Classics has always provided a language by which contemporary women could explore their environment and reconcile themselves to their condition. It is a trend that we can see extending from colonial America (Gentilcore 1995) to women’s historical fiction in the twentieth century (Hoberman 1997). Yet more than providing the courage to endure, the classical tradition has also been used by women to resist. The defiant Queen Christina (1626-89) appropriated the image of Alexander to signify her male soul within her female body (Biermann 2001; Kajanto 1993). From the very beginnings of feminism, the classical past was used to challenge and subvert attempts to regulate gender roles. Throughout the struggle for female emancipation, historical and mythical figures have been offered up to inspire activists, horrify them into action, or provide intellectual underpinnings to their philosophical endeavors. Indeed, the constant turn to antiquity is a recurring motif throughout successive waves of feminism.
One of the significant early struggles for female emancipation centered on the rights of nonaristocratic women to divorce their husbands and retain control of their property. In England and Wales this debate came to a head in the passing of the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act. Both sides of the debate were not averse to invoking classical material in support of their case (Hall 1999: 54-64). Prominent opponent William Gladstone, Member of Parliament and later Prime Minister, waxed nostalgically for the Homeric Age in which both divorce and prostitution were unknown - a position that he repeated a year later in his Studies on Homer (1858). Against such attempts to validate Victorian morality through recourse to Greek epic, we find the proponents of social change mobilizing their own classical allusions. Francis Talfourd, son of one of the radical MPs who supported increased rights for women, composed a burlesque entitled Alcestis: The Original Strong-Minded Woman (1850), in which the heroic Alcestis finds herself trapped in a disastrous marriage with a profligate Admetus. Other contemporary musical burlesques (e. g., Mark Lemon’s Medea; or, a Libel on the Lady of Colchis and Robert Brough’s Medea; or, the Best of Mothers, with a Brute of a Husband) deployed the figure of Medea to illustrate the situation of abandoned women spurned by their lovers and left desperate and destitute (Macintosh 2000).
Indeed, the figure of Medea and, in particular, her impassioned speech to the women of Corinth (Euripides Medea 215-66) became a favorite of the female suffrage movement. This speech had the status of an underground classic. It was largely omitted from performances of Medea until Augusta Webster (1837-94), poet and political activist, published her translation of the play in 1868 - just a year before her close associate John Stuart Mill published his famous treatise The Subjection of Women. Gilbert Murray famously described Medea to Sybil Thorndike as a play that ‘‘might have been written for the ‘Woman Movement’ ’’ (Thorndike 1936: 74), and it was a popular item in the repertoire of the Actresses’ Franchise League, whose members performed the ‘‘Women of Corinth’’ speech and the choral denunciation of the misogyny of myth (lines 410-30) at suffragette meetings (Hall and Macintosh 2005: 511-19).
Fueling this appropriation of classical imagery was the increased access women had to classical education. Traditionally classical learning represented a male preserve. Indeed its masculine exclusiveness was often attacked by female writers - George Eliot (1819-80) held it up to savage parody and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) questioned whether these men could ever claim to really know Greek (Jenkyns 1980: 63-4; Fowler 1983). Although no period was ever without some women who knew Latin and Greek (the case of Thomas Ascham’s tutelage of the future Queen Elizabeth I [1533-1603] in Greek, for example, while unusual was not unparalleled; see Grafton and Jardine 1986: 29-57), it was only with the midnineteenth-century reforms in women’s education that we see a substantial increase in women’s access to Greek and Latin texts (Hardwick 1997). It was a fruitful engagement. Classical myth, for example, had an important impact on the early American feminist Margaret Fuller (1810-50; Cleary 2000). The extraordinary thing about these early generations of female classical scholars is the willingness of a number of them to deploy classical culture to critique or subvert male repression.
During this period, a number of female authors and figures from antiquity were reclaimed. The figure of Sappho would prove inspirational (Prins 1999b). Numerous female students record how her lyrics seemed to speak directly to them. Even epic, traditionally conceived as the most masculine of genres, was not immune. In 1897, Samuel Butler published his infamous The Authoress of the Odyssey, in which he claimed that the author of the Odyssey was a women living in Sicily. His claims infuriated classical scholars, who ridiculed his conclusions. In making such a claim, however, Butler presents an eccentric reflection (or perhaps clever parody) of the concerns of his time.
Amongst those associated with the emancipation movement, there was a marked preference for strong, dramatic, dark women. The wild revels of the maenads exerted a powerful attraction on these free-spirited women (Prins 1999a), and scholars such as Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) assisted in their fantasies with her exploration of the darker side of Greek ritual behavior. Medea was not the only villain to be reclaimed. Delphine de Girardin’s Cleopatre (1847) has Octavia bemoan the wife’s lot and declare her envy of the liberated Cleopatra. The dancer and choreographer Martha Graham (1894-1991) chose Clytemnestra in order to dramatize ‘‘the private hell of a woman who has killed her love because her love killed her creative instinct - her child’’ (Freiert 1990). In one of her earliest works, the poet and novelist Amy Levy (1861-89) took the side of Xanthippe, the infamously shrewish wife of Socrates, and recast her as an early blue-stocking wronged by her husband, who cruelly derides her attempts to match him in philosophy (Xanthippe and Other Verse, 1881). In examining the fate of Xanthippe, whose soul ‘‘yearned for knowledge’’ but was left only ‘‘to bleed and quiver’’ by a husband who, ‘‘pregnant with noble theories and great thoughts, / deigned not to stoop to touch so light a thing / as the fine fabric of a women’s brain’’ (lines 120-22), Levy found the perfect vehicle both to express the anguish of women’s plight and indict the male chauvinism that caused it.
World History
