whose struggle is not between maternal love and revenge, but between sexual awakening and family loyalty. She boils not with middle-aged jealousy, but with the impossible, turbulent, disruptive passion of adolescent rebellion.’50 Purkiss points out that the key themes in Renaissance representations of Medea are the loss of control over female family members, the disruption of patrilinearity, and the (anti-)heroine’s choice of passion over female duty. Lee is positively playful with the various stages of Medea’s European reception. Referencing a wide variety of Renaissance and contemporary sources, she develops her own heavily intertextual construct, which is both familiar and strange. The character of Medea da Carpi in fact complies with Renaissance representations of Medea as outlined by Purkiss. For instance, Lee tells us that, at the age of fourteen, Medea is married to her first husband, Giovanfrancesco Pico. ‘But this match not satisfying her own or her father’s ambition, the marriage by proxy was, upon some pretext, declared null, and the suit encouraged of the Duke of Stimigliano, a great Urbanian feudatory of the Orsini family’ (46). Having been prostituted at the age of fourteen, Medea learns to act ruthlessly and decisively to secure her safety, her name and her fortune. More of a female Machiavelli, than a Euripidean personality, Medea da Carpi is sexually and politically aggressive. On the way to becoming the Duchess of Urbania, Medea brings about the violent deaths of five of her lovers and two of her female competitors. Yet, despite giving birth to nine children, Medea never threatens the safety of her offspring. Conversely, having murdered the Duke of Urbania and his wife, Medea declares her bastard son, Bartolommeo, duke and herself, regent. It is in this role, as a


political actor, in which Medea excels. Extraordinarily, Lee allows her Medea to initiate a (gender) war against her enemies: With the help of two or three unscrupulous young men, particularly a certain Captain Oliverotto da Narni, who was rumoured to be her lover, [Medea] seized the reins of government with extraordinary and terrible vigor, marching an army against the Veranos and Orsinis, who were defeated at Sigillo, and ruthlessly exterminating every person who dared question the lawfulness of the succession. (48) This is a fantasy of female rebellion, of women’s political and military empowerment. Medea da Carpi is a thoroughly Dionysian figure, transgressing conventional gender boundaries, social codes of behaviour and indulging her desires to violent excess. What Medea attacks is the cultural values of paternity, patrilineal inheritance and notions of female obedience and obligation. The disruptive actions of Medea da Carpi are a fine example ‘of what happens when the family loses control over one of its female members’, of ‘patrilinearity disrupted, passion over female duty’.51 Yet, Medea’s warlike behaviour can also be seen to reflect the deep anxieties in Victorian culture with regard to female political power. Indeed, Medea’s faculty for waging war recalls the increasing militancy of the feminist movement in England and the combative tone of much of the contemporary journalism and commentary, such as that by Mona Caird and Emily Pfeiffer.52 In keeping with the vicious misogyny of the time(s), Medea is not allowed to win her war. Rather, she is pitted against Guidalfonso’s younger brother, Cardinal Robert, who enters into battle with her as a defender of the patriarchal family, both secular and divine. Cardinal Robert, a man Trepka describes as a ‘cunning, cold, but craven priest’, is a representative of the forces of tradition.53 As such, it is his view of the battle and Medea’s subsequent capture which comes to dominate the historical record. In documentary mode, Trepka tells us that: Little by little, one town after the other of the Duchy went over to Robert, and Medea da Carpi found herself surrounded in the mountain citadel of Urbania like a scorpion surrounded by flames. (This simile is not mine, but belongs to Rafaello Gualterio, histographer to Robert II.) But, unlike the scorpion, Medea refused to commit suicide . . . At last the ex-Cardinal Robert succeeded, and triumphantly entered Urbania in November 1579. His accession was marked by moderation and clemency. Not a man was put to death . . . the Duchess, respectfully confined in the left wing of the palace. (48–9) The mendacious historiographer Gualterio is not the only one pressed into Duke Robert’s service. The paranoid Duke soon transfers Medea from the


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palace to a convent, ‘where she was guarded and watched in the closest manner’ (49). The convent-cum-prison is a nice metaphor for the degree of social, religious, physical and political control exercised over Renaissance women. The sinister ascetic Robert desires to control not only Medea’s body, but also her soul. It is in this supposedly sanctified, moral environment that the Duke, ‘unwilling to cause a scandal’, has Medea strangled. ‘What is remarkable’, Trepka tells us, is that the Duke ‘insisted that only women – two infanticides to whom he remitted their sentence – should be employed for the deed’ (50). Medea’s death at the hands of female infanticidal killers, suggests that the murder of children is seen as less damaging and disruptive than a woman who threatens the social, political and religious order, by breaking male bonds of familial loyalty and affection. Infanticide can be forgiven, but the female usurpation of male power cannot. Lee’s decision to have Medea murdered by female killers has, of course, a wider symbolic significance. The manner of Medea’s death is surely a sly nod-and-wink gesture to Vernon Lee’s classically educated audience. However, the outcome of this act of character assassination is that one version of Medea’s history appears to have contaminated the other. Lee’s Renaissance Medea is effectively overcome by the more familiar characterization of her as a child-killer. In finally uniting Medea da Carpi with her Euripidean counterpart, Lee demonstrates that there is no clear, linear evolution of the Medea myth. An ostensibly trivial incident in Trepka’s diary adds yet another shadowy layer to Medea’s rich history when he recalls a meeting with the son of a local prefect. The boy, ‘who has heard me talk a hundred times of Medea da Carpi, suddenly recollects that, when he was a child at Urbania, his nurse used to threaten him with a visit from Madonna Medea, who rode in the sky on a black he-goat. My Duchess Medea has turned into a bogey for naughty little boys!’ (59). A continuous process of appropriation and misrepresentation has blackened Medea’s reputation to the extent that, in the eyes of a provincial Italian boy, the legendary Golden Fleece has become the coarse coat of a black he-goat. The fact that the young boy has a recollection of Medea demonstrates how history and myth do not operate on a solely textual and intellectual level. For Lee, mythical figures clearly have a power and relevance beyond the academy. The afterlife of Medea is not simply maintained and contained by writers and academics, but is expanded and adapted by oral history and popular culture. Functioning on an unauthorized civic level, folk-tales and urban myths often take on a life of their own. Indeed, ‘Madonna-Medea’ is an altogether different entity from Euripides’ child-killer. She is a heady combination of Christian and pagan elements. On an ideological level, Madonna-Medea signifies the intersection of Christian and Hellenic belief systems; a highly convoluted process which began with the Roman conquest of Greece and which continued throughout


the Renaissance. Furthermore, as her dual appellation signifies, MadonnaMedea personifies the polarized stereotypes of feminine behaviour; that of the virginal, maternal female, devoted to the stability and unity of the patriarchal family, against that of the highly sexualized, socially destructive woman who destroys the patriarchal family unit. What Madonna and Medea have in common, of course, is a profound symbolic power. Invoked in order to modify male behaviour, Madonna-Medea seems to have the (Freudian) capacity to frighten little boys into compliance. The boy’s sense of fear does, however, recall the threat of Euripides’ infanticidal Medea. The child’s memory evokes the denouement to Euripides’ play in which Medea escapes from Corinth in a dragon-drawn sky chariot. On a deeper level, Madonna-Medea’s ability to fly summons up the much earlier cultural memory of Medea as a sorceress.54 According to Emma Griffiths, ‘the strongest image of Medea in the ancient world was undoubtedly that of witch, the sorceress using herbs, incantations and innate magical powers to achieve her aims . . . her powers are not trivial – she can control natural forces, and even reverse the order of life and death by rejuvenating the old’.55 Medea’s abilities as a sorceress are most fully explored by Seneca and Ovid. In ‘Amour Dure’, Medea’s supernatural heritage is deliberately intertwined with medieval notions of witchcraft. When Trepka discovers the personal letters of Duke Robert in Urbania’s archives, he reveals that the Duke, ‘trembles at the bare thought of Medea – “la pessima Medea” – worse than her namesake of Colchis, as he calls her. His long clemency is a result of mere fear of laying violent hands upon her. He fears her as something almost supernatural; he would have enjoyed having her burnt as a witch’ (58). It is important to note that Robert does not believe Medea da Carpi to be a witch. Rather, he fears Medea’s influence and power. However, the duke is too much of a politician to allow Medea to die as a female martyr. He chooses instead to unofficially defame and denounce Medea post-mortem. This strategy is so successful that when Trepka converses with the boys of the village they respond to Trepka’s cries of ‘Evviva Medea!’ with the riposte, ‘ “She is a witch! She must be burnt!”’ (63). Ironically, Duke Robert’s posthumous vilification of Medea keeps her memory alive. In his monumental analysis of witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Stuart Clark suggests that in the mythographies and emblem-books of the period, witches like Circe and Medea were ‘bearers of a rich moral symbolism involving the sway of the passions and the force of the irrational. Metamorphosis was readily understood as a metaphor for the transformation which vice could inflict on individual men and women, while demonic storms and tumults referred to the havoc it caused in society.’56 However, not all such representations of Medea were so negative. In Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies), for instance, Christine de Pizan suggests that Medea ‘knew the powers of every herb and all the potions which could be


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concocted, and she was ignorant of no art which can be known. With her spells she knew how to make the air become cloudy or dark . . . how to stop the flow of rivers, confect poisons, create fire to burn up effortlessly whatever object she chose, and all such similar arts.’57 Christine depicts Medea as a highly intelligent and knowledgeable woman, who has an innate understanding of, and the power to affect, the natural world. She is a woman who can transgress boundaries at will, but she is neither inherently evil nor malicious. In a similar vein, Trepka attempts to redeem Medea from accusations of feminine evil. We suspect that Trepka’s scholarly interest in Medea’s biography is actually driven by his desire for a deeply sensual encounter with femininity. His subsequent narrative not only confirms his textual/sexual desires, it also reveals his tendency towards moral relativism and historical revisionism. Am I turning novelist instead of historian? And still it seems to me that I understand her so well; so much better than my facts warrant. First, we must put aside all pedantic modern ideas of right and wrong. Right and wrong in a century of violence and treachery does not exist, least of all for creatures like Medea. Go and preach right and wrong to a tigress my dear sir! Yet is there in the world anything nobler than the huge creature, steel when she springs, velvet when she treads, as she stretches her supple body, or smoothes her beautiful skin, or fastens her strong claws into her victim? (55–6) Trepka’s attempt to justify and rationalize Medea is actually more damaging than flattering. His characterization of Medea as a ‘tigress’ dehumanizes his subject and places her outside of the socio-political realm, which has largely determined her actions. Furthermore, Trepka’s seemingly casual analogy corresponds with ancient and contemporary representations of Medea. For instance, in Euripides’ play Jason describes Medea as a lioness (1342); an identification which Medea readily accepts (1358–9). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Medea is associated with a ‘tigress’ (Book VII) and the same metaphor is used by Seneca in his Medea (863). If we recall, the menacing character of Nikias also identifies Medea as a ‘tigress’ in Amy Levy’s dramatic fragment, which invokes a whole host of ‘exotic’, alienating associations. Trepka’s analogy is more suggestive of Medea’s predatory sexuality and her status as a Renaissance femme fatale. But, as Zorn suggests, ‘when Trepka claims to “understand” Medea, he fails to recognise the cultural condition of his desire as well as the Renaissance woman’s historical otherness’.58 Trepka’s narrative becomes increasingly obsessed with his personal search for physical evidence of Medea’s life and death. He is assisted in this regard with the discovery of some letters found in the Archive at Urbania: ‘I have


found in the Archives, unknown, of course, to the Director, a heap of letters – letters of Duke Robert about Medea da Carpi, letters of Medea herself! Yes, Medea’s own handwriting – a round, scholarly character, full of abbreviations, with a Greek look about it, as befits a learned princess who could read Plato as well as Petrarch’ (57–8). His stunning find highlights the importance of primary evidence, particularly with regard to the historical research of women lives. The letters also signify, in the most literal sense, that Medea is primarily a literary character, originating from the extant corpus of ancient Greek literature. But in Lee’s fantastic tale, Medea is also a Renaissance woman, ‘a learned princess who could read Plato as well as Petrarch’. Yet, Trepka never directly quotes from any of the letters of this ‘learned princess’. His self-obsessed narrative excludes Medea’s attempts at self-representation. Trepka soon finds that he can put a face to the brilliant mind which he believes he has rediscovered when he comes across portraits of the Duchess Medea amongst Urbania’s Archives. As he tries to describe the multi-layered qualities of the portraits, Medea becomes confusingly conflated with other famous images of women from antiquity. In one portrait she is Cleopatra, in another Arethusa. But it is the enigmatic miniature portrait of Medea that stimulates a whole host of sensations and associations for the highly sensitized scholar. The Duchess Medea is seen to exhibit ‘a strange refinement, and, at the same time, an air of mystery, a somewhat sinister seductiveness . . . The mouth with a kind of childish pout, looks as if it could bite or suck like a leech . . . A curious, at first rather conventional artificial-looking sort of beauty, voluptuous yet cold, which, the more it is contemplated, the more it troubles and haunts the mind’ (52). Lee is again playing the game of allusion and insinuation. As a number of scholars have pointed out, the portrait of Medea not only evokes Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, Mona Lisa, but also Walter Pater’s aesthetic reading of the painting as given in The Renaissance (1876).59 Another portrait Trepka describes is probably that of Lucrezia Panciatichi, as depicted by Bronzino. The point of such dense cross-referencing is to illustrate, in very literal terms, the process by which artists appropriate and generate work often in dialogue with one another and how intervening generations impress each ‘text’ with new meanings and interpretations. The same process informs Vernon Lee’s complex recreation of Medea. In ‘Faustus and Helena’, Lee comments that ‘to raise a real spectre of the antique is a craving of our own century’.60 Lee parodies this process in the second section to her divided narrative. In part two, ordinary distinctions between fantasy and reality, mind and matter, subject and object begin to dissolve and break down. An increasingly work-obsessed, paranoid Trepka believes that the cloaked woman he sees about the town of Urbania is the ghostly manifestation of Medea da Carpi. Trepka tells us he sees ‘Medea herself, no mistake, no delusion, no sham’ (68). But, obeying the conventions of the genre, Lee creates a profound sense of doubt. Trepka considers that he


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may have been suffering from hallucinations, day-dreams or even a hereditary form of madness. Yet, so convinced is he by his auditory, olfactory and visual experiences that he comes to believe in Medea’s ghostly presence. After a series of uncanny events, Trepka is found murdered in his room, ‘by an unknown hand’ (76). He dies in the belief that a reincarnated Medea has come to claim him as her own. The allegorical interpretations of this fantastical section of the narrative are, of course, manifold. We may view Trepka’s ghost as primarily emotional in origin, the product of his acutely refined sentiment and character. Terry Castle explains that, ‘by the end of the nineteenth century, ghosts had disappeared from everyday life, but as the poets intimated, human experience had become more ghost-ridden than ever. Through a strange process of rhetorical displacement, thought itself had become phantasmagorical.’61 Trepka’s haunting may therefore be seen as an example of his powers of sympathetic imagination; a form of emotional engagement with history that Lee would later formulate as ‘empathy’. In a similar vein, we might attribute Trepka’s visualization of Medea as the metaphoric conception of his repressed desire; as her erotic phantom lurking within his (Freudian) unconscious. On another level, Lee’s ghost story can be seen to invoke what Leighton calls ‘a still-living past haunted and reawakened by the historian’.62 Indeed, as Trepka’s obsessive narration progresses, we begin to wonder, who has been haunting whom? Trepka’s relentless pursuit of his subject in a sense brings about the resurrection of Medea. The ambitious young scholar will simply not allow Medea da Carpi to rest in peace. Trepka certainly seems to suffer from a pathological form of nostalgia. And yet, his work not only resurrects local cultural memory of Medea, it also provides a point of departure for future historical investigations. Alternatively, one may consider the ghostly Medea to represent not only the lack of female ‘voices’ in history, but also the peripheral position of women within European culture and society. Lee approaches the ‘Woman Question’, as Zorn suggests, ‘not as a political activist, but rather from the standpoint of a cultural critic’.63 Throughout ‘Amour Dure’ Lee references many male-authored texts, pictures and histories which are deemed to be crucial in the story of European culture and civilization. But in all of these works, the voices of women like Lucrezia Borgia, Bianca Capello and Faustina remain frustratingly silent. There are many images, allusions, archetypes and stereotypes in Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’, but there is no genuine female presence within Lee’s text. This absence at the heart of so much culture is well expressed by the figure of a female phantom. As Vanessa Dickinson rightly points out, ‘the position of the nineteenth-century female, as influential as it was, was yet equivocal, ambiguous, marginal, ghostly . . . this paradox finds a most interesting expression in women’s relations to the supernatural, particularly the ghost, a figure of indeterminacy, of imperilled identity, of substance and insubstantiality’.64 The ephemeral and ethereal figure of


Medea da Carpi can, I think, be seen to express the peripheral position of women in relation to political power in the late nineteenth century. I would also like to suggest that the spectral Medea may be usefully interpreted as an allegory of the invasion and incursions of ancient Greek and Renaissance culture into Victorian life and thought. Jenkyns reminds us that ‘the Victorian fancy was recurrently haunted by the ancient world’.65 Throughout ‘Amour Dure’ Lee gestures towards the haunted properties of art and literature, by emphasizing the notion of inheritance. For instance, in terms of the narrative, Trepka’s descriptions of Medea’s portraits are always filtered through his inherited knowledge of other texts and images. Trepka’s understanding of Medea da Carpi, such as it is, is limited by the conventional and conformist quality of his education. Consequently, Trepka essentially typecasts Medea, ranking her alongside other notorious and misrepresented women from the Renaissance. Medea haunts Lee’s narrative because her transgressive and treacherous qualities have a particular significance to Victorian notions of femininity and female behaviour. Lee can be seen to reveal just how cultural myths are summoned to serve contemporary purposes, and yet remain historically contingent. This process of appropriation and modification is exemplified in Lee’s text by the amalgamated figure of Madonna-Medea. Throughout ‘Amour Dure’ Lee can be seen to engage in a form of ‘cultural archaeology’, which not only reveals the social and cultural conditions in which certain art and literature is produced, but also how people and events influence such narratives. Of course ‘Amour Dure’ is itself a cultural artefact which reveals just how important the past was to Victorian notions of identity. Despite her own preoccupation with history, Lee’s text cautions us about the dangers of nostalgia; of the risk of revering the past to the extent that it is found to be preferable to the present. In ‘Amour Dure’ Lee can be seen to engage in a sophisticated process of demystification and conscientious reinterpretation of the past. In so doing, Lee emphasizes the need for women to not only engage with intellectual culture on a scholarly level, but also to rethink and to write history from an expressly female point of view. Not to do so is to risk women’s lives being transformed into myths, or to condemn women’s lives to the dark recesses of history.

Afterword: Looking Back With an Eye to the Future

It is testimony to the power of ancient Greek ideas, ideas that James I. Porter calls ‘some of the most persistent ideals ever known, indeed some of the most profoundly constitutive ideologies of modernity’, that we often know more about the ancient Greek texts than we do about the Victorian women who reinvigorated, reinvented and revised such texts.1 Whilst Victorian women actively engaged with and (re)produced the ancient past for contemporary and future audiences, they were largely forgotten by posterity and by the literary tradition they helped to enrich and uphold. Recent feminist scholarship has made more and more Victorian female Hellenists visible. A much more convoluted picture of Victorian Hellenism, intellectual and literary culture and ‘first-wave’ feminism has consequently emerged. Yet, the sense of frustration and disaffection which permeates women’s Hellenic writing in the late nineteenth century is often ignored, as is the desire of women writers to challenge and modify ancient Greek texts and paradigms. As James Porter suggests, ‘one need not take the “greatness” of the classical past for granted. One can instead ask how this claim to distinction came into existence and evolved, how it was sustained, transformed, questioned, perverted and so on.’2 It remains intellectually and politically imperative to acknowledge the dark, prejudicial, anti-democratic impulses within Victorian Hellenism if we are ever to understand why it was so important for so many Victorian women to write themselves into the classical tradition in the first place. As we have seen, the positive benefits for women writers of revising established female characters from myth and ancient literature are numerous. Firstly, appropriating canonical texts or mythological narratives gives one access to discourses invested with immense cultural power and authority, typically denied women. Yet, by approaching classical subjects from an explicitly gendered position, women writers are able to expose the mythological and literary narratives of the past as predominantly stories of male experience. In so doing, women may reveal the extent to which all historical and mythological narratives are gendered and ideologically fraught. 171


By complicating notions of gender, as well as foregrounding it as a subjective position, writers may also explore the relationships between sex, gender, sexual practice and desire. Indeed, the ancient past may be seen as particularly useful conceptual space for exploring ‘sexuality’, from a non-contemporaneous point of view. Potentially explosive emotions and controversial subjects can also be seen to be explored at a ‘safe’ distance. Writing from within the classical tradition, women are also able to challenge readers’ assumptions about the past and question the value of individual myths for the future. Furthermore, integral to the revision of ‘classic’ texts or myths are the wider cultural issues of scholarship, translation, transmission and interpretation. These complex cultural issues are addressed by Adrienne Rich in her seminal essay, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971). Rich’s ‘call to literature’ is worth quoting at length: Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of maledominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name – and therefore live – afresh.3 In the last decades of the twentieth century, with the advent of second- and third-wave feminism, women writers have returned to the disturbing and tragic figures from Greek literature and mythology. In the work of Sylvia Plath, Sandra Gilbert, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Margaret Atwood and Christa Wolf, amongst many others, the violently transgressive woman of myth has made something of a comeback.4 Ostriker notes that ‘when they traffic in the demonic, women poets have produced some of the most highly charged images in recent [American] poetry’.5 As with the literary protagonists of nineteenth-century women, it would be a mistake to interpret these raging female characters simply as figures of protest, which they most certainly are, or cathartic expressions of anger. Instead, critics like Alicia Ostriker choose to celebrate women poets as positively subversive ‘thieves of language’, who redefine both woman and culture: Whenever a poet employs a figure or story previously accepted and defined by a culture, the poet is using myth, and the potential is always

Afterword 173

present that the use will be revisionist: that is, the figure or tale will be appropriated for altered ends, the old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible.6 However, a number of critics have argued that revising myth may be counterproductive for women writers, as it is conceived and inscribed in terms of a male-dominated discourse. To revise myth is therefore to reinscribe and validate a discourse of male dominance. Further, myth by its very nature claims an atemporal universality. Consequently, women writers who employ mythical female figures as exemplars of ‘femininity’ or ‘womanhood’ may be, at best, accused of biological essentialism or at worst, of ignoring the critical differences between women, in terms of class, culture, nationality, ethnicity and sexual orientation. As Drucilla Cornell suggests, ‘to write of Woman homogenizes, masking the differences’.7 Purkiss also suggests that changing the focus of mythological narratives from male to female, or shifting the terms of a myth so that what was a negative female role becomes a positive female role, is a highly problematic literary strategy. For Purkiss, by insisting that ‘positive’ images of women are somehow timeless and by refusing to recognize the ‘literariness of literature’, feminist stories may ‘repeatedly founder if we assume that stories can be excised from text, culture and institution, that their meanings are not circumscribed by their histories’.8 But as Ostriker points out, ‘revisionist poems do not necessarily confine themselves to defiance or reversal strategies’.9 Other theorists, such as Luce Irigaray, suggest that mimicry, the deliberate assumption of the feminine role, can positively align the writer with the silence and marginalization of women: ‘to play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it’.10 Such writing is what Irigaray calls ‘disruptive excess’. The historically silenced and marginalized may be given voices, and a tradition which may have appeared closed to women suddenly appears full of creative possibilities. In this sense, Irigaray’s claim to ‘femininity’ may be seen as a resourceful political strategy.11 In a similar vein, Ostriker points out that ‘where women write strongly as women, it is clear that their intention is to subvert and transform the life and literature they inherit’.12 Cixous also writes that ‘to fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly. We have all learned flight/theft, the art with many techniques, for all the centuries we have only had access to having by stealing/flying.’13 Furthermore, ‘a feminine text cannot be more than subversive: if it writes itself it is in volcanic heaving of the old “real” property crust. In ceaseless displacement.’14 I would argue that what is most impressive about the revisionism of late Victorian women writers is precisely their grasp of the ‘literariness’ of literature and the endless capacity for reinterpretation. Neither Webster, Levy,


Michael Field, Emily Pfeiffer, Mona Caird nor Vernon Lee purport to having created the final, definitive version of the female figures they represent. Moreover, these writers do not seek to excise classical female figures from their historical, cultural or literary context. Working within the classical tradition, women writers remind their audience that classical myths and literature have significance in a contemporary setting, if only as figures for comparison or inspiration. Finding a space within the classical tradition from which to speak does not necessarily mean acquiescence with all of the tenets of a male-dominated discourse. As I hope to have shown in this study, many women writers of the late nineteenth century were prepared to actively engage with the classics, in terms of scholarship, translation, teaching and editing, as well as being informed consumers. Though it may be impossible to quantify whether feminist revisions of classical myth and literature had any direct political impact, there can be little doubt that Victorian women writers expanded the boundaries and appeal of Hellenism, by incorporating female experience. Throughout this study I have stressed the interconnectivity, the intertextuality and the dialogic nature of Victorian Hellenisms. Not only were women writers writing in relation or response to their male counterparts, they were often in dialogue with or indebted to one another. In recognizing such networks, our understanding of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century is changed. Whilst the aims and agendas of these women may have differed, all of these writers acknowledge Hellenism as a rich source of intellectual and creative inspiration. The Hellenic characters that they appropriated and recreated were the ideal vehicles through which they could explore their frustrations, fantasies, hopes and fears. In looking back into the ancient past, all of these writers expressed their hopes for a brighter, more egalitarian future.

Notes

Introduction: Contested Ground: Gender and Victorian Hellenism(s) 1. Francis Cornford, The Cambridge Classical Course: an Essay in Anticipation of Further Reform (Cambridge, 1903), p. 19. 2. John Addington Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive (London, 1907), p. 313. 3. Extract from Adrienne Rich’s important and now famous essay, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ [1971], in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, selected and ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York and London: Norton and Co., 1975, 1993), p. 167. 4. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 5. 5. For extended discussions concerning the influence of Ancient Greece on Victorian culture see Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece; Richard Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (London: HarperCollins, 1991); Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); G. W. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 6. A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 3. 7. Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 59. See also Hilary Fraser’s ‘Victorian Poetry and Historicism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 114–36, and Simon Goldhill’s Who Needs Greek? for observations concerning the contested nature of Hellenism throughout the Victorian period. 8. B. M. W. Knox, The Oldest Dead White European Males: And Other Reflections on the Classics (New York: Norton and Co., 1993), p. 28. 9. Fraser, ‘Victorian Poetry and Historicism’, p. 116. 10. Culler notes that the analogy between early eighteenth-century England and Augustan Rome was of Victorian origin. But, as Culler suggests, this assertion by Victorian scholars needs to be thoroughly scrutinized, if not revised (Victorian Mirror of History, p. 15). 11. Ibid., p. 15. 12. For recent assessments of the development of Romantic Hellenism, see Jennifer Wallace’s Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) and David Ferris’ Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 13. Wallace, Shelley and Greece, p. 9. 175

176 Notes 14. Henry Fanshawe Tozer, Lectures on the Geography of Greece (London: John Murray, 1873), p. 5. 15. John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of J. S. Mill, 33 vols, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91), XI, p. 273. 16. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, p. 74. 17. Harry C. Payne, ‘Modernizing the Ancients: the Reconstruction of Ritual Drama 1870–1920’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122 (1978): 182–92. Quoted by Ruth Hoberman in Gendering Classicism: the Ancient World in Twentieth-Century Women’s Historical Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 15. 18. Turner, The Greek Heritage, p. 5. 19. Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, p. 63. 20. Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves [1975], 2nd edn (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 60. 21. The self-educated Linton was a formidable essayist, novelist and journalist, as well as a competent classicist. She was close friends with the Greek scholar Walter Savage Landor, who supported her literary career, and that of George Eliot. 22. Arabella Kenealy, ‘Talent of Motherhood’, National Review 16 (December 1890): 446–59. 23. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., 1895). 24. See M. L. Clarke’s Classical Education in Britain 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). It should be noted, however, that Clarke displays little interest in the classical educations of girls and women. A much more comprehensive survey is Christopher Stray’s Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). See also Christopher Stray (ed.), Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999) and Christopher Stray (ed.), Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800–2000 (London: Duckworth, 2007). 25. Christopher Stray, ‘Curriculum and Style in the Collegiate University: Classics in Nineteenth-Century Oxbridge’, in History of Universities, vol. XVI/2, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 183–218 (p. 184). 26. Aristotle, Politics, Book I (1254 b13). The translation I have used here is that by W. D. Ross et al., The Works of Aristotle Translated into English (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). 27. Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, pp. 62–3. 28. Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought [1979], 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 15. 29. Aristotle, Generation of Animals IV, 767b, 775a. 30. Nathalie Bluestone, Women and the Ideal Society: Plato’s Republic and Modern Myths of Gender (Oxford: Berg, 1987), pp. 28–9. 31. C. Merivale, Autobiography of Charles Merivale (London, 1898), p. 102. My emphasis. 32. Edith Hall makes a number of important class-related observations in ‘Putting the Class into Classical Receptions’, in A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 386–97 (p. 392). 33. Ibid., pp. 392–3.

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34. Without doubt, the middle-classes were the primary consumers and disseminators of Hellenism. It is difficult to know to what extent Greek literature, philosophy and mythology may have been disseminated to the working-classes through ‘working-class’ newspapers, journals or periodicals. This area is certainly worthy of further research. 35. John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (London: Smith, Elder, 1876), ch. 25. 36. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, ed. C. Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–62), III, p. 56. 37. Quotation cited in a lecture delivered by Wilde on a tour of the US, entitled, ‘The English Renaissance of Art’ (1882). The lecture is reproduced in full (CELT, 1997) at http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E800003-002/E800003-002.html (last accessed 24 October 2006). 38. See Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to his translations of Nietzsche’s works in the Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), p. 9. 39. Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, p. 147. 40. See Inderpal Grewal’s fascinating study, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), p. 112. 41. For a much more detailed discussion on this issue of racial purity and the discourse of Hellenism see Martin Bernal’s controversial study, Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London: Free Association Press, 1987). 42. See Walter Pater’s essay on ‘Winckelmann’, included in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan and Co., 1873). 43. Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, p. 149. 44. Ibid., p. 266. 45. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, p. 73. 46. Ibid., p. 28. 47. Victorian Studies has been dramatically influenced by Michel Foucault’s multivolumed History of Sexuality. Whilst Foucault’s theories have reinvigorated critical readings of sexuality in the nineteenth century, his neglect of women and women’s issues can be highly problematic. I will discuss this issue in more detail in relation to Michael Field’s work in Chapter 2. 48. Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, p. 16. 49. Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 51. 50. See Isobel Hurst’s Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: the Feminine of Homer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) for an excellent survey of the issues in relation to women and classics. 51. Jennifer Wallace, ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Knowing Greek’, Essays in Criticism 50:4 (2000): 329–53 (p. 330). 52. Jeanette King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 41. 53. For detailed discussion for Eliot’s appropriation and application of Greek myth and literature see Lesley Gordon’s ‘Concepts from Classical Greek Literature in the Novels of George Eliot’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle University, 1989); as well as chapters by King (Tragedy in the Victorian Novel), Jenkyns (The Victorians and Ancient Greece), Hurst (Victorian Women Writers and the Classics), Fiske (Heretical Hellenism), and articles by Wiesenfarth (‘The Greeks, the Germans and George Eliot’, 1982), Easterling (‘George Eliot and Greek Tragedy’,

178 Notes

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

1994), and Laura McClure (‘On Knowing Greek: George Eliot and the Classical Tradition’, Classical Modern Literature 13 (1993): 139–56), amongst many others. Henry James, ‘George Eliot’, Atlantic Monthly (May, 1885). A reference to Barrett Browning’s famous refrain, ‘I look everywhere for grandmothers, and see none’. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, 4th edn, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1898), I: 232. Quotation from Eliot cited by Mathilde Blind in her biographical study, George Eliot, 3rd edn (London: W. H. Allen, 1884), p. 4. Hartley Coleridge, ‘Modern English Poetesses’, Quarterly Review 66 (1840): 382. See Leslie Stephen’s unsigned obituary article, ‘George Eliot’, Cornhill Magazine (February 1881), 43: 152–68. Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, p. 5. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [1979], 2nd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 70. Elizabeth Barrett to Anne Thomson, The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. P. Kelley, R. Hudson and S. Lewis, 12 vols (Winfield: Wedgestone Press, 1984–94), X, p. 222. In The Resisting Reader: a Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), Judith Fetterley describes the process by which women, as readers, become ‘immasculated’: ‘as readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate male systems of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny’ (p. 26). In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar, on the other hand, focus on the ‘anxiety of authorship’ for the Victorian woman writer. Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, p. 12. Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850–1900 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 28. Claire Breay, ‘Women and the Classical Tripos 1869–1914’, in Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge, ed. C. Stray, pp. 48–70 (p. 50). Extract taken from a letter by Augusta Webster to Professor John Blackie, dated 30 May 1870. Letter held in the Blackie archive, in the National Library of Scotland, MS 2629, pp. 205–8. See Hurst’s description of Cory’s classes, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, pp. 68–9. Ibid., p. 60. Levine, Victorian Feminism, p. 27. Breay, ‘Women and the Classical Tripos’, p. 49. Greek was a compulsory element of Cambridge University’s Previous Examination up until 1918. Breay, ‘Women and the Classical Tripos’, p. 51. Levine, Victorian Feminism, p. 30. But as Levine points out, trying to assess the precise objectives of these educational reformers is an issue of contention for historians. Breay, ‘Women and the Classical Tripos’, p. 52. Breay’s study focuses on the ratio of female students at the women’s colleges at Cambridge, ibid., p. 50. Levine observes that, ‘while the campaigns at Cambridge had been spearheaded by women outside the existing academic community, at Oxford the active

Notes

77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

179

women were the daughters, sisters, and wives of college fellows’. Consequently, the establishment of Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville Colleges in 1879 constituted what Levine calls a ‘consciously non-feminist’ parallel collegiate system for women, which had no official university recognition. See Levine, Victorian Feminism, p. 46. For a thorough analysis of the role of women at Cambridge see Rita McWilliams Tullberg’s Women at Cambridge: a Men’s University – Though of a Mixed Type (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975). Ibid., p. 88. Davies’ desire for parity was further undermined by the fact that the University not only refused to grant female students degrees, but in some cases male tutors refused to allow female students to attend lectures. For further discussion see Tullberg, Women at Cambridge. Breay, ‘Women and the Classical Tripos’, p. 55. Ibid., p. 49. To summarize Maudsley’s sexist argument, he suggested that ‘there is sex in mind and should be sex in education’. Henry Maudsley, The Fortnightly Review 21 (April, 1874): 466–83. Grant Allen, ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, Fortnightly Review 52 (October, 1889): 453. Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, p. 81. Ibid. Amy Levy, ‘Women and Club Life’, Woman’s World 1 (1888). Reprinted in Melvyn New (ed.), The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy 1861–1889 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), pp. 532–8. See Judith Walkowitz’s excellent study of London life, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). However, other scholars such as Yopie Prins, Lorna Hardwick and Isobel Hurst have begun to track the influence of Hellenism in Victorian women’s writing. For instance, Prins’ Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) was one of the first books to analyse, in detail, women’s appropriation of classical subjects. Hurst’s Victorian Women Writers and the Classics is the first detailed survey of the subject, whilst Lorna Hardwick has focused on the important issue of translation in ‘Women, Translation and Empowerment’, in Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge 1790–1900, ed. Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence and Gillian Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 180–203, and Translating Words, Translating Cultures (London: Duckworth, 2000). Shanyn Fiske’s Heretical Hellenism is the latest addition to this growing body of scholarship. Kristin M. Bloomberg has also recently written on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American women writers’ use of myth and classical literature in Tracing Arachne’s Web: Myth and Feminist Fiction (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). Alicia Ostriker includes a very useful bibliography on nineteenth-century American women writers who wrote on Hellenic subjects. Yet, she is primarily concerned with the ‘mythological’ work of twentieth-century poets Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks, amongst others. See Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, pp. 16–17.

180 Notes 91. London University was the first British institution to offer English as a degree subject in 1828. Oxford University opened its English School in controversial circumstances in 1894, whilst Cambridge University established its English Faculty as late as 1919. The ‘rise’ in English studies corresponded with the decline of the classics within the British educational system. 92. For a useful overview of female travellers in Greece see Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Efterpi Mitsi (eds), Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008). 93. Pfeiffer’s poem ‘Hellas’ is included in the volume Under the Aspens (London: Kegan Paul, 1882). 94. For a full discussion of Pfeiffer’s travelogue see T. D. Olverson, ‘ “A world without woman in any true sense”: Gender and Hellenism in Emily Pfeiffer’s Flying Leaves from East and West’, in Women Writing Greece, ed. Kolocotroni and Mitsi, pp. 113–34. 95. Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 6. 96. Nietzsche, section 20, The Birth of Tragedy, from Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, p. 122. 97. Ibid., p. 124. 98. Wilamowitz’s attack was published in pamphlet form as Philology of the Future! A Reply to Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Birth of Tragedy’ (1872). 99. M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 132. 100. Margot K. Louis, ‘Gods and Mysteries: the Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies 47:3 (2005): 329–61. 101. Ibid., p. 347. 102. According to Paul Patton (citing Hinton), Nietzsche was admired by anarchists, socialists and feminists in the 1890s (Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (London and New York; Routledge, 1993), p. xii). He is no less popular over a century on, despite the fact that Nietzsche espoused an anti-egalitarian political ethos and that he frequently spoke of women as the inferior sex. Indeed, the wide-ranging essays in Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory focus on the application of Nietzschean theory in relation to feminism, political theory and ethical concerns. 103. See Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, ‘Medea and Mid-Victorian Marriage Legislation’, in Greek Tragedy and British Theatre 1660–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 391–429. 104. Knox, Oldest Dead White European Males, p. 53. 105. Ibid., pp. 56–7. 106. Helene P. Foley, ‘The Conception of Women in Athenian Drama’, in Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. Helen P. Foley (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1981), pp. 127–68 (p. 133). 107. Ruby Blondell, Mary-Kay Gamel, Nancy Rabinowitz and Bella Zweig (ed. and trans.), Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (London: Routledge, 1999), p. x. 108. Jo Ann McNamara, ‘Matres Patriae/Matres Ecclesiae: Women of Rome’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Stuard and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 77–103 (p. 59).

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109. Froma Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 347. 110. Kathleen Komar, Reclaiming Klytemnestra (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 1. 111. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, p. 123. 112. Ibid., p. 124. 113. Louis, ‘Gods and Mysteries’, p. 341. 114. Ibid., p. 342. 115. For a good introduction to the Cambridge Ritualists see William Calder (ed.), The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991). However, Mary Beard and others have argued against the notion of the ‘Ritualists’ as an easily defined group, sharing common intellectual goals. The term ‘Cambridge Ritualists’ has, therefore, been jettisoned by many recent critics. See Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, especially ch. 8. 116. Yopie Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 43–81 (p. 46). 117. Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, p. 7. 118. Jane Ellen Harrison, Alpha and Omega (London, 1915), see pp. 201–4. For an interesting reading of Harrison’s engagement with the chthonic deities see Andrew Radford’s The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination 1850–1930 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), ch. 1. 119. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion [1903], 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 561. Italics in original. 120. Sandra J. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison: the Mask and the Self (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 188. 121. Beard, Invention of Jane Harrison, p. xi. 122. Ibid., p. 7. 123. Ibid., p. 8. Martha Carpentier also suggests that Harrison influences the writing of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. See M. C. Carpentier’s Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text: the Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot and Woolf (Australia: Gordon and Breach, 1998). 124. Dora Russell, Hypatia, or Woman and Knowledge (London: Kegan Paul, 1925), pp. 16–17. Cited by Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, p. 199. 125. Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, p. 198. 126. Ibid., p. 200. 127. Ibid., p. 201.

1 Taking on the Tradition: Augusta Webster’s Feminist Revisionism 1. Thomas E. Hake and Arthur Compton-Rickett, The Life and Letters of Theodore Watts-Dunton, vol. II (London, 1916), p. 18. 2. Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia), pp. 166–7. 3. ‘A Castaway’ taken from the volume Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1870), pp. 92–4. All subsequent references to Portraits refer to the reprinted volume, Augusta Webster: Portraits and Other Poems, ed. Christine Sutphin (Letchworth: Broadview Press, 1999). 4. Rossetti made the observation in light of William Gladstone’s decision not to include Webster in his roll-call of Victorian poets.

182 Notes 5. See the anthologies by Isobel Armstrong, Joseph Bristow and Cath Sharrock (eds), Nineteenth Century Women Poets: an Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Virginia Blain (ed.), Victorian Poets: a New Annotated Anthology (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001); and Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (eds), Victorian Women Poets: an Anthology (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 1995). Individual studies include the influential works by Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets; Petra Bianchi, ‘ “Hidden Strength”: the Poetry and Plays of Augusta Webster’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oxford 1999); Christine Sutphin ‘The Representation of Women’s Heterosexual Desire in Augusta Webster’s “Circe” and “Medea in Athens” ’, Women’s Writing 5:3 (1998): 373–93 and ‘Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery Saints: Augusta Webster’s “A Castaway” and Victorian Discourses on Prostitution and Women’s Sexuality’, Victorian Poetry 38:4 (2000): 511–32; Lorna Hardwick, Translating Words, Translating Cultures (London: Duckworth, 2000); and Victoria Lei, ‘Positioning the Woman Writer: Augusta Webster and Her Victorian Context’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2000) amongst others. 6. Augusta Webster, ‘The Translation of Poetry’ in A Housewife’s Opinions (London: Macmillan 1879), p. 64. Webster wrote another fascinating essay on the principles of translation entitled, ‘A Transcript and a Transcription’, which is also republished in A Housewife’s Opinions, pp. 66–88. 7. Lorna Hardwick, ‘Women, Translation and Empowerment’, in Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge 1790–1900, ed. Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence and Gillian Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 183. 8. Garnett is primarily known for her translations of Russian texts, rather than Greek. Nevertheless, her remarkable output ensured that she was well known as a translator of the period. 9. Hardwick, Translating Worlds, Translating Cultures, p. 24. 10. Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. L. Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 72. 11. Augusta Webster, The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus (London and Cambridge: Macmillan & Co., 1866). 12. Westminster Review 30 (1866): 278–9, and Contemporary Review 2 (1866): 448. 13. James Elwin Millard, ‘The Medea of Euripides’, Athenaeum (September, 1868): 394. 14. Contemporary Review 8 (1868): 465–6. 15. Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation (London: Routledge, 1996), p. viii. 16. Isobel Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: the Feminine of Homer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 63. 17. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Christina Georgina Rossetti (London, 1894), p. 355. 18. Letter from Augusta Webster to Professor John Blackie, 30 May 1870. Emphasis in original. Letter forms part of the Blackie Collection, at the National Library of Scotland. MS 2629 ff, 205–8. 19. If we recall, Girton College, Cambridge, did not open its doors to single women until 1869. 20. Webster, A Housewife’s Opinions, p. 150. 21. Ibid., p. 151. 22. Many ancient authors and artists developed variants of Medea’s tale, including Appollonios Rhodius, Kallimachos, Seneca and Ovid.

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23. Marianne McDonald, ‘Medea as Politician and Diva: Riding the Dragon into the Future’, in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, ed. James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 297–323 (p. 303). 24. For a more detailed explanation of Euripides’ original contributions to the Medea myth see Emily McDermott’s Euripides’ Medea: the Incarnation of Disorder (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), ch. 1. 25. Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 128. 26. Edith Hall, ‘Medea and British Legislation Before the First World War’, Greece and Rome 46:1 (1999): 42–77 (p. 66). 27. For a discussion of Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus and Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ see Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), ch. 6. For my reading of some fin-de-siècle Medeas see Chapter 5, this volume. 28. Interestingly, de Morgan included a quote from Morris’ Life and Death of Jason (London: Bell & Daldy, 1867) when she exhibited her painting at the New Gallery in 1890. See Elise Lawton Smith’s Evelyn Pickering de Morgan and the Allegorical Body (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), for more detail. 29. Delacroix’s ‘Medea about to Kill Her Children’ (1838) captures Medea clasping her children and a dagger, as she looks over her shoulder seemingly in fear of violent pursuers. The painting can be seen to represent Medea’s infanticide not as outright murder, but as an act of maternal protection. 30. See Hall’s important article, ‘Medea and British Legislation’ and Fiona Macintosh’s chapter, ‘Medea Transposed: Burlesque and Gender on the Mid-Victorian Stage’, in Medea in Performance 1500–2000, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 75–99. 31. Hall, ‘Medea and British Legislation’, p. 56. 32. Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, ‘Medea and Mid-Victorian Marriage Legislation’, in Greek Tragedy and British Theatre 1660–1914, ed. Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 391–429 (p. 399). 33. See note 57 to Hall and Macintosh’s, ‘Medea and Mid-Victorian Marriage Legislation’, p. 408. 34. Hall, ‘Medea and British Legislation’, p. 42. 35. Ibid., p. 43. 36. See Patricia Rigg’s description of Webster’s technique, ‘Augusta Webster: the Social Politics of Monodrama’, Victorian Review 26:2 (2000): 75–107. 37. Medea’s uncertainty on receiving the news is in itself surprising, as towards the end of Euripides’ play, the Colchian princess foresees Jason’s death: ‘For thee, as is most fit, thou, an ill man/Shall die an ill death, thy head battered in/By the ruins of thine Argo’ (1403–5).Webster cites the Medea of Euripides, as translated by Paley (Eur. Med 1386–7) (London, 1857). When referring to Euripides’ Medea, I will henceforth employ Webster’s translation (1866). 38. Sutphin, ‘The Representation of Women’s Heterosexual Desire’, p. 386. 39. Pomeroy’s comments relate to the practices of ancient Athens. Other Greek states operated different codes for the dissolution of a marital union. See Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 64.

184 Notes 40. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 116. 41. Ibid., p. 117. 42. Ibid., p. 105. 43. Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers, ‘Introduction’, Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Broughton and Rogers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 9. 44. Ibid., p. 9. 45. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 108. 46. John Stuart Mill, speech in House of Commons, 20 May 1867, Hansard, vol. 187, pp. 821–3. 47. Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, p. 111. 48. For interesting discussions of the Lamia figure in nineteenth-century art and literature see Adrienne Auslander Munich’s Andromeda’s Chains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) and Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de- Siècle Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 49. Margaret Williamson, ‘A Woman’s Place in Euripides’ Medea’, in Euripides, Women and Sexuality, ed. Anton Powell (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 16–31 (p. 19). 50. See Book 14 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 7 of Virgil’s Aeneid and chapters 126– 128 of Patronius’ Satyricon. It is in Book 4 of the Argonautica that Circe is visited by Jason and Medea, who have escaped from the dangers of Colchis. 51. Judith Yarnall, Transformations of Circe (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 6–7. Italics in original. 52. Ibid., p. 5. 53. Translation by E. V. Rieu, The Odyssey, revised edition (London: Penguin, 1946; 1991), Book x. 54. Charles Segal, ‘Circean Temptations’, TAPA 99 (1968): 419–42 (p. 426). 55. See Richard Jenkyns’ description in The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 198. 56. James I. Porter, ‘Homer: the History of an Idea’, in The Cambridge Companion to Homer, ed. Robert Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 324–43 (p. 338). 57. Ibid., p. 338. 58. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, p. 201. For a more recent analysis of Gladstone’s relationship to classical literature see David Bebbington’s ‘Gladstone and the Classics’, in A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2008), pp. 86–97. 59. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, pp. 199–200. 60. Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses: a Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), p. 109. 61. Letter from D. G. Rossetti to Barbara Bodichon, 15 March 1870. The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. William E. Fredeman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), p. 70. 62. John Ruskin, footnote 1 to ‘Labour and Trade’, essay reprinted in Unto This Last and Other Essays on Art and Political Economy (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), p. 255. 63. Babbington White [Mrs Mary Elizabeth Braddon], Circe, or Three Acts in the Life of an Artist, vol. I (London: Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1867), p. 176.

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64. E. Warwick Slinn provides an excellent overview of the main issues relating to the dramatic monologue as a nineteenth-century literary form in ‘Dramatic Monologue’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 80–98 (p. 83). 65. Ibid., p. 82. 66. Ibid., p. 92. 67. Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, p. 195. 68. See, for example, William Rathbone Greg’s highly critical article, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’ National Review (1862), reprinted in Literary and Social Judgments (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873). 69. Webster felt strongly that marriage should be a union based on mutual sympathy and admiration, rather than a middle-class pursuit motivated by romantic paradigms, or profit. As she summarized in her essay, ‘Husband-Hunting and Match-Making’, ‘that a young woman will have no place in the world unless a husband gives her a home and a purpose for her life is, no doubt, a strong temptation to marriage, but it is not a reason for it’. Essay reprinted in A Housewife’s Opinions, 236. 70. Christine Sutphin, ‘The Representation of Women’s Heterosexual Desire’, p. 382. Angela Leighton makes the same observation about Circe’s desire in Victorian Women Poets, p. 194.

2

Amy Levy’s Greek (Anti-) Heroines

1. Levy’s essay, ‘James Thomson: a Minor Poet’ (1883), was initially published in the Cambridge Review (February, 1883), but has recently been reprinted in The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy 1861–1889, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), pp. 501–9 (p. 506). 2. Levy, ‘James Thomson’, p. 508. In recent years James Thomson’s work has undergone critical reappraisal. For instance, Thomson’s most famous work City of Dreadful Night has been included in Victorian Poetry: an Annotated Anthology, ed. Francis O’Gormon (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). There have also been a number of recent articles on Thomson, including essays by Dafydd Moore, ‘ “The Truth of Midnight” and “The Truth of Noonday”: Sensation and Madness in James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night’, in Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation, ed. Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 119–34, and David Seed, ‘Hell is a City: Symbolic Systems and Epistemological Scepticism in The City of Dreadful Night’, in Spectral Readings: Toward a Gothic Geography, ed. Glennis Byron and David Punter (New York and London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 88–107. 3. Levy, ‘James Thomson: a Minor Poet’, p. 508. 4. James Thomson, ‘A Word for Xantippe’ [1866], in Essays and Phantasies (London: Reeves & Turner, 1881), pp. 220–7 (206). Further references will be given in parentheses in the main text. 5. Linda Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), p. 13. Beckman cites Todd Endelman here, see Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History 1656–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 73. 6. Beckman, Amy Levy, p. 19.

186 Notes 7. See Martha Vicinus, A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture in the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago Press, 1992). 8. Levy’s ‘Confessions Book’ entry is reprinted in Beckman, Amy Levy, p. 16. 9. For a more detailed discussion on the inequality in nineteenth-century classical education see Claire Breay, ‘Women and the Classical Tripos 1869–1914’, in Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community, ed. Christopher Stray (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), pp. 48–70. 10. The brief article won a Junior Prize in the October edition of Kind Words (1875). The article forms part of the Camellia Collection of the Amy Levy Archive, Kent, UK. Italics in original. 11. This famous quote is taken from Browning’s acclaimed poem ‘Aurora Leigh’ (II, 76). 12. Extract taken from an undated letter to Amy’s sister Katie, reprinted in Beckman as letter five, Amy Levy, pp. 219–20. 13. See Rosemary Day, ‘Women and Education in Nineteenth-Century England’, in Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge 1790–1900, ed. Joan Bellamy, Anne Laurence and Gill Perry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 91–109. 14. Quotation from an undated letter by Levy to her sister Katie, quoted in Beckman as letter eleven, Amy Levy, pp. 228–9. 15. As Beckman observes, Levy’s own notes in her copy of A Minor Poet and Other Verse indicate that Xantippe was composed in 1879 in London and Brighton, see Amy Levy, note 14, p. 290. 16. Letter from Levy to her mother, dated 10 November 1881. Reproduced by Beckman as letter thirteen, Amy Levy, pp. 232–3. ‘Xantippe’ first appeared in 1880 in the May edition of the Dublin University Magazine. 17. The review is entitled ‘A Newnham Student’s Poems’, The Literary World, 5 August 1881. 18. Nathalie Bluestone, Women and the Ideal Society: Plato’s Republic and Modern Myths of Gender (Oxford: Berg, 1987), p. 5. 19. For a more detailed discussion on the issue of sexism in Western philosophic discourse see Susan Moller Okin’s Women in Western Political Thought, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 20. See Nancy Sorkin Rabinowtiz and Amy Richlin (eds), Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Eve Cantarella Pandora’s Daughters: the Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, trans Maureen Fant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Sarah Pomeroy’s groundbreaking work, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (London: Pimlico, 1994), to name but a few of the recent works in this area. 21. Thomson, ‘A Word for Xantippe’, pp. 220–1. Dryasdust was a popular figure in Victorian satire after Sir Walter Scott invented the character to present tedious background information in his novels. 22. Arran Leigh [pseud. Katharine Bradley], The New Minnesinger (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1875). 23. See Roger Just’s important work, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London: Routledge, 1994), p.4. 24. See Cynthia Scheinberg’s essay, ‘Recasting “Sympathy and Judgement”: Amy Levy, Women Poets, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue’, Victorian Poetry 35:2 (1997): 173–91 (p. 179). Also, Scheinberg’s chapter on Levy in her book,

Notes

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

187

Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Pericles pronounced the virtue of women’s silence in his funeral oration for the fallen soldiers of the Peloponnesian war (Thucydides, 2.45.2). The half-light which characterizes the opening of Levy’s poem bears a resemblance to Charlotte Brontë’s poem, based on another of history’s long-suffering wives, ‘Pilate’s Wife’s Dream’. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 93. See Alice Falk’s article, ‘Lady’s Greek Without the Accents’, Studies in Browning and His Circle 19 (1991): 84–92 (p. 92). George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, [1874] 1994), p. 30. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Modern Revolt of Women’, Macmillan’s 23 (December, 1870): 142–9 (pp. 146–7). Plato, Lysis, Phaedrus and Symposium: Plato on Homosexuality, trans. Benjamin Jowett with selected retranslation and intro. Eugene O’Connor (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991), 210c, p. 143. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, p. 7. Jowett’s obfuscations regarding pederasty are somewhat incongruous; especially if one considers that it was Jowett who was largely responsible for the ‘Socratic’ tutorials for which Balliol College became renowned. See Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 76–7. Richard Jenkyns, ‘Introduction: the Nineteenth Century’, in Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 201–6 (p. 205). Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, p. 80. Okin reminds us that neither sexual equality nor justice, in the sense of fairness, were values for Plato. Plato’s radical idea of dismantling the family not only enabled him to rethink women’s role, but actually forced him to do so. See Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, especially ch. 2. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Parker & Sons, 1869), reprinted in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 519. See ch. 3 of Mill’s The Subjection of Women. Plato, Symposium, 208e–209a (pp. 141–2). See Luce Irigaray’s reading of Diotima’s speech in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 20. It is also possible that Levy is making a reference to Eliza Lynn Linton’s early novel, Amymone: a Romance of the Days of Pericles (1848), in which a young Linton acclaims Aspasia as a proto-feminist heroine. The quotation is from the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). See Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1904), in The Complete Poems of Cavafy, trans. Rae Dalven, intro. W. H. Auden (New York: Brace & World, 1961). Susan Brown, ‘Determined Heroines: George Eliot, Augusta Webster, and Closet Drama by Victorian Women’, Victorian Poetry 33:1 (1995): 89–109 (p. 104). See notes 3 and 4 to Brown’s article ‘Determined Heroines’, p. 106. I am paraphrasing Brown’s title here. See Beckman, Amy Levy, p. 1.

188 Notes 47. See Todd Endelman’s assessment of Levy in The Jews of Britain 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002), p. 170. 48. See Edith Hall, ‘Medea and British Legislation Before the First World War’, Greece and Rome 46:1 (1999): 42–7 (pp. 45–6); Fiona Macintosh, ‘Introduction: the Performer in Performance’, in Medea in Performance 1500–2000, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 1–31 (p. 18). 49. Translation of Medea, lines 230–1, by Ruby Blondell in Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, ed. Ruby Blondell, Mary-Kay Gamel, Nancy Rabinowitz and Bella Zweig (New York and London: Routledge, 1999). Epigraph from Amy Levy, A Minor Poet and Other Verse, 2nd edn (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891). All subsequent references to Medea will appear in parentheses in the main text. 50. Bernard M. W. Knox, ‘The Medea of Euripides’, Yale Classical Studies 25 (1977): 193–225 (p. 211). 51. Levy’s letters from Cambridge indicate that she greatly enjoyed the camaraderie of college life, but her later writings indicate that life at Cambridge could be difficult for both women and Jews. As Beckman points out, Levy’s unpublished short story ‘Reading’ reveals the inherent sexism of Cambridge culture (Amy Levy, pp. 39–40). ‘Leopold Leuniger: a Study’ and ‘Cohen of Trinity’, on the other hand, suggest that Cambridge may have had a problem with institutionalized racism. Incidentally, Levy never travelled to Greece, but she made repeated trips to Europe and she had a particular fondness for Italy. 52. See the letter from Levy to her sister Katie, reprinted in Beckman as letter sixteen, Amy Levy, pp. 235–6. 53. See Beckman, Amy Levy, p. 110. Beckman’s use of the phrase is borrowed from Sander Gilman’s important study, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). See especially ch. 4. 54. See letter nineteen, dated 18 July 1884, reprinted by Beckman, Amy Levy, pp. 241–2. 55. Levy’s partial translation, ‘From Grillparzer’s Sappho’, was published in the Cambridge Review (1 February 1882): 141. Levy’s translation of Grillparzer’s ‘Sappho’ can be seen in the Camellia Collection. 56. See Macintosh, ‘Introduction: the Performer in Performance’, p. 14. 57. W. E. Yates, Grillparzer: a Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 92. 58. Bruce Thomson, Franz Grillparzer (Boston: Twayne, 1981), p. 45. 59. Ibid. 60. Macintosh, ‘Introduction: the Performer in Performance’, pp. 12–14. Hall and Macintosh also call Grillparzer’s Medea ‘Hasidic’ in ‘Medea and Mid-Victorian Marriage Legislation’, in Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and British Theatre 1660–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 391–429 (p. 424). 61. See Martin Bernal’s controversial Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London: Free Association Press, 1987). 62. See Nadia Valman’s The Jewess in Nineteenth Century British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 4. Reina Lewis also provides a gendered reading of visual productions of the Orient in British culture in Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996).

Notes

189

63. See Endelman, The Jews of Britain, p. 150. 64. Ibid., p.156. 65. For more detailed discussions on the impact of Jewish immigrants on English culture in the nineteenth century see David Cesarani, The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Brian Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Endelman, The Jews of Britain; David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); and Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 66. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, pp. 171–2. 67. Ibid., p. 173. 68. For a detailed discussion on the ‘Tide of Immigration 1880–1905’ see V. D. Lipman’s Social History of the Jews in England 1850–1950 (London: Watts & Co., 1954), especially ch. 5. 69. Beckman, Amy Levy, p. 112. See also Beckman’s article ‘Leaving “The Tribal Duckpond”: Amy Levy, Jewish Self-Hatred, and Jewish Identity’, Victorian Literature and Culture 27:1 (1999): 185–201, for reproductions of Levy’s sketches. 70. Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 171. 71. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, p. 207. 72. Gilman, The Jew’s Body, p. 172. 73. It should also be noted that a Kristevan reading of the fear of contamination of the patriarchal body politic by the flow of menstrual blood is also available. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) for a psychoanalytic reading of the contaminating effect of menstrual blood. 74. All subsequent quotations of Grillparzer’s Medea will be taken from Arthur Burkhard’s translation of Das Goldene Vlieβ [1821], 3rd edn (Yarmouth Port, MA: Register Press, 1942, 1956). 75. Michael Galchinsky explores representations of scientific racism and the Jewish community in his article ‘ “Permanently Blacked”: Julia Frankau’s Jewish Race’, Victorian Literature and Culture 27:1 (1999): 171–93. 76. In his battle against the barbarians and philistines of English culture, Arnold can be seen to fall back on racial stereotypes in an attempt to reinforce the differences between the ‘Oriental and polygamous nation like the Hebrews’ and the English. Michael Ragussis concludes that, ‘in the end, Arnold uses the authority of ethnology to frame his argument that in England the corrective influence of Hellenism (against Hebraism) is needed’. See Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, p. 224. 77. See Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 161. 78. Ibid., p. 154. 79. See Pat Easterling, ‘The Infanticide in Euripides’ Medea’, Yale Classical Studies 25 (1977): 177–91 (p. 185). 80. As both Gill and McDermott and others have pointed out, the Corinthians violate their sacred obligations of troph¯e in their treatment of Medea. Medea then violates her own duties of troph¯e when she kills her children. 81. Knox, ‘The Medea of Euripides’, p. 197. 82. Ibid., p. 197.

190 Notes 83. As with ‘Xantippe’, we should question the motivation and veracity of the male speaker here. Following his report Nikias poses the question, ‘Spake I not true?’ 84. See Lillian Corti, The Myth of Medea and the Murder of Children (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998) and Fiona Macintosh, ‘Medea Transposed: Burlesque and Gender on the Mid-Victorian Stage’, in Medea in Performance 1500–2000, ed. Hall, Macintosh and Taplin, pp. 75–99. 85. Lionel Rose, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain 1800–1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 175. 86. Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture 1720–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 124. 87. Emily McDermott, Euripides’ Medea: the Incarnation of Disorder (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 2. 88. Review of Amy Levy’s A Minor Poet and Other Verse, Oxford Magazine 17 (15 October 1884). 89. Ruth Hoberman, Gendering Classicism: the Ancient World in Twentieth-Century Women’s Historical Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 4.

3

Worlds without Women: Emily Pfeiffer’s Political Hellenism

1. Kathleen Hickok, ‘Why is this Woman Still Missing? Emily Pfeiffer, Victorian Poet’ in Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830– 1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 373–89. 2. In recent anthologies on Victorian women’s poetry, such as those by Armstrong and Blain (Women’s Poetry), and Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (Victorian Women Poets: an Anthology (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 1995)), Pfeiffer briefly appears. However, detailed critical analysis of Pfeiffer’s work remains in short supply. 3. Extract taken from an obituary for Pfeiffer in The Academy (19 April 1890). 4. Hickok, ‘Why is this Woman Still Missing?’ p. 373. 5. See Basil Herbertson’s unpublished article, ‘The Pfeiffer Bequest and the Education of Women: a Centenary Review’ (Hughes Hall, Cambridge, 1998), p. 5. 6. Ibid., p. 3. 7. Funds were also provided to endow a school of dramatic art for women and to establish an orphanage. The remainder was left to trustees to further women’s higher education: £2000 of this was used to build Aberdare Hall, the first dormitory for women at the University College of South Wales, Cardiff, which was opened in 1895. 8. Pfeiffer enjoyed a close friendship with John Blackie and his wife as well as a lively correspondence, as revealed from letters from the ‘Blackie Collection’ held by the National Library of Scotland. It is said that Mark Pattison was the model for George Eliot’s Mr Causabon. Yet the brief glimpses we have of Pattison’s correspondence with Pfeiffer would seem to suggest that the suggestion is unfair, if not misleading. For more on the interesting and lively debate about Eliot and Pattison, see Anthony D. Nuttall, Dead from the Waist Down: Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 9. Letter held as part of the Gladstone Correspondence, British Library, authored by J. Edward Pfeiffer and dated 25 March 1878 (f. 194).

Notes

191

10. That the costume of the ancient Greeks was in fact a fashionable topic can be seen from the books of J. Moyr Smith, Ancient Greek Female Costume (London: Low et al., 1882) and Maria Millington Evans, Chapters on Greek Dress (London: Macmillan, 1893). 11. Emily Pfeiffer’s finely detailed drawings accompanied her husband’s letter to Gladstone (f. 197). 12. See Stella Mary Newton’s fascinating Health, Art and Reason: Dress Reformers of the Nineteenth Century (London: John Murray, 1974), especially ch. 3, ‘Grecian Fillets’. 13. All subsequent quotations from Aeschylus’ trilogy will be taken from Robert Fagles’ highly acclaimed translation, Aeschylus, The Oresteia (London: Penguin, [1966] 1979), p. 22. 14. Rossetti’s ‘Cassandra’ is included in Poems (London: F. S. Ellis, 1870), p. 252, and The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), p. 213. 15. Aside from Rossetti’s potential influence, the Scottish writer Charles Mackay wrote a volume entitled Studies from the Antique in 1864 in which he included a poem on Cassandra. See p. 95 for further discussion. 16. Alison Chapman, ‘Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 99–114 (p. 102). 17. Extract from the essay by Robert Fagles and W. B. Stanford entitled ‘The Serpent and the Eagle: a Reading of the Oresteia’, which forms the introduction to Fagles’ translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, pp. 13–97 (p. 14). 18. Ibid., p. 19. 19. Simon Goldhill, Aeschylus: the Oresteia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 33. 20. Macintosh, ‘Viewing Agamemnon in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 139–62 (p. 158). 21. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism ([S.l.]: Hogarth Press, 1939) in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74), vol. XXIII, p. 153. 22. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Vintage, [1949] 1997); Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, [1970] 1977); and Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), p. 100. 23. Cixous, ‘Sorties’, p. 112. 24. See Pantelis Michelakis, ‘Agamemnons in Performance’, in Agamemnon in Performance, ed. Hall et al., pp. 1–20 (p. 6). 25. Goldhill, Aeschylus, p. 27. 26. Grant Allen, ‘Plain Words on the Women Question’, Fortnightly Review 52 (October, 1889): 448–58 (p. 453). 27. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Threatened Abdication of Man’, The National Review 13 (July, 1889): 577–92 (p. 586). 28. For Aeschylus’ ‘romanticism’ see Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 88. For the erotically charged Aeschylean exchanges between the Brownings see Yopie Prins, ‘Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, and the Différance of Translation’, Victorian Poetry 29:4 (1991): 435–51

192 Notes

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

(p. 445). Robert Browning produced a much-maligned translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in 1887. For a good discussion of Jenkin’s productions, using Campbell’s scripts, see Fiona Macintosh’s essay, ‘Viewing Agamemnon in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. Ibid., p. 140. Fiona Macintosh, ‘Tragedy in Performance in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Productions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. Pat Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 284–323 (p. 290). Review of ‘The Tale of Troy’, The Times (31 May 1883). For a good overview of the play and the circumstances of its production, see Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), ch. 4. See also, Macintosh, ‘Tragedy in Performance’, pp. 293–4. Warr followed his Tale of Troy with an adaptation of Aeschylus’ trilogy, Story of Orestes, in 1886. Macintosh, ‘Viewing Agamemnon in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, p. 141. Michelakis, ‘Agamemnons in Performance’, p. 13. See Apollodorus (III), Pausanias (II.16, III.19, V.26) and Hyginus, Fabulae (93). Pfeiffer, Sonnets, revised and enlarged (London: Field & Tuer, 1886), p. 67. Extract from the Eumenides (666–71). Fagles in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, p. 36 David Kovacs cited by Rush Rehm in ‘Epilogue: Cassandra – The Prophet Unveiled’, in Agamemnon in Performance, ed. Hall et al., pp. 343–58 (p. 354). Iphigenia in Aulis (757–61). See Orestes and Other Plays, trans. and intro. Phillip Vellacott (London: Penguin, 1972). Trojan Women (451–6). See Euripides, The Trojan Women and Other Plays, trans. James Morwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). See Carol T. Christ, ‘ “The Hero as Man of Letters”: Masculinity and Victorian Nonfiction Prose’, in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thaïs Morgan (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 19–31 (p. 20). John Holloway set the trend for ‘sage discourse’ with his book The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan, 1953). Recent studies have attempted to interrogate and complicate the notion of ‘the sage’, particularly in relation to gender. See George P. Landow’s important essay, ‘Aggressive Re-interpretations of the Female Sage: Florence Nightingale’s Cassandra’, in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse, ed. Thaïs Morgan, pp. 32–45 (p. 33). Ibid., p. 34. I am paraphrasing Landow’s definition of the quadripartite structure of nineteenth-century sage discourse. Landow also suggests that sage writing might include grotesque analogies and satiric definition of key terms. Meredith’s Aeschylean lyric sequence, entitled ‘Cassandra’ (1861), highlights the inevitable demise of Agamemnon’s ‘Asian tempest-star’. Fate is the driving force of Meredith’s poem and the never-ending cycle of violence and revenge is seemingly inescapable. Rossetti’s ‘Cassandra’ (1869) is said to have been inspired by Meredith’s poem on the fallen woman of Troy. See Carl A. Peterson, ‘The Iliad, George Meredith’s “Cassandra” and D. G. Rossetti’s “Cassandra” Drawing’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 7 (1965): 329–37 (p. 336). Interestingly, Tennyson elected not to treat Cassandra directly, but through the figure of the Trojan

Notes

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

193

maid Oenone. For a good discussion of this poem see Richard Cronin, ‘ “Oenone” and Apostolic Politics: 1830–1832’, Victorian Poetry 30:3/4 (1992): 229–46 (p. 243). The Times, 19 November 1900. Daily Telegraph, 7 March 1921. Illustrated London News, 22 May 1886, p. 524. Landow, ‘Aggressive Re-interpretations of the Female Sage’, p. 41. Claire Kahane, Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative and the Figure of the Speaking Woman 1850–1915 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 47. Florence Nightingale, Cassandra and other selections from Suggestions for Thought [London, 1918], ed. Mary Poovey (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1991), p. 208. Kahane, Passions of the Voice, p. 53. Pfeiffer, Sonnets, p. 68. Josef Breuer began his analysis of ‘Anna’, the pseudonym of Bertha Pappenheim, in 1880. Freud began his treatment of ‘Dora’, Ida Bauer, in the autumn of 1900. Although the two analysts published their work separately, Breuer and Freud collaborated to produce the now famous volume, Studies in Hysteria (unpublished, 1895). Claire Kahane, ‘Introduction: Part Two’, in In Dora’s Case: Freud – Hysteria – Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, [1985] 1990), pp. 19–34 (p. 31). For a good discussion of rage in relation to hysteria see Kahane’s Passions of the Voice, especially ch. 3. Importantly, Clément also notes the profoundly negative connotations surrounding the hysteric: ‘the hysteric, metaphor of the petite bourgeoisie, is a prisoner’, she does not have any ‘liberating powers other than to reread the past’. Clément in Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, p. 56. Emily Pfeiffer, Women and Work (London: Trübner & Co., 1887), p. 170. Emily Pfeiffer, Flying Leaves from East and West (London: Field & Tuer, 1885), p. 65. In Trojan Women Cassandra conceives Apollo not as her ‘destroyer’, but as her guardian and her saviour. She even tells Hecuba that Apollo will aid in her revenge for the rape of Ilium: ‘For if Loxias [Apollo] exists, Agamemnon, the famous lord of the Achaeans, will marry me in a union more disastrous than Helen’s. Yes, for I shall kill him, and I shall lay waste to his house in revenge for my brothers and my father’ (355–9). We already know that Cassandra does not kill Agamemnon. Nevertheless, Euripides adapts Aeschylus’ famous character, not only emphasizing her ‘virgin’ body, which she devotes to her absent god, but also her strength and her capacity for retaliation. Cixous, in Cixous and Clément, The Newly Born Woman, p. 108. Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 201. Fagles in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, p. 31. For a similar view of Clytemnestra’s dominance see R. P. Winnington-Ingram, Studies in Aeschylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 76. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu, revised D. C. H. Rieu and Peter Jones (London: Penguin, 1991). Clytemnestra appears in Aeschylus’ plays, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenindes (as a ghost). She reappears in Aegisthos and Orestes, the Electra of both Euripides and Sophocles and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. Her fate and her

194 Notes

70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

role in the murder of Agamemnon is also recorded by Apollodorus (E.6.23) and Pausanias (2.16.6). If we recall, Agamemnon’s expedition to Troy is said to have begun at Aulis, where the king was instructed by the seer Calchas to sacrifice his daughter, in order to receive a blessing from the gods. See Sally McEwan, ‘Oikos, Polis and the Question of Clytemnestra’, in Views of Clytemnestra, Ancient and Modern, ed. Sally McEwan (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990, pp. 16–34 (p. 4). Edith Hall, ‘Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra versus her Senecan Tradition’, in Agamemnon in Performance, ed. Macintosh et al., pp. 53–76 (p. 56). Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 74. Kathleen Komar, Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. 26. Ibid., p. 23. Pfeiffer, Sonnets, p. 69. Iphigenia in Aulis features in Euripides, Orestes and Other Plays. Fagles in Aeschylus, The Oresteia, p. 22. Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11:1 (1978): 149–84 (p. 149). Ibid. Ibid., p. 157. Pfeiffer, Sonnets, p. 70. The reference to lions is a deliberate allusion to the gate of the royal palace at Mycenae, which features two lions battling on the pediment. Emily Pfeiffer, ‘The Suffrage for Women’, The Contemporary Review (1885), p. 429. Pfeiffer, Women and Work, p. 20. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 152. See Barbara Caine’s analysis of the WSPU’s activities in English Feminism 1780– 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 158–9. See Martha Vicinus’ important study, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (London: Virago Press, 1985). Hall, ‘Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra versus Her Senecan Tradition’, p. 60. Italics in original.

4 Old Greek Wine in New Bottles: Michael Field’s Dionysiac Poetics 1. Robert Browning’s affectionate term for Bradley and Cooper is cited in Works and Days: From the Journals of Michael Field, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore (London: J. Murray, 1933), p. 20. 2. In ‘Flesh and Roses: Michael Field’s Metaphors of Pleasure and Desire’, Women’s Writing 3:1 (1996): 47–62, Chris White explores the ‘quasi-decadent eroticism’ of Michael Field’s lyrics.

Notes

195

3. There has been considerable critical discussion regarding Michael Field’s dual authorial identity. See, for example, Prins, Victorian Sappho and ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’. See also Jill Ehnenn, Women’s Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008) and Holly Laird, Women Co-Authors (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 4. See Angela Leighton’s chapter on ‘Michael Field’ in Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (London and Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), p. 214. 5. Ibid., p. 241. 6. Ibid., p. 209. 7. Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, 1997), p. 9. 8. Ibid., p. 4. 9. Quotations from passages in the unpublished journal of Michael Field at the British Library (‘Works and Days’, Journals 1868–1914’, Add Ms. 46776–46804) will be cited by manuscript number and date. Diary entry dated 31 December 1895, Add Ms. 46.784, ff. 54–6. 10. Logan Pearsall Smith, Reperusals and Recollections (New York: Books for Libraries, [1937] 1968), pp. 91–2. 11. Edith’s diary entry dated 16 July 1894, Add Ms. 46.785, f. 93. 12. Entry dated 10 February 1896, Add Ms. 46.785, ff. 19–20. 13. Letter to Havelock Ellis, cited by Mary Sturgeon, Michael Field (London: George G. Harrap, 1922), p. 47. 14. Quotation in Works and Days, p. 54. 15. See Hilary Fraser’s highly suggestive article, ‘The Religious Poetry of Michael Field’, in Athena’s Shuttle: Myth, Religion and Ideology from Romanticism to Modernism, ed. Franco Marucci and Emma Sdegno (Bologna: Cisalpino, 2000), p. 140. 16. Ibid., p. 135. 17. Later, however, Edith admitted to her Confessor, the Reverend McNab, that, ‘it is rather difficult to make any terms between Zeus and Christ’. See Add Ms. 46798. 18. See Edith’s comment in their diary, Add Ms. 46798. 19. Quoted by Emma Donoghue in We Are Michael Field (Bath: Absolute Press, 1998), p. 46. 20. Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, p. 242. Interestingly, Edith and Katharine began a masque on the figures of Pan and Syrinx entitled Silence and Music. The masque was never published in full. 21. Virginia Woolf, quoted in Henry M. Alley’s article, ‘A Rediscovered Eulogy: Virginia Woolf, “Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher” ’, Twentieth-Century Literature 28 (1982): 290–301 (p. 299). 22. Yopie Prins, ‘OTOTOTOI: Virginia Woolf and the Naked Cry of Cassandra’, in Agamemnon in Performance 458 BC to AD 2004, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 163–88 (p. 170). 23. Jane Ellen Harrison, Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1919), pp. 5–6. 24. Prins, ‘OTOTOTOI: Virginia Woolf and the Naked Cry of Cassandra’, p. 171. 25. See Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 34.

196 Notes 26. The three volumes of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality were published before his death in 1984. Written in French in 1976, the first volume, The Will to Knowledge was translated into English in 1977 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), followed by volume II: The Use of Pleasure (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) and volume III: The Care of the Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). 27. Vigdis Songe-Møller, Philosophy Without Women: the Birth of Sexism in Western Thought (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 143. 28. Lee Behlman, ‘From Ancient to Victorian Cultural Studies: Assessing Foucault’, Victorian Poetry 41:4 (2003): 559–69 (p. 560). My emphasis. 29. Amy Richlin, ‘Foucault’s History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?’ in Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, ed. David Larmour, Paul Miller and Charles Platter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 138– 70. 30. Chris White, ‘ “Poets and lovers evermore”: the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field’, in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 26–43 (p. 28). 31. Ibid., p. 26. 32. Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 102. 33. Ibid. 34. This biographical approach challenges Lillian Faderman’s equivocal reading of Bradley and Cooper’s personal relationship. See Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: The Women’s Press, 1981, 1985), pp. 209–13. 35. It certainly seems to be the case that Bradley and Cooper enjoyed a sexual relationship for a number of years. However, as Treby demonstrates in his introduction to Uncertain Rain: the Sundry Spells of Michael Field (Bury St Edmunds: De Blackland Press, 2002), not all of Bradley and Cooper’s declarations of love are what they appear to be (pp. 14–16). Furthermore, as a number of critics have elucidated, the term ‘lesbian’ was historically available, but it had limited usage in the 1880s. Bradley and Cooper do not employ the term ‘lesbian’ in relation to themselves or their work. 36. Linda Dowling interprets the homosexual Hellenism of Wilde et al. as a ‘coded’ language of homoeroticism in her excellent study, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 37. Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, p. 225. 38. White, ‘ “Poets and lovers” ’, p. 34. 39. See Emma Donoghue’s fine short study of the two poets, We Are Michael Field, p. 14. 40. Ibid., p. 14. 41. Katharine’s Parisian sojourn proved to be educational in more than one respect, when she became besotted with the brother of a friend with whom she was staying. The flirtation ended tragically and abruptly when Alfred Gérente died suddenly in his sleep. 42. Diary entry dated February, 1891. Add Ms. 46779. 43. The story of Atys is recounted in The Histories by the ancient Greek author Herodotus (I, 35–45). It is notable that the story of Atys features King Coresus. The play is contained in a notebook in the archives at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 44. Quotation taken from Katharine Bradley’s annotated version of Callirrhoë, held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Eng.poet.e.70.

Notes

197

45. University College, Bristol, Calendar (1878). 46. See University College, Bristol, Calendar (1880–1), pp. 41–2. 47. These compelling Roman dramas still await in-depth analysis and, for the time being, remain out of the scope of this study. 48. Donoghue, We Are Michael Field, p. 27. 49. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, p. 102. 50. Letter from Edith Cooper to Robert Browning, dated 29 May 1884, quoted in Works and Days, p. 3. 51. Bradley and Cooper worked on other Greek subjects, but only Bellerophôn, Callirrhoë and Long Ago made it into print. 52. Donoghue, We Are Michael Field, p. 60. 53. Entry dated 9 May 1889, vol. no. 46777. 54. Sturgeon, Michael Field, p. 137. 55. Easley points out that the use of a pseudonym by both male and female writers was not an unusual literary strategy in the nineteenth century. Alexis Easley, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media 1830–70 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 6. 56. Ivor C. Treby, The Michael Field Catalogue: a Book of Lists (Bury St Edmunds: De Blackland Press, 1998), p. 66. 57. Letter from Michael Field to A. C. Swinburne, 27 May 1889. Reprinted in Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, vols. I–III, ed. Terry L. Myers (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), II: 475. In ‘A Ballad of François Villon’ Swinburne described the reputation of Villon as, ‘sad bad glad mad!’ And in his unfinished novel Lesbia Brandon Swinburne’s Lady Wariston cautions one of her young sons to ‘Never write verse . . . people who do are bad, or mad, or sick’ (LB, 148). Bradley and Cooper are clearly trying to display their familiarity with Swinburne’s work in this note. 58. Describing their collaborative relationship to an inquisitive Robert Browning, Cooper noted that, ‘my Aunt and I work together after the fashion of Beaumont and Fletcher’. Swinburne provided readings of over a dozen plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, as part of a series of essays on Elizabethan dramatists. Letter from Edith Cooper to Robert Browning, 29 May 1884. Cited in Works and Days, p. 3. 59. John Morley coined this rather wonderful description of Swinburne in his article, ‘Review of Swinburne, Poems and Ballads’, Saturday Review (4 August 1866): 145–7. For a comparative analysis of the work of Swinburne and Michael Field see my ‘Libidinous Laureates and Lyrical Maenads: Michael Field, Swinburne and Erotic Hellenism’, in a forthcoming special edition of Victorian Poetry, ed. Rikky Rooksby and Terry Myers (Winter, 2009). 60. It was Matthew Arnold, of course, who famously described Greek culture in terms of ‘sweetness and light’ in Culture and Anarchy: an Essay in Social and Political Criticism (London: Smith & Elder, 1869). 61. See Margot K. Louis’ important article, ‘Gods and Mysteries: the Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies 47:3 (2005): 329–61 (347). 62. John Ruskin described Swinburne as a ‘demoniac youth’ in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 22 January 1866. See Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, ed. C. E. Norton, 2 vols (New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1904), vol. I: p. 157. According to Judith Stoddart, Ruskin was far more sympathetic to Swinburne than he initially appeared to be. See Stoddart, ‘The Morality of Poems and Ballads: Swinburne and Ruskin’, in The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on

198 Notes

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

Swinburne, ed. Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), pp. 92–106. Antony H. Harrison, ‘Swinburne’s Losses: the Poetics of Passion’, ELH 49 (1982): 689–706 (p. 690). Anonymous review in the Academy 53 (1 January 1898): 13–14. In Book VI of The Iliad, Homer recalls the story of Bellerophôn. Other possible sources of the myth include Hesiod’s Theogony (319), Pindar’s Odes 13, 84 (120), the Fabulae of Hyginus (57) and Appollodorus, Library and Epitome (2.3.1). Bradley and Cooper also refer to Euripides’ Bacchae and the Homeric Hymns in the course of their narrative. Extract from a letter by John Addington Symonds to Mr Grislestone, dated 30 June 1881. The letter is included in the unpublished journals of Michael Field at the British Library (‘Works and Days’, Journals 1868–1914’). See Add Mss. 46866–46867. For an interesting, metrical reading of Robinson’s translation see Yopie Prins, ‘ “Lady’s Greek” (With the Accents): a Metrical Translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson’, Victorian Literature & Culture 34 (2006): 591–618. ‘Phaedra’ was published in the first edition of Poems and Ballads (London: J. C. Hotten, 1866). Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 107. Cited in a letter from Swinburne to Edmund Gosse (2 January 1876), reprinted in The Swinburne Letters, ed. C. Y. Lang, 6 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), III: 99. Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, p. 214. Annotated copy of Callirrhoë held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Eng.poet.e.70. It is also possible that Bradley and Cooper were influenced by Chariton’s ancient novel, Chaereas and Callirrhoe, which begins ‘Eros loves strife and paradoxical outcomes’ (1:1). The arrival of the Thracian god Dionysus in the lands of Greece was treated by a variety of ancient playwrights in a number of tragedies. Aeschylus, for instance, elected to deal with the significance of Dionysiac religion in his works, specifically in Lycurgus, Semele, Xantriae, Pentheus and ending with a satyr play, The Nurses of Dionysus. But it is Euripides’ depiction of the subversive wine-god that remains the most memorable. Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed., trans. and intro. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), p. 37. See Albert Heinrichs’ article, ‘ “He has a God in Him”: Human and Divine in the Modern Perceptions of Dionysus’, in Masks of Dionysus, ed. Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Farone (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 13–43. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, p. 73. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 92. Segal, Dionysiac Poetics, p. 158. See Paul Patton’s introduction to Patton (ed.), Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. vii. See the articles by both Kathy Psomiades (‘ “Still Burning from this Strangling Embrace”: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics’) and Yopie Prins (‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’), in Victorian Sexual Dissidence and Ruth Vanita’s

Notes

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102.

103. 104.

105.

106. 107.

199

Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, p. 54. Ibid., p. 47. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, p. 94. Walter Pater, Greek Studies: a Series of Essays [1895] (London: Macmillan & Co., 1920), pp. 27–8. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1990), pp. 399–400. Ibid., p. 399. Pater, Greek Studies, p. 39. Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, p. 53. Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, p. 144. Quotation taken from Jill Ehnenn’s article ‘Looking Strategically: Feminist and Queer Aesthetics in Michael Field’s Sight and Song’, Victorian Poetry 42:3 (2005): 213–60 (p. 216). Pater wrote ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ in 1878, but the essay was not published until 1889. Consequently, it is highly unlikely that Pater’s ‘Bacchanals’ influenced Michael Field’s Hellenic dramas. Pater, ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’ in Greek Studies, p. 68. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 76. Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, pp. 108–9. From Katharine Bradley’s annotated version of Callirrhoë, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Eng.poet.e.70. This description of Swinburne was coined by Edmund Gosse in Portraits and Sketches (London: Heinemann, 1912), p. 47 Julian Baird has identified what he calls the ‘Pleasure–Pain paradox’ in Swinburne’s poetry, see ‘Swinburne, Sade, and Blake: the Pleasure–Pain Paradox’, Victorian Poetry 9 (1971): 49–75. In a letter to Edmund Gosse, Swinburne furiously stated that ‘a fourth form boy could see that as far as Erechtheus can be said to be modelled after anybody it is modelled throughout after the earliest style of Aeschylus’ (2 January 1876). In The Swinburne Letters, ed. C. Y. Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), III: 99. See Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia’, Arethusa 11:1 (1978): 149–84, for a more detailed discussion of the sexual politics of Aeschylus. David G. Riede, ‘Swinburne and Romantic Authority’, in The Whole Music of Passion, ed. Rooksby and Shrimpton, pp. 22–39 (p. 35). See Catherine Maxwell’s discussion of Swinburne in The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 181. Dorothea Barrett, ‘The Politics of Sado-Masochism: Swinburne and George Eliot’, in The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne, ed. Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), pp. 107–19 (p. 116). Jean Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, 1992), p. 199. The myth of the Calydonian Boar Hunt was recorded by Pausanias and later, by Ovid. For a thorough discussion of the classical sources of Swinburne’s Atalanta,

200 Notes

108.

109.

110.

111. 112.

113. 114.

115.

116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124.

see William R. Rutland’s Swinburne: a Nineteenth Century Hellene (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931), especially part two. For an interesting reading of the role of Artemis in Swinburne’s poem see Mark Siegchrist’s article, ‘Artemis’s Revenge: a Reading of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 20 (1980): 695–712. Adam Roberts, ‘Hunting and Sacrifice in Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 31 (1991): 757–71 (p. 760). Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (London: E. Moxon & Co., 1865), I, 199. I will hereafter refer to the reprinted version of the drama in Swinburne: Major Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). All subsequent references will appear in the main text in parentheses. Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘Cultic Models of the Female: Rites of Dionysus and Demeter’, Arethusa 15:1/2 (1982): 129–57 (p. 130). Jean Watson Rosenbaum, ‘Of Hunts and Hunters: Atalanta in Calydon’, PreRaphaelite Review 3:1 (1979): 41–53 (p. 41). For an alternative reading, John O. Jordan suggests that the hunt might be seen in terms of a young male’s search for identity. See Jordan’s ‘The Sweet Face of Mothers: Psychological Patterns in Atalanta in Calydon’, Victorian Poetry 11 (1973): 101–14. I refer to Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’, which was famously published in his now notorious volume, Poems and Ballads (1866). The pomegranate is a powerful and ancient symbol which appears in numerous sources including Homer’s famous ‘Hymn to Demeter’. See also Marcel Detienne’s detailed analysis of the significance of the pomegranate in Dionysus Slain (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 42–4. Michael Field, ‘Pomegranates’, in The Wattlefold: Unpublished Poems by Michael Field, collected by Emily C. Fortey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1930). For a comprehensive discussion of the Demeter–Persephone myth in Victorian literature see Andrew Radford’s The Lost Girls: Demeter–Persephone and the Literary Imagination 1850–1930 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), especially chs. 1 and 2. Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, p. 56. Linda M. Shires, ‘Of Maenads, Mothers and Feminized Males: Victorian Readings of the French Revolution’, in Re-Writing the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender, ed. Linda M. Shires (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 147–65 (p. 147). Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 149. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 250. Prins, ‘Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters’, p. 46. Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary, p. 30. The theme of the maiden punished for her refusal to acknowledge the power of Dionysus occurs in the obscure legends of Minyas and of Proetus, the daughters of whom resisted the god and suffered terrible afflictions for their rejection of him. The ancient Greek writer Apollonius Rhodius recorded the story of the women of Lemnos and their ruler Hypsipyle. When the Argonauts landed in Lemnos they found the island to be bereft of men. The Argonauts heard how the Lemnian

Notes

125.

126. 127.

128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

5

201

women had failed to worship Aphrodite and, as punishment for their disrespect, Aphrodite conferred a fetid smell on the women. Repelled by the smell of the women, the men of Lemnos sailed to Thrace where they captured and bedded Thracian maidens. Outraged by their infidelity, the women conspired to murder the men on their return to Lemnos. All of the men were killed, with the exception of Thoas, who was saved from the slaughter by his daughter, Hypsipyle. The Lemnian women took the newly arrived nautical heroes to their beds and the curse was lifted. Hypsipyle bore the Greek hero Jason two sons before he left with the Argonauts on his journey home. From that time onwards, the population of Lemnos was said to have a heroic lineage. Thaïs Morgan suggests that the ideal of civic masculinity has three analogous levels: ‘the putative condition of “ethical virility” provides the male citizen with the ability to exercise self-control, resulting in “sexual virility” according to the model of “social virility.” The man who fails to meet any area of his obligations is considered “effeminate.” ’ See Thaïs Morgan’s article, ‘Victorian Effeminacies’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Dellamora, p. 111. For a more detailed discussion of Artemis’ victory see Siegchrist, ‘Artemis’s Revenge’. Buchanan, ‘Review of Poems and Ballads’, The Athenaeum 48 (1866): 30–4. Reprinted in Swinburne: the Critical Heritage, ed. C. K. Hyder (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 137–8. Anne Ardis reminds us that before the ‘official’ coinage of the phrase, ‘New Woman’ in 1894, she was called ‘Novissima, the Odd Woman, the Wild Woman, and the Superfluous or Redundant Woman’. See Ardis, New Women, New Novels (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 10. Eliza Lynn Linton, ‘The Modern Revolt of Women’, Macmillan’s 23 (December, 1870): 142–9 (p. 142). See note 59 above. Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 17. Thomas L. Wymer, ‘Swinburne’s Tragic Vision in Atalanta in Calydon’, Victorian Poetry 9 (1971): 1–16 (p. 1). Ibid., p. 14. Harrison, ‘Swinburne’s Losses’, p. 690. See Works and Days, p. 14. Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Macmillan & Co., 1917), pp. 135–6.

Medea’s Haunting of the Fin-de-Siècle 1. Marianne McDonald, ‘Medea as Politician and Diva: Riding the Dragon into the Future’, in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, ed. James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 297–323 (p. 297). 2. Edith Hall, ‘Medea and British Legislation before the First World War’, Greece and Rome 46:1 (1999): 42–77 (p. 42). 3. See Julian Wolfreys’ introduction to Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny, and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 3. 4. Edith Wheelwright, The Vengeance of Medea (London, 1894). All subsequent references will be cited in parentheses in the main text.

202 Notes 5. Mona Caird, Daughters of Danaus [London: Bliss, Sands & Co., 1894], reprinted (New York: Feminist Press, 1989). Henceforth, all subsequent references will be in parentheses. 6. The conclusion to Aeschylus’ Danaid trilogy has been lost. But in Prometheus Bound, we learn the fate of the Danaids and the relevance of the much earlier myth of Io. 7. See Ann Heilmann’s extended discussion of Caird’s Daughters of Danaus in New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 221. 8. See Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s fine essay on Caird as the ‘Afterword’ to the Feminist Press reprint of the Daughters of Danaus (New York, 1989), pp. 493–534 (pp. 494–5). 9. See Ann Heilmann’s early article, ‘Mona Caird (1854–1932): Wild Woman, New Woman, and Early Radical Feminist Critic of Marriage and Motherhood’, Women’s History Review 5:1 (1996): 67–95 (p. 78). 10. Lynn Pykettt, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: the Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 20. 11. Ibid., p. 42. 12. Heilmann, New Woman Strategies, p. 233. 13. See M. L. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Its Nature, Structure and Origins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 149, 154. 14. The position of the Suppliants in the tetralogy has been hotly debated, as has the content and conclusion of Aeschylus’ Danaid triology. For a detailed discussion of the issues see A. F. Garvie, Aeschylus Supplices: Play and Trilogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 15. Lynette Mitchell, ‘Greeks, Barbarians and Aeschylus’ Suppliants’, Greece and Rome 53:2 (2006): 205–23 (p. 209). 16. See Froma I. Zeitlin’s thorough discussion of the Danaid trilogy in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), part two, ch. 4. 17. Ibid., p. 133. 18. Ibid., pp. 150–1. 19. Garvie, Aeschylus Supplices, p. 212. 20. Furthermore, Mitchell points out that the Danaids are ‘not wholly innocent in their supplication. Not only do they threaten Pelasgus with their suicide (and consequent pollution) if he does not win their right to be received as suppliants . . . but also they threaten the gods if they do not lend their assistance’ (‘Greeks, Barbarians and Aeschylus’ Suppliants’, p. 217). 21. Zeitlin, Playing the Other, p. 154. 22. Ann Heilmann, ‘Medea at the Fin de Siècle: Revisionist Uses of Classical Myth in Mona Caird’s The Daughters Danaus’, Victorian Review 31:1 (2005): 21–39 (p. 25). 23. Heilmann, ‘Mona Caird (1854–1932)’, p. 73. 24. Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Europides’ Bacchae (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), especially ch. 4. 25. Ibid., p. 70. 26. Ibid., p. 75. 27. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990), p. 399. 28. See Sally Ledger’s reading of Caird’s novel in The New Woman Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 25–31.

Notes

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

203

See also Angelique Richardson’s chapter, ‘ “People Talk a Lot of Nonsense about Hereditary”: Mona Caird and Anti-Eugenic Feminism’, in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 183–211. See Richardson, ‘ “People Talk a Lot of Nonsense about Hereditary” ’, p. 199. Preface to Vernon Lee, Hauntings: and Other Fantastic Tales [London: W. Heinemann, 1890]. Subsequent references to ‘Amour Dure’ will be made in parentheses in the main text, and all references will be to the Broadview reprint of Hauntings, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (2006). Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), p. 166. See Maxwell and Pulham’s introduction to Hauntings, pp. 9–27. Ibid., p. 27. Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. xviii–xix. In note 14 to the Introduction, Pulham suggests that ‘Lee’s fascination with Nietzsche finds expression in works ranging from essays such as “Nietzsche and the Will to Power” in Gospels of Anarchy and Other Contemporary Studies (1908) to treatises such as the Handling of Words (1923).’ Lee’s late essay ‘Dionysus in the Eugean Hills’, Contemporary Review 120 (September, 1921): 346–53, is dedicated to Walter Pater. But, more like Michael Field than Pater, Lee is willing to emphasize the wild, feminine side of Dionysiac revelry. Lee’s intense relationship with Robinson came to an abrupt end in 1887 when Robinson became engaged to James Darmesteter. See Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: a Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003) and Zorn, Vernon Lee, for further discussion of this important relationship in Lee’s life. Emily Harrington, ‘The Strain of Sympathy: A. Mary F. Robinson, The New Arcadia, and Vernon Lee’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 61:1 (June, 2006): 66–98. Letter from Amy Levy to Vernon Lee [Miss Paget], dated February 1887, reproduced in Linda Hunt Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000) as letter 28, pp. 260–1. Catherine Maxwell, ‘Vernon Lee and Eugene Lee-Hamilton’, in Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Patricia Pulham and Catherine Maxwell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 21–39 (p. 30). Gordon Griffiths, ‘Classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance’, in Pathways from Ancient Greece, ed. Carol G. Thomas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), pp. 92–117 (p. 93). Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 16–17. Vernon Lee, Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance (1884), p. 7. Euphorion is the child of Goethe’s Faust and Helena. Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 1. Ibid., p. 42. According to various unconfirmed sources, one of Lucrezia Borgia’s most outrageous crimes was that of being in a sexual relationship with her father and two brothers. Burchard’s contribution is interesting as he recorded his observations about the Borgias in the form of a diary, which he kept during his residency at the Vatican in Rome (1481–1506). Interestingly, in a letter to Lee, Amy Levy recalled that to her ‘astonishment’, ‘Eleanor of Toledo is the first idea of Medea’. Levy continues, ‘she is a being for

204 Notes

48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

whom Miss [Constantina] Black & I share an odd sort of personal antipathy; derived fr[om] the account of her in Benvenuto Cellini & fr[om] the numerous Bronzinos in Florence. Indeed, I once had a scheme of getting the photographs of her & all her ghastly family & framing them together.’ Levy goes on to say that, ‘there’s that same look of badness about them all . . . A sort of family rejoicing in a traceable hereditary curse.’ See Beckman, Amy Levy, letter 28, pp. 260–1. For a thorough discussion of the intertextual development of Medea during the Middle Ages see Ruth Morse, The Medieval Medea (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996). See Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). For a more general study of the influence of classical culture over the period see The Influence of the Classical World on Medieval Literature, Architecture, Music and Culture: a Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies, ed. Fidel Fajardo-Acosta (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993). Diane Purkiss, ‘Medea in the English Renaissance’, in Medea in Performance, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 32–48 (pp. 32–3). Ibid., p. 33. See Chapter 3 for an examination of feminist ‘militancy’ in the late nineteenth century. Surely a reference to Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), who is perhaps most famous for being one of the judges who served in the trial of Giordano Bruno, who was subsequently burned as a heretic, and in 1616 he summoned Galileo Galilei for trial. Emma Griffiths points out that Saint Augustine, in the late fourth century, says that he sang ‘The Flying Medea’ in a competition (Confessions, 3.6.11). See Emma Griffiths, Medea (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 104. Griffiths, Medea, p. 41. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 649. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, ed. Maureen Cheney Curnow (Ann Arbor, Michigan, University Microfilms, 1978). English translation, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982), p. 69. Zorn, Vernon Lee, p. 164. See Zorn’s analysis of the portrait in ibid., p. 158; and Ruth Robbins, ‘Apparitions Can Be Deceptive: Vernon Lee’s Androgynous Spectres’, in Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 182–200; Catherine Maxwell, ‘From Dionysus to “Dionea”: Vernon Lee’s Portraits’, Word and Image 13:3 (1997): 253–69. See the essay in Lee’s Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (London: W. Stachell, 1881), p. 104. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 144. Angela Leighton, ‘Resurrections of the Body: Women Writers and the Idea of the Renaissance’, in Unfolding the South: Nineteenth Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy 1789–1900, ed. Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 222–38 (p. 235).

Notes

205

63. Zorn, Vernon Lee, p. xxix. Zorn further comments, ‘coming late to an interest in the Woman Question, [Lee] mentioned to Karl Pearson in 1888 that he had actually first drawn her attention “to that question, which the exceptional good fortune of my life had me to despise” (13 March 1888). A decade later, she would credit Charlotte Perkins Gilman for having “converted” her to the Woman Question’ (p. 3). 64. Vanessa D. Dickerson, Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996), p. 5. 65. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece ((Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 52.

Afterword: Looking Back With an Eye to the Future 1. James I. Porter, ‘Reception Studies: Future Prospects’, in A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 469–81 (p. 469). The scant details of the lives of Augusta Webster, Emily Pfeiffer and Mona Caird are cases in point. 2. Ibid., p. 478. 3. Rich’s ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1971) is reprinted in full in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose, selected and ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York and London: Norton & Co., 1975, 1993), pp. 166–77. 4. For example, see DuPlessis’ ‘Medusa’ in Wells (1980); Plath’s ‘Edge’ in Collected Poems (1981), and Susan Gilbert’s ‘Bas Relief: Bacchante’, which appeared in the Massachsetts Review (Winter, 1976). Poems reprinted in Alicia Ostriker, Writing Like a Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 134. Margaret Atwood’s revision of myth is extensive, but one thinks of Atwood’s Circe/Mud poems and The Penelopiad as particularly rich examples. The novels of Christa Wolf, Kassandra (1983) and Medea (1996) are similarly suggestive. 5. Ostriker, Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 221. Ostriker cites Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ and DuPlessis’ ‘Medusa’ as examples. 6. Ibid., p. 212–13. 7. Drucilla Cornell, ‘Feminine Writing, Metaphor, and Myth’, in Between Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Dorota Glowacka and Stephen Boos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 161–85 (p. 181). 8. Diane Purkiss, ‘Women’s Re-writing of Myth’, in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, ed. Carolyne Larrington (London: Pandora Press, 1992), pp. 441–57 (p. 442). 9. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, p. 217. 10. Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One, trans Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 76. 11. For a more detailed discussion of Irigaray’s essentialist position in relation to myth see Cornell, ‘Feminist Writing’, pp. 168–74. 12. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, p. 211. 13. Hélène Cixous, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I. B. Tauris, 1975, 1996), p. 96. 14. Ibid., p. 97.

Bibliography

Private papers of Amy Levy are held in the Camellia Collection of the Amy Levy Archive, Kent, UK. The letters and diaries of ‘Michael Field’ are held in microfiche and folio form at the British Library, London. Further correspondence and papers of Michael Field are held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Correspondence between Emily Pfeiffer and John Blackie is held at the National Library of Scotland, as is the letter between Augusta Webster and John Blackie.

Primary sources Anonymous, Review of ‘A Newnham Student’s Poems’, The Literary World (5 August 1881). Anonymous, Review of ‘The Tale of Troy’, The Times (31 May 1883). Anonymous, Review of Michael Field’s Callirrhoë, The Spectator (24 May 1884). Anonymous, Review of Amy Levy’s A Minor Poet and Other Verse, Oxford Magazine 17 (15 October 1884). Anonymous, Obituary for Emily Pfeiffer, The Academy (19 April 1890). Anonymous, Review of Swinburne, The Academy 53 (1 January 1898). Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, [1966] 1979). Allen, Grant, ‘Plain Words on the Woman Question’, Fortnightly Review 52 (October, 1889): 448–58. Aristotle, The Works of Aristotle Translated into English, trans. W. D. Ross et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). —— The Complete Works of Aristotle, revised Oxford translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Arnold, Matthew, Schools and Universities on the Continent (London, 1868). —— Culture and Anarchy: an Essay in Social and Political Criticism [London: Smith & Elder, 1869], ed. and intro. Ian Gregor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971). Babbington White [Mrs Mary Elizabeth Braddon], Circe, or Three Acts in the Life of an Artist, vol. I (London: Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1867). Bachofen, Johann Jakob, Myth, Religion and Mother Right [Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1926], trans. Ralph Manheim and intro. Joseph Campbell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, Aurora Leigh [London: Chapman & Hall, 1856], reproduced in Selected Poems (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). —— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, 4th edn, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1898). Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs Du Mal [Paris, 1857], ed. and intro. Graham Chesters (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995). Bradley, Andrew, ‘Old Mythology in Modern Poetry’, Macmillan’s Magazine 44 (May, 1881): 28–47. Browning, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Brownings’ Correspondence, ed. P. Kelley, R. Hudson and S. Lewis, 12 vols (Winfield: Wedgestone Press, 1984–94). 206

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208 Bibliography —— Works and Days: From the Journals of Michael Field, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore (London: J. Murray, 1933). Gladstone, William, ‘Address on the Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order of the World, Delivered Before the University of Edinburgh on the third November, 1865’ (London, 1865). Gosse, Edmund, Portraits and Sketches (London: Heinemann, 1912). —— The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Macmillan, 1917). Greg, William Rathbone, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’ National Review (1862), reprinted in Literary and Social Judgments (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873). Grillparzer, Franz, Das Goldene Vlieβ [1821], The Golden Fleece, trans. Arthur Burkhard (Yarmouth Port, MA: Register Press, 1942, 1956). Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure [London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1895], ed. Norman Page (New York, London: Norton & Co., 1978). Harrison, Jane Ellen, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion [1903] 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922). —— Ancient Art and Ritual (London: Thornton, Butterfield Ltd., 1913). —— Alpha and Omega (London, 1915). —— Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1919). —— Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (London: Cambridge University Press, 1921). Hazlitt, William, ‘On Classical Education’, in Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and A. Glover, with an introduction by W. E. Henley, in 13 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1901–2), vol. I. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], trans. A. V. Miller; analysis and foreword J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). —— Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History [1837], trans. H. B. Nisbet, intro. Duncan Forbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, trans. and notes M. L. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 1990). —— The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu, revised D. C. H. Rieu and Peter Jones (London: Penguin, 1991). James, Henry, ‘George Eliot’, Atlantic Monthly (May, 1885). Kenealy, Arabella, ‘Talent of Motherhood’, National Review 16 (December 1890): 446–59. Knox, Robert, The Races of Men: a Fragment (London: H. Renshaw, 1850). Lee, Vernon, Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (London, W. Stachell, 1881). —— Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance, vol. I (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884) [Kessinger reprints]. —— Hauntings: and Other Fantastic Tales [London: W. Heinemann, 1890], ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Broadview, 2006). —— Vanitas: Polite Stories [London: W. Heinemann, 1892] (Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 2004). —— ‘Dionysus in the Eugean Hills’, Contemporary Review 120 (September, 1921): 346–53. Leigh, Arran [pseud. Katharine Bradley], The New Minnesinger (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1875). Levy, Amy, Junior Prize Review of ‘Aurora Leigh’ in Kind Words, n.d. [probably 1874].

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210 Bibliography Pausanias, A Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Omerod, 5 vols (New York: Putnam, 1926). Pfeiffer, Emily, Poems (London, 1876). —— Sonnets and Songs, new edn (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1880). —— Under the Aspens: Lyrical and Dramatic [1881] (London: Kegan Paul, 1882). —— The Rhyme of the Lady of the Rock and How it Grew (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1884). —— Flying Leaves from East and West (London: Field & Tuer, 1885). —— ‘The Suffrage for Women’, in The Contemporary Review (1885). —— Sonnets, revised and enlarged (London: Field & Tuer, 1886). —— Women and Work (London: Trübner & Co., 1887). —— Flowers of the Night (London: Trübner & Co., 1889). Pierce, F. E., ‘The Hellenic Current in English Nineteenth Century Poetry’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 16 (1917): 103–35. Plato, Republic, trans. and intro. Desmond Lee, 2nd edn (London: Penguin, [1955] 1987). —— Lysis, Phaedrus and Symposium: Plato on Homosexuality, trans. Benjamin Jowett with selected retranslation and intro. Eugene O’Connor (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991). Reece, Robert, Agamemnon and Cassandra, or, The Prophet and Loss of Troy; A Classical Burlesque (London, 1868). Robertson, Erich S., English Poetesses: a Series of Critical Biographies with Illustrative Extracts (London: Cassell & Co., 1883). Robinson, A. Mary F., The Crowned Hippolytus (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1881). —— The Collected Poems, Lyrical and Narrative (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902). Rossetti, Christina, The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (London: Macmillan & Co., 1906). —— The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, [2001] 2005). Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Poems (London: F. S. Ellis, 1870). —— The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911). Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, revised and enlarged (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., [1865]). —— The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm (London: George Allen, [1869] 1905). —— Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, ed. C. E. Norton, 2 vols (New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1904). —— ‘Labour and Trade’, Unto This Last and Other Essays on Art and Political Economy (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), p. 255. Russell, Dora, Hypatia, or Woman and Knowledge (London: Kegan Paul, 1925). Sandys, John Edwin, The Bacchae of Euripides, with critical and explanatory notes and with numerous illustrations from works of ancient art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1880). Smith, J. Moyr, Ancient Greek Female Costume (London: Low et al., 1882). Stephen, Leslie, ‘George Eliot’, unsigned obituary article, Cornhill Magazine 43 (February, 1881): 152–68. Swanwick, Anna, The Dramas of Aeschylus, 4th edn (London: George Bell & Sons, [1873] 1899). Swinburne, Algernon Charles, Atalanta in Calydon [London: E. Moxon & Co., 1865] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880). —— Notes on Poems and Reviews (London: J. C. Hotten, 1866).

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228 Bibliography Skinner, Marilyn, ‘Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological Approaches to Women in Antiquity’, Helios 13:2 (1987): 9–30. Slinn, E. Warwick, ‘Dramatic Monologue’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 80–98. Smith, Elise Lawton, Evelyn Pickering de Morgan and the Allegorical Body (London: Associated University Presses, 2002). Smith, Logan Pearsall, Reperusals and Recollections (New York: Books for Libraries, [1937] 1968). Snyder, Jane McIntosh, Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho (Chichester and New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Songe-Møller, Vigdis, Philosophy Without Women: the Birth of Sexism in Western Thought (London and New York: Continuum, 2002). Spencer, T., Fair Greece, Sad Relic: Literary Philhellenism from Shakespeare to Byron (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954). Stoddart, Judith, ‘The Morality of Poems and Ballads: Swinburne and Ruskin’, in The Whole Music of Passion: New Essays on Swinburne, ed. Rikky Rooksby and Nicholas Shrimpton (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1993), pp. 92–106. Stray, Christopher, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). —— (ed.), Classics in 19th and 20th Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, supplement 24 (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999). —— ‘Curriculum and Style in the Collegiate University: Classics in NineteenthCentury Oxbridge’, in History of Universities, vol. XVI/2, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 183–218. —— (ed.), Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800–2000 (London: Duckworth, 2007). Sturgeon, Mary, Michael Field (London: George G. Harrap, 1922). Sussman, Herbert, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Sutphin, Christine, ‘The Representation of Women’s Heterosexual Desire in Augusta Webster’s “Circe” and “Medea in Athens” ’, Women’s Writing 5:3 (1998): 373–93. —— ‘Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery Saints: Augusta Webster’s “A Castaway” and Victorian Discourses on Prostitution and Women’s Sexuality’, Victorian Poetry 38:4 (2000): 511–32. Taplin, Oliver, Greek Fire (London: Cape, 1989). Thomas, Carol G. (ed.), Paths from Ancient Greece (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998). Thomson, Bruce, Franz Grillparzer (Boston: Twayne, 1981). Tosh, John, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Treby, Ivor, The Michael Field Catalogue: a Book of Lists (Bury St Edmunds: De Blackland Press, 1998). —— A Shorter Sh¯ıraz¯ad (Bury St Edmunds: De Blackland Press, 1999). —— Uncertain Rain: the Sundry Spells of Michael Field (Bury St Edmunds: De Blackland Press, 2002). Trelawny, Edward John, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, 2nd edn (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, [1858] 1859).

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Index Academy, 83, 124, 190, 197 Actresses’ Franchise League, 70, 72 adultery, 38, 40, 100, 105–6 Aeschylus, 11, 87, 90, 91, 92, 100, 101, 102, 105, 107, 129, 193, 198, 199 Agamemnon, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 99, 101, 103, 105, 191 Eumenides, 89, 110 Oresteia, 87–94, 99, 105, 133, 156, 190, 191 Prometheus Bound, 28–30, 150–1 Suppliant Maidens, 148, 150, 202 aesthetic, aestheticism, 10, 112, 129, 130, 131, 143, 159, 160 Agamemnon, 85, 92, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 194 Allen, Grant, 15, 16, 89, 179, 191 Amazon, 4, 102, 138 Ancient Greece, 1, 2, 10, 38, 45, 54, 63, 80, 91, 111, 114, 117, 122, 129, 136, 175 anima, 45 anti-feminist, 4, 62, 98, 141, 148 anti-Semitism, 71, 72 Aphrodite, 62, 136, 201 Apollo, Apollonian, 19, 86, 87, 92–4, 97, 98, 129, 141, 193 Apollodorus, 92, 192, 194, 198 Apollonius Rhodius, 182, 200 Apuleius, 11 archaeology, 18, 91 Argonautica, 37, 45, 184 Argonauts, 34, 43, 200–1 Aristotle, 5, 6, 62, 101, 157, 176 Politics, 5, 176 Arnold, Matthew, 46, 63, 124, 189 Culture and Anarchy, 8, 76, 112, 124, 197 Arnold, Thomas, 5 Arran Leigh, see Katharine Bradley Artemis, 126, 134, 139, 200 Aspasia, 66 Atalanta, 134, 135, 139 Athena, 92

Athenaeum, 27 Athens, 2, 3, 5, 18, 20, 22, 33, 34, 39, 58, 59, 61, 66, 68, 89, 104, 117, 131, 132 Bacchae, 113, 126, 128, 129, 132, 133, 140, 198 Bacchants, 24, 25, 113, 114, 131, 135, 137, 149, 155, 156 Bacchus, Bacchic, 111, 131, 133; see also Dionysus Bachofen, J. J., 7, 23, 88, 115 Barker, Wright, 47 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 10, 11, 12, 30, 61, 86, 90, 112, 178 An Essay on Mind, 12 Aurora Leigh, 10, 11, 56, 186 The Battle of Marathon, 11 Prometheus, 28 Bell, Mrs C. M., 47 Berenson, Bernard, 114, 122 Bion, 11 Blackie, Professor John Stuart, 13, 28, 31, 84, 178, 182, 190 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth [Babbington White], 48, 184 Bradley, Katherine, 59, 119, 186; see also Michael Field British Museum, 8, 9, 16, 73, 121 Brough, Robert, 36 Browning, Robert, 56, 90, 111, 121, 143, 160, 194, 196, 197 Buchanan, Robert, 139, 200 Burges, George, 28 burlesque, musical, 7, 20, 36, 128 Burnard, F. C., 47 Burne-Jones, Edward, 35, 47 Butler, Josephine, 50 Butler, Samuel, 47 Byron, Lord Gordon, 17, 127–8 Caird, Mona, 24, 25, 144, 174, 202 Daughters of Danaus, 148–57, 183, 202 Calydonian Boar Hunt, 134, 135, 199 Cambridge Ritualists, 22, 181 231

232 Index Cambridge University, 4, 6, 14, 18, 22, 24, 160, 180 Greek play, 22, 96 Carlyle, Thomas, 95 Cassandra, 24, 85, 86, 91–103, 110, 192, 193 Charterhouse Grammar, 12, 31 children, and classical literature, 7 Christianity, 114, 115, 142, 143, 148, 165, 195 Chthonic gods, 19, 22, 105, 113, 115, 124, 129, 136, 181 Church, Alfred J., 47 Circe, 32, 33, 45–53, 166, 184 Cixous, Hélène, 88, 89, 98, 100, 173, 191 classics access to learning, 4, 7, 10, 119 classical tripos, 6, 14 dictionaries, 7 home education, 10, 12, 112, 116, 118–20 women and the classics, passim, 10–17, 33, 112, 116, 118–19, 178 closet drama, 24, 70 Clytemnestra, 24, 85, 86, 89, 91, 92, 93, 100–10, 149, 193 Cobbe, Frances Power, 50, 85 Coleridge, Mary, 13 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 28 Collier, John, 91, 138 Contagious Diseases Acts, 89 Contemporary Review, 30, 83, 107, 194 Cook, A. B., 22 Cooper, Edith, see Field, Michael Cornford, Francis, 22 Cory, William, 13 Danaids, 148–52, 202 Darwin, Charles; Social Darwinism, 62, 156 daughters, 18, 20, 31, 91, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 119, 126, 138, 141, 142, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 156 Davies, Emily, 14, 15 decadence, 112 Demeter, 19, 22 democracy, 2, 3, 5, 68, 88, 150

De Morgan, Evelyn, 183 Cassandra, 91 Medea, 35, 183 Dionysian, 19, 23, 68, 85, 113, 114, 129, 130, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 149, 155, 156, 159, 164 Dionysus, 19, 20, 22, 25, 111, 112, 113, 126–44, 154, 155, 198, 200, 203 Diotima, 65 divorce Divorce Act, legislation, 35, 39–40, 42 Divorce Court, 39, 42 domestic politics, 5, 150, 153, 157 Dowling, Linda, 9 education, 4–7, 12, 13, 15, 56, 98, 112, 118–20, 160, 176 Education Act (1870, 1876), 13 education boards, 16, 27 educational reform, 13, 15, 28, 84, 120, 176, 190 see also classics; scholarship; schools Eliot, George, 10, 11–12, 35, 54, 61, 90, 95, 176, 178, 190 Adam Bede, 35 Daniel Deronda, 35 Felix Holt, 35 Middlemarch, 187, 190 Eliot, T. S., 23, 181 emasculation, 45, 48, 77, 106, 125, 135, 139 enfranchisement, 35 Eros, eros, 22, 63, 112, 113, 118, 124, 130, 198 erotic, eroticism, 65, 94, 102, 112, 115–18, 123, 124, 127, 130, 133, 136, 143, 169, 194 Euripides, 11, 33, 34, 36, 39, 44, 69, 70, 81, 87, 92, 101, 104, 125, 129, 133, 145, 193 Bacchae, 113, 126, 128, 129, 132, 133, 140, 198 Electra, 102 Hippolytus, 125 Iphigenia in Aulis, 94, 102, 104 Medea, 33, 39, 69, 70, 71, 79, 153, 154, 163, 165, 166, 167 The Trojan Women, 92, 94 evolution, evolutionary, 88, 156, 157

Index family, familial, 5, 11, 19, 24, 25, 38, 40–4, 55, 58, 64, 65, 80, 104, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 157, 162, 163, 164, 166 fathers, fatherhood, 12, 40, 58, 80, 104, 139 feminine, 13, 22, 24, 60, 61, 67, 77, 87, 102, 106, 129, 132, 133, 134, 166, 167; see also gender femininity 19, 50, 61, 102, 103, 143, 150, 152, 157, 162, 170, 171, 172, 173 feminism, feminist, feminists, 15, 22, 23, 25, 33, 36, 64,69, 87, 92, 96, 102, 109, 138, 149, 150, 156, 160, 171, 172, 174, 187, 194 Field, Michael, 24, 25, 70, 86, 111–44, 158, 159, 174, 203 Bellerophôn, 25, 112, 113, 118, 123, 124–7, 197 Callirrhoë, 25, 112, 113, 114, 118, 123–44, 197, 198 ‘Dionysus Zagreus’, 115, 143 Long Ago, 113, 117, 118, 122, 123, 197 New Minnesinger, 59, 119 Works and Days, 194, 195, 196, 197 Foucault, Michel, 117, 177, 196 Frazer, Sir James, The Golden Bough, 21, 22 Freud, Sigmund, 23, 88, 89, 98, 191 Furies, 89, 101, 106, 110, 137 Garnett, Constance, 29 gender, 19, 33, 41, 45, 59, 68, 78, 87, 89, 102, 105, 107, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 125, 132, 140, 143, 158, 164 Girton College, 14, 182 Gladstone, William, 46, 84, 90, 181, 184, 190 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8, 56 Golden Fleece, 34, 77, 165 Greece, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 76, 78, 92, 111, 122, 128, 155, 165 Greek as ‘coded’ discourse 10, 116, 117, 118, 196 culture, passim dress, 84, 191 and homosexuality, 9–10, 63, 64–5, 196

233

language, 13, 57, 61, 76, 116 literature, passim, 31, 84, 168, 176 philosophy, 6, 55–69, 84, 112, 120, 160, 177 scholarship, 12, 16, 28, 30–2, 58–9, 84, 112, 118–21, 122, 128, 159, 160, 172, 174, 176 tragedy, 11, 19, 20, 21, 25, 79, 86, 90, 124, 129, 132, 133, 141, 142, 150–1 Greek Anthology, 7 Greek Movement, 9 Grillparzer, Franz, 36, 69, 72–3, 81, 188–9 Grote, George, 7 Hacker, Arthur, 47 Haldane, Naomi M., 24 Hall, Edith, 7, 35, 47, 102, 144, 176, 184 Hardwick, Lorna, 28 Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure, 4, 176 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 18, 22–4, 95, 115, 116, 180, 181, 195 Alpha and Omega, 22 Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 22 Mythology and Monuments, 21 Myths of the Odyssey, 21 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 22 Themis, 22 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 7 Hazlitt, William, Classical Gazetteer, 7 H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 23 Heine, Heinrich, 69 Helen, 104 Hellenism, 1–5, 8–10, 12, 18, 19, 21–4, 25, 26, 32, 71, 111, 122, 124, 130, 132, 133, 140, 143, 146, 159, 160, 171, 174, 175, 177, 179 Henley, W. E., 11 Heraud, John, Medea, 7 Hermes, 46 heroines, 24–5, 54, 141, 142, 145, 146, 149 heroism, 21, 79, 87, 101, 134, 139, 140, 141 Hesiod, 150 Theogony, 5, 198 Works and Days, 5

234 Index heterosexuality, 52, 63 Homer, 11, 51, 90, 91, 101, 200 Iliad, 85, 91, 198 Odyssey, 45, 51, 85, 90, 91, 100, 184 Homeric scholarship, 11, 46–8 homoeroticism, 10, 63, 64, 65, 130 homosexuality, 9–10, 63, 64 Hungerford, Margaret, ‘The Duchess’, 48 husbands, 36, 39, 41, 42, 58, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 75, 79, 84, 90, 100–7, 139, 145, 149, 151, 152, 153, 163, 185 hysteria, 98, 156, 162, 193 immigration, 71, 73, 74, 75 Infant Custody Act, 40 infanticide, 34, 37, 40, 71, 79, 80, 104, 165, 166, 183, 189 infection, 74–5 inheritance, 25, 156, 170 Io, 150, 152 Iphigenia, 20, 101, 104, 105, 107, 141 Irigary, Luce, 65, 173, 187 Italy, 5, 17, 121, 147, 148, 158, 160, 161, 163 Jason, 34, 37–44, 71, 75, 76, 77–9, 147, 153, 167, 184, 201 Jebb, Richard, 47 Jenkyns, Richard, 5, 9, 46 Jews, Judaism, Anglo-Jewry, 55, 71–4, 185, 187–9 Jowett, Benjamin, 6, 9, 63, 187 Kallimachos, 182 Kenealy, Arabella, 4, 176 Kingsley, Charles, 7 Knox, Robert, 74 Lamia, 43, 47, 184 Landor, Walter Savage, 13, 176 Lang, Andrew, 47 Latin, 12, 13, 16, 56, 58, 59, 112, 119, 121 Lee, Vernon, 24, 25, 136, 144, 174, 203 ‘Amour Dure’, 157–70, 183 Lee-Hamilton, Eugene, 160 Leigh, Arran, 59, 123, 124; see also Field, Michael Leighton, Frederick, 91

Lemprière, John, Bibliotheca Classica, 7 lesbian, 117, 118, 126, 138, 196 Levy, Amy, 16, 24, 54–82, 122, 149, 158, 159–60, 167, 173, 185, 203 classical education, 54 Harum Scarum, 56 Kind Words, 56 Medea, a Fragment, 54, 55, 69–82 A Minor Poet and Other Verse, 54, 69, 81 Reuben Sachs, 71 ‘Run to Death’, 71, 81 ‘Women and Club Life’, 16, 179 ‘Xantippe’, 54, 55, 57–69 Xantippe and Other Verse, 72 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 89, 187 The Modern Revolt, 3–4, 62, 141, 176, 187, 191, 201 Literary World, 57, 69 Mackay, Charles, 95, 191 Maenads, Maenadism, 22, 24, 114, 123, 124, 126, 127, 131, 133, 135–44, 155 marriage, 15, 32, 35–6, 38–9, 40, 42, 44, 52, 58, 64, 68, 77, 100, 108, 109, 136, 147–57, 162, 183–5 companionate, 42, 64, 153 legislation, 89, 151 marital infidelity, 33, 76, 100; see also adultery Martineau, Harriet, 50 masculinity, 41, 52, 139, 140, 200 masculine, 12, 14, 15, 16, 21, 61, 68, 78, 79, 87, 95, 99, 100, 106, 107, 122, 125, 132, 135; see also gender maternal, maternity, 88, 103, 105, 108, 133, 141, 147, 153, 156, 157, 163, 166 matriarchy, matriarchal, 22–3, 26, 88, 102, 104 matricide, 110 Matrimonial Causes Act, 41 Medea, 24, 32–45, 69–82, 89, 91, 145–70, 182–4, 201 Men and Women’s Club, 16 mentors, male, 12, 13, 31, 156 Meredith, George, 95, 192 militancy, 100, 108–10, 149, 164 Mill, John Stuart, 3, 42, 63, 184 The Subjection of Women, 42, 64, 187 misogyny, 5, 6, 66, 133, 154, 164

Index modernist writers, 23 monologue, dramatic, 37, 48–9, 59, 70, 184 Moore, George, 112 Morris, William, 32, 47, 48, 160 motherhood, mothers, 15, 40, 44, 50, 61, 62, 80, 83, 85, 87, 88, 93, 100, 102–5, 107, 108, 110, 119, 139, 141, 148, 153 republican notions of, 3–4, 80, 149 Müller, Max, Comparative Mythology, 7 Murray, Gilbert, 22, 36, 121 myth, 1, 7, 21, 22, 25, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 45, 52, 71, 92, 98, 111, 112, 115, 117, 125, 127, 128, 134, 136, 149, 150, 152, 157, 158, 163, 165, 170, 171–4 mythmaking, 19, 55, 82, 69, 91, 123, 150, 157, 165, 166, 172–3 mythology, 5, 148 Newman, Francis W., 47 Newnham College, 15, 55, 72, 84, 119, 188 New Woman, 25, 141, 146, 148, 201 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, 8, 19, 20, 128, 129, 159, 180, 203 Nightingale, Florence, Cassandra, 96–7, 192 Odysseus, 46, 48, oikos, 3, 44, 66, 75, 78, 140, 141 Olympian gods, 19, 22, 23, 105, 113, 114, 134 Orestes, 88, 89, 93, 106, 110 Oriental female, 81, 147 Orientalism, 75 Ovid, 34, 56, 107, 163, 166 Metamorphoses, 34, 45, 167, 182, 184 Oxford Magazine, 82, 189 Oxford University, 4, 5, 6, 9, 14, 16, 22, 64, 90, 180 paganism, 112–15, 118, 142, 143, 148, 165 Paget, Violet, see Lee, Vernon Paley, F. A., 28 Pandora, 5 Parthenon, 18 marbles 8

235

Pater, Walter, 8–9, 19, 63, 118, 121, 122, 130–2, 158, 159, 177, 199, 203 The Renaissance 8, 130, 168 patriarchy, 23, 24 patriarchal, 21, 23, 24, 41, 43, 87, 88, 100, 102, 103, 104, 129, 137, 141, 152, 156, 157, 164, 166 Pausanias, 92, 192, 194 pederasty, 2, 63, 66, 187 paiderastia, 9 pederastia, 121 Pericles, 59 Persephone, 19, 115, 136 Petronius, Satyricon, 45, 184 Pffeifer, Emily, 13, 24, 70, 83–110, 149, 164, 174, 180, 190–4 Flying Leaves from East and West, 17–18, 99 ‘Hellas’, 17 Kassandra, 86–100 Klytemnestra, 86, 100–10 Sonnets and Songs, 86 Studies from the Antique, 85–110 Women and Work, 83, 98, 107, 108, 194 Pizan, Christine de, 163, 166–7 Planché, James Robinson, 35 Plato, 3, 6, 10, 57, 58, 60, 66–8, 168 Menexenus, 66 Phaedo, 58, 60 Republic, 6, 18, 58, 60, 64, 65 Symposium, 58, 63–6, 187 Platonic philosophy, 10, 55, 57, 64–6 polis, 3, 44, 61, 66, 67, 68, 75, 76, 78, 89, 110, 131, 133, 135, 139, 140, 141, 142, 155 politics, 4, 5, 24, 57, 59, 66, 81, 88, 89, 100, 108, 109, 131, 149, 151, 160, 163 Prometheus, 5, 21 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), 11, 28–32, 150 prostitute, prostitution, 28, 83 Punch magazine, 16 Purvis, Billy, 7 Pythagorean philosophers, 5–6 rape, 92, 94, 97, 104, 108 reception, of classics, 28–32, 36, 46–8, 90, 123, 128, 144, 163 Reece, Robert, 90

236 Index religion, 18, 19, 22, 72, 112, 113, 124, 126–31, 133, 135–43 revenge, 34, 42, 43, 58, 78, 79, 81, 86, 87, 89, 92, 100, 104–8, 133, 134, 139, 147, 148, 154, 163, 193 revolution, 4, 25, 29, 88, 95, 126, 127, 132, 137–8, 141, 142, 150, 154 Robbins, Eliza, 7 Robinson, Mary F., 29, 125, 159, 198, 203 Rome, 2, 120 Rossetti, Christina, 28, 86, 87, 136, 181, 182 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 86, 95, 97, 184, 190, 192 ‘The Wine of Circe’, 47 Ruskin, John, 48, 184, 197 Russell, Dora, 23 sacrifice, 20, 42, 56, 64, 68, 76, 93, 104, 127, 128, 133, 135, 141, 142, 149, 152, 156 sage discourse, 94–7, 192 Sandys, George Frederick, Medea, 35, 147 Sandys, John Edwin, 128 Sappho, 117, 123, 124, 133, 136 Schliemann, Heinrich, 91 scholarship 19 women and, 11–13, 174; see also classics; education; Greek schools, 4, 11, 13–14 Brighton High School, 55, 56 Charterhouse, 4, 10, 116 Eton, 4, 90 Harrow, 4, 90 Queens, 13 Rugby 4, 5 Second Reform Bill, 42 Segal, Charles, 46 Sellers, Eugenie, 95 Seneca, 107, 163, 166, 167, 182 sex, sexuality, 2, 24, 38, 45, 47, 49, 83, 93–4, 98, 105, 112, 113, 116, 117, 124, 127, 135, 138, 159, 167, 172, 173, 195 sexual desire, 127–8, 135–6, 147, 172 sexual double standard, 41, 45, 52, 67, 99, 101, 117, 148

sexual equality, 57 sexual immorality, 38, 50, 162 sexual jealousy, 44, 99, 102, 103, 107, 148 sexual morality, 33, 39, 125, 127 sexual politics, 2, 10, 29, 98, 105, 116, 117, 123, 129, 162 sexual violence, 104, 113, 118, 124, 125, 126, 135–6, 162 Shelley, Mary, 28, 116 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 17, 28, 56, 63, 116, 127, 128, 132, 175 Sidgwick, Professor Henry, 15 Sirens, 46 Socrates, 1, 3, 9, 54, 58, 63 Socratic philosophy, 57–67, 129 sonnet, 83, 86, 87, 97, 103, 110, 160, 191 Sophocles, 11, 101, 102 sorcery, 32, 34, 43, 166 statues, Greek, 8, 9, 76 supernatural, 77, 131, 146, 159, 166, 169 Swanwick, Anna, 29, 30, 85, 90, 122 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 8, 19, 56, 112, 118, 123–5, 132, 136, 139, 143, 144, 197, 198, 201 Atalanta in Calydon, 124, 125, 127, 132–5, 139, 143 Erechtheus, 143 Poems and Ballads, 124, 200 Symonds, John Addington, 8, 9, 47, 63, 118, 125, 159, 177, 197 Taunton Commission, 13 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 47, 95, 192 theatre, 20, 35 Theocritus, 11 Thomson, James, 54, 58–9, 82, 185 Thucydides, 5, 186 Tozer, Henry Fanshawe, 3 tragedy, Greek, 19–20, 28, 36, 79, 86, 90, 129, 132, 133, 141, 142, 191 transformation, 45, 52, 166 translation, 11, 28–32, 63, 172, 174, 182 transmission, of classical learning, 4, 25, 28–30, 156, 157, 158, 172, 174 travel, 17, 18, 72, 84, 119, 121, 148, 150, 158, 177, 180, 188 Troy, 91, 92; Trojan, 91, 104 Turner, J. M. W., 47

Index universities Bristol, 14, 120, 128, 197 London, 14, 180 Manchester New College, 14 University College, London, 159 see also Cambridge University; Oxford University Verrall, Margaret de Gaudrion, 21 victim, victimization, 33, 42, 84, 85, 86, 91, 101, 102, 104, 125, 138, 146, 148 Victorian England, 1–5, 39, 42, 50, 80, 129 Victorian Hellenism, passim, 9, 10, 18, 23, 25, 112 violence, women and, 33, 40, 86, 87, 89, 99,100, 103, 105, 106, 109, 112, 124, 140, 143, 146, 149, 151, 154, 163, 172 Virgil, 119 Aeneid, 45, 184 virgin, virginity, 93, 94, 134, 141, 148, 166 Warr, George Professor, 90, 95, 192 Waterhouse, John William, 47 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 27 Webster, Augusta, 12, 16, 24, 27–53, 59, 83, 107, 149, 150, 158, 159, 173, 178, 181, 182, 185 A Castaway, 28, 38 Circe, 32, 45–53 A Housewife’s Opinions, 33

237

Medea, translation of, 28, 36 Medea in Athens, 32, 33–45, 70 Portraits, 32, 33, 45 Prometheus, 28–9 Webster, Thomas, 29, 31 Westminster Review, 30, 149 Wheelwright, Edith, 146–8 Wilde, Oscar, 8, 9, 112, 118, 136, 160, 177 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 8 witch, witchcraft, 32, 43, 47, 166 wives, 37, 40, 50, 87, 100, 102, 144, 149 ‘Woman Question’, 130, 146, 150, 169, 203 women education of, 2, 7, 11–16, 29, 56, 69, 84, 90, 118–22 in Greek society, 5, 20, 21, 59, 61–9, 157, 186 and power, 66, 89, 103, 107, 109, 146, 149, 164, 169–70 rights of, 27, 36–7, 56, 66, 72, 102, 108, 109 , 146, 150 writers, 2, 16, 19–21, 23, 26, 34, 83, 92, 130, 146, 170, 171–4, 178 Women’s Social and Political Union, 70, 109 Woolf, Virginia, 23, 116, 195 ‘Xantippe’, 54, 57, 58, 60, 64, 66, 67, 82, 89 Zeus, 5, 29, 104, 113, 195

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