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Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination
Abstract
The prevailing assumption regarding the Victoriansâ relationship to ancient Greece is that Greek knowledge constituted an exclusive discourse within elite male domains. Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination challenges that theory and argues that while the information women received from popular sources was fragmentary and often fostered intellectual insecurities, it was precisely the ineffability of the Greek world refracted through popular sources and reconceived through new fields of study that appealed to women writersâ imaginations. Examining underconsidered sources such as theater history and popular journals, Shanyn Fiske uncovers the many ways that women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy without formal classical training. Through discussions of women writers such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Jane Harrison, Heretical Hellenism demonstrates that women established the foundations of a heretical challenge to traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about womenâs place in literary history. Heretical Hellenism provides a historical rationale for a more expansive definition of classical knowledge and offers an interdisciplinary method for understanding the place of classics both in the nineteenth century and in our own time.
... Arguing that Hellenism simultaneously supported contemporary power structures and challenged Victorian certainties (Goldhill, 2002(Goldhill, , 2011Stray, 1998Stray, , 2018, they have emphasized its contribution to artistic innovation and social critique as well as to the representation of matters related to gender and sexuality (Dowling, 1994;Evangelista, 2009;Fiske, 2008;Hurst, 2006;Olverson, 2009;Prins, 1999Prins, , 2017. 1 This essay sheds light on a particular moment in late Victorian culture when Modern Greece by contrast becomes the focus of representation through popular genres. The proliferation of literary texts on Modern Greece in British nineteenth-century magazines reveals the country's appeal to the Victorians' imagination, inviting them to envisage the birth and development of the new nation after the War of Independence (1821)(1822)(1823)(1824)(1825)(1826)(1827)(1828). ...
This article examines the proliferation of popular literary texts about Modern Greece in nineteenth‐century British periodicals from the 1860s to the 1890s, texts that reveal the country's appeal to the Victorians, inviting them to imagine the birth and development of the new nation after the War of Independence (1821–1828). Short stories published in popular magazines, such as the New Monthly Magazine, Bow Bells and Sunday at Home, revisit the Greek Revolution and return to the popular allegory of Greece as an enslaved or endangered woman to reflect on the “Eastern question” and British colonial politics of protectionism in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, women authors like Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds and Isabella Fyvie Mayo, publishing in women's magazines, write stories and articles about the role of women in the Greek War of Independence, relating the feats of these historical or fictional figures to the “woman question” and to Victorian debates on femininity and gender, as well as national and imperial politics. In the late Victorians' re‐imagining of revolutionary history, Modern Greece is not enslaved to its classical past, as in traditional philhellenist representations, but must discover its modernity through its powerful nationalist agents. Revolutionary Greece re‐emerges as a symbolic event through a variety of publications, which often highlight the country's cultural hybridity and construct a transnational network of literary affiliations, creating parallelisms between Greece and Britain.
The vision of mythological Medea allures and repels the Victorians. The late Victorian women writers recognised the powerful figure of the Colchian princess, who has served as the embodiment of female cruelty and brutality. However, women authors saw the need to portray Medea not exclusively as a ruthless killer, but rather as a desperate woman entangled in the web of social, and marital constraints.
One of these writers was Amy Levy, an English poet, whose insights into the Woman Question have recently been rediscovered by literary scholars. In this article, I explore how Medea, as reworked by Levy, personifies the concept of the Other in nineteenth- century English literature. Looking at Medea through the lens of monstrosity theories, I argue that Medea’s depiction becomes symptomatic of the larger problem of perception of unconventional women in late Victorian middle-class society.
Virginia Woolf had an ambivalent relationship with the classical world. As a reader, essayist, and creative writer of catholic tastes, she could not be untouched by the literature of Rome and, to an even greater extent, Greece. In her novel, Orlando: A Biography, myth-inspired metamorphosis as therapy for the creative artist becomes the conceit that drives the entire narrative, through the metamorphosis of the main character and through literary, rather than family, history. For Woolf, metamorphosis is not just about modernist tropes, or ancient mythography, but personal renewal, and this belief underpins two of her other novels of the 1920s: To the Lighthouse and Orlando. The tapestry as a symbol of the overlaps between Greek myth, art, and life, offers a faint echo of Philomela, who wove her autobiography into a tapestry. The myth of Procne and Philomela that underpins this birdsong is certainly one of terrible violence.
This chapter examines the leading, albeit frequently dismissed, twentieth-century professional woman scholar and public intellectual, Jane Ellen Harrison, and her ardent pacifism in response to the First World War, as it puts her in conversation, through her correspondence, commentary, and anti-war, pacifist polemic, ‘Epilogue on the War: Peace with Patriotism’ (1915a), with leading pacifists and anti-war activists such as Bertrand Russell, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Clive Bell, and Gilbert Murray. Her essay ‘War and the Reaction’, which became ‘Epilogue on the War: Peace with Patriotism’ and was a model and important source for Virginia Woolf’s more well-known pacifist essay, Three Guineas, and Harrison’s other essays on war and humanism, ‘Heresy and Humanity’ and ‘Unanism and Conversion’, each collected in Alpha and Omega (1915b and d), add dimension to a discourse on peace, peace-making, and peace-building that has recently sought to historically construct both aesthetic and active resistance to the war, as well as to act as a counter to the myth of war experience (see Jonathan Atkin’s A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War (2002); Jay Winter’s Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20th Century (2006); and Grace Brockington’s Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900–1918 (2010)). Here, I explore Harrison’s engagement with and support of the No Conscription Fellowship and the Union of Democratic Control, led by ‘Goldie’ Dickinson, which she backed at great professional risk, incurring the public wrath of her male, pro-war colleagues at Cambridge; her vehement disagreement with her beloved and respected colleague, Gilbert Murray, one of the early crafters of the League of Nations and her close friend, when, in writing to him, she disputed his assumption that ‘War has its good side’; and her public support, again, at great professional risk, of Bertrand Russell. Harrison was read and respected by, and internationally well known to, her contemporaries as a pacifist and a radical, Cambridge intellectual, but her work as a pacifist remains underrepresented. This chapter seeks to act as a corrective, to fill a gap in a critical history in need of acknowledging and investigating her important contributions and efforts to prevent the war.
This chapter argues that Jane Harrison’s writing on ancient Greek religion constitutes a modernist project to create a new version of a very old religious experience. Harrison took Victorian theories of religion centered on the decline of faith and reworked them to insist on, and celebrate, religion’s persistence into the twentieth century. Linking religion’s increasing prominence with that of women, she claimed a parallel between her present moment and the archaic Greek world of goddess worship she described in her classical studies. In these, Harrison further elaborated an understanding of religion grounded in ritual and mystical experience. Her scholarly books act as sacred texts of this feminist, post-theological religion, and in them scholarship itself comes to offer a peculiarly modern form of ritual practice.
This advertisement for Socratic childrearing appeared anonymously in the November 1820 installment of the women’s journal, the Court Magazine, or La Belle Assemblée.1 As parenting advice, the invitation to humiliate curious infants might be dismissed as unconscionable quackery. But regardless of the long-term psychological riskiness of its proposal, the passage merits consideration for its placement of the Classics in a domestic setting, among “enlightened British ladies.” Such placement defies our conventional understanding of Hellenism, which assigns the reception of Socrates to male public culture—to the university, to the learned historical essay, and the philosophical treatise. Nothing has prepared us for this intrusion of “Grecian” values into the British mother-child relationship.
This article aims to shed light on the semiotic possibilities of Victorian theatre as well as uncovering hidden substrata
of the reception of the Cassandra myth in England. Nineteenth-century refigurations of Cassandra manifested ambivalent contemporary
attitudes towards women and knowledge. Thus, Cassandra paralleled prevailing conceptions of social stereotypes on the periphery
and was equated with false prophets, fortune-tellers, mendicants, witches, and most important for this article, gipsies. An
intertextual analysis of comic refigurations of the myth and stage adaptations of Miguel de Cervantes’ La gitanilla (The Little Gipsy) allow us to understand how Priam’s daughter became Cassandra the gipsy both in highbrow and popular reworkings
of the myth in the Victorian period. As shall be demonstrated, the aesthetic links between Cassandra and the Spanish gipsy
respond to cultural and political paradigms which question the association between women and knowledge.
In this paper I set out to provide a close reading of Carroll's "The Mouse's Tale" with special focus on parts of the Greek mythologicodramatic tradition. I argue that Carroll's poem about a trial involving Fury and a Mouse can be traced to two ancient counterparts who partook in the most famous trial in the Greek mythological tradition: the Furies and Apollo. © 2015 Croatian Association of Researchers in Children's Literature. All Rights Reserved.
Introduction Knowing Greek: Classical Education and English Society Knowing the Ancients: The Classical Scholar at Work Knowing Antigone: Jebb's Sophocles and Woolf's Three Guineas Conclusion Guide to Further Reading References
This paper seeks to analyze Francis Talfourd’s Electra in a New Electric Light (1859) as related to the Victorian stereotype of the strong-minded woman. After a brief introduction on the links between nineteenth-century burlesque and the social history of women in Victorian times, I shall focus on the figure of Electra as epitome of late nineteenth-century representations of New Women.
Resumen: Resumen: El objetivo de este trabajo es el estudio de Electra in a New Electric Light (1859) de Francis Talfourd a partir del estereotipo victoriano de la strong-minded woman. Para ello, tras comentar la relación existente entre el teatro burlesco decimonónico de tema clásico y la historia social de la mujer a lo largo del siglo, nos centraremos en la figura de Electra, y en cómo, acompañada de otras heroínas clásicas, anticipa la representación de la Nueva Mujer de finales de siglo.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) regularly appeared on concert hall and opera house stages in New York and other American cities. Audiences were taken with her striking persona and nontraditional conception of dance, and impressed by her success in Europe. Duncan's artistic, intellectual, and personal self-association with Richard Wagner—a mythological being in the contemporary American imagination—also captured the attention of many audience members. Duncan danced to excerpts from Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and other works while rejecting Wagner's conception of dance; she borrowed language and ideological formulations from his writings while dismissing his aesthetic theories. The American Wagner cult has long been associated with the Gilded Age and conductor Anton Seidl (1850–1898). Isadora Duncan's American performances demonstrate that American Wagnerism persisted well into the twentieth century, albeit in a different form. Conjuring herself as a rebellious disciple of Wagner, Duncan modeled a second generation of American Wagnerism that combined contemporary cultural debates and early modernist aesthetics with strains of Wagner's art and ideologies.
Under the editorship of Oscar Wilde, the Woman’s World exemplified the popular dissemination of Hellenism through periodical culture. Addressing topics such as marriage, politics, and education in relation to the lives of women in the ancient world, the magazine offered an unfamiliar version of the reception of ancient Greece and Rome in late-Victorian aestheticism, one that was accessible to a wide readership because it was often based on images rather than texts. The classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison addressed herself to this audience of women readers, discussing the similarities between modern collegiate life and the “woman’s world†that enabled Sappho to flourish in ancient Greece. The Woman’s World thus questions gender stereotypes by juxtaposing ancient and modern women, implicitly endorsing varied models of womanhood.
Recent scholarship on Victorian writers’ literary responses to the ancient world has moved away from models of classical influence or the classical tradition, drawing rather on theories of reception and intertextuality. The 19th century is prominent in accounts of the reception of Greek and Latin texts, and scholars have begun to explore the dissemination of classical texts to a wide audience through varied forms of translation and adaptation. Studies of literary and popular culture show that creative responses to intensely debated interpretations of classical myth and history helped to shape Victorian thinking about contemporary questions.
Under the editorship of Oscar Wilde, the "Woman's World" exemplified the popular dissemination of Hellenism through periodical culture. Addressing topics such as marriage, politics, and education in relation to the lives of women in the ancient world, the magazine offered an unfamiliar version of the reception of ancient Greece and Rome in late-Victorian aestheticism, one that was accessible to a wide readership because it was often based on images rather than texts. The classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison addressed herself to this audience of women readers, discussing the similarities between modern collegiate life and the "woman's world" that enabled Sappho to flourish in ancient Greece. The "Woman's World" thus questions gender stereotypes by juxtaposing ancient and modern women, implicitly endorsing varied models of womanhood.
Victorian Periodicals Review 38.3 (2005) 337-339
Josephine McDonagh draws on a wide and multifarious context for her subject – child murder. For this "extensive and complex" topic, McDonagh has chosen to concentrate on "discussions of commercial society from the 1720s; anthropological debates about the nature of man in the 1770s ...; debates about the social order following the French Revolution in 1798; the explosive responses to the New Poor Law at the end of the 1830s; and the so-called epidemic of child murder in England around 1859." In each of these contexts, McDonagh demonstrates, "child murder emerges as a motif in which debates of serious nature about key issues in Britain's self-imaginings are conducted" (9–10). Included in these wide-ranging primary sources are also allusions to various contemporary journals such as Illustrated London News, the National, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, National Reformer, Northern Liberator, Northern Star, Pall Mall Gazette.
Beginning with Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees and Swift's Modest Proposal, McDonagh reads infanticide in these texts as vehicles of discussing "the modes and manners of commercial life, the pleasures and pains of luxury, the pitfalls of colonial policies, the corruptions of the state" (15). In Swift's perspective, commerce creates vanity, avarice, dishonesty, vices "tantamount to killing babies" (17–18). Luxury and unlicensed passions for commodities turn "civilized people" into child-eating savages. For Mandeville, "modest" women would not flinch at killing their children if they were unwanted, while "common Whores ... are full of motherly tenderness" (26). Infanticide is an act that "paradoxically contributes to the national good by sustaining the economy of public benefit and private vice" (28).
Burke's influential Reflections on the Revolution in France "emblematized social and political disorder in revolutionary France" through the figure of the "the sexually voracious woman" (68). For Burke, the French Revolution was associated with sexual excess and violence. Mary Wollstonecraft was seen as a dangerous persona of the French Revolution, "a mother without being a wife" (84). Wordsworth and Malthus both "respond to the political risks posed by women at the end of the eighteenth century by absorbing dissident femininity into nature" (71). From that time on child murder is usually associated with "the horror of femininity." Malthus added the possibility that child murder could be one of the "preventive checks" that could help regulate population growth (88). The unmarried mother in "The Thorn" is represented as a "pathetic but traditional and indigenous form of deviancy"(80).
Chapter Four discusses the Anti-Malthusian polemics prevalent in the contemporary press. By 1839 Chartists began to blame infanticide and early childhood death on the industrial culture. A series of articles attack the so-called "Marcus pamphlets," satirizing Malthusian politics as justifications for infanticide. These pamphlets illustrate "the way in which ideas ... circulated within the culture, and were co-opted by different individuals and groups to support widely different political positions: in this case, child murder is incorporated in the rhetoric of people of party and opinion as different as the Tory Radical, Baxter, Chartists of various complexion ... as well as the Owenite, Mudie" (112).
The 1860s saw an epidemic of child murder cases – 12,000 women in London were estimated to be murderers (123). Despite "the tenor of much of the literature on female infanticide in India, the child-murder outbreak in Britain in the late 1850s and 1860s shared many characteristics with its occurrence in India" (144). The most famous child murder in the literature of the period appears in Adam Bede, the genesis of which was based on a story of child murder. In this case McDonagh carefully aligns dates in Eliot's notebooks with sociopolitical events and legislative acts related to child murder. Child murder in Adam Bede, she contends, functions "as the bearer of memories that have to be forgotten for the perpetuation of the nation." However, "the figure of forgetting is also the bearer of those memories that must be forgotten, so that to forget means to remember" (145).
Chapter Six deals...